grantc

Great idea. The things available to give parents controlled access to music aren't great. Echo (Dot) + Kids+ seems to be the closest to meh on the speakers--the kids devices like Yoto are too limited (or require downloads) and the other voice speakers are worse than Echo/Alexa/Kids+. Which is mind-boggling because the Echo setup is wildly bad. I was thinking about how to lock an old iPad down to nothing but this app -- will need some time looking at parental controls again. Adding respect for Explicit tags might be a good feature if you don't have it. I have playlists that I'd love to share to them, but 5% of the songs need the radio edit or need to be elided.

This. Seems like you could wedge this and a model into a scrappy version of computer use for browsers.

Fwiw, thanks for contributing this. It seems apt for a number of repetitive things I probably do dozens of times a week and don't even notice as cruft anymore.

I'm not sure why there were such hot takes on what this is or isn't. Maybe Big Selenium crisis actors? You made something cool, you shared it w/ world -- that should be the system prompt for people posting about it in my kinder world of things.

I too save information that may have future value in a textfile. I too am managing knowledge!

Calling this a lifestyle business seems off. I'd wager for most, these are livelihood businesses; lifestyle sounds more of an affectation. Or, more simply, these are small businesses, full stop. We have a working term for these and many political forces claim to be about the. Then again, many or most political forces accomplish much less than they propose.

Indeed. While dr==cr gets you far towards being able to calculate account balances and an entity's aggregate financial position, it's also fairly foundational that you are able calculate the company's position with different counterparties. So knowing that Alice purchased the book from Foo Booksellers, but maybe hasn't settled with FooBooks yet is super relevant.

The company's accountant may care about balances and reconciling them back to things like the existence of said book, a receipt for payment or a bank transaction indicating settlement happened. At a big enough company, the accounts payables nerds may come along and be focused on making sure the full process procuring and paying has happened correctly, including record-keeping, tax compliance, and the actual movement of funds.

When you start to scale how all of these processes are executed and recorded, it's dense enough that it still surprises me many years later.

Well said. It's actually not complicated or arbitrary. It also works effectively in practice over the gdp of the known universe. If you are savvy enough to be interested in and understand the different computing approaches to double-entry bookkeeping, one can assume the whole DR/CR concept isn't beyond you.

Claude says (or, tl;pillm):

Q. How well--perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10--does this essay follow its own recommendations? Is it a great essay by its own standards?

A. The essay "The Best Essay" does follow many of its own recommendations, but it also falls short in a few areas. Let's evaluate the essay based on the 10 rules it sets out for writing great essays.

Important topic with surprising insights: 8/10. The topic of what makes a great essay is important for writers, and the author provides some surprising insights, such as the idea that the best essay would be about a groundbreaking scientific or technological discovery.

Compelling question: 7/10. The essay starts with the question of what the best essay would be like, which is interesting but not as compelling as it could be.

Thinking out loud and refining: 9/10. The author does an excellent job of thinking out loud and refining their ideas throughout the essay.

Recursive process: 8/10. The essay follows a recursive process, with responses generating further questions and exploration.

Cutting content: 6/10. While the author mentions cutting a 17-paragraph subtree, it's unclear how much unnecessary content remains in the essay.

Following novelty and generality: 7/10. The essay explores novel ideas but could have delved deeper into some of the more interesting tangents.

Writing about interesting topics: 9/10. The author is clearly interested in the topic of essay writing and what makes essays great.

Breadth and depth of knowledge: 8/10. The author demonstrates a broad knowledge of essay writing and related topics, but the depth could be further developed in some areas.

Aiming for timelessness: 7/10. The essay discusses the concept of timelessness but doesn't fully achieve it, as some of the ideas may not be surprising to readers well-versed in essay writing.

Discovering ideas through questions and answers: 8/10. The essay does explore ideas through asking questions and refining answers, but the most valuable questions could have been pursued further.

Overall, the essay scores well in following its own advice, with an average score of around 7.7/10. However, it falls short of being a truly great essay by its own standards. The author could have pushed further in exploring the most compelling questions, cutting unnecessary content, and aiming for more timeless insights. Nonetheless, it remains a thought-provoking and insightful piece on the art of essay writing.

It's because there are two ways to sync content across devices, paid sync through Obsidian vs. git. Given sync is a p0 feature, it seems logical that both get mentioned when the question arises.

Also, the app's really good, and I pay for Sync -- git works well, but it's a bit clumsier on iOS. Never posted a paid comment in my life.

You could browse the fiction shelves at a local bookseller; they may have things approximating what you seek.

911s aren't really about the straight lines. You can get a reasonably equivalent performing car for well less than half the price of the SC, so factor in that at least half the car's value comes from scarcity due to low production numbers and 911 halo effect. It's non-trivial to get these cars even if you can well afford them and they're considered iconic by many folks who love cars. All that said, this model is more of a collectible money grab to me than the car someone who loves 911s goes for -- I'm biased, 992 GT3 is more fun all day, and that's on a track where it belongs.

Timberborn is great, worth a try. You'll be stressing about droughts in no time.

Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.

To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.

It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.

What a gifted writer. Times Arrow and London Fields are easy to find recommended, and deservedly so. The Information might be one of my favorite books of all, and Night Train was a lot of fun. I haven't caught up on his most recent two.

To me, it sounds a lot more like "not using screens as a default babysitter." Support. Who cares if it's sustainable at 10+? If you get ten years of low threshold screen time for your kids, you've done well. You've probably done well to establish an activity prioritization that helps you for the tween years and beyond. The playground bit doesn't sound great and I don't know anyone who does this (I know many parents who attempt to minimize screen time).

W/ my obsidian setup, the note's name equalst its headline and I don't do a ton of linking for the sake of linking. I like to pick folders of broad realms or topics. But the act of creating a new note is no different than most tools, except maybe for Notes or Keep where you just hit plus and throw them pretty much in the same stack.

Logseq is well done. I ended up using it for about a month but then went to Obsidian -- I ended up realizing I like to use outliner mode for certain types of notes, but found Obsidian to be better for straight writing. There's an outliner plugin for Obsidian that gets you close-ish to Logseq and other outlners, but I ended up detuning its settings to just make bulleted lists better. Totally recommend checking out Logseq though, it's good software.

Same. Although paying for Sync makes mobile workable. But the combo of the base too, available plugins, and a large, active community combine to be among the best of the various capture tools out there.

I'd recommend exploring Obsidian. It's inherently self-hosted : it's just local markdown files (but you can sync via git or their for-pay sync service). The plugin community is large and it has some of the best extensibility going.

My suggested starting point (others' may be superior): switch to Minimal theme plus watch a few videos (search for 'my obsidian setup' and you'll find a broad range of fairly different takes on how to use and configure Obsidian, and you'll likely get a hint of the plugins available -- 'top obsidian plugins' is also a decent quick tour of what kinds of things are already available).

On balance, it took a couple of tries w/ Logseq and Obsidian and then a month of iterating and adding to Obsidian, and I had something better than what I liked about Bear, Ulysses, Craft, Spaces, Roam, Logseq, Evernote, Simplenote... I feel like I've tried them all.

You won't end up with the 100% polished experience of some of the well crafted paid apps above, but it's pretty close and the depth of features w/ extensibility is worth the delta. Obviously, this is very much based upon which features and workflows matter most, but it's been a delightful piece of software that no single other product seems to best right now.

I like that Snow Crash doesn't take itself too seriously. Reamde was also a not too heavy Stephenson read.

The IRS can't even provide a simple reliable service to verify a TIN; they're not getting into the IVE game.

The 20,000 families benefitting from housing in the Seattle metro area as a result of Amazon's investments in the community might define charitable vs. non-charitable differently than you. I've personally met the women and children benefitting from the $100M Amazon and its employees have donated to Mary's Place -- their lens is not yours. Your comments about AFE are a bit underdeveloped. File under no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

Can there be endless meetings about whether your issues are top or bottom of funnel?

Curious why AGPL was the optimal license choice? As a license, it will preclude a number of the same companies that would want to run it on-premise for data security reasons. (Some large companies that might have the same need to run on-prem or private cloud, also blanket won't approve GPL/AGPL licenses.)

This is the first book I recommend to anyone who wants to improve their writing. With Minto's Pyramid Principle as a follow-on.

My top 3: 1/ Edit ruthlessly. Every single word is reduced to its simplest form and pulls its weight--it has a damn good reason for being there. 2/ Aspire to write at a third-grade reading level. Readers prefer simple writing even when reading deeply technical content. 3/ Start your most important conclusions up front, not at the end. You're not writing The Sixth Sense. Do your reader a favor and tell them the big reveal first. You can then follow through and persuade the reader why your conclusions are right.

It can be cost-driven, but it's just as likely to be complexity-gated (w/ cost frequently being implementation driven and a proxy for complexity). The cost comes from actually unwinding a gnarly legacy system (that may be less than well understood) and making the successor system work. Also, Gall's law has entered the chat:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Even if they're at 0% done in terms of what happens after you connect to a digital world via immersive conduits, $10B a year can put a dent in that burndown.

The companies paying Kail know enough to never mention this to anyone else at Netflix. They know what they are doing. And this is why it is common in industry--it's commonly undetectable, and, sadly, that alone will influence many folks' moral compass heading.

One point that was mentioned that was interesting was...

"When an inquiry from the Netflix CEO ensued, Kail falsely denied that he was formally working with Platfora."

This data point suggests that Kail was pushing underwhelming or otherwise odd-shaped vendor products frequently and/or persistently enough that people at Netflix suspected he was a shill for vendors. The fact that Reed Hastings is presumably calling Kail out for this means the bad smells were pretty powerful. Kail probably does not have final boss-level skills at reading the room.

The companies being asked to include options/warranty/equity usually aren't public, so this wouldn't be insider trading on that basis. Overall, it's better to think of it as Big Co is making an investment in Little Co that it thinks will appreciate as a result of Big Co's business. The cost of that investment is included in the price of whatever Little Co is selling, ergo, there's a large implied discount because Big Co's business is so valuable.

It depends on you and your company's ethical take. Personally, if a vendor is providing anything of value to me, I might as well be taking cash from them. This includes sporting events or concerts, meals, golf, xmas gifts, whatever. If you work for a company that the vendor wants badly for the money or the credential, vendors are going to throw all of these things your way. I keep it simple: if we need to do business, I have a perfectly good conference room and we can do it there.

One area that's more fuzzy is free passes to user events, i.e., a DreamForce or Oracle World. We clear these per our process and are fine to accept them because we were going to spend money on sending someone anyway. We saved the company money. Also: it was never indirect between individuals, it was company to company.

Very little in SOX scope is going to detect transactions outside of the company such as these. SOX is primarily about having effective mechanisms to assure that the financial information you report is accurate and complete, and then those mechanisms are inspected internally and audited externally. SOX is about what happens inside a company and with a companies resources -- you might have different means of preventing an employee from exfiltrating the company's money, and those are SOX-scoped.

Being able to detect whether a given employee has taken a bribe from a vendor might trip over SOX-relevant things incidentally but not directly. For example, you might need to certify that every employee has taken anti-bribery training every year, and that's your preventative mechanism so at least employees know what is permissible and what the consequences are.