flkiwi

The Creator Studio is a pretty big miss for Apple. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have always been productivity apps, not creativity apps (and there is a difference). Of the remaining apps, Pixelmator Pro is the only one that is remotely relevant to my needs, and I'm not subscribing to a $12.99/mo plan just for Pixelmator. Compared to $19.99/mo cost for a much more coherent set of Adobe photography and imagery tools, it's a no brainer to go with Adobe. Not the outcome I would prefer, but a bunch of audio and animation tools will be functionally useless to me, so I'm being asked to pay $12.99/mo for a photo editing app and some productivity tools I already have. I'm sure there are some people who will benefit from the breadth of the Apple bundle, but I don't expect there are THAT many.

The fact that it is impossible to get Pixelmator Pro outside the bundle just makes the situation more ridiculous, unless you want the legacy version.

Create serious pro/prosumer tools for creative verticals again (Aperture, you are dearly missed) and you'll have my attention.

For me, Trillium is far too busy, and it’s not an outliner. It’s great software though. (Believe me, I have tried the whole universe of these apps.)

Fable has some Marvin the Android vibes going. It just sounds depressed all the time.

We do find it irritating at times. Office jargon, corporate buzzwords, etc. Claude communicates like the worst, most irritating project manager I’ve ever worked with, obscuring the most straightforward conclusion with layers upon layers of stuff so that its point is almost lost. I’ve largely gotten it to avoid that behavior with me, but bits of it sneak through. It couldn’t stop talking about “scaffolding” for a few weeks before I hammered it into submission.

Edit: fixing a dumb meatbrain typo

Aside from not wanting to take notes on a test subdomain, it's still local to the machine. I can fire up my notes from literally anywhere, any device and see a consistent state without having to sync anything.

Same. And it's been fascinating to watch the genuine gap between people in our camp and people who really, really want "local-first" (which, to me, translates to inconvenience and otherwise unnecessary sync requirements).

After Logseq moved to an app focus and abandoned the "edit anywhere" convenience of being browser-based, I lost interest. I liked the original Logseq/Roam/Athens model, and I couldn't find anything similar elsewhere, so I just wrote my own. Markdown, git for versions, remote backup, themes (using the Tinted Themes repository of base16 themes), optionally encrypted notes. Lives in a browser, editable from anything with a browser and an Internet connection. Absolute note-taking heaven (for me). No more fooling with sync solutions or not being able to install an app on certain devices.

I'm sorry to have said goodbye to what used to be a great community project, but they've been following the classic enshittification model, albeit slowly, for a while now.

Constant battle in my (American) house. I set my digital devices to 24-hour time years and years ago, because I ran into situations where there could be genuine confusion about which "4:32" someone might be referring to (global company, irregular work hours, etc.), but my family insists on calling it "military time", which is so very strange because they're well travelled and have been plenty of places that use 24-hour clocks.

This reminds me of how my wife absolutely thrives on gamification and the social competition of things like Peloton, while they destroy 100% of my interest in the thing. We’re both intensely competitive people but in completely different ways.

A guy across the street from me has a new one. It's loud as hell, but this guy is the type to remove his muffler to make whatever car he has this week sound "cooler". I'm not ready to blame the scooter yet.

I hope so, but I work with people with exactly this attitude and approach.

I'm not particularly anti-AI. I have some concerns about the intellectual property aspects of it, but my opposition is really the (a) functionally illiterate MBAs who think (?) that AI is a thinking machine that will take them right to the C-suite by allowing layoffs of 90% of the workforce and (b) evangelists who believe they're entitled to do whatever they want with other people's information to make their machine god.

LLMs write like that because people wrote like that. Enough, unfortunately for my remaining love of humanity, to cause the LLMs to adopt the quirk.

I didn’t say he said it was privileged because he consulted with Claude for legal purposes so I’m not sure where that came from.

Re: Mitsui, it’s not the same case. It’s the same paragraph. And it’s pretty clear from the context that, if I send my lawyer an email requesting legal advice, the contents of that email are privileged, but if I attach pre-existing documents those documents are not, because they had no privilege to begin with. That’s not controversial. The challenge comes from the interplay between the court’s description of the privilege test, the reasonable expectations of a technology user, and the underlying, possibly obfuscated, reality of that technology’s function. Read literally, this case undermines privilege for a wide range of laypeople and attorneys doing a wide range of normal activities that have nothing to do with asking Claude for trial strategy.

I gave it a good minute of reading and re-reading because I thought it SURELY was meant tongue in cheek, but I couldn’t make it work.

I agree with you, but I actually understand the issue they're raising. Counsel sends a draft demand letter to client and says "Please review and let me know of any issues with my description of the underlying claims." Client responds with an inline note stating that she feels the claim is overstated but that she wants to leave it in for leverage. The draft is, transparently and without notice, processed through the user's O365 Copilot integration in both Word and Outlook. Hell, let's assume the attorney is a sole practitioner using a regular O365 account, and the outbound request to the client is silently run through Copilot. What is the status of privilege in this situation? Both seem to fail the confidentiality test. Does that mean that privilege exists only for big law firms that negotiate enterprise O365 licenses with no training clauses? There's definitely tension here.

But both your scenario and the OOP behavior of the client are not particularly hard ones to resolve.

My code is perfectly secure and bug-free.

I mean, bold statement but statistically speaking it's almost certainly incorrect. I will say that, irrespective of whether source is open or closed, I would be deeply skeptical of a project that made this assertion.

Obviously this (along with the original unwritten order a few weeks ago) is causing a stir, but this decision isn't as weird as it sounds. The defendant's assertion was essentially a retroactive application of privilege: he didn't use Claude to draft documents at his attorney's request but instead used Claude effectively in lieu of an attorney and later provided the Claude-drafted materials to his attorney (heavily paraphrasing here). Privilege is not a bandage that closes self-inflicted wounds.

I have some concerns about some of the reasoning, namely the practical implications of referencing Claude's TOS in a world where public AI features are creeping into everything, but I expect some of the reasoning is based on this particular defendant likely being more sophisticated than an average person.

There was an old flash game called, I think, curveball that was kind of like 3d perspective, 2d plane Pong. I could play that gave for so, so long and not get tired of it. This might end up being a replacement.

EDIT: Uh oh. I found it again. I'm screwed.

The number of times I find myself saying to beginning photographers that babying their camera is the surest way to hate photography, whether as a hobby or a profession… I get particularly testy about handwringing about weather sealing or protecting the finish on their kit. Just take the camera places and use it. It’s probably going to be fine. It’s going to get scars. That’s just stories.

Same principle applies to, e.g., Leica cameras. Yes, they're pricey (absurdly so), but the lack of features, the slow speed, and the lack of configuration contributes to me improving my photography. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but it gives me the time and space to focus on being one, rather than just firehosing my camera at whatever is in front of me. It makes my photography intentional rather than reactive.

It's ... weirdly validating that what I ended up with is what I actually use (Source Code Pro).

I literally just fixed a couple of nagging config issues that I couldn't be bothered to find in my (admittedly complex) set of NixOS and HM config files by asking Claude to find and fix them.

I had Claude do the grunt work of shifting parts of my config to a new structure I started but didn't have time to fully implement.

Based on examples I provided, I had Claude use specialisations to set up a couple of different WM and DE test environments.

And the thing is that, now that I have everything set up the way I want, I don't really have to DO anything to keep the system running, other than occasionally update (I'm on unstable, so I do that manually).

Could I turn Claude loose on my .config directory, give it access to apt or dnf (etc.), and let it set up a non-NixOS environment for me? Probably, and it would probably work reasonably well, but I wouldn't trust it the way I trust NixOS.

First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.

Me, before clicking: Man, I remember I had this USR modem that did this weird BONG sound during handshake. I wonder if anyone else in the comments remembers that.

Comments: YUP.

Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.

Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.

Remote, multi location workforces, supervisors and workers thousands of miles apart.

This is only going to become more common. Companies are implementing checks using similar services (a) to prevent employment scams (where the person who interviews is not the person who works; usually the latter is a low-paid offshore individual) and (b) basic security authentication. It won’t be long before this sort of biometric validation starts showing up to authenticate users on regular websites and similar services, if it hasn’t already. I think the last one I had to do was to authenticate when activating a bank card.

One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.