foxbarrington

A common reaction I get to https://forty.news is that the stories “need sources” which I always find funny. I don’t hear the same demand of sources from every other news outlet (I find it extra weird because all FN’s stories are 40 years old, simple to verify, and can’t push an agenda the same way).

Totally agree with you: all newspapers should cite sources. What’s silly to me is how selectively people care—big outlets get to hand-wave the “trust me” part even when a piece is basically a lightly rewritten press release, thinly sourced, or reflecting someone’s incentives more than reality.

https://david.app/

I just tried to put omarchy/arch on my 16” mbp. Everything worked (eventually… speakers and keyboard backlight needed special stuff) except for suspend or hibernate. After about a week, I gave up and put Monterey on it.

I tell people to get an LCD and xreal or viture AR glasses with the saved money. AR glasses are a WAY better display than a small OLED screen.

GPT-5’s results:

Your Programming Philosophy

You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose.

Abstract ↔ Concrete: +3 Abstract

Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +11 Human-Friendly

Estimating: similar to planning, thinking through the whole problem and surfacing early anything that seems like not a big deal on the surface, but actually is.

Estimate changes over time: surfaces underlying issues e.g. too many urgent bugs/fires/triage, product changing priority constantly, etc...

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

It’s not the estimate that is valuable. It’s the estimating and seeing how/why the estimate changes over time that is valuable.

Use this to learn more about what is going on at the company and how you can provide more value in exchange for what you want.

Want more money? Use this to figure out what the company and manager would want in exchange so you can work towards it.

Want more visibility for promotions? Use it to figure out the highest visibility projects and get assigned to those

Want to work on newer/different technologies? Use it to figure out where those could best fit in or get reassigned if they are already in use.

Business doesn’t hate creatives, and is not specifically targeting creatives to automate them away. Any job that can be done as good for a lower price or better for the same price is going to be a target.

I was a psych major in undergrad, and did an experiment as a riff on stereotype threat and got a small effect. I had the participants solve brain teaser puzzles and the only difference was introducing them as coming from 11th grade or graduate level math. Undergrads did worse when they thought it was graduate level.

This is the most maddening thing about all content now. It's all platform based and every platform wants to constantly push/"recommend" things to you and your kids. Right now I use Roku and Plex but even both of those are constantly trying to break down the wall.

Sure, and they even go on to say that the article is about “what helps to explain the differences in outcome between two genetically identical people.” However it’s clear that is not actually what the article is about and they do talk about traits that are highly heritable and not shown to be dependent on environment and life experience.

From the link:

Results

The analysis of the data revealed no significant difference between MZA twins (reared apart) and MZT twins (reared together) in regards to personality measures such as temperament, hobbies, interests, career pursuits or social attitudes.

Personality is ~70% determined by genetics, not life experience.[0]

I’m surprised that someone interested enough in the topic to write such a long post wouldn’t put the time in to do a cursory dive into personality psychology. I’m going to assume that the author has a similar definition of personality to mainstream psychology, but if so, they are ignoring accepted studies and evidence that make it pretty clear that personality is not learned through conditioning like AI.

0: https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2019/02/11/key-s...

I tried to use Charles on Robin Hood, but it looks like they use cert pinning to prevent it.

They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.

Been having a similar debate with a client about their (remote) company all hands. If it’s just going to be a few execs talking at the camera, it shouldn’t be a live group video call.

Thanks! Was surprisingly hard to find something that looked good on Amazon. I'm thinking it has to be matte for the full effect. Probably worth checking out an art supply store.

Love it, going to try them out. What paper do you use?

Right, the less it looks like printer ink and printer paper.

I just got an axidraw and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Because it can just use SVGs as is, I could plot a “still”[0] from one of my existing generative pieces[1] minutes after bringing it home.

What surprised me is how good some plots look and how “cheap” others come out. I’ve made a few that were fun to watch but the output isn’t nicer than a laser printer.

My current thinking is the more “exotic” the pen and paper is, the better.

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/5t4lWRT

[1] https://david.app/projects/geo-clock

I hesitate to recommend this because of how woo woo it sounds, but... I had terrible pulsatile tinnitus (both sides) for over a year and half. I went to doctors, specialists, tried steroids, the works. I had to sleep with headphones to drown it out. Eventually my wife suggested I try craniosacral therapy. After the first session it started to get a lot quieter and even would "stutter" out for short periods of time. After the second session it disappeared and hasn't been back. The practitioner came from https://milneinstitute.com/what-is-vcsw/

I built https://upfollow.app to help a product manager have a better relationship with the software engineers. It makes it easy to create calendar reminders to follow up on features and other requests that she is waiting on. This provides a little structure, allows delivery estimates to change, limits interruption/nagging, and still catches rabbit holes or distractions before they can prevent features getting put in front of users.

I just finished an MVP for a free tool to help delegated tasks get done. I was wondering if I did it all wrong, but like you say, I would have a very hard time describing a management tool like Upfollow.app as “lovable”—I’d be happy with appreciation.

You might find my survival guide for founders who depend on devs to get things done useful. It covers topics like how not to lose key information if a dev leaves, preventing endless rebuilds and framework switching, keeping devs busy vs. keeping them productive, and ensuring product builds don't go off the deep end.

As an example, here's the chapter on estimates: https://superstruct.tech/blog/estimates

Agreed. Would make more sense with a red X over it.

When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail… There’s a fun project using AI here isn’t there?

Anyone else thinking of making a service that can easily fork and host a fandom like this?

Remote work and async comms means that latency tends to be high. Latency issues can be overcome by not stopping to wait at each decision point.

For example, low latency this is ok: “do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” Movie. ”Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?” Oppenheimer. “Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?” 8:00.

Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead time in back and forth: “Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you’d rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00.” Let’s do Oppenheimer at 8

It’s more work up front and any unchosen paths are “wasted effort”, but for work there’s usually value in fully exploring the alternate paths anyway.

Jonathan Haidt has a recent essay that argues the teen mental illness epidemic started in 2012: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

Yes, it uses this library to do it: https://github.com/Andrew-Chen-Wang/openai-python/tree/async...