alexjplant

My grandparents sprung for a subscription to PC Magazine when I was a preteen for a year or two so that I could read his column in the very back of each issue. I'm sure my thoughts on his opinions would be radically different today but his prose was timeless and hilarious. Mad respect and RIP.

home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness

N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".

The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.

Claude does this too. I asked it recently to compare two versions of a song (the original and '97 remake of EPMD's "You Gots To Chill", if anybody wants to try and replicate this) and it flatly refused. No amount of reasoning would knock it off of its moralizing perch - reproducing any part of lyrics is expressly prohibited.

In light of this and other ridiculous behavior I'm migrating to my own OpenWebUI instance with open-weight models from OpenRouter (with ZDR, of course). We'll see how it goes.

We do. People who, for example, memorize question banks to pass certification tests without knowing the underlying material are equally frowned upon for not having the problem solving skills that they purport to. I'll leave the contrasts between LLMs and people to the well-written sibling comments.

The Zapp & Roger shout-out in the title is gold too.

I am in neither of these and nor is any of the many people I know with macbooks. I honestly do not understand why any average person would buy anything else than a macbook today.

Because a used Thinkpad running Linux is the people's champ. It costs $200 instead of $2000. Parts are plentiful and virtually anything can be replaced with a small Phillips head screwdriver. The screen doesn't break if you look at it wrong. You can drop it down a flight of stairs and it'll keep chugging. Linux support has been great for north of a decade. It's the pinnacle of productive e-cycling.

Apple Silicon's value prop is undeniable but their laptops are otherwise "meh". Judging by all the internet whinging you'd think that every laptop besides a MacBook has a Game Boy screen and a trackball but the truth is that many non-Apple laptops are perfectly usable. I have both and actually spend more time on my Thinkpad.

I must confess that I asked a leading question. At no point did I say that the usage wasn't real; by way of dramatic omission I was more pointing to the fact that a common ECMAScript/React-ism is overrepresented in Claude's training set to the point that it's being applied to situations not involving duck-typed languages.

I'm not a grammatical prescriptivist but I find it viscerally troubling that a bunch of LLM cargo-culted terms are starting to inform how we talk about our work.

This is the same shape as many other life-cycle bugs [...]

Claude-ism detected. IME with Claude Code an object does not have a type or definition, apparently, but rather a shape (or at least it reaches for that word before more technically-accurate ones). Problems are not of a similar class or type, but of the same shape. Functions are not defined by their signatures but by their shape. Who talks like this and how did it make its way into the training data so pervasively?

I was about to link to something I'd read in Foreign Policy a few days ago until Krugman beat me to the punch:

I don’t want to overstate the case here. The dollar’s role as the dominant currency for ordinary business is not under threat. A new article in Foreign Policy by Agathe Demarais is titled “China’s de-dollarization drive has hit a wall.” [1]

The headline is this:

Iran’s ability to withstand American pressure has demonstrated that U.S. sanctions are a lot less effective than in the past given that rogue actors can use the yuan and CIPS as a work-around.

The dollar as an instrument of offensive diplomacy is now weakened, not as the currency of international transaction. That being said Iran's economy isn't exactly doing numbers at the moment so even this caveat has a caveat.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/24/china-dollar-dedollariz...

Makes complete sense to me. Fender has immense cultural cachet among multiple big-spending demographics: blues boomers, Cobain disciples, indie kids, even the hair metal guys via Charvel. The Gibson/Harley-Davidson move of leveraging a company that makes stuff into a lifestyle brand is the play here. Fender would rather throw legal weight around to execute that than compete by building high-quality guitars at a good price.

Too many Clapton lawyers have gotten hip to boutique builders. Fender would rather make them buy a $5000 Masterbuilt Custom Shop Deluxe Roadworn Heritage Double Relic No-Caster than a Tom Anderson or Suhr. Same for kids buying Harley Bentons and ESPs - a $1000 Indonesian-built instrument is their future if Fender has anything to say about it.

Rock and Roll San Diego (the aforementioned rehearsal space) is slated to be part of the redevelopment :-( as is Soma. I only moved here 6 years ago and it already feels like the end of an era.

Les Girls is still there. I chuckle every time I pass it on the way to the rehearsal space my band uses. I always suspected that it had been a bigger deal in some bygone era; glad to see that confirmed via photographic evidence.

“There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.

These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.

It seems to really be a nice step-up and is getting quite close to the frontier.

IMHO it's already surpassed them. I vastly prefer my personal GLM and OpenCode setup to the Claude Code and Opus one that I have to use at work. The former makes way fewer StackOverflow brogrammer-tier mistakes and is considerably better at following instructions. The harness UX is also vastly superior as it doesn't ignore, randomly change, or incorrectly report settings.

Maybe it's the harness and I'd have even greater success with OpenCode and Anthropic, but I think it safe to say that Anthropic's moat is evaporating.

I drop photo of my water meter and tell it to read the value and serial number. It was far from instant but it was also easily under 3 minutes and result was correct.

"Useful" as in "has a use that isn't just for show". It takes me two seconds to read a photo of a water meter. Having an LLM read it for me in 3 minutes isn't useful. Similarly small models are capable of tool use (e.g. web searches) but their synthesis leaves much to be desired. As an example I'd ask some small models to find examples of products with specific characteristics and they'd come back with only one or two because they discounted other possibilities incorrectly by reasoning themselves out of it.

Feels like he was just comparing some benchmarks.

On what do you base this assertion?

The Claude web UI popped a modal up a few days ago advertising their new model to me. It was full of HTML tags that were escaped or otherwise not rendered so that the text was literally

  <b>Included in your plan limits until Jun 22</b> <br><br>Fable takes 2x the usage of Opus.
  <b> Switch models when a message is flagged</b><k <br> When safety measures flag a message, automatically switch to a different model to keep chatting. When off, your chat will pause instead. <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/153636
  target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" > Learn more</a>

I've spent the past week trying to scheme a way to get affordable local inference of something useful (Qwen3.6-36B-A3B) for ~$500 and have come to the conclusion that it simply isn't viable. A pair of power-restricted P100s in a workstation gets close but the workstations themselves are expensive and rare as hen's teeth (not to mention loud and large). I think early '27 will be when things open up as the hardware market unclenches and further strides are made in small capable models.

I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.

Nobody pretends that high-end watches are anything besides objets d'art and even then not every watch is a Rolex synonymous with conspicuous consumption. TE, on the other hand, has legions of fans that buy this stuff without knowing the first thing about music production just because they think it's cool and want to try it out. Nobody who buys a $700 Tissot thinks it tells better time than a $17 Casio.

I have no problem with any of this. The world needs more aspiring creatives and it's none of my business how these consumers choose to spend their money. The fact that you find it appropriate to unilaterally shit on people who have nice watches while being in possession of a $2000 groovebox is, however, as the kids say, "a choice."

I'd love an invite if you have one to spare (no expectation either way). Email is in my profile if you feel so inclined.

Sorry WHAT?! I was under the impression this whole time that this wasn't feasible due to asymmetric key encryption with the private keys baked deep into the hardware. Perhaps I'm misremembering but Cliff (the founder) is very big on protecting trade secrets so I'm rather surprised you were able to. Or do you mean you were able to flash new firmware, not reverse-engineer the existing one?

Either way I don't blame you for not writing it up. The same guy just recently accused another industry player of "infringing on [his] idea" with a product because he "filed a preliminary patent". I've been using Fractals since long before they were cool but based on the guy's forum posts I think he's having a hard time navigating the modern internet cultural landscape (the tenuous nature of his legal argument notwithstanding). It's a real shame as he's clearly super talented but I think trolls have gotten to him.

I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).

I've heard several LDS adherents talk about these people and I get the impression that they really don't appreciate the practices or the negative media attention that the polygamists bring to their faith. It's rather out of character for each of the people I heard this from to speak ill of anybody at all so I'm pretty sure they feel strongly about it.

As an atheist I don't claim loudmouth internet "GoD iSnT ReAl ShEePlE" edgelords so I understand the frustration.

Not incompatible with my satirical post (I wrote "performant," a notorious tech neologism, not performative). Whether subconsciously or not people 100000% use language to communicate and determine others' social tribe membership.

Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.

I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis.

Today's frontier models are genuinely useful as rubber ducks or grunt units. They are horrible for actual problem solving. These tools are not capable of actual reasoning. They will happily crap out a broken, untyped, untested Next.js monstrosity with no discernible architecture. They will build esoteric shell scripts to perform operations that could be done idiomatically and simply with tools already in your codebase. They will tell you to walk to the car wash then have the car wash valet your car back to you when confronted with the flaw in their logic. They will validate incorrect beliefs like ketchup being an acceptable hot dog condiment or the notion that "The Red Hot Chili Peppers" make good music. They have no taste, no anima, no drive.

Rule #1: Do not anthropomorphize the LLM. It is a million monkeys at a million typewriters piped into a digital sieve. I don't know how or why people place such trust in them while bemoaning other technology in our lives for being so broken ("my algorithm [sic] only shows me X", "the new iPhone update sucks", etc). If everybody followed this rule then the deluge of emoji-ridden hokum pouring into Slack workspaces and GitHub PRs around the world would cease but I'm not holding my breath.

I never left anything valuable or personal at my desk when I worked in an office simply because I had a very nonzero number of colleagues who acted like animals. My fizzy waters, coffee, and snacks would be consumed without permission or replenishment. Chairs, monitors, and input peripherals would get swapped without asking. Desks surfaces would be sat on with chairs used as footstools. Corporate effluvia of all types would end up on my "unused desk" because I wasn't in at the exact moment some roving bandit walked by looking for a spot to dump their crates of paper and binders.

Some people simply have no regard for others and will mess with or jack your shit. Don't give them the chance.

the current "It's got electrolytes" craze

The modern emphasis on electrolytes is directionally correct but ultimately silly. Most electrolyte satchets and drinks are just overpriced salt water with artificial flavoring and sweeteners. The majority of the Western world actually fails to meet their recommended intake of potassium and magnesium. The former is rare in beverages because of its bitter taste and possible drug interactions. Magnesium is also used somewhat sparingly because certain forms create GI distress. This is very unfortunate since both of these minerals are essential to overall health and of great benefit to the cardiovascular and circulatory systems when taken in recommended amounts.

I dump Lite Salt (potassium and sodium chloride in equal amounts), Stevia, and powdered grapefruit into a bottle and shake to make my own electrolyte drink. It's dirt cheap and tastes like flat Fresca.

I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they seem to have some gnarly legacy monolith that everybody is slowly chipping away at while old-timers continue deploying .NET services to IIS running on Azure VMs because it's a small evolution of what they've been doing for the better part of 20 years.

In the interest of fairness the San Francisco version of this is also a thing: a giant, untyped ball of Rails spaghetti from the same period running on Heroku that everybody has Stockholm Syndrome'd their way into loving because of Ruby's elegance and beauty. The burden is merely shifted from a large Microsoft to a series of small SaaS companies :-)

Exceptions to this rule exist (hence my "80%") and modern .NET is lovely but it seems that the non-Java/Python mindshare is now taken up by the Golangs and Rusts of the world. It's a true shame since I do love C# for basically being a better Java.

With the weight of the batteries in back it might be fine. The issue with RWD trucks with traditional drivetrains is the lack of traction owing to all of the weight being over the non-drive wheels. Driving my F-150 in the snow or rain was always dicey because of this.

That being said I wouldn't touch a Tesla with a barge pole for reasons numerous.

instead that they include the name of a person they just met in every sentence because it made that person like them more.

I've never read this book but have learned through cultural osmosis that this practice largely originated from it. I always found it rather stilted and ever since discovering where it came from I view it with a degree of suspicion. A contrasting, more generous reading is that the people who read the book and do this are trying to do more of the "win friends" part than "influence people." I'm also notoriously bad with names so I can't really blame somebody for perhaps trying to use mine verbally to commit it to memory :-).