Top Five Tech

Welcome to Top 5 Tech, my weekly show about what to watch, listen to, read, download,

and something deep every week.

More of a top 10 this week because there's a bunch of great links that I wanted to point

you to.

The first one is an interview with Craig Federighi and YouTube channel Donald Decodes.

He has some great questions about the iPhone Duo, swipe gestures, and Craig Federighi gets

thankfully nerdy.

Kind of explains the details about how they decide things like the backswipe and why it's

not from both directions like on Android.

Really fun interview.

Not super long.

It's about 11 minutes.

So I'll link that.

Then there's MUSE AI on primary technology and on last week on this show.

And Joanna Stern's interview with Mark Zuckerberg is one of the best.

She has hard-hitting questions both about the Ray-Bans, Metaglasses, and of course MUSE

AI.

So we'll link that interview down in the show notes as well.

On what to listen to, I would listen with a big grain of salt, but Ezra Klein actually

interviewed Bill Gates talking about AI and the warnings that Bill Gates have been giving

very publicly.

This is also a video interview if you want to watch it on the New York Times website.

but I'm going to link the audio podcast in Apple Podcasts and Bill Gates.

Bill Gates has some strong feelings. He thinks that while people are comparing the AI revolution

right now to the industrial revolution, he thinks of it more as like an evolutionary

leap. And he says many jobs are not just going to change in nature, but will be going away.

I'm not going to say he's a doomsdayer, but he has some strong feelings about it. Now,

we actually discussed on primary technology this week, how much we should take Bill Gates

ideas and thoughts on AI, because he's not really in the world right now working on the

frontier models, and Microsoft isn't really in the conversation.

When it comes to all of that either, it's like open AI, Anthropic, Meta, Google.

So again, big grain of salt, but I did find it to be a fascinating interview.

And Ezra Klein pushes back on a lot of the ideas that Bill Gates puts forward.

So I thought it was a great interview.

And on a second, what to listen to my co-host on primary technology, Jason

Aiton interviewed Ron Johnson, which if you're not familiar with that name, he

joined Apple and along with Steve Jobs helped build out the idea of the Apple

store, the original concept, the genius bar.

He came from Target and there's really fascinating

stories about that and how Steve Jobs courted him to come to Apple.

Several fun Steve Jobs stories in this episode but that's the episode of Creative Effort

linked below.

Now on what to read, I have two picks here.

One's an actual read.

One is you should read this website because a childhood friend of mine actually, Nick

who I've known I think 35 years, he built Roadrunner.

He vibe coded this and it is a better replacement for Nextdoor.

Now this is only available in Catalina, Saddlebrook, Oro Valley, Oracle, San Manuel and the rest

of the southern Tucson suburbs but it's a really cool website and he has ways where

it's going to verify that these people actually live in this place, that it's private, newest

posts first.

Basically all the bloat and junk that makes Nextdoor not very fun to use, he built a way

better option.

Now it would be cool if he could expand this to many other neighborhoods, maybe even across

the country.

I'm not sure what that all would take but Roadrunner, especially if you live in that

area, really fun tool.

Great job Nick on building that.

And I'll plug another one of Jason Aten's articles on what to read.

Back in July, how the AI landscape right now is more like Jurassic Park than anything

else and Jason put that into words over on Inc.com, how the AI industry has a Jurassic

Park problem.

Another great read.

I wanted to download, wanted to highlight two free apps, both completely free.

The first one, Ensemble Music Player.

This was built by Felicity, a developer that I met personally at WWDC and it is a replacement

to be able to browse your Apple Music but if you also store music on a Plex server,

You can put it all in one place.

It feels a lot like the stock Apple Music app, really nicely designed.

It's available on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

Again, free to download.

Try it out, especially if you have a Plex library of music

and you want to be able to browse that and Apple Music together.

And another free app.

I recently moved away from Raycast, Raycast updated to version two.

I was loving Raycast for the last month when I switched to it.

But version two has broken some things like my shortcuts and a lot of controls.

And so I've been experimenting going back to Spotlight.

I created a bunch of shortcuts.

And I'll link my YouTube video explaining how I'm going back to Spotlight and building

all those Raycast features with shortcuts, even things like window management.

But one of the applications that make it possible is something called HyperKey, free macOS app,

free to download.

And what this does, it lets you remap the Caps Lock key on your keyboard to be a bunch

of modifiers.

So I have it so when I hold the Caps Lock key, it actually reads Shift-Option-Control-Command.

Four modifier keys.

This way you can create keyboard shortcuts that

rather than having to hold down all those keys and then a letter you can

just hold the caps lock key and then W. I mapped that to a shortcut that will

take whatever the active app window is put it on the left side of my screen a

quarter size and place it precisely where I want. In my video I talk about a

lot of other use cases I have for the hyper key but it's a great free app

that's linked down below. And finally on something deep MKBHD Marcus Brownlee one

of the largest tech youtubers on the platform he posted a 12-minute video

commenting on the new YouTube feature that we've mentioned on primary.

the AB video test feature that will be coming next year in 2027. There's lots of AB thumbnail

tests on YouTube right now, you might even notice as you go on YouTube, you see a video

from a creator, you know, the thumbnail and title might look one way. And the next time

you log on to YouTube, or maybe when you look on your phone versus the TV, you see a different

thumbnail. And I do this a lot too, I will test three different thumbnails and three different

titles. And whichever gets the most watch time from people who click through, YouTube will say

that one wins and then make that the thumbnail and title. And I think it's

a great tool to be able to test which is most effective. YouTube is launching

video A/B testing, meaning when you click the same YouTube link versus your friend

or someone else clicking that same link, you might see a different video. Now

Marquez explains that he talked to YouTube and they are going to have an

algorithm that tells how different these videos are. So supposedly you won't be

able to create a video how the new iPhone 18 is amazing and then create

another video the iPhone 18 is terrible. Supposedly this algorithm...

will catch how different those videos are and not allow a creator to A/B test

that. You also can't go backwards and A/B test a video you already published. This

will only be for new videos going on a platform next year. But Marques has a

good point, meaning comments will be broken. So if you comment on a YouTube

video and the timestamp is in the comment, which version of the video did

that person see? Will those timestamps be broken? And you might watch the first 30

seconds of a video, share it to someone else, and they might see a different first

30 seconds of a video.

You're not even talking about the same video.

Again, with this algorithm testing, maybe it will be clear that these

videos are not that different, but it creates this world where the YouTube

video, even at the same link that you may watch might be a different experience

than the video that I watch at the same link and the algorithms that already

power the feeds on Instagram and Facebook and threads and all these social media

platforms, it creates different experiences of the world.

And that's why many of these platforms are echo chain.

the biases that people may have just get confirmed and reaffirmed because the algorithm gives

them the content that they interact with and want to watch.

And while YouTube is based on an algorithm as well, at least the videos you see on the

homepage, this idea that we click the same YouTube link and we might see different videos

at that same destination, that doesn't feel super great.

Now it's also a huge lift for someone like me who's a solo creator to edit two or even

three videos differently and upload that as one to the platform.

So I will probably not be taking advantage of this, but I'm curious if YouTube walks this back or just how this feature can be used, especially in relation to Marquez posting this video, which again, he's very influential on the platform and one of the biggest tech creators out there.

But let me know what you think. How do you feel about A/B video testing on YouTube?

You can sign up for my free newsletter by scanning this QR code. And when you reply to that, I get every email and read those.

So I'd love to hear from you. A/B video testing. How do you feel?

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