brandall10

He's had a wild life with an arc similar to Steve Jobs. Taliesen West was basically an architecture cult where he frittered away for nearly a decade before landing Falling Water for his big comeback... at 70 years old.

And the HN denizens vote it right to the top.

Wow, listening to the Power Broker now, about 1/3 of the way through.

Audiobooks completely changed things for me... in the past 2 years, 'read' about 40 books, almost entirely listened to on my daily runs. The prior 2 years? Only 3 or so.

To be clear, Oh My Pi isn't simply batteries included like LaziPi. It's a fork with a bunch of foundational extra features built into the core.

It's hard to compare to the US as a big part of this is the very weak yen.

I spent a couple years traveling the world and punctuated my travels with a 2 week stop in Japan (Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto) in May '24. I was not prepared for how inexpensive everything was... much less than several eastern European cities I had just come from, more on par with places like Mexico City.

From the top of their corporate website, there is a video explaining this:

https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise

And from the top of their wikipedia page:

"is expected to reach supersonic speeds without causing a sonic boom at ground level by taking advantage of a physics phenomenon known as mach cutoff"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Overture

Their claim is the boom won't actually reach ground level for overland flights due to how they're profiled.

Of course that's the theory. The Trump Admin just allowed for a fairly audible boom.

This is discussed in the article:

"My personal impression is that within these quantizations Qwen 3.6 27B is as good as (or maybe slightly better than) DwarfStar4. Though, I won’t be surprised if for longer context projects DS4 has an edge."

Curious why OpenCode instead of a more 'full-fat' version of Pi with the larger model?

I feel like the amount of context bloat that OpenCode puts these small models into the dumb zone too quickly. The system prompt alone is 9k tokens, and when you add your own setup it can easily creep up to 15k.

Masterbuilts are closer to $10k now, fwiw. Plenty of shop built CS hover around $5k or more.

You might want to consider investing in something like a Babelio sound machine. It's tiny, quite loud, kinder to the environment and will guarantee you have a solution if the bathroom is too far away or the outside noise is a bit too aggressive.

They're designed for side-sleeping, but may present a bit of pressure on your ears... they do for me, I've adjusted. It's minor as the materials are quite soft.

They have a newer model that is slightly slimmer w/ more features like active noise cancellation, but has a smaller battery that is marginal for full-night sleeping, so I didn't bother upgrading.

One thing to note is they have some bad reviews due to issues with batteries dying or depleting quickly - my right bud wouldn't charge past 50% after 9 months of daily usage, which only lasted about 6 hours or so before dying. That said, Anker's tech support promptly sent out a new pair with minimal friction, which I received just days after reaching out. I've had 4 months of usage on those new ones without a hitch. Hopefully those kinks have been worked out.

Even if these new ones die outside of warranty, they're so good that I feel I'll have gotten my money's worth and will immediately buy them again.

Huge fan of my Anker Soundcore A20s w/ a mixture of noise colors over conventional ear plugs. Much more comfortable and don't create such a closed in effect. Easy to take in/out if I need to chat w/ a partner.

Also a simple noise machine can work wonders.

Internal tools and help/marketing pages aren't generally considered production code.

There was a book I read a couple years back called "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity", by David Bessis.

He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious.

So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.

Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”.

You're writing words that I did not say or imply.

The point is going against any (current) admin is almost always bad for a publicly traded company. Any public entity is going to have to have extremely good reasons to "fight back", how doing so is good for business. As a CEO of such an entity you're having to answer to many people who want a concrete plan and a belief in your strategy.

In the first rodeo, when all this was novel, it was believed such social signaling would pay off. Obviously silicon valley as a whole no longer feels this way.

TSLA is an outlier being grounded more on some superior man theory, that Apple did have in the past w/ Jobs, who is no longer there. Religious fervor stuff. It doesn't really apply. Rational moves here, please.

There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value

This is what I asked you to expound on. Please state a few.

Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.

That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.

Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.

It would be unusual for a leader of such a thing not act in accordance w/ shareholders' best interests, as well to defy likely board guidance.

Understood, but to be clear, I felt the same way after I heard how off I was, as if maybe there was something defective with my brain.

Just start small, record 4 bars of something, play it back. Use a metronome to gauge the actual amount of drift. See if you can hear what the metronome is telling you. Try to improve it with a few more attempts, then call it a day.

Try again after a good night's rest. Over time you should be able to naturally feel when you're slowing down or speeding up.

Until my late 20s, I was bad with both pitch and rhythm despite playing guitar for over a dozen years. Then I took singing lessons with a professional opera singer for 9 months, one hour a week.

She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."

The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."

After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.

And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.

At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.

And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.

So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.

In recent years Japan has been cheap due to the weakness of the yen, which has been trending 160/1 USD. Just 10 years ago it was nearly twice as strong. When I visited a couple years ago (2 weeks in Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto), everything seemed to be surprisingly cheap.

- Yes food, as well as alcohol, was quite cheap. Had very few meals that came out to more than $10, alcohol (about $3-4/drink) included.

- I purchased a couple pairs of running shoes that were about 30% cheaper than they were offered for sale in the US.

- I purchased an umbrella for $45 that sells in the US for $75.

- An all-access pass at their premier amusement park, Fuji-Q Highland, was only about $40 - when entry to comparable parks in the US can easily be twice as much.

- I recall the subway came out to around $1.50 a ride, roughly half what the NYC subway costs and the 1 and 3 day passes made it ridiculously cheap (IIRC something like $5/$10).

- I only used capsule hotels, but those were only $15 to up to $38 for a luxury one, almost all in desirable/touristy areas.

- I also took a look at apartments, and in decent areas in Tokyo you can find small apartments for about $1500 that would cost ~$3500 in Manhattan, or maybe $2000 in medium sized US city centers.

My first 'real' machine was a Price Club (now Costco) 386sx for $3800 in late '89, which would be nearly $10k adjusted for inflation. 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, 40 MB hard disk.

That was bargain basement for that era. IBMs, Compaqs and the like were ~$5k similarly configured, and the first 486s were in the $7-9k area.

I'm assuming he's in some sort of high-end communal housing, a trend that began emerging in SF ~15 years back ... ie. where multi-millionaire startup founders and the like choose it on purpose for the synergistic benefits.

It could signal potential disruption to the Strait of Hormuz.

There were definite geopolitical signals of an impending conflict - ie. warships moving into the region, Iran increasing oil exports just days before the attack.

I guess what might be more interesting is how many people bet $1000 the day before that, and the day before that. That would be more helpful to determine what is noise from well-informed outsiders vs. insiders.

Also it was impressive when someone was good enough to play 40 minutes. Usually a small crowd would gather, which could inspire bad players to plunk in more quarters to improve.

I remember beating Zaxxon when I was only 6 years old in '82, in large part because I probably spent at least 100 hours watching older kids do it.

When the genius of Upton Sinclair and Russ Hanneman come together so eloquently.

IME, Claude is more powerful, but Codex follows instructions better. So the more precise the context, the better results you'll get with Codex.

Claude OTOH works better with ambiguity, but it also tends to stray a bit off spec in subtle ways. I always had to take more corrective action w/ the PRs it produced.

That said, I haven't used CC in 3 months and the latest models may be better.

- Whenever I have a change to suggest, I ask Gemini to review my docs/specs folder. I then describe the change I'm thinking of and ask it to modify the specs as it sees fit. I review those changes, ask questions or make suggestions/corrections, rinse/repeat until I'm satisfied. This tends to take about 5-6 iterations, esp. if the agent is adding or suggesting things I hadn't considered and want to dig in deeper on.

- I don't update plans in the past - any work that superseeds work from an earlier plan is simply a new plan. If during creation of a new plan I review the plan and decide I want to something else that requires a spec update, I trash the plan, do the spec update, and rerun plan generation. Past plans of course can point to divergent specs but that's not something I care about much, as plans are a self-contained enough story of the work that was done.

I go a bit further than this and have had great success with 3 doc types and 2 skills:

- Specs: these are generally static, but updatable as the project evolves. And they're broken out to an index file that gives a project overview, a high-level arch file, and files for all the main modules. Roughly ~1k lines of spec for 10k lines of code, and try to limit any particular spec file to 300 lines. I'm intimately familiar with every single line in these.

- Plans: these are the output of a planning session with an LLM. They point to the associated specs. These tend to be 100-300 lines and 3 to 5 phases.

- Working memory files: I use both a status.md (3-5 items per phase roughly 30 lines overall), which points to a latest plan, and a project_status (100-200 lines), which tracks the current state of the project and is instructed to compact past efforts to keep it lean)

- A planner skill I use w/ Gemini Pro to generate new plans. It essentially explains the specs/plans dichotomy, the role of the status files, and to review everything in the pertinent areas of code and give me a handful of high-level next set of features to address based on shortfalls in the specs or things noted in the project_status file. Based on what it presents, I select a feature or improvement to generate. Then it proceeds to generate a plan, updates a clean status.md that points to the plan, and adjusts project_status based on the state of the prior completed plan.

- An implementer skill in Codex that goes to town on a plan file. It's fairly simple, it just looks at status.md, which points to the plan, and of course the plan points to the relevant specs so it loads up context pretty efficiently.

I've tried the two main spec generation libraries, which were way overblown, and then I gave superpowers a shot... which was fine, but still too much. The above is all homegrown, and I've had much better success because it keeps the context lean and focused.

And I'm only on the $20 plans for Codex/Gemini vs. spending $100/month on CC for half year prior and move quicker w/ no stall outs due to token consumption, which was regularly happening w/ CC by the 5th day. Codex rarely dips below 70% available context when it puts up a PR after an execution run. Roughly 4/5 PRs are without issue, which is flipped against what I experienced with CC and only using planning mode.