Apple’s Podcasts App
This thing is a storage trojan horse. It downloads every episode of every show you subscribe to by default, on every one of your Apple devices. Is this a rational norm? The overwhelming bulk of the time I have 1Gbps+ high speed data available, and it can cache a whole two hour episode in memory in less than two seconds. For the infrequent case where I might be so data deprived it can’t handle a simple audio program — say on a flight — I can plan in advance and download individual episodes, much like Netflix’s download facility for such cases.
Maybe it’s that podcasts are an “extra” for me, and are not an obligation. I subscribe to podcasts I like to have easier access to them in an interface that really wants to push their recommended bunk otherwise. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to dutifully listen to every single episode like a todo list. Instead, I listen to a episodes here and there, depending on if the topic and description draw me in.
So the cache “hit” rate of the app default downloading everything is already low single digits, but once you add that it does it across my Apple devices it falls below 1%.
This doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal, but for people who use this app you’re eventually going to find that you have 200GB of podcasts clogging up your drive. And while I assume it has some logic for pruning…eventually…it’s a bit like SQL Server in that it seems to assume it has the run of the place except in total exhaustion of storage, which is a recipe for trouble when there are multiple apps all plying the same pattern.
Eventually you’ll find that it’s doing this, unasked, and disable downloading episodes and purge what you have locally. You need to make sure to disable it on every single Apple device you own, as it doesn’t sync this behaviour and will just default every new device to download 100s of GBs of patter.
Problem solved, right? I learned my lesson and disabled it, and the space was freed up. Yet I just did a periodic disk usage check on my primary Mac1 to find it again consuming 100GB+ deep within the user’s Library subfolder structure. This time it was the “Sync library” function. Downloads had long been disabled on every device, and I purged said storage everywhere, but still there’s some mysterious sync floating around.
Make Consumers Choose Between Too Little And Too Big
I’m a big fan of Claude Code, and lean on it heavily. It’s a fantastic work partner and tool in the toolbelt.
With Claude Pro you’re going to always find your quota exhausted, waiting for session timers to expire and logging extra usage charges: It’s too little usage for the average developer, and simple activities will leave you maxed out. So like many I upgraded to Claude Max.
Now I have to seriously work to exhaust the usage (to “get my money’s worth”), or to get anywhere close. I understand lots of other people have no problem saturating it, but I like to audit its creations, to understand its output, and to be careful in my trust in its choices. I’ve “caught” it making a number of egregious, critical mistakes over projects, and am constantly correcting the direction back to optimal. That isn’t a criticism, and it’s exactly what I do when working with other developers as well. But it is a natural rate limiter, and I’m not just typing prompt after prompt.
I really feel like Anthropic monitored developers and set subscription levels such that Pro would be below what the average developer needs, and the next step is a big jump up in capacity and price.
Which would be a trick they learned from Apple (to loop back to Apple and storage sizes). Apple long did this scheme where if the optimal amount of storage on a device was 16GB, they’d offer an 8GB option and a 32GB option. When the norm moved to 32GB, they’d offer 16GB and 64GB. For generations of devices they did this marketing pattern where you had to either underbuy and regret it (and then apps like the podcasts entrant would do their best to clog up the overpriced storage you did get), or overbuy for extra you likely wouldn’t need. It’s a good tactic for revenue maximization.
Provincial Politics
Since I touched on politics in other areas, I will spend a moment criticizing the politics in my own province, Ontario.
Ontarians don’t really pay much attention to provincial politics generally, and it’s treated as almost an afterthought. So standards are incredibly low and incredibly weak performances and platforms go with almost no question or attention.
We have political parties spending over a billion taxpayer dollars to cancel needed and underway natural gas power generation station projects purely to try to buy two ridings that looked flippable on the eve of an election.
And then we have the current Ontario government, whose agenda seems to be overwhelmingly alcohol and gambling based.
At this point I’m actually seriously concerned that my province is full of alcoholic degenerate gamblers, because the government’s agenda constantly returns to more places to buy and drink alcohol2, and more ways for degenerates to blow everything up with gambling. It’s utterly bizarre.
The gambling problem is hardly limited to Ontario, though. It is perverse how almost all media is sponsored by degenerate gambling ads3 now, which is an extremely bad, dystopian sign.
And to be clear, provincial governments have the enormously important portfolios of healthcare and education, given which you’d think every moment would be improvements and questions about those imperfect systems.
Best we can do is now you can chug keggers in the park while online sports betting. Deal?