HN user
Of the models I've tried lately, I get more value out of Gemini for personal stuff like researching products or learning how to do things than the others. It seems more factually correct in domains I know about and hallucinates minor stuff less than the others.
For most of my waking hours, my phone is sitting next to me on my desk, couch, or table. Carplay has my back when I'm driving. I honestly don't miss any of the notifications from my smart watches.
I set expectations with my team that it's only an emergency if I call or page them. I don't have Slack notifications on in my personal time, I don't expect my team to either.
After wearing an analog watch for two years, I'll never buy another smart watch.
I do not need to be so connected to my phone that my wrist vibrates when someone texts me. The little reminders to stand up are ignored. The guilt at the end of a day when I didn't get enough steps in is gone. And I have a newfound appreciation for the pure craftsmanship that goes into making this tiny analog device on my wrist that is powered by tiny springs and gears and somehow crafted well enough to be accurate within seconds per day. It's also the one piece of jewelry that is socially acceptable for every single man to wear and can be a fun expression of self given the sheer variety of watches in the world.
On the flip side, I've been using them for years with no issues. I jam pack them full of filthy dishes and they come out perfectly clean every time. I use high quality detergent, rinse aid, keep the filter clean, and regularly run dishwasher cleaner through it. I wouldn't have any other brand.
My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?
What signal are you looking for with that question? It feels much more like a thought experiment with friends while having a few pints than something reasonable for a job interview.
You can let a local LLM run loops all night or all weekend and it costs nothing. It works offline. There's no rate limits. Privacy. You aren't tied to the whims of the US Government banning models. You can tie it in to HomeAssistant for home automation tasks very easily.
That site works fine in Firefox.
What are the foolish maneuvers that China is making?
For fun, I ran some numbers here.
If we wanted to launch the Stratos Hyperscale AI Data Center, which will take 40,000 acres of land, to space, we're looking at roughly 3 million tons of equipment, or 3 billion kilograms. SpaceX charges $1520 per kilogram, so it would be about $4.5T to launch all of that into orbit. We'll just assume the space station already exists and labor is free to hook it up, given that we've already hit the annual budget for the US federal government in launch fees. And it'll take about 47,000 launches to get the equipment there, or roughly 300 years.
What problem is solved by putting a data center in orbit?
You can solve all of them far cheaper and easier on land.
On the opposite side of the experience, after wavefront LASIK on my very very high prescription eyes, I've had dry eyes for the past 15 years and needed glasses again about 5 years post-surgery. It's now a very mild prescription and I'd definitely say my vision is better now than it was before LASIK, but it didn't last long. I opted not to get a touch up out of fear of my eyes getting even more dry. I use eye drops 5+ times per day. My dark night vision is worse than it was before, mostly a lack of contrast. It doesn't impact driving, but being in a very dim room feels like the gamma was slightly raised.
I've never had a cpu die in the decades I've been using them. I've bought 10-20 year old computers that still work just fine. I kept my last MacBook for 9 years before I upgraded out of want for more RAM.
Most computer equipment fails quickly, otherwise you'll get a long life out of whatever it is.
It's not terrible for interactive... https://mikeveerman.github.io/tokenspeed/?rate=12&mode=text
And it should be just fine for plenty of background use cases.
You pay per impression or per click, just like in all the rest of their ads. Except these have a higher CPC since you're the only featured brand to go along with paragraphs of text about why your shoes are the best.
Shitty startup idea of the day: pay developers $0.05 per commit message to inject an ad at the end of it in a git commit hook.
[PRJ-123] Fix the prod bug. This commit brought to you by Acme!
It's so bad. This happens to me on a weekly basis:
"Get directions to <restaurant in the city I live>"
"Getting directions to <restaurant with same name 800 miles away>"
Or they'll leave their services open to Greece. They don't have a physical presence there and aren't subject to their laws.
Cocaine and crack are also Schedule 2.
Why do you need an M5 to run Cursor and a browser? Your laptop isn't doing anything in your described workflow.
Maybe it's an excellent experience these days, but every time I've tried Linux on desktop over the past 25 years I get burned. Maybe it works for a while, then your NIC driver gets borked and you spend 2 days trying to get it working again. Or some update goes sideways and you lose the GUI, launching only into a terminal. It's always something. And laptops have even less common hardware than desktops.
On the other hand, every Mac I've used over the past 15 years has been bulletproof. It turns on, it works, it runs *nix. It's an invisible interface to getting work done.
Won't they simply blacklist freedom.gov?
It's always a game of cat and mouse, but NSO had a quarter billion USD in annual revenue in 2020. They are clearly providing highly effective spyware to governments around the world. It wouldn't surprise me if they have that many zero day, zero click exploits that they can always get in to a phone. We're talking nation state espionage here... they probably have insiders at Apple and Google who introduce subtle unnoticeable bugs in core OS stacks.
It's relatively well know that the NSO Group / Pegasus is what governments use to access locked phones.
There might be. You need to talk to your market and find out. I work at larger companies, so I can’t speak to startup culture right now. There’s no way I would personally sign off on giving access to all of our company data to a small company with no certifications, especially in an AI world where you might leak all of our data into public training models if it’s done wrong.
You need to have compliance certifications or no one will use this. Think along the lines of SOC2, HIPAA, willingness to sign BAAs, etc. The hardest part of this company is going to be sales. You're not selling to small businesses who will pop in a credit card number -- this is an offering for enterprises with annual agreements and longer sales cycles.
Also, consider supporting CCPA for California businesses.
Nanit is horrible spyware. Do not buy their products.
If you have a router that lets you inspect data flowing out, you'll be astonished at what your little Nanit cam exfiltrates from your home network. Even if you don't pay for their subscription service, they still attempt to exfil all of the video footage caught on your camera to their servers. You can block it and it will still work, but you shouldn't have to do that in the first place if you don't pay for their cloud service.
Stay away if you value your privacy.
This page cannot be scrolled in Safari or Firefox.
Devs -- stop hijacking native scrolling functionality. Why? You had one shot to sell me on this product. I can't see the page, so I can't consider it for purchase. That's a lost sale.
I've used Ruby off and on since the hype train started with DHH's early videos showing how easily you can make a blog in Rails. Oof, that was published 20 years ago! I wouldn't use it for anything beyond simple shell scripts these days. You're better off with Go for back-end work.
Police officers in SF make $103k per year.
Making less than $105k per year in SF is considered low income.