manmademagic

Some people genuinely want to help others, without any immediately visible reward.

I won’t say it’s necessarily altruistic, as of course there could be a drive from inner machinations that we’d never be privy to.

(Sometimes the exposure of an article can be considered a reward, for those looking for ego inflation)

Even myself, I generally don’t leave comments unless I feel they’re going to be helpful or insightful to someone else. But I am also biased, as I do have a very strong affinity towards sharing information, so I greatly appreciate the effort artisans and those more knowledgeable than I go through to share such knowledge.

This may be true in some cases, but I’ve also seen issues with too many stamps, signatures, red-tape, tribunals/committees, and multi-stage approval chains.

There’s a balance somewhere put there, but that balance is different for everyone.

Personally I think problematic decision making is more to do with the “blame” side of ownership. It benefits the unsure more than the certain, and not many people are okay with making and admitting to mistakes.

Mostly because there are different depths of reporting required depending who you’re creating said reports for. Often it’s unnecessary bureaucracy, but also often the ones doing the “actual work” don’t have a full understanding of how what they’re working on interacts with other parts of a system. (I mean this broadly, and not just related to software development)

Middle management can sometimes be good at this, because they may actually have the time to step back and take a holistic look at things. It’s not always easy to do that when you’re deep in the weeds with clients, managers, colleagues, or direct reports bugging you about misc things.

Overall I think (or hope) the more useless reporting will die a slow death, but I also think there’ll be a loooooong period of AI slop before we reach the point where everyone says “why are we actually doing this?”

I wouldn't call myself an 'experienced' developer, but I do find LLMs useful for once-off things, where I can't justify the effort to research and implement my own solution. Two recent examples come to mind:

1. Converting exported data into a suitable import format based on a known schema 2. Creating syntax highlighting rules for language not natively support in a Typst report

Both situations didn't have an existing solution, and while the outputs were not exactly correct, they only needed minor adjustments.

Any other situation, I'd generally prefer to learn how to do the thing, since understanding how to do something can sometimes be as important as the result.

It's an interesting dilemma, since if I know that an email was written mostly with AI, it feels to me like the author didn't put effort in, and thus I won't put much effort into reading the email.

I had a conversation with my manager about the implications of everyone using AI to write/summarise everything. The end result will most likely be staff getting Copilot to generate a report, then their manager uses Copilot to summarise the report and generate a new report for their manager, ad inifinitum.

Eventually all context is lost, busywork is amplified, and nobody gains anything.

It would be pretty hard to do a fair comparison between the users of the Reddit app and Apollo.

Accessing reddit.com on a mobile will bombard you with pop ups to get you to access through the official app, while Apollo would only be found via word of mouth or actively seeking an alternative.

Review score average might be a better, where they're pretty on par in that regard, but again hard to tell if that's an indication of each app or a review of the content served by reddit itself.

https://monkeytype.com is also an excellent alternative.

You can change the difficulty to fail on words, individual characters, or if you fall below a % threshold.

Obviously the ideal solution would be for Apple to fix this, since resetting network settings forgets wifi passwords.

But as far as I’m aware the issue doesn’t affect everyone, so could potentially just be some minor corruption occurring during the network/modem firmware upgrade.

I’ve had something similar happen with a few different iOS updates.

Usually I’ll just reset the network settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings) and that seems to resolve the issue.

Also love fraidycat, the approach it takes for keeping things “fair” is really nice.

It solves one of the problems I’ve had with other RSS readers around the overwhelm when adding a new source/neglecting an existing source. Opening up to see tens/hundreds of items in the backlog that you feel obligated to read isn’t fun.

I’ve got it set as my new tab page, which makes it easy to see new stuff at a glance, and then I can delve into the less important stuff when I’ve got time to waste.

Probably due to their workplaces using different schemes

e.g. My personal is [firstname].[lastname] and work is [firstinitial][lastname]

If I didn’t use macros I’m sure I’d eventually mix them up too.

All of the old direct page links still work

You can click on the Disney logo, and then on the various icons on the bottom of the text notes to navigate around

Seems to be a fun little hypertext adventure/joke about Kicks Condor's upcoming role in the 2021 National Treasure 3 film

Reminds me a bit of http://mackerelmediafish.com/

ING Australia is even worse for this, as it’s an 8 digit acc number with a 4 digit PIN to login.

St. George isn’t as terrible, but they have a quirk of requiring a 4 digit security number along with your password. That’s not how MFA works...

Better security practices and open APIs are the two things I wish banks would get sorted.

I used to bank with WestPac and from memory it wasn’t possible to do this as they had some additional javascript running that would cipher every letter.

I think I had most things working properly within the first few days, but kept customizing and changing settings/fonts/themes/plugins.

Mostly procrastinating by pretending I was "Being Productive"

Writing appears to be fine for me (Chrome 79 on Win 10)

The drawing above the cursor looks like an issue with the iframe

The iframe url is https://app.ryeboard.com/board/demo, which works well

Had the same thing when I was studying CompSci.

Ended up spending more time configuring vim than doing the work I was supposed to do.

Even did the completely pointless exercise of making custom syntax highlighting for the pseudocode language we had to use.

That’s basically what I did. I had a few things running in IFTTT and Microsoft flow, but both have pretty big limitations.

Moved everything across to webhook, which is running powershell scripts in the backend.

Makes it a lot easier for testing that things are working properly too.

The small incentive from gamification works surprisingly well, especially for things where it's hard to visualise the net gains (Oral care, cleaning, etc).

For tasks though, I personally use Todoist, which I've haphazardly rigged via IFTTT and Microsoft Flow to sync through to Habitica. That way I get the organisation of Todoist, but the incentives from Habitica.