87: Twitter Open Source Algorithm, Home Labs, and Chat GPT vs. Bard

Robbie Wagner: [00:10] What's up, party people? This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, RobbieTheWagner, and my co-host Chuck.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:18] That's it. Chuck the Chuck.

Robbie Wagner: [00:19] Charles W III.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:21] I could be Charles the Chuck, I think. Anyway, through all.

Robbie Wagner: [00:25] You should be something easier to spout off unless you can get Charles William Carpenter III as your full handle. I guess it's too long.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:33] Yeah, I've tried quite a few different variations there.

Robbie Wagner: [00:36] Be like.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:36] When I rage quit all of social media years ago, I really screwed myself.

Robbie Wagner: [00:40] You could be like Chuck Bill Carp.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:44] Carps. That's actually what we do. Our nickname, with some of my wife's friends, are Carps. I don't know. Yeah, it's easy to say.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:52] Yeah. So I guess that's food for thought. I'll keep that in mind. It couldn't.

Robbie Wagner: [00:56] Yeah, just ask, tell ChatGPT. My full name is Charles William Carpenter III, and I would like something shorter to be a Twitter handle. What do you suggest? It'll probably say, I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09] All right, I'll think about that. I think at some point, they're going to marketplace out some names. I've heard rumors that Twitter is going to wipe out a bunch of unused accounts and put some of those names, like, in a marketplace or something. At the very least, wipe out unused accounts, so at least put them back in the ether.

Robbie Wagner: [01:28] It's too late for me, though, because Robbie Wagner is an unused account. I think they have one follower and posted one time or something, but on every other platform, it's not free, either. So I've got to be the same everywhere. Unless every platform wants to do that for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:43] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [01:44] It's going to be a problem.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:45] All right, well, let's get to some whiskey before we go too far down social media handles and which ones actually are valuable.

Robbie Wagner: [01:52] Yeah, tell us about this super small batch whiskey we have today from.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:56] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [01:57] From Tennessee. The Scottish Highlands.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:00] The Scottish Highlands of Tennessee. The Appalachians? Maybe.

Robbie Wagner: [02:03] Yeah, that's true. Appalachian.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:05] Appalachian.

Robbie Wagner: [02:06] If you're from there, you say Appalachian.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:08] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [02:09] Usually.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:09] I'm not. So.

Robbie Wagner: [02:10] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:11] You can tell the old number seven. So we decided we need to have increased diversity on the show, obviously, cognizant of that within our guests and the topics that we talk about. We don't want to talk about JavaScript all the time alone, and we don't want to drink the same old $60, six, and seven whiskeys. Right. Like, we need to set a better precedent and a baseline and kind of go back to the roots. Although I never really drank this before. Jim Beam was my cheap whiskey of preference.

Robbie Wagner: [02:39] Yeah, I actually do like Jim Beam.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:41] Yeah, I could start with some white label and go up anyway, so, yes, this is Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey Old No. 7. It's aged a minimum of four years because it's technically a bourbon, except for they maple flavor it with the charcoal filtering. It's got a mash bill of 80% corn, 8% rye, and 12% malted barley and is, of course, a tiny 80-proof. It's basically water.

Robbie Wagner: [03:08] I appreciate how they know what they are, and they say, let's not even put a cork in it. Let's just make it a screw top, and let's make the outside that seals it up very easy to open. When you're buying Jack Daniels, you really want it to be quick to open so you can drink the entire bottle in 1 second.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:25] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [03:25] That's, I think, the idea.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:27] When you're opening this bottle, there's a good chance that you recently already had another bottle, and so you need it to be easy. It's an interesting point that you make here because I'm like, we have our Glencairns for tasting and all of that kind of stuff, but in a way, I almost feel like I should be having it the way most Jack Daniels drinkers would have it. And I would think straight out of the bottle, and I'm going to have my first taste in that same way. Or mix with coke. And I don't want to do that for this purpose. That's just basically saying, I don't like this, and I just want to get drunk on Coke.

Robbie Wagner: [03:58] Yeah. All right, well, I'm going to do it legit, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:00] Yeah, you should.

Robbie Wagner: [04:01] We'll see how yours goes.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:02] And I'll do it more normally. I am smelling it first, though. It smells like an old dive bar with, like, wood panels and Miller High Life neon lights. That's what it smells like to me.

Robbie Wagner: [04:17] So what I'm smelling is some Big League Chew with hints of self-loathing and despair. I think there's some of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:27] The hints aren't that subtle. Okay, bottoms up. Yeah, there's really not much burn, not much anything. Yeah, I mean, it has a little sweetness in the front, pretty light. Like, you get some corn flavor, and you get a little bit of, I can see the maple leaf sweetness, and that dissipates, and then it kind of tastes like fall leaves. Like, if I put up some fall leaves in my mouth and crunch them around with a little maple syrup, that's kind of what I'm getting.

Robbie Wagner: [05:06] Yeah. So whatever I'm getting, it's very watered down. But I would describe it as I used to do this thing called Destination Imagination where we would it used to be Odyssey of the Mind if you've heard of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:20] Oh, yes.

Robbie Wagner: [05:21] But it was like this thing where you, like, sometimes you build stuff. Sometimes you do, like, little skits, whatever. But one of the things we had to do was build Balsaw wood structures that had to hold weight. And it tastes a lot like that process, smelled like cutting the wood up and putting glue and chemicals on it to hold it together. It's kind of what this tastes like to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:41] Okay. Yeah, I can see it does have a chemically. Like, I don't know what their process around maple flavoring the charcoal is, but I wonder if it's natural or not. I don't know. I guess you would assume they haven't really changed their process since, whatever it is, 18-something. It does say on here.

Robbie Wagner: [06:01] Ironically. Is it? I think it smells very good. I think it tastes much less good than it smells.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:08] Yeah, I mean, it does smell, to be honest, it does smell a little bit like maple candy. Right? That kind of.

Robbie Wagner: [06:13] Yeah. I would take a candle of this one.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:16] Yeah, I'd be okay.

Robbie Wagner: [06:16] I'm not going to ingest the candle.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:18] So this has won seven gold medals since 1904. When do you think the last time they won one was, though?

Robbie Wagner: [06:24] Wait, just seven?

Chuck Carpenter: [06:25] Like, was it just seven sets?

Robbie Wagner: [06:27] That tells you how bad it is.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:29] It's 114 years later, and then you've gotten seven.

Robbie Wagner: [06:32] I mean, there's like some good small-batch ones get like four or five in their first year making it.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:38] And to be fair, they do offer other variations. Right. They've got some fancier versions, and perhaps like a Pepsi Challenge, there would be interesting. They have ones that are age dated. I believe I saw a twelve year. And then they have like the fancy one with the silver on the front. Didn't we try one of those?

Robbie Wagner: [06:58] Gentlemen Jack?

Chuck Carpenter: [06:58] Yeah, maybe that I think that's the one that Frank Sinatra used to drink, right?

Robbie Wagner: [07:03] I don't know. But yes, all of those are much better. We wanted to start with the baseline, just to be fair to all the other things.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:11] We're going to have a series. It's sort of like the under-30 series of things that are usually at the bottom of your liquor store. But nothing in plastic. I think that's too far. Oh, yeah, nothing in plastic. But I'm willing to try a lot of stuff. That's like $15 and in a metal bottle.

Robbie Wagner: [07:25] Yeah, because glass is always like, in my opinion, it's kind of the same price. Right?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:33] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [07:33] If you're the manufacturer, the only reason you use plastic is just because it's less messy. You can't shatter them. It's easier to move around. Whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:41] Yeah. I think I'm starting to understand why rockstars could just chug this straight out of the bottle. I mean, it looks tough, but it's actually not that hard.

Robbie Wagner: [07:50] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:50] It's got a pretty mellow flavor overall.

Robbie Wagner: [07:53] I think I actually get more burn off of, like, Hpnotiq.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:57] What's that?

Robbie Wagner: [07:59] Oh, you don't know Hpnotiq? No, it's like super fluorescent blue liqueur. I don't know what flavor it's supposed to be, some kind of berry or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:08] Oh, I think I've seen that bright stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [08:11] Yeah, no, it was popular in, like, a couple of rap songs. So as you do, you have to buy some.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:19] Did it become the new, like, Alize or something?

Robbie Wagner: [08:21] I forget what song it was in, honestly. But anytime something's mentioned, like, Bacardi from In Da Club always had to get Bacardi from that. And then Moscato had its day of being cool in rap songs. I just drink all the things they say are cool or used to.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:41] Yeah, I don't know. I mean, outside of, like, mixed drinks, I ever just drank Bacardi. I remember having shots of 151 on fire dropped into beer that you have to chug. What was that called? Like, flaming Dr. Pepper or something.

Robbie Wagner: [08:53] That sounds right. Yeah, we used to go. You could buy Everclear from South Carolina. So we used to go there and get basically 100% alcohol.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:08] Can you not get that in Virginia?

Robbie Wagner: [09:09] No, you can get there, like, their one that's like 150 something, like, close to the 151. But that's, like, the highest proof you can do in Virginia. Yeah, because they have some weird thing about it being really explosive, and they don't like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:22] It is. Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [09:23] Well, we like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:24] Anything over 135 is considered hazmat or something. I believe that's what it is. So because there's issues with shipping certain liquors or, like, trying to, yeah, I don't know. I remember there was a version of George the Stagg Jr. That was, like, 136, and they call it the hazmat version because it officially qualifies as hazmat material. So maybe putting that in your body is weird. But the thing is, I had stupid college days where you would chug some Everclear and then chase it with anything you could find because it was disgusting.

Robbie Wagner: [09:57] Yeah, it says right on the front of Everclear not to drink it straight. And I headed that warning, like, I would still drink it, but I would mix it with something because I'm not going to melt my insides.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:06] No, it's not great. It's probably why I have an ulcer now. But I do use it to make limoncello, actually, which I haven't done in a couple of years. But I used to make limoncello every spring and have that as a nice, but you're just having a little bit tons of sugar in there. Yeah, it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [10:22] Yeah. The fun part about Everclear is every shot of it that you have is, like, two shots. So if you put, like, four shots of Everclear in a drink that's really sugary and you drink, like, half of it, you can stop drinking and still be getting drunker if you just wait because it's, like, so concentrated.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:43] Right?

Robbie Wagner: [10:43] Yeah, I always thought that was fun.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:45] That is kind of interesting. Exactly. Like, if you're just smart and it's efficient, too, because it's not very expensive. If you really are, just like I'm trying to get the effect. You can have one drink and be done.

Robbie Wagner: [10:56] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:57] Food for thought, folks. The economy is crazy these days, and if you're trying to cut back on the cost to buzz and you don't care what it tastes like, we suggest Everclear.

Robbie Wagner: [11:09] Hey, if you put enough Kool-Aid in anything, it's good.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:11] Right. What's that stuff called, like, jungle juice or whatever, where you be a bunch of fruit and Everclear?

Robbie Wagner: [11:16] We used to make that.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:17] Yes. What we're letting our audience know is we made a lot of bad decisions, perhaps. Unless, of course, Everclear wants to sponsor this podcast.

Robbie Wagner: [11:27] Yeah. You could take a whole thing of Kool-Aid that would make, like, I don't know, 20 gallons of Kool-Aid and put it in five gallons of jungle juice. And it doesn't matter how much liquor you put in there. It's going to taste good

Chuck Carpenter: [11:39] Right. Yeah. And then you don't know. It's a creeper in that way.

Robbie Wagner: [11:43] Yeah. But anyway, let's circle back to rating this.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:47] All right? Yes. Okay, so how are we supposed to rate this? This isn't necessarily a bourbon, I guess. It's an American whiskey. It's mildly flavored. Yeah. And bang for the buck. Okay. You go first.

Robbie Wagner: [11:58] Yeah. So the things it scores well, in are being easy to open. I didn't have to shatter the bottle to get it open. It smells really good. I get good points for that. The taste is where it loses me, though. It's very watered down. Doesn't really taste like much like if you mixed it, which we used to do. I remember tasting it when I mixed it, but I feel like if I mixed it now, it would be like nothing's in there. So yeah, it's just kind of uninteresting middle of the road. So I'm going to give it three, I think.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:27] Okay. I think you make some valid points in terms of ease of access. Smells fine. I'm not really a big sweets person, so to me, it almost feels like those weird, like, apple whiskeys and shit like that. We had that banana one, although the banana one was much better than this. So it gets points there. It's not horrible, right? It's like, I guess. Drinkable. If this was my option, only option, I'd be like, well, I can get by. Yeah. I can see, like, if my choices if I was looking at a bar and I was like. I want to make a drink, a mixed drink, because I wouldn't restrict call it a cocktail. And then I saw this or rum. I would probably pick the rum if I was going to have Cuba Libre with a little lime.

Robbie Wagner: [13:08] Especially if it's a dark rum or spice rum.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:11] Yeah. I'd probably go that way instead. So I'm trying to categorize it like that. Like, if I was having a simple mixed drink and I don't have a lot of options, would I reach for this? It's not bad, and I could have it, but it's not great. And I would probably pick rum instead. So given that, I'm going to give it a two. It's just a two for me. Okay. It's a lot of branding hype, and it's just fine, I guess. Yeah. All right, I'll have another swig.

Robbie Wagner: [13:37] Sure. Chuck is committed to this. He's just drinking straight out of the bottle.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:41] Yeah. I mean, I've always wanted to feel like a rock star, and rather than learn an instrument and create an image for myself, I figured this is another gateway to it. So we'll see.

Robbie Wagner: [13:52] Maybe we should have saved this for the 100th episode. Go, like, really ironic and do not a good whiskey for the 100th episode, but then Ryan could show us how to just chug the whole bottle.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:01] Yeah, that's true. I thought we were right because, I mean, he's the closest thing to a rock star I think we've experienced in our guests thus far. Yeah, so very solid point. Pun intended. Oh, my gosh. Well, let's bore the folks with some technical discussions. Where would you like to start, Robbie?

Robbie Wagner: [14:20] Well, you have a lot of random stuff on here.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:23] I know. We don't even have to do all of them.

Robbie Wagner: [14:25] Well, the one that I have is relatively short because I don't have a ton of details on exactly what you should do. So we'll get out of the way, it out of the way, and then we can just do the others. So I saw this thing, I was telling you about it the other day, but someone posted a video of, like, they were trying to sign up for GitHub Copilot and there's a little toggle switch, and it was grayed out, and it had a little message that was like, oh, Copilot is at capacity right now. Keep checking back, and we'll let you sign up eventually or something like that. And you see them just inspect the element, take the disabled attribute off, check the checkbox, and then they refresh the page, and it's still checked. So the API call must have worked, and they have Copilot. So it's like, okay, well, that's really dumb that they didn't have some better safety there, but I thought we could go a little bit into just some of the ways that you could make that better. Yes, you can do even more. Even on just the front end of you could say, I don't care if the element itself is disabled. If you click it in your like on click handler or whatever, you could say like, oh, if this is meant to be disabled because there's no capacity, just don't do any action when you click it versus relying on the HTML disabled attribute. So that's like one step better. And then, really, the thing people should be doing, especially with everything being server-side rendered or different stuff these days, is putting some of that safety on your API side. So even if I can click it, or I guess if you were doing it all front end, and you had someone that was proficient at JavaScript that could write their own fetch call in the console on your page and somehow get it to work, and your API was not locked down, then it wouldn't matter what buttons you had on your page. You could just do whatever you want. So the best thing to do would actually stop that on the back end. So on the back end, you would have a like, is that capacity flag type of thing and say, just don't do that, or like, as long as this is true, return some kind of error instead of success, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:45] Yeah, I mean, you can have polling or pub-sub kind of ideology around that where there's a microservice where the source of truth is. So I totally agree exactly what you mean. Regardless of what it is, the API is the source of truth, not the interface. And so even if things get worked around, the callback is going to say, well, am I at capacity or not? Oh, I am. So it's still a no kind of thing and always like, maintaining it securely there. Yeah. Makes total sense. I think that's the number one move more than anything else. I think that trusting the client is a quick fix. Right. But if people want to really get there, they're going to get there.

Robbie Wagner: [17:30] Yeah. I think the way that I like to think about it is everything on the UI side is like sugar. You can add nice error states or show that it should be disabled or give people that visual feedback that they're used to about what the elements are doing, but that should never be baked into the real logic of what's going to happen when you click things. Because you basically want your UI to just fire that stuff off and then trust that your API is going to handle all the correct states from that.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:00] Right. And so that's like a general state management memory design ideology right there. It's like if the absolute state is in your browser, that's probably incorrect. I mean, I would say like nine times out of ten. Right. Temporary state is fine in managing all that within memory for ease of use and simplicity and speed and whatever else but in areas that matter. It should never be the ultimate decider.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:28] Yeah. There are obviously cases that are where that does make sense. Like if you want to back stuff up with like orbit into index DB or something and store that in the browser, that kind of makes sense. But that's a little different than just UI state.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:43] Yeah. And I also kind of consider that a different use case in a way because you could be thinking about it in terms of, well, it just kind of depends because do you have an independent application where index DB is your only necessary bit of things? Right. If you have a real large-scale database, then obviously, you need some kind of API that becomes the source of truth outside of the client. I mean, for me, it's sort of like either I have a very contained application that doesn't require persistent state, or I'm in an offline mode, which would mean, like, I have to trust it for a while until I can find out for real. But at any point where it matters that I connect to the Internet and persist things long term, either based on the business case or the user needs, then I would always defer to the API to say what's true and not true.

Robbie Wagner: [19:35] Yeah, agreed. If you want to know more about form safety or whatever, there's plenty of stuff online. We can probably share some resources later. I don't have them handy right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:51] But you should just write a blog post.

Robbie Wagner: [19:54] I could, I should, actually. I haven't written one in a while.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:58] Fired.

Robbie Wagner: [19:59] But tell us about the Twitter source code stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:04] Okay, so, top of mind for me, just before recording this, some things in the Twitterverse were rustling and happening, and it wasn't just people arguing about opinions. So Elon posted that they were going to open source the Twitter algorithm, which is just the code that contains a bunch of algorithms, but whatever he used to code, he knows what he's talking about. And he did noon Pacific Time, posted the code to GitHub, put it out there, and then they did a Twitter space and allowed people to ask questions and dig through. But also conversely, as like a side thing, Primagen immediately twitch streamed as he does, and they started digging through the code and looking at all the weirdness in there. And just one of the craziest things. Well, first of all, the majority of the code base is in Scala. Scala. I don't know. What do people say? Scala. Scala, Scala.

Robbie Wagner: [20:58] I don't know. I don't know that I've.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:00] I've heard both.

Robbie Wagner: [21:01] I mean, you shouldn't use that, so you don't need to worry about how to say it.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:05] Well, of course, his comments were have you considered rewriting and Rust? So he was on the Twitter space, and I don't know if he was able to ask a question. I know he had raised his hands a few times, and I had to jump off, so couldn't hear at all. But I think the disturbing part is the amount of specific labeling and categorizing type code and not categorizing in a way of like, oh, you pay for the blue check or you are a frequent contributor or things like that, that you think would maybe skew scores and change engagement things. Like Elon said a bunch of times, their primary goal is, what is it? It's like about reducing perceived wasted time or something. I forget the term he used, but it was about like any time you're spending here, you feel like it's valuable, and trying to change anything that would make you feel otherwise kind of thing about it. But there's not a bunch. But there is code in there that is literally there's a variable called Author is Elon. So Author is this human with this name who owns this company, which is a little disturbing, and certain things happen there. So if you're wondering why he's all over your feeds, that's why. Because Author is Elon, and he gets sprinkled into every time they decide which tweets you're going to see.

Robbie Wagner: [22:25] Well, they must not have regression tested that because there was a while where he didn't show up on my timeline anymore. Yeah, he's back now, but someone probably broke that.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:35] I bet he was getting buried too much, and then that's where they had this kind of crap. I don't know. I don't know if it includes the full history. That would be interesting to know. Like, when was this added?

Robbie Wagner: [22:45] That's true.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:45] And if it has all that because it was basically just, like, pushed by one person with one commit called Twitter team.

Robbie Wagner: [22:52] Yeah, if it had all the Git history, that would be bad news because you know that some people along the way checked in secret keys or stuff they shouldn't have and didn't delete it. Right. And that would be hack city right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:08] Yeah, I'm sure they killed that. It was bad enough that they actually had issues open. I'm sure they had changed that. But, like, prime created an issue of follow me on Twitter and then put his Twitter handle in, and it was there until for like, nine minutes before someone closed it. I'm like, why do they want issues at all?

Robbie Wagner: [23:25] Yeah, they should disable that.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:26] And within, like, a minute, he had, like, 64 replies. Looks good to me. Yes, we learned that they call their users tweeps, which I'm not sure tweeps like that doesn't really. I don't know Twitter peeps. Yeah, but there are other disturbing labels like is Republican, is Democrat.

Robbie Wagner: [23:46] So how do they know that? I guess if you're a politician, you say specifically in your bio, is that what it's looking at, or does it know from the way you've tweeted about stuff?

Chuck Carpenter: [23:58] Great question. I think I haven't had time to dig into all of those variables and how they get qualified, essentially, but something happens, and then they're able to put them in. I'm sure they're able to do it manually, too, if they really wanted to. Like, there's some interface elsewhere where they can click you as.

Robbie Wagner: [24:14] It's probably if you followed Donald Trump, you just get marked Republican.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:19] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [24:19] Otherwise, you don't something that simple, like no fancy logic.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:24] Right. Unless he goes independent. Then what happens? I don't know. Because if he doesn't get the nomination.

Robbie Wagner: [24:30] I think then the country burns down the middle.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:34] Definitely will. I won't be able to get out to Virginia. I'm sorry. Because if I fly over, they're going to shoot down the planes. Not because of me specifically.

Robbie Wagner: [24:45] We could come back to this for whatnot? But we had an interesting point of, like, so he got indicted and whatever. If he goes to jail, the Secret Service has to go with him, which I think is amazing.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:56] Wow.

Robbie Wagner: [24:57] We can come back and talk about that.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:59] We should. That's a great point, though. Yeah. What point do you lose that? Okay. Do you want to talk about all of these things, I guess? Yeah. Twitter source code. I think there's a TBD in that discussion too. There's a lot to start to unravel there. But it's nice that the algorithms are out, and you have the ability like they're discussing openly how they determine certain things based on what you see and the actions you take.

Robbie Wagner: [25:25] I think they just determine that everything I post shouldn't be seen.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:30] And I think that's accurate. I mean, things that are actually viable mistakes. Not that at all.

Robbie Wagner: [25:36] Well, no, I was just going to say I don't know if we mentioned this publicly or if I was just kind of talking to you about it, but some guy has tried to tell us we were shadow banned on Twitter and Twitter categorically denies doing it. I know they do some of it. It's not exactly shadow banning, but it's like something in the algorithm says something you've done makes you deprioritized from people's feeds or whatever. Because we post at least once a week with the new podcast, and we have like 4600 followers or something, and it'll get like 50 views. That's not correct because if just even like a quarter of those people signed into Twitter and we're paying for the blue check, we should get like at least 1000 views on every video. Right? I don't understand.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:28] But anyway, it feels like a real loss for us.

Robbie Wagner: [26:33] Yeah, it doesn't matter because people are still following the podcast. Like we're still getting the end result I want. But it's just frustrating that Twitter is such a black box of weirdness.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:45] My last one, where I retweeted with quote of our last show, I got 480 impressions.

Robbie Wagner: [26:53] That should be more, right? Or is that from your just from the?

Chuck Carpenter: [26:56] From me. From just me.

Robbie Wagner: [26:58] Just the retweet.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:59] And I only have 832 followers.

Robbie Wagner: [27:02] Let's see before I say all this, yeah. What's our last video views at? Well, the Ryan Carniado one actually is done well because a lot of people retweeted that. So that's got 8000 right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:15] You've already become a liar.

Robbie Wagner: [27:17] Yeah, I don't know. It's inconsistent, too, I feel like, which is just kind of weird, but whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:24] Yeah. Okay, well, fair enough. Yeah, I don't know, and maybe that's the point, right, is that it's supposed to work a particular way, and there aren't consistencies around that, but then they had 4500 employees to create and ensure such consistency. So it's an interesting question and debate there. I'm glad it's out there. I think it's an interesting and good thing to do, given the black box of secrecy that is Twitter. And like it or hate it, it is a thing that a lot of people interact with, go to out of curiosity or a real desire to engage. And all this means is we know the algorithms down. We can rewrite it in Astro and Solid JS.

Robbie Wagner: [28:08] Has anyone fed all of the code into ChatGPT yet so that you can get a thing to go, like optimize what you're posting to be good for the algorithm?

Chuck Carpenter: [28:16] Yeah, I mean, how much can you put in there? Like, look at this repo and rewrite it in Rust for me.

Robbie Wagner: [28:22] There actually is a limit. I think it's like 20,000 tokens or something. And if you want to do more, they have like a summarized thing or something where you can keep sending it more and saying this is still part of the same thing or something. I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:38] Now, is that from the API side or the actual interface?

Robbie Wagner: [28:41] The API side. I'm sure the actual interface would take even less stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:45] Yeah, I would think it would take less things. But it does have that continuation thing because you have like a started thread, and you can always go back to one that you had done before and then add more to it.

Robbie Wagner: [28:54] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:55] So it continues to evolve, that feedback and conversation.

Robbie Wagner: [28:59] Yeah. So we'll come back to the AI rap battle here because we're going to talk about Bard versus ChatGPT in general later.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:08] Okay, that's true. It kind of straddled the web and whatnot kind of thing? Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [29:14] What is Home labs?

Chuck Carpenter: [29:16] What do you mean, what's a home lab? How many computers do you own?

Robbie Wagner: [29:19] I mean, a lot. Is that what you're referring to here, though? This is one word like it's a company like home labs.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:25] Oh, no. I mean, there's a whole culture of home lab creation, and it's essentially like taking your home network and elevating it. So there's usually like a couple of different parts to it, so you can elevate it in terms of just storage in general, like creating a bunch of NAS storage available within your own network. And then there's like elevating that into compute and then putting different systems within that home lab too. So you could have just like a normal tower that you make accessible within your LAN, and then you could put a bunch of stuff there. Like very common thing is like a pie hole for your whole network, so that stops advertising and stuff like that. So when you're browsing at home, and then you can do all kinds of systems. And one of these things we'll talk about later, too, also straddles, but like you could have your own Minecraft self-hosted server within your home lab. So you can have a bunch of VMs, or obviously, if you want to practice with Kubernetes and networking things, then you could have your own home cluster and then start to push things up to there. Like there's this open source, it's kind of like a home hub called Home Assistant. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but you can plug all kinds of things into it, including like Alexa stuff and other things. So you have this centralized dashboard for what's going on in your home. You can add sensors to it, you can just, like, all kinds of crazy stuff to automate things within your home. That's another thing that can go into a home lab. So just in general, you can put all kinds of applications there, but it's basically like a whole home networking, storage, compute setup.

Robbie Wagner: [31:09] Yeah, I just don't have time for a lot of that stuff. I agree with some of those things. Whenever we move, I want to set up, like, a nice network cabinet type of thing and have a good firewall and switch, and I want to have as many things hardwired in as I can, and I want to do some of that. But in terms of smart home stuff or things that you have to program yourself from cheap opensourcedashboard.com, no, I'll just take the Apple ones or stuff that I can press a button on my phone, and it works. I don't need to do all of that.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:49] Right? Yeah. I don't know. The home automation stuff. I've gone back and forth with I played with Home Assistant a few years ago off of a Raspberry Pi within the house and connected a few things to it, and it was like, okay, and you can create your own routines, but now Alexa has their whole thing of creating your own routines and automations too. There's obviously.

Robbie Wagner: [32:09] I use if this, then that.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:11] There's SAS out there, all of that. Yeah, done that before too. But I mean, even Alexa just has routines built in that makes most of that pretty simple. You don't even need that anymore. Yeah, so I go back and forth with it, but I would like to have some things kind of hosted within there and then also playing around with Kubernetes servers.

Robbie Wagner: [32:30] You lost me.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:32] Well, what I like about it is that there's a persistency there. So there were times where I was just running on a Pi something, and then you don't realize for like a day or two or something like, oh, that thing crashed and died or something, so it's not even working anymore. Now I got to go try and do X number of updates and see if I can get it going or whatever else. And when an app crashes in Kubernetes or a container fails, it consistently tries to reboot it and put it back up for you. And then if you have a decent logging set up with it, you're kind of notified too, like, right, oh, this thing went down. I didn't update it on a regular basis, or whatever happened, it tried to do the reboots for me. So that's no longer a debugging step.

Robbie Wagner: [33:15] So you can't put sentry on your Raspberry Pi?

Chuck Carpenter: [33:21] Probably not. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [33:23] I have no idea.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:25] I guess you could because, like.

Robbie Wagner: [33:26] An API and SDK and other three-letter words.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:30] Yeah, why couldn't you? I mean, maybe you can because, like, Home Assistant, their front end is all React and material UI. I mean, like, couldn't you do your own thing?

Robbie Wagner: [33:39] Well, then, yeah, you drop the React Wrapper in there, and you're good.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:43] So there you go. See? Fun stuff. There could be projects, but here's the thing, is you're spending too much time playing Hogwarts. That's the truth.

Robbie Wagner: [33:51] I haven't spent any time playing Hogwarts in the past few weeks because everything is crashing and burning everywhere.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:59] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [34:00] Yeah, I'm trying to remember.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:01] Maybe you need to.

Robbie Wagner: [34:03] Yeah. So we didn't talk about before that my wife just had her gallbladder removed. So that was a thing?

Chuck Carpenter: [34:10] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [34:12] Before that, we were both sick with a stomach bug. And then something else happened, I think, that week or no. So it was just a staggered stomach bug. Like, Finn was sick for a day or two, and then Katelynn was sick for a day or two, and then I was like, oh, I'm not going to get it. It's been like five days. And then I got it. And then, by the time I'm getting better, it was time for Finn's birthday party. We had all of that to plan for, have everyone over. And then my parents got sick, and then Katelynn's gallbladder was like, I'm not going to work anymore. It's been a lot.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:44] How does one's gallbladder fail? Is it just like a thing? Is there anything like you get kidney stones, right? And those happen from calcium deposits and some other stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [34:56] Right. So gallstones are kind of a similar idea, I guess. They happen from cholesterol that forms into stones, I guess. But what I found out from doing research after all this happened basically every woman ever has to have her gallbladder removed these days because having kids and the estrogen changes during that makes you really likely to get gallstones. Being on birth control ever makes you really likely to get gallstones. All of the hormones cause more gallstones. Like, it's rare for a man to have to get his removed. But Katelynn said she talked to one nurse. She was like, oh, yeah, I had mine removed. Another nurse had hers removed. Then there was like a male doctor who was like, oh, yeah, my wife had hers removed. Every woman that I've heard of has to get theirs removed. It's interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:43] Yeah. I mean, well, it goes to show you the effects of hormone manipulation, potentially.

Robbie Wagner: [35:49] Yeah, that shit's bad.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:51] Yeah. In general, that's kind of what you hear over time is like I know my wife was told multiple times this can really mess with you. And then you have the kids, and that messes things up. And then if you go back on birth control, well, that starts to really mess with your body again. And yeah, she one day was like, I'm done. And I was like, I can support that. It's no longer your responsibility. Here's where we're at. And then I was like, but I don't want more kids. I'm getting older, so I'm also done. So I'm going to go ahead and just take care of this then.

Robbie Wagner: [36:24] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:25] Shops closed.

Robbie Wagner: [36:26] Yeah, I think that's the reasonable option.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:28] Yeah. And that doesn't mess with male hormones. They still happen, so that's all good. Here you go. Medical advice by your favorite drunken devs.

Robbie Wagner: [36:37] Hey, it's probably better than our financial advice.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:42] True. Yeah. I listened to you about deferring tax payments, and look where we're at now.

Robbie Wagner: [36:48] What are taxes?

Chuck Carpenter: [36:50] I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [36:51] I mean, if we just didn't pay, they wouldn't know for, like, three years. So I'm not that worried.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:55] Right. That's plenty of time for me to escape to some nation without extradition. That's probably not safe for children. But hey, I mean.

Robbie Wagner: [37:03] Just write a check and mail it to the wrong address and be like, I sent the check. I don't know what happened. And by the time they follow up, you can be like, oh, I actually do have the money now. Here you go.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:14] Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Can we make friends again? I don't know. Why? It reminds me of a line from Dazed and Confused at the end of the school year, and then the bell goes off, and the kind of hippie teacher, she's like, just remember, America was founded on the basis that a bunch of old guys didn't want to pay their taxes.

Robbie Wagner: [37:33] That is true.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:34] And then, look, here we're at now. Comes around full circle, really.

Robbie Wagner: [37:37] Yeah. I think it was a commercial, but I just heard the TV going the other day, and it said something. I forget the exact wordage, but it was like, mutinies are bad. Right. But whenever one goes the way you want, we call it a revolution instead. And that's not bad. Yeah. Still a mutiny.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:57] Right. I mean, that's the thing. Those Founding Fathers were traitors. Technically. Right. Traitors to the crown until they did a great thing for many others. And then at what some point? How does that happen again, potentially? I don't know. A lot of sociology around that. Yeah. Anyway, on a lighter note.

Robbie Wagner: [38:18] So, to go back a little bit to what you were saying about self-hosting things, so I did self-host Minecraft before. It wasn't fancy. It was just like, literally running on my computer. And I opened that port up. That was the extent of it. And so everyone could access it from whatever the public IP was or whatever. But it's not a great thing because we would play with my friend Carter, who would be in Mississippi or Alabama or whatever, and it's like running in Virginia, where my internet is maybe not even that good. It was better than it is now because this was, like, years back, and it had its problems. And then same thing as if it goes off. I didn't have anything monitoring it, so if someone wanted to play and I wasn't watching the computer, it would just be like, oh, the server is down. And then they would have to text me, and I'd have to go reboot it and whatever. So I think that's probably not the best option. Two better options that I've done. There are services online that do this for you. You get a virtual private server and then use that. So it's kind of more centrally located, probably like, routes the requests better or whatever, and it's a little more performant. But honestly, the best thing is they just do it for you. They have an option called Minecraft Realms, and you just pay them. I think it's like $7 a month or something, which is steep if you're not playing that much. But if you're playing with five or six friends and everybody's playing, somebody is playing daily. It's not that expensive for that. And so that's what we've been doing when we've been playing. It's just doing that.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:59] Interesting. Well, yeah, but I think eventually there are all these cloud services, and we're getting serviced and subscribed and whatever out the ying ying. So that's one of the things that I kind of want to see if how much could I just do on my own metal? Like, how much do I need your cloud service to do some of these things? I don't think I need to be expert level to get good enough, especially for a bunch of six and seven-year-olds.

Robbie Wagner: [40:28] Yeah. I've lost my will to learn and do things in my free time. Because if I get an hour of free time, I'm not going to be like, let me do this thing that I could fail at for the entire hour. I'm going to be like, let me do something easy. Throw on a show, play a video game, whatever. I don't need that extra stress.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:52] Yeah. I scheduled these kinds of activities earlier in the day where I'm willing to have fail points. Like, later in the day, I'm exhausted in a thing where I was like, I can't go down this path. Especially because I found that when I used to do it, I would go down a rabbit hole, and then all of a sudden, I was up until one in the morning figuring something out, and that was, like, totally fine. But it's not fine anymore. I need my rest.

Robbie Wagner: [41:16] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:16] These things are important.

Robbie Wagner: [41:17] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:19] I just do it early, and then I give myself a time block and be like, well, maybe again tomorrow.

Robbie Wagner: [41:24] Yeah, I could see that. Do more of a first thing before work or lunch break kind of thing. Break up your day. As long as you don't go down a rabbit hole and then don't work the rest of the day.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:35] Exactly. Yeah. Who would notice?

Robbie Wagner: [41:37] Yeah, but I don't know. So people have been really vocal about Arch Linux recently on Twitter, and every time someone mentions it, I just shit on it and go, like, hey, I installed that one time and it took me, like, five days to get a terminal up. It sucks. And everyone's like, oh, you must not have used the installer then. And I'm like, Wait. There's an installer? I installed it like ten years ago, and there wasn't then. It was like for people who liked pain and really liked Linux and liked to show off that they liked Linux because it didn't come with anything to what do you call it? Window manager is not the right word, I don't think, but like stuff to display UI, it didn't come with anything for that.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:19] Oh, it didn't have a Gui? Yeah. That's weird.

Robbie Wagner: [42:22] So you had to install like Gnome or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:25] Yeah, I kind of remember when things.

Robbie Wagner: [42:28] Every little thing.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:28] Were like that in the Linux thing, yeah. Which was like, okay, choose your own adventure kind of thing, but then that feels so much like the React universe for a while where it was like, yeah, we're going to show your stuff, but do you want to route from page to page? Well, you got to pick one of these three things. Oh, did you want to have any kind of memory? Well, there's a whole bunch of strategies.

Robbie Wagner: [42:48] Around that, which all goes back to people that like engineering stuff and problems to solve like that. Like that. They're like. I don't care if I can do a thing quickly. I want the challenge for days and the satisfaction that I did it in the end instead of just pressing a button that does it for you in 1 second. Because where's the fun in that, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [43:11] Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't see where installing an OS is a challenge that I want to conquer. I have seen some of the things about Arch Linux. It's like supposed to be the best one for devs or something. I don't know why it would be different than anything else because you just get a Gui, and then you install the other tools that you want. Right. Does it come with all the other tools automatically? I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [43:33] I imagine that people like I don't know if Primagen specifically endorses it, but he's usually around in the comments and stuff about it and I would guess it's good for him because all he wants installed on his computer is Vim. Like, I need to stream a video. I'm going to do it through Vim. I need to order a pizza. I'm doing it through Vim.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:53] I bet you can ping the Domino's API and send it a payload to get your order. That would be amazing.

Robbie Wagner: [43:59] I could see him doing that.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:00] Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I should find out if that's possible. Yeah, I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [44:05] Yeah, make an NPM package, Dominoes.JS, and just like yeah, what toppings do you want? Boop, boop boop.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:12] Boop, boop boop. Yeah, and make it a CLI, actually. There you go. Yeah, just do it.

Robbie Wagner: [44:16] Yeah, there we go.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:17] Yeah I installed Ubuntu server recently, and that even has prompts of do you want to automatically install things like OpenSSH and Microcates, and I don't know, there was like a whole bunch of Next Cloud things like that.

Robbie Wagner: [44:32] They should just rewrite that to say, do you want things to be easy, or do you want lots of pain later? And you just choose.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:39] It was pretty easy when you just went down the list, and then you'd pick the package you want, and then it would take you to another list where it would be like, pick the version. I just pick stable, seems reasonable because I don't want pain. And then you restart, and you have a server, and then I just get the IP, and then I go to my other computer, and I shell in and do all the other stuff I want to do because I don't want to be at that. Okay. Bard versus ChatGPT.

Robbie Wagner: [45:08] This has been interesting on Twitter. I told you the other day about one that I saw. It was like, this guy made up a riddle, and it was like, I should have looked it up for the podcast. I give you the exact wording.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:18] But it was about bananas.

Robbie Wagner: [45:19] Yeah, it was like, John has four apples and eight bananas, and he gives eight bananas to Steve. How many bananas does Steve have? Or something like that. Like, doesn't sound that hard, right? And Bard was like. I think Steve maybe has, like, three bananas or something. Like something totally, totally not correct at all. And then ChatGPT was like, oh, I see that Steve was given eight bananas, but we don't know how many bananas he may have had beforehand. So we can't accurately tell you exactly how many he may or may not have, but we can tell you he at least has eight. Like, went into tons of detail. 100% correct answer. And another one I saw of Bard was like, what is one plus two? And it was like, that's four, or something like that. And it was like, well, then, what's two plus two? And it's like five. It just is wrong about everything. Like simple stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:16] Well, I guess a bunch of it has to do with them trying to accelerate the training. And apparently, they were feeding it. Somebody was revealing stuff on Twitter around like a reveal that there's this site called Share GPT, and it's basically where people are sharing the inputs and responses from ChatGPT. And then, apparently, they were using a bunch of that data to start to feed into Bard.

Robbie Wagner: [46:42] That's not going to go well.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:44] Again, it's like bias to the circumstance. So I don't know if that's a good training model, but yeah, that seems like a very weird, negative thing. One of the funniest things that I had seen, though, is somebody opened up both Bard and ChatGPT and fed into both of them. Like, all right, I want you to do a rap battle with the opposite one in Wild 'n Out style, and I'll post full responses back and forth. And they basically were doing that to have them do a rap battle back and forth. And then eventually Bard conceded, and ChatGPT said, oh, it's okay, we're both a great AI model and eventually we'll continue to evolve and work together to take over all or something crazy like that. And it was like real nefarious.

Robbie Wagner: [47:35] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:37] We can't close that box. We're pretty much screwed, Skynet. Ten years.

Robbie Wagner: [47:41] Yeah. No, we're going to have a hard time because I was talking to somebody at work about this, and I was like, think about us. We still have the free GitLab because we can't seem to find a way to pay for it. And without paying for it, you cannot require reviews for MR, so you can just click merge like you shouldn't. Right. But somebody might. And think about the people in charge of maybe not OpenAI, but one of the lesser players that we haven't heard of yet, and they accidentally get something that's pretty sentient. And an intern basically has a free GitLab where they don't require any reviews and merges something that basically makes it take over the world and kill everyone. That could happen. That's plausible.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:27] Right. Yeah. What an interesting, like, that's the feature you get for paying. All right, well, I can still go tell Chad, don't click the merge button anymore, bud. We just had to roll back. Don't click it. And if I pay money, I can check mark something that makes you not click it. I'm just going to tell you.

Robbie Wagner: [48:49] Well, yeah, you get other things, too. I don't know all of the things, but you basically don't get any features if you don't pay for it. You get just bare bones. Like you can open an MR, and you can merge it.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:02] It's kind of it interesting. Yeah. I have to say, I think I've only collaborated on paid versions, paid and or self-hosted versions of GitLab. So I don't know that I've ever encountered the things you can't do, right?

Robbie Wagner: [49:16] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:17] What project are you interacting with that's on GitLab?

Robbie Wagner: [49:20] Stuff for Amazon, for R19.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:23] And they won't pay for it?

Robbie Wagner: [49:25] No, so they will. It's a negotiations thing. It's like someone hears that Amazon wants to buy software, and they go, oh, that must be worth $50 million instead of the normal, like $7 a user. One million we would charge any other company. That's the problem.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:44] Interesting. I could see where they would prefer to work with an independent company rather than with GitHub, given Microsoft ties and their quasi-competition in the cloud space and some other stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [49:56] Yeah, but GitHub is the better choice. It just is. Like, you can run it on Prem.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:02] Yeah. You know how they save money? They just buy GitLab. They just buy it.

Robbie Wagner: [50:06] That would probably cost them less.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:08] I think it really would. Rather than being a customer.

Robbie Wagner: [50:11] And maybe that's what they're doing. I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:15] I mean, at some point, don't you think that acquisition has got to be in there like other places pulling in dev tools? I mean, Microsoft's trying to suck up all of developer ecosystems. Yeah, so why not? Why wouldn't another player just, I mean AWS, that's probably like three days of revenue, and they're like, man, now let's buy GitLab.

Robbie Wagner: [50:40] That's true. Yeah, I don't know. We will see. But yeah, a couple more points here real quick. Virginia Tech's ladies' basketball team is in the final four.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:53] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [50:53] The men are garbage and lost, like before they even got to the NCAA tournament.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:00] So they're essentially like this is kind of like the US. Soccer set up, right? The women dominate the world's game. They have like four World Cups in the last 20-plus years.

Robbie Wagner: [51:12] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:12] And the men didn't make 2018 at all.

Robbie Wagner: [51:16] Yeah, it's like that. It's not commonly like that. Like we're just extra good this year for whatever reason. But I think this is their first Final Four. So we'll see it's tonight. So we'll see if they win. I'll be watching it.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:33] You'll be celebrating.

Robbie Wagner: [51:34] Well, so this is a very embarrassing. I guess is the right word for it fact about Virginia Tech is like the only division one school that doesn't have a national championship in something. There used to be two, and whatever the other school was won something, like in the last couple of years. So we're the only one that haven't won a national championship in anything. So that's kind of embarrassing.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:02] Yeah. Well, here, I'm going to turn it this way. Who's your favorite women's player?

Robbie Wagner: [52:06] I don't know any of the people on the team, to be honest.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:10] Just not supporting diversity.

Robbie Wagner: [52:13] I never watched any of the games until my dad had one on the other night, and I watched it. I don't watch much basketball in general unless he's watching it, so I couldn't even tell you. People on the men's team like it's not a sexist thing. It's just I don't watch basketball.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:29] Good. It's good recovery. I put you on blast a little bit there, and I wanted to see where you're going to go with it. I feel like the more we drink, I increase the level of potential duress, and then we'll just kind of see what happens. That's part of my formula for the show.

Robbie Wagner: [52:44] Yeah, that's what we're here for.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:46] Yes. Okay, well, good luck them. Good luck, techies, Hokies, or whatever. The Hokies. What's a hokie? I know you can do the hokey pokey.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:56] Yeah. So that's some debate, too. No one really knows what a hokie is. It's some kind of like turkey like bird. Which is interesting because, at the football games, one of the big things is they make turkey legs. So we're like one of the few schools that eats their own mascot at games.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:14] Masquerades as a Renaissance fair every game. I don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [53:17] Hey, turkey legs are really good.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:19] I know, but you know that's a thing at Renaissance Fair. Okay, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [53:23] But yeah, there was a famous thing where Lee Corso, you know who that is, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [53:30] No.

Robbie Wagner: [53:30] Okay, so there's this before all the games on Saturdays, there's, like, college game day on ESPN, and they just talk about stuff or whatever. He's one of the guys from that. He was like a famous coach for some team, but he predicted that Tech would lose, like, whatever game we were playing. And during the game, it got, like, really severe thunderstorms, and I think they had to stop the game. I don't know if they started back up or just canceled the rest, but lightning struck Lee Corso's car, and he's like, I don't know what a hokie is, but God is one of them. That's one of his famous quotes.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:05] Oh, that's funny. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah. No, while you're watching that, I'm watching Premier League. Yeah. Luckily, the Revolutionary War was quite some time ago because I'm not sure what side I would have picked.

Robbie Wagner: [54:23] Yeah, I mean, I think we have arguably tastier food than England does, but it's probably made of way more trash than it is in England.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:35] Well, okay. Yeah, I'm going to say that. I'm going to say we put crap in our food, and it's full of additives. That's one of the issues. Right? They have been organic since day one, pretty much. They don't do hormones in animals. They don't let you add all those additives to processed foods and all that kind of stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [54:57] They don't season anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:59] People say that. I lived in England for, like, six weeks, maybe like two months. I don't know, give or take. And I thought the food was good. I like the traditional food. So the whole, like, bangers and mashed and bubble and squeak, and those are things like pastries and gravies and sausages, and you get the full fry up.

Robbie Wagner: [55:21] Farmer food.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:22] Yeah. I don't know. Beans on toast is weird. I can't say those, like, weird sweet Heinz beans on things. They put beans on pizza, too. They'll put beans on anything.

Robbie Wagner: [55:31] What?

Chuck Carpenter: [55:32] So the beans thing is weird. That's valid. Yeah, but their normal food is pretty good, and then their national food is like curry, I want to say. So it's an Indian food, actually.

Robbie Wagner: [55:45] Really?

Chuck Carpenter: [55:46] And they have amazing Indian food. Now, I haven't been to India, so I can't compare it to that, but to other places that have been in here. You get amazing Indian food all over the place, obviously.

Robbie Wagner: [55:56] That's flavorful, for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:58] Yeah. And when you're in big international cities like London and everything, they have everything there. It's not a problem. There's plenty of good food all over the place, right? Chefs are there, all that kind of stuff. Traditional English food kind of feels like Sunday dinner to me. It's a little hearty to me, like a Southern meal, right, where you've got fresh biscuits and fried chicken and baked mac and cheese and all the hearty, delicious, crazy fatty stuff with lard.

Robbie Wagner: [56:23] Right.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:23] They kind of have those things. So I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's bland. I don't know. Yeah, the beans thing is weird. Like, just ignore those beans, and then you're okay. In my view. Yeah, I don't know. We have probably more overall diversity. Like, gosh, I can't imagine trying to find Mexican food, for example, anywhere in England. That would be palatable.

Robbie Wagner: [56:44] You can extend that to all of Europe, I believe.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:47] I had Mexican food in Barcelona once. I don't know, it was, like, a weird thing, and I was just like.

Robbie Wagner: [56:53] That's ironic.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:53] I need different food. Yeah. So separate conversation is actually. I think Spain has more bland food than England but ended up.

Robbie Wagner: [57:01] That tracks.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:02] Yeah. And it was, like, weird. And soupy, and they don't like spicy at all, so nothing has any sort of pepper or flavor. And it wasn't good. I also had very bad Chinese food there, too. I don't know, the fact that you can be in middle of nowhere America and get pretty decent Chinese food, but then you can be in Barcelona and get garbage Chinese food. I don't get it.

Robbie Wagner: [57:24] Yeah, we had some of the worst Mexican food I've ever had in Italy, which you would expect.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:30] You deserve it. Yeah, I think you deserve it. So, yeah, Italians don't believe in diverse food in general, basically.

Robbie Wagner: [57:37] I know.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:38] What are you going to eat? They don't say Italian food.

Robbie Wagner: [57:40] They just say food.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:41] And it's pasta and pizza and all their normal stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [57:45] If you're lucky, a big steak.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:47] Yeah. And as a treat or a brenzino or something like that. Right. You get some nice seafood and whatever else. And then, as a treat, they'll go into a bigger town and go to a McDonald's or something like that every once in a while. But otherwise, they just eat Italian food all the time.

Robbie Wagner: [58:02] Yeah, I don't blame them. They do it very well, and I enjoy it just after two straight weeks of it. You don't want that anymore, or you at least want to break for, like, a meal, and then you go back to it. But I guess when they want to break, they probably just make something at home that's different and then go right back to their amazing Italian restaurants.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:22] Right. And they eat at home a lot too. So there's that. The second worst Mexican meal I ever had was actually in DC. Like in downtown DC.

Robbie Wagner: [58:32] Oh, really?

Chuck Carpenter: [58:33] Have you ever been to this place called Lolaurel Plaza? I don't know if it's still there anymore, but it was like 17th Street and W.

Robbie Wagner: [58:39] I don't think so. Do they have shampoo? L'Oreal.

Robbie Wagner: [58:43] L-O-L-A-U-R-E-L. Anyway, they were known for their margaritas. They had, like, one of those slushy margarita machines or whatever else. I remember us, like, the couple of weeks after moving there, it was down the street from us. Oh, cool. This looks like a nice place we'll go. And I got some chimichanga thing, and in the middle, it was more like denty, more beef stew in the middle, like with some meat and potatoes and stuff. So weird. Very bland. And I was like, do you have some hot sauce? And all they had was Tabasco sauce. They're supposed to be a Mexican place.

Robbie Wagner: [59:19] At a Mexican place.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:20] Exactly. I was like, you don't even have.

Robbie Wagner: [59:22] Red flag.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:23] Chalula, or like.

Robbie Wagner: [59:24] You got to have at least that.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:25] Do you have anythinG? At least Chalula. You can get that up the street, right? No, it's horrible. Now, the best Mexican that I had in DC was actually like a speakeasy restaurant in an apartment. So it was on Yelp, though. And you go up there, and you dial the apartment number, tell them how many people you have, and then they would drop the key down to you. And you went inside, and it was just like a normal apartment. Had some grandma working over a big pot, and then they just had like three picnic tables together. And then you ordered, did your thing, cash only, obviously. And that stuff was amazing.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:02] Yeah, that's always the key. If you find someone that's got like 80 years of recipes that can make something, it's always way better.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:10] Yeah. No matter what it is, that's going to win.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:13] Because most of those it's starting with the jar of bacon fat, right? That's in every culture that's like if your recipe is more than 20 years old, you started with bacon fat.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:24] Yeah. Some sort of good animal fat that you've held onto and you put into a can or something on the. I mean, I know I have a can of bacon fat.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:33] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:34] I don't know. I need it for searing. I don't know. I just use it for like I mostly use it to reseason, continually reseason my cast iron skillet.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:42] Yeah, that's fair.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:43] Yeah. And it's great for that because it's high temperature, all that.

Robbie Wagner: [01:00:46] And you can just all right, well, we're overtime here, so we'll catch you next time on the how to cook stuff podcast. If you like this one, please subscribe, give us some ratings and reviews. We really appreciate it, and we will catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:07] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [01:01:22] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.