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jmuguy

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neontuna.com linkedin.com/in/justin-mullis-nc

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A big part of messaging for the republican party, for at least as long as I've been alive, has been that criminals are everywhere and constantly doing more and more heinous crimes. So if you don't give the police more and more money and ridiculous unconstitutional authority and military tech, these criminals will come in your house and do all sorts of crimes to you and your family.

Its funny to watch them still run on this playbook, even at the exclusion of other more obvious issues. For instance the current republican campaign for the senate seat in NC is all about crime, while we can literally watch gas prices and everything else go up day by day.

The mobile app is kind of pointless anyway, imo. It cannot start an agent session on your computer, it can only be "handed off" an existing session from your computer. I don't use Cloud Agents, because for some reason they can't connect to our Linear instance. So I was only interested in using the mobile app as a proxy for my home system.

Free the Icons 22 days ago

There must be someone senior at Apple that still thinks the squircles look good, I dunno how we're still stuck with them. I haven't made a change to my dock in years and I have to hunt for apps nearly every time I open it. It doesn't help that a lot of newer apps seeming don't actually have a logo and are just happy with some random circular shaped blob.

Cursor for iOS 23 days ago

The way remote control works is pretty underwhelming, and I think currently broken.

Essentially you need to "hand off" a session started from your computer to the mobile app. Where as I assumed I would be able to start a session on my home PC from the mobile app, that's not possible.

Also when I did the hand off (using /remote-control command in Cursor on my computer) that agent session stopped responding normally on my computer - namely the little suggested "chips"/buttons stopped showing up.

Tidal AI Policy 23 days ago

If you keep each album in its own folder, basically any app will be able to use the MP3 tags to keep things organized for you. Really even the folders aren't needed, you could just have a huge directory full of every MP3, but that would be annoying to deal with for other reasons.

Something like https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ can be used if you want to get more complicated. For instance I like to keep albums in folders per release year.

Tidal AI Policy 23 days ago

You're correct that AI will probably end up producing the majority of music no one cares about. Like the muzak you hear on elevators. Or for people that just put on a playlist at work and don't really care much beyond having some background noise.

When you're paying attention, and if you actually care about art and music as human expression, then it will matter. And maybe AI music will still "fool" someone then. Maybe we'll discover the next Michael Jackson was just prompting their way to the top of the charts. But that won't really be the point, just like it wasn't the point when everyone discovered that Milli Vanilli were faking it.

People don't like liars. And using AI to generate art is lying. You didn't make it, the AI that did make it was only possible because it collectively stole from every human musician and artist before it. You can wrap it up however you like, but at the end of the day its just a lie.

And yeah there's some nuance here. Lets take Milli Vanilli for example. They were considered frauds because they weren't actually singing on their tracks. What if they had been singing, but using autotune? I don't know where you draw the line but for me its somewhere around people who have no appreciation of the amount of effort that goes into producing art that think they can create it whole cloth from a couple of prompts.

This seems to take the view that code review is essentially linting for simple issues. Our team is fairly small so "code review" usually involves QA and everything else you might want to do before something is pushed to production.

But yeah - I can have one LLM check another LLMs work. Kind of a waste of tokens for most PRs.

I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.

I think I'm late to the party with cursor but I don't use it as an editor at all, I keep VS Code open on another screen for that. All I do in there is agent sessions. I would be open to something else but all the comparisons I see are out of date and talk about the IDE a lot.

Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors.

I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator.

I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.

In the movie Revenge of the Nerds, they basically rape someone. So I dunno, being a "nerd" doesn't necessarily imply you're also a good person. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely a nerd, and he's also a piece of shit.

I also think its another variation of that trope that the people that seek power are the very ones you don't want to have it. And those that don't care about it are the ones we need to seek it. Take Woz for example.

Yeah its hard to deny just the raw throughput from the AI. Like it really is doing work in hours that would take me days.

But those times when I had to drop down into a repl and play around with the output of a method. Or try different ways of doing what anyone else would think is boring, like array manipulation - that's a lot of what I actually LIKE to do.

A big part of me just hopes I can hang in there for another... decade, or two. Then I can retire! Maybe.

I don't see a lot of talk about how AI development breaks the old feedback loop of write code, watch it run, change it, repeat. I really hate sitting around waiting for the agent to get done planning, reading the plan, then waiting for the agent to get done coding. It's those 5-10 minute windows when its working that really sap my patience and suck all the fun out of our jobs. Writing code by hand is just more fun.

Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that.

For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.

He also predicted the future for after the merger.

Its funny - of all the stuff people make up that was Obama's fault, no one ever mentions his admin allowing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to merge. Now they need to be broken up, probably like the Bell System back in the day. But I'll keep on dreaming about that.

Siri AI 1 month ago

This is disappointing. I had hoped when Apple revisited AI that they would lean into agents more and give us some sort of agent interface between the phone and a model running locally on your Mac at home. More niche for sure, but much more powerful. Instead we're getting more generic AI tie-ins to apps and "suggestions".

The irrational exuberance around Tesla was at least somewhat grounded in reality. There were some possible future(s) where it was really going to take off and completely redefine the auto industry. Then of course things went really off the rails with the Cybertruck, pivot to robotics, and just seemingly giving up on their existing line of business to go chasing whatever bong fueled dream Musk is having this quarter.

SpaceX is on a whole new level of bullshit. I think all these guys know how to do is double down. If the hype isn't working, its not stupid and big enough, so you start talking about transhumanism and singularity and other BS in your SEC filings.