leokennis

Exact same question as you. When the new ChatGPT app dropped it suggested to me to set up a task something like (paraphrased) “every Monday read my Gmail and Slack an make a summary and task list for the week”.

Why would I need an LLM to do this for me? That’s 5 minutes of work max, and doing it gets me in the flow of work again, to see what’s going on and needs to be done.

Even if Lightning was possibly a nicer or smaller connector; nothing beats a true industry standard. Makes the entire “what chargers and cables to bring to connect my stuff” question so much easier.

It definitely has the Vaporwave aesthetic. Would love to try and test this for usability.

Reading your reply, I think we have different definitions of “incredibly easy”.

I enjoyed OiNK and What.cd but ultimately their ratio requirements killed that joy.

At some point the “market” was saturated. 99% of music was on the site, and every release had plenty of seeders and peers.

Unless you had early access to new releases, or maybe a seedbox with insane bandwidth and storage, it was almost impossible to actually meaningfully seed.

For me the only working strategy was to download What.cd releases from other torrent sites, then “downloading” the release from What.cd and then wait weeks until I had seeded enough to be able to “afford” one new download.

I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

Fully agree. I cleaned a potato processing plant at night. They had to stop production for a few hours so there was huge time pressure. Crawling under machines to drain waste water tanks (onto yourself as the plug was of course on the bottom), slippery potato-mash everywhere, reaching into and almost running over all kinds of machines and conveyor belts.

All while wearing a rubber suit in the heat of warm water pressure washers and the smell of industrial cleaning agents.

So yes, I'll happily take that 15 minute useless "strategy meeting" with you.

I always understood it as "the further from the (dirty/basic) Earth, the more luxurious".

(At least in Europe) Toyota used to name their models "Sol", "Luna" and "Terra" as well. Sol had all the trimmings, Terra had the least.

It sounded nicer than something like "Luxury" and "Basic".

I agree there might be a more or les arbitrary border, and it will probably be in different places for different people.

However the original statement:

The CEO’s extracurricular activities are none of my business.

Basically says that no border should exist, and it makes no difference at all who provided the service as long as the service itself is excellent.

That is a fundamentally different argument that I very much disagree with.

Let's draw this to its ultimate conclusion.

Would you subscribe to an excellent VPN service, if it was run by [insert universally abhorred brutal dictator from history here]?

Unfortunately, somehow AirPods also at random go from my wife's iPhone to my iPad. And then when she "steals" them back switch to my Mac a minute later.

Doesn't matter that they are linked to her iCloud account/Apple ID and my devices are linked to mine.

Apple "it just works" smarts are very nice, until it doesn't just work anymore and you have no way to disable them.

It's the reason I switched to JBL earbuds with a touch screen case, where I can explicitly tell them what device to connect to.

My experience with German colleagues is not efficiency; but they do have a remarkable ability (in my field) to read a 400 page regulator rulebook and overlay it on a 200 page design document and pinpoint the rulebook edge cases not covered by the design...

Days of our Lives is staged and so is The Godfather.

Yet one is not like the other.

Valve staged a scene of two people playing a game like how most people play a game. Just like that, there are many small human touches to this Steam Machine page. The messy cable picture where they show off the led strip, the honest and plain FAQ. Etc.

We don't have to glaze Valve for doing this, but we can still appreciate it.

Beautifully said. Engineering is often just a cost center and I often have the feeling management is suspicious that the engineers are just wasting time and throwing up roadblocks for nothing. This in turn makes managers always on the lookout for "the shortcut" to cut out as many of those engineers as possible.

There is a definite lack of appreciation for the often repetitive grit, toil and maintenance work required to just have profit generating working software running reliably in production.

Always appreciate people answering their own questions in great detail!

I bought my parents a M1 iMac in 2021. Connected a drive to it for Time Machine. Set up an admin account and wrote its password on a sticky note. Set up auto update. Gave a 5 minute instruction.

I haven’t had to look at it for 5 years now. It’s still 200% more powerful than what they need.

As a “power user” Apple’s recent output has been frustrating. But for casual users it’s an unbeatable ecosystem.

+1 for Fastmail.

I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.

Me too. To be honest, I am not that interested in reading the first 5-10 search results to find what I am looking for. If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved.

Apart from the tone which is not my cup of tea either, I think what these types of articles/advice try to convey is that we (the working population) are still the monkeys we were thousands of years ago.

Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well.

Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys.

This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.

I’d be fine with America not wanting the world to feel “entitled to” it, if at the same time they’d stop feeling entitled to the rest of the world themselves.

Vietnam. Middle America. Afghanistan. Iraq. Greenland. Venezuela. Iran. Now Cuba.

Stop it.

May the world extend Americans the hospitality that the US has extended to the world in the last year.

All day every day my iPhone makes me feel like an idiot. I need to correct every other word I type (or at least what my iPhone thinks I typed). While correcting, autocorrect introduces new and even more baffling misspellings.

Sometimes it gets to “fever dream where you’re suddenly unable to successfully perform everyday tasks” levels of insanity.

And the worst part is: it used to be fine. I’d type more or less on full keyboard levels of speed and accuracy on my iPhone 4S.

It's interesting the economic damage a few disgruntled WASP's in US swing states can do to the US economy by electing an orange toddler.

Idea! Maybe these now redundant humans can be turned into a kind of battery, so they serve as a source of energy for the machines?

Perhaps it's then smart to make the humans have a brain/computer interface, to make then dream/think they are living in a normal society so they don't revolt.

The obvious objection is that code produced at that speed becomes unmanageable, a liability in itself. That is a reasonable concern, but it largely applies when agents produce code that humans then maintain. Agentic platforms are being iterated upon quickly, and for established patterns and non-business-critical code, which is the majority of what most engineering organizations actually maintain, detailed human familiarity with the codebase matters less than it once did. A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today. The liability argument holds in a human-to-human or agent-to-human world. In an agent-to-agent world, it largely dissolves.

Then I'd wager it's the same for the courses and workshop this guy is selling...an LLM can probably give me at least 75% of the financial insights for not even .1% of what this "agile coach" is asking for his workshops and courses.

Maybe the "agile coach LLM" can explain to the "coding LLM's" why they're too expensive, and then the "coding LLM's" can tell the "agile coach LLM" to take the next standby shift then, if he knows so much about code?

And then we actual humans can have a day off and relax at the pool.

I read ZoneAlarm and it was like suddenly a part of my brain that went unvisited for 25 years lit up...

While Microsoft in general is a mess, this article is like saying: what even is “save”? Microsoft has 1286 save products! Save in Word, Save in Paint, Save in Notepad…

Copilot means there’s a button/menu/command in the Microsoft app/site/tool that allows the user to pass whatever text/file/site/context/prompt is on the screen to the Copilot AI backend so it can summarize/transform/expand/explain it, and then have the user wait an inordinate amount of time for a mediocre response.

My favorite coding font is the one that is pre-installed on my work laptop because I cannot install additional ones...

So Aptos Mono or Consolas it is.

Honda seems to love pulling out of things just when they are about to succeed. Both in F1 and apparently now also in EV's.

I admire and applaud Kagi for what they are trying to be.

But on the AI front, the Assistant is simply worse than using for example Gemini or ChatGPT directly. It is slower, it cannot generate images etc.