The Most Controversial Mac App... Ever

I spent far too much time on this one. Full disclaimer: Yes, AI was used to generate the pictures of Adam as no pictures exist (or rather none that he personally posted). There roughly 100~ AI images used as composites. Believe me, this did not save me any time. More below. Beelink MiniPC https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eqi13-pro Synology DS Series https://www.synology.com/en-us/products?product_line=ds_j%2Cds_plus%2Cds_value%2Cds_xs Hotline Navigator - new HL client (Mac / Windows / Debian Linux) https://github.com/fuzzywalrus/hotline/ Hotline https://github.com/mierau/hotline Mobius (hotline server) https://github.com/jhalter/mobius Obession (Hotline client for WIndows / Mac / Arch Linux) https://github.com/tjohnman/Obsession Hosting a Hotline server with a VPS and WireGuard to a Raspberry Pi https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/12/11/mobius-hotline-vps-wireguard-pi.html 0:00 The damn truth 1:37 Hotline 2:18 Keep It Real 4:37 D'evils 6:19 Money changes everything 8:21 Once upon a time in Australia 11:00 Waxing Philosophical 12:56 The context is everything 14:58 Hotline today 16:24 Beelink MiniPC 17:09 Hotline Navigator 18:19 Setting up my own server 21:05 YouTube is a good hobby to lose money It felt entirely weird for me to use someone else's photo and turn the internet into a casting couch. So the pictures you see of Adam (and those 2 brief video clips) are AI as are his father and business guys. I figured that of the 800+ images having only about 100 was fine and it allowed me to narrative create a visually ADHD exhausting style to create the feeling of burnout to lead into the faux-Western outro and Adam's retreat. Several very vocal people hated that I used AI images. Everyone has a line with AI, and the problem is I know where I used it but for many people this creates distrust. If an image is AI how do I trust anything else that's being presented? The reality is most people don't care but the ones who do REALLY care. AI is and was never going to be a mainstay of my channel as it just doesn't even make sense for most use cases. It's not better than me at expressing my own voice and thoughts, nor can it generate video that's remotely in the ballpark of what I do or even visually create something as trivial as thumbnails in the style I want of 90s-esq Photoshop like my pirate flag. So the critics have spoken and I have listened. AI generated images aren't what people want to see even when buttressed by lots of real photos and video clips. ---- sources ---- Hotline's civil war https://www.salon.com/1999/02/25/feature_224/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990901171737/http://salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/02/25feature2.html hotline to the underground: https://web.archive.org/web/19991002010708/http://salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/02/24feature.html Adam's legal nightmare: https://web.archive.org/web/19990427171756/http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/981215/industry/it1.html Haxial dev news https://web.archive.org/web/20071031081149/http://news.haxial.com:80/kdxdev/ Street Cred: Hot Connection - Wired Mag https://web.archive.org/web/20160304053700/http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1997/09/6945 Hotline revisited https://www.macworld.com/article/220650/hotline-revisited.html Battle for Hotline hits the courts https://web.archive.org/web/20000519222408/https://www.it.fairfax.com.au/990223/software/software3.html Netscrawl https://wiki.preterhuman.net/NetScrawl Hotline reinvents the Net https://mg.co.za/article/1998-11-20-hotline-reinvents-the-net/ HInk's blog https://web.archive.org/web/20030424183005/http://hinks.hypermart.net/ Hotspring's Hotline https://web.archive.org/web/20021128192512/http://hotspringsinc.com/ https://www.afr.com/politics/employer-owner-of-copyright-20010405-k0xwm https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/hotline_info/AdamHinkley-Redrock-HLComm.pdf https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Hotline_Communications