CSSer

Given that I just read this comment after getting off a connecting flight that had me waiting on a fully boarded plane in 100 degree Phoenix weather for half an hour, it’s pretty poignant. I read an article earlier today about how Phoenix may not be inhabitable in twenty years, and I’m here to tell you that it’s already insufferable no matter how well the A/C was or was not working on that plane.

I don’t need a plane that flies faster. I need an airline that puts pure service before profit.

Put that on a T-shirt!

I think people miss this because these companies exist in a space that is new in tech, and that means lots of competition through PR and marketing. When that happens, it’s easy to feel like a company is telling you about everything they’ve been working on or are openly talking about what gives them their edge when in fact the opposite is often true.

They want it to equal identity verification! When virtually every top tech executive who wants a favor is at the inauguration and you have companies doing 180 degrees on support for something they previously furiously opposed, someone is getting something they wanted. It seems naive to think otherwise. Furthermore, the current administration in the U.S. fired or ignored the competent people to which you’re referring, and those people oppose a centralized repository of various metadata because it creates a central point of failure, otherwise known as a target, that is generally a bad idea for both our nation and our citizens. Of course there are agencies in the federal government that possess this information already, but they possess it for their purposes only. This is good because it means that it’s both more difficult to abuse internally in addition to being more cumbersome to collect externally.

Everything is going to plan! Protect the precious bodily fluids.

And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.

Before LLMs, learning on the job looked like reading documentation. Now it’s a guided tour with verification. When I produce things in this way, I’m not just blindly accepting it. The goal is that by the end of it I have learned more about the codebase and architecture, not less. I feel that’s important.

Oh joy. A model whose safeguards make it prone towards code that make your systems less safe. How brilliant!

Yes, and "in collaboration with the U.S. Government" feels like a very gross ploy at appeal to authority. You don't need Mythos or really any SotA frontier model to make malware or do extensive penetration testing/reconnaissance already. Sure, Mythos might be faster/more efficient, but the cat has been out of the bag for awhile. Even the terminology "infrastructure providers" practically screams "Enterprise leads".

I don’t think you’re going to find a consensus on this because it really just comes down to the quality of the employees in each discipline. Actions speak louder than words. I’ve seen the IT people GP is describing. I’ve also seen yours. In GP’s scenario, they often even mean well but are very overwhelmed because they’ve come to exist in a space where _everything is IT_ because no one else is remotely qualified to fill the specialty gap. When I found myself in your scenario, the opposite was true and it completely matched what you described.

Anthropic (re-?)confirmed this.

It works until they get to the sentience part. Neat idea!

Those numbers are bullshit. The bottom of a grown woman’s cycle is around 100 pg/ml. I have no idea where they’re getting those numbers but I assure you they’re wrong, and even if they were remotely correct about E levels being close to one another at some point in the cycle the majority of the time they’re much farther apart.

Gold is pretty soft. You would have to cut it to 10 carat, so there’s be even more to go around!

It's practically karmic how rich this is.

Right. It's deterministic, and determinism should be the goal. It's not metaphysical. Some users know what they want while others do not. The software we create (by any means) should give users who know what they want the tools to find it, and guide those who don't until they do. Software exists to help us create our fate. It surprises me how many people are willing to relinquish that control or never wanted it, even within our ranks, by using AI to simplify experiences. IMHO, the optimization for most, but not perhaps not all, tools is to introduce AI internally to refine, create and expose more parameters, not less. Search is a perfect example of this.

But even then, you have to know to do that. It feels like a bit of a turtles all the way down situation, no?

This is what fascinates me. I have a friend, also a smart guy, who has made it to the point he’s at by being a kind of solutions expert. He’s an IT guy, basically. He’s very technical but has never claimed to be a software engineer. He’s writing software with Claude now. The other day he sent me a screenshot of some other team at his work asking him to shut off something he made that was brutalizing an API of theirs. I asked him if he had ever heard of a 429 or exponential back offs. He said no. How do you meta-prompt for that without knowledge?

I fully agree with you about communicating, but I’m not persuaded that translates to movement or is required for wisdom, which I think you’re broadly describing.

Physical movement can be joy. Dancing, running with children, playing sports with friends, and even just taking care of errands like cleaning so we can get on to enjoying our spaces with our friends and family are all benefits from being able to move and react faster. And I imagine any number of things will slow me down as I age, so I’ll take a +10% wherever I can get it!

Yes and no, it seems. Yes in Developer Mode. With that configuration, which confusingly requires you to turn on LAN mode first, you can use your own software to control all features of the device.

In LAN mode it’s more complicated. LAN mode requires you to still use their slicer because the majority of functions beyond the extremely basic are still restricted by their authorization layer. This means using their SDK/network plugin for anything you develop, effectively coercing developers into their ecosystem for use-cases by the majority of users.

It seems pretty clear, in my opinion, that what they’re trying to communicate by using the “developer mode” language is that owning your device end-to-end is big, scary, and only for professionals. Oh, btw, developer mode leaves your device completely open and introduces various UX friction points to the experience related to constantly needing to rebind. Effectively it’s malicious compliance on their end. They’re giving the middle finger to anyone who wants to cut them out, and it’s hard to say anyone who feels that way is imagining it.

I suppose you really enjoyed Leviathan…

being 'a man' is something that males must pursue actively.

I don’t know about this, but guys like this exhaust me. I figure skate, which is a stereotypically feminine hobby by association with its predominant participants (women). Of the few men who I do see figure skating, I rarely question their masculinity. If anything, I often notice it because I see how their unique strengths manifest in the sport through power and agility. It’s reflected in the height in their jumps or the speed in their spins. They do a thing I also happen to find interesting, the best way they can do it their way, and they don’t make a big deal about it. That’s attractive! It seems pretty masculine to me.

I can only hope that when men are alone with each other, they’re occupying each other’s space because they feel comfortable with each other, not because they’re proving anything. That’s how I choose friends, anyway!

Also, rinks are a third space. Now that I think about it, they’re arguably for men more than women. Maybe that’s a coincidence? It’s hard to say.

Unlike with women and menarche, males must continuously prove their manhood

I don’t personally find this to be true from the womanhood side of things without further clarification. Simone de Beauvoir famously said “Women are not born. They’re made” and I still find this to be true today even though many things no longer default to being for men. I think I probably “perform” womanhood for other women more than I do for men, and as I said above, that doesn’t necessarily make them like me more or vice/versa. It’s more of a common ground thing.

I had no idea the age range was so low! In my mind, men or women, my stereotype of an addicted gambler is older because they’re often retired and have nothing better to do. Or at least they’re in their 40s or 50s and are doing it because they’re… bored? Idk, I don’t get gambling personally. But this is a surprise.

Wait, I'm confused. Was that supposed to be an insult?!

The problem, from a UX standpoint, is that you need a visual affordance for the behavior. That is, you must indicate that it's about to happen and give the user the opportunity to abort. Alternatively, a continuous gallery could suffice.

The idea was getting a dog to improve your life, but agreed. That would be quite weird.

Are you considering jobs that are extraordinarily demanding? What if you're an ER Doctor? Or an Air Traffic Controller? Or someone getting started in their career in their early 20s, when most of us possess the unique combination of a lack of life experience that would prevent exploitation and ambition? For these jobs, I can easily sympathize with the idea that after a workday they're too tired to develop personally. Moreover, it's a manager's job to sap every ounce of productivity out of a person. Modern technology increasingly makes this possible. Even seemingly mundane jobs like working in a call center can be so orchestrated that using the bathroom makes them fall behind. And productivity has done nothing but rise for decades!

I also don't see how your final paragraph really refutes rather than just restates their opinion. Hobbies produce projects and business ventures all the time. Someone also has to find some way or another to socialize with the community. Volunteering is a great way to do that.

Doesn't seem that bad if you're convinced they're the only viable market dominator.

My experience mid-2024 was pretty much the same, and when I look now things do seem easier to find. The only caveat is the wider white collar market still seems pretty affected. I have a handful of friends in advertising who have been laid off and looking for more than six months.

My friends have told me that here in LA there are positions but many want you to move or commute excessively far, and there's real wage suppression going on. Also, many of the positions are "unicorn" roles, where they want someone with very niche experience. It's an employer's market for them.

You don't take photos on trips or with dogs?