jen729w

We, tourists, were driving in one helluva rainstorm in Texas back in 2017. It was all I could do to focus on the road. (And yes, we found a spot and pulled over. A Denny's, IIRC.)

Anyway, midway through this hellish journey, the car was filled with terror. What the hell? Just pure raw audio chaos. Neither of us knew what was going on.

It was my phone, of course. Helpfully telling me that it was raining, via some absurd bust-through-my-DND 'alert'.

Not helpful.

If you're going to be a pointless language pedant, it really helps if you don't fuck it up.

OP said:

me and my friends together built an 8 bit CPU…

– and if one replaces that with your suggestion:

My friends and I together built an 8 bit CPU…

– you'll find that you are, gleefully, wrong.

For those unaware, the simplest test for 'me and x' vs. 'x and I' is that, in the latter case, you should be able to remove 'x and', and have the sentence still make sense.

For example, 'Me and Lucy went to the shops' is technically incorrect, because 'Lucy and I went to the shops' makes sense if we remove Lucy. 'I went to the shops'.

The pendant's adjustment fails this test:

I together built an 8 bit CPU

Is it detecting bots? Or just matching ‘fastmail’?

A bot I am not.

I just ordered a pizza from Uber Eats here in Taiwan and was offered the option to "Try Uber One".

Clicking "Try now" in fact just signs you up for Uber One. So I suppose you are, technically, trying it. For money.

Dirty. I'm Australian and I'm sure that wouldn't be legal.

Basically you should pre-authorize the senders

This is kinda what 'masked email' services like Fastmail's – of which I am a delighted customer – do.

Until you've known the comfort of creating an address; giving it to a service; deciding that you want to end your relationship with them; just deleting that address, without changing your mailbox or infrastructure or archives or anything else … it's kinda life changing. I recommend everyone try it.

Also, the chances of a phisher trying to get my BigBank details by sending mail to lonely.chicken6382@spuriously-named-and-unused-other-than-for-email-domain.com are … well, it seems unlikely.

I've never felt more secure. For real.

I use Astro but it's not static, I server-render. There's a whole bunch of other stuff once you're signed in.

That's not a terrible read of the site's tech. It over-sells it a touch – I use Umami for analytics, for example – but yeah, auth, payments, entitlement-gated downloads, those downloads adapt to the app you've selected in your settings, yada yada.

I never said I was a good dev! That's why it would have taken me 6 months. To pretend that I could have done it in days is just silly.

My point – site roast over – is that it's absurd to suggest that LLMs don't help anyone 'ship' faster. Like them or not, it's a fact that they do.

Okay. I rebuilt my website in ~a month with the help of Opus 4.7/.8 and it would have taken me, unaided human, at least 6 months. Link's in my bio if you care.

Satisfied now? Will you stop asking this question? Thought not.

a universal existential risk

I'm not sure it is, if your primary business is selling hardware. People are still going to need a 5" wide screen and battery in their pocket in order to do things.

Makes you wonder how much money Apple has poured into Siri over the years.

Orders of magnitude less than the literal trillions that others have?

Yet I'm glad my index funds have to buy Coinbase.

Curious why? Its chart is a nightmare – up and down like a yo-yo. Not something I'd want to have to depend on.

I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater

Yeah you don't say. High of $124, currently $22. But hey: that's ~~gambling~~ stock trading for you.

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FIG/

- you can't carry 50 of them in your backpack. Invaluable as I travel the world.

I still vastly prefer paper books, however.

Half an hour in and I'm already thoroughly sick of "look I need to be honest with you here…"

Edit: OMG too much. Toooo much.

    Want me to:
    - (a) stop here and save honest memories + commit, or…

Right. But how much of that 30% food cost is insurance that the farmer paid?

It's insurance all the way down.

I'd love someone to build a tool that shows the price of that burger, say, and breaks it down to the input cost.

    Burger:    $5.00
    ----------------
    Meat:      $0.20
    Bun:       $0.05
    Staff:     $0.25
    Insurance: $4.50

Because the stock market won't care about that.

I blocked the email. I use one-time addresses at Fastmail.

I meant that after step 3, I was never interested in hearing from the service again.

There's a false dichotomy here between 'deterministic creation' and 'vibing'.

I use Claude all day. It has written, under my close supervision¹, the majority of my new web app. As a result I estimate the process took 10x less time than had I not used Claude, and I estimate the code to be 5x better quality (as I am a frankly mediocre developer).

But I understand what the code does. It's just Astro and TypeScript. It's not magic. I understand the entire thing; not just 'the prompt that started it'.

¹I never fire-and-forget. I prompt-and-watch. Opus 4.7 still needs to be monitored.

1. Goes to site. Clicks appointment.tb.pro link in sidebar.

2. Gives email address.

3. Is told to join the waitlist.

4. Blocks email address given at 2.

Hardly a terrific experience.

Oh, catch yourself. Tell me you wouldn't do the same for your family.

I run a tiny thing that a lot of people like. Its licence is permissive: if I 'sold out', nobody who is using it today would have to change a damned thing.

And you know what? Call me if you wanna buy it. Because here's my priority list:

1. Looking after my family.

2. Looking after yours.

Tailscale, perhaps ironically in this context, has shown me the value of not caring about an IP address.

I used to. When I had a home network I'd carefully assign `10.52.1.x` where `x` was the periodic number corresponding to the machine name! (I write from `lutetium`.)

Now, with Tailscale's magic DNS – `lutetium` being all I need – why on Earth would I give a crap about an IP address? I've gone from being obsessed to truly not caring at all.

So, give me IPv6. Auto-assign everything! All I want is a name.

Those test failures are pre-existing. We're all done!

Nah, it's not that simple.

Work is an amazing place to bond with people, if you all enjoy the work and find value in it. I'm still friends with a bunch of folks I met in 2007 when we all managed the 3rd level infra for a bank. We meet for beers, we go to each other's houses, we're best men at each other's weddings. Just yesterday evening I inter-continentally called one of them for a catchup.

Can it be toxic? Of course! Is it always toxic? Don't be silly.

I remember the march in London. A staggering number of people. Makes a mockery of any modern-day ‘protest’.

Made not a jot of difference. In Tony went anyway. Shame.

This is a delightful historical fiction if you're into this.

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

Also there's a museum. It's on my list!

https://www.niche-museums.com/59

Sounds like you'll be spending your day making a better video! :-)

You might misunderstand how ISO works on digital cameras. (I did.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWSvHBG7X0w

They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200.

Isn't that exactly what they just did?

I can’t take an article seriously that starts:

Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software

and then proceeds not to explain how it’s doing that to me, a Safari user.

Because, spoiler: it isn’t. Or, it might try to search, and fail, and nothing will be collected.