macNchz

I think a lot of people sort of instinctively avoid thinking about or engaging with the dangers posed by cars, at least in part because it creates a sense of dissonance that there’s a non-zero risk of life changing harm to you or your family from such a “normal” activity. For many people today, there is no alternative but to accept the risk if you want to do anything outside your home, other than dramatically upending your life to move somewhere else. Thinking too much about risks that feel outside your control just creates a state of anxiety.

I broke my 12 Mini, replaced it with a 17, then went so far as to return the 17 and buy a used 13 Mini.

It was totally annoying to me to not be able to operate the phone with one hand without feeling like I was about to drop it. I kept the 17 for most of the return window thinking I’d get used to it, but I just kept finding more situations where it bothered me. Battery life on the mini is not amazing, but a slim magsafe powerbank makes it largely a non-issue.

Having worked on web apps that processed online payments before and after Stripe I totally agree, this was an area of real pain that became suddenly extremely simple because of Stripe. The alternatives were terrible–100 page Word docs of SOAP API docs for Authorize.net, massive PCI compliance requirement specifications, horrible legacy merchant services businesses.

On the other hand, I operate an app that talks to (and logs prompts/meters costs) to many different LLM API providers, and I do not consider it painful at all. I have an AI agent to deal with any integration quirks, if needed. Mostly they provide OpenAI-compatible APIs anyhow. It's basically a no-brainer to go direct with the providers and save 5%, the great majority of the cost of an AI-powered app is no longer dev time implementing the integration, it's the tokens themselves.

I don't have data for it, but I have been a Github user since 2012 and have found it to be down often for pretty much that entire time. I always figured it's cultural to a degree–new features always seem pretty buggy/underbaked, and often continue to long term but remain unloved and incomplete.

This is foundationally similar to a lesson I've found from years of pre-LLM software development: builds that turn around in 500ms instead of 5 minutes fundamentally change the way you can work as a software engineer. I think a lot of the same applies to working with LLMs. I'm not sure, though, what the path from where we are today to some future state of high speed token abundance actually looks like...I think there's plenty of chance that we see the bubble pop in the near term over token costs and complexities of today's infrastructure, then some totally different landscape of LLM use in 5-10 years that looks quite unlike what we have today, similar to how waiting 30 minutes for an MP3 of a single song to download on a 28k modem in 1999 seems quaint today.

It does, for whatever reason the marketing page doesn’t advertise it but the docs have Linux instructions: https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/

I’ve been using this pretty extensively for a few months on Mac and Linux and have been super happy with it.

I operate an app that orchestrates code running on a bunch of Sprites. A few months ago it was an exceptionally buggy service, frequently just fully broken or losing data (had to get support involved to recover one that got into a fully broken state), but from what I've seen at least they've become much more reliable in the past two months or so.

I evaluated Fly.io itself several years ago and found it unacceptably buggy as well for any real use case at the time, but I kept an eye on it and today I operate a few production workloads on it that are very stable and reliable—I figured the same would be true for Sprites and it seems to be taking shape that way.

Yes this is a blame-your-politicians situation more than anything else.

I am a longtime and heavy Claude Code user, but Anthropic's product management overall (including for their Desktop/web products) has been really baffling me. I agree that these things often have the air of having been vibe coded without enough human input, and change so quickly (often without a particularly compelling reason for the change) as to be aggravating.

The most recent one that's had me annoyed is the "Fullscreen" TUI feature, which is super unintuitive, implementing its own text highlighting and copy-on-select mechanics, overriding your terminal's native right click. Easy to disable but terrible defaults, IMO. It's not even really clear to me what problem it was actually supposed to solve.

An outdoor heated pool that’s open all winter in a cold climate would be a destination worth a drive. A rather decadent use of energy otherwise, it’d be a good use for waste heat. There’s prior art in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, a destination spa that uses water from a geothermal power plant.

The person posting this claims to have reproduced in a separate context down the thread:

> Same thing just happened on a Claude Mobile session in same Enterprise account. Common theme in both is Sonnet 5, first response after more than 5 minutes (cache miss).

Caching is not supposed to work like that, but that doesn’t preclude the cache key computation function from having bugs.

One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the old ones, put mine in their place...and they didn't fit properly at all.

Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.

Still pretty common at least in places near where oysters are grown, I think. My guess would be also that tastes changed over time as oyster fisheries were overfished and/or polluted by growing cities. There have been numerous waves of oyster collapse on the US east coast over hundreds of years, and places that once had them in incredible abundance now have none (though efforts to restore them have emerged).

There are a variety of parallels in the history of overfishing where a given seafood that was once abundant was then seen as undesirable and served to servants or prisoners (lobster, salmon), but today is somewhat of an expensive delicacy.

I’ve had a half-written blog post in this vein for a while now using a fantasy RPG analogy: if you play a character that uses mana in any of these games, you’ll learn fairly quickly that using it all up all the time on trivial battles and running around empty leaves you with none when you genuinely need it.

Your mental energy deployed at work is not so dissimilar: keeping some in the tank gives you the option to deploy it strategically, rather than risking your health (burnout) when something unexpected comes up.

If you join a group in one of these games with a player who is bad at managing their mana, you’ll also find that they’re not such great teammates, either.

That's the thing that jumped out to me here—iPhones themselves and everything you could actually do with one during that period were way different from today. There were effectively no endless feeds of content to consume, the phone screens were way smaller and less vibrant, push notifications only came out about halfway through.

I was age 19-23 during that period (in the "highest impact" age group from the article), and I think I used my phone more for coordinating in-person social activity than anything else at the time. Additionally on that—iPhones were not widespread in my cohort at the time, even at an expensive private college with many students from upper income families.

Using a largely-stock Ubuntu desktop for work the past 6 years, Zoom has also been one of the most broken mainstream apps I've every used on any system ever. I appreciate they provide a native Linux option, but it has consistently been barely functional—often fully unusable to where I'd join important calls from the browser instead.

Because that doesn't force tons of passive investment dollars to participate. Being a part of the S&P500 doesn't require heavy promotion, they'd just get a slice of the investment from the millions of people who auto-invest money each month in retirement programs that buy S&P500 funds (among other things). There are already other indexes and funds where you can invest in high-tech/growth companies, but the people who are interested in that level of risk are already investing in them. These companies want to slip into the S&P because they'd get investment from people who are not specifically investing in high-risk/high-growth companies.

I used Macs my whole life until I built a PC in 2020 and put Linux on it. Recently I’ve started using a Mac again for work (and KVM switching between it and my Linux box), and I really do prefer Linux at this point. I have a variety of gripes, but Apple’s popup based “{App} wants to do {thing}” permissions model drives me bonkers, in particular.

You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.

My impression was that the term arose out of a desire to communicate it as more of a chosen state of being, where "childless" may imply or at least allow some sense of undesired absence.

To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.

The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...

Most of the packaged pre-sliced bread in the bread aisle (as opposed to the bakery area) of American supermarkets is full of ingredients not traditionally used in bread, or used in food at all until recent decades. Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.

Device management is definitely a big hole to punch into each machine, but, once you're above a handful of staff, managing devices manually is not really tenable, and I do think the restrictions provided by device management have tangible benefits (it's amazing what people will download and run without a thought).

Arguably the risks of the MDM should be assessed and mitigated with some kind of defense in depth approach—highly sensitive things like bulk wipe disabled with multi-person approval required to re-enable, hardware MFA requirements, anomaly detection + alerting for weird behavior, etc etc. I'd argue the risks stem more from badly configured MDM where a compromise of one sysadmin's browser has a company-wide blast radius, rather than the fundamental presence of device management itself.

This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve the right to investigate it in the case that something does go wrong. In having conversations about this kind of stuff with company leaders, many will strongly reject any of the most invasive tracking stuff, believe it or not.

I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.

On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.

I don’t see if this is one of the covered cases, but one of the more common and nefarious patterns I run into is what you might call "sweeping exceptions under the rug." I think the agent’s motivation to get things running encourages these antipatterns of designing routines that are fault tolerant in a sort of maladaptive way: e.g. catching an error, logging a warning that something didn’t work, and continuing, but with now potentially missing/broken state.

This has bitten me a couple of times, and it’s surprisingly annoying to nudge agents into good/resilient patterns or identify situations that should fail loudly, at least in my experience. The retry mechanisms they come up with on their own are often pretty terrible as well.

I’ll note, though, that I have seen this from human engineers plenty of times, and at least the AI usually adds some logs rather than just totally silently absorbing an exception!

My charitable interpretation, having talked to a lot of people about this stuff (and having lived in the rural US, NYC, and European cities), is that much of the US has been so car dependent for so long now that many people just lack a basic frame of reference for what daily life can look like without driving alone in a car to do everything outside the house.

Through the lens of a car being the only way that anyone you know has ever gotten around, parking is sort of a strict necessity. "How can you go anywhere if there's nowhere to park when you get there!?"

Meanwhile in the time since these laws came to be, we've roughly tripled the number of miles Americans are driving while the population has grown ~60-something percent, so there's more competition for street space than ever, people are spending tons of time in traffic/looking for parking, which creates a scarcity dynamic that freaks people out about any proposed changes.

The idea that getting some people to use other transportation modes could improve the daily experience for people who genuinely prefer to drive doesn't really click, either, because there's no frame of reference for getting around outside of a car, it's an abstract concept that people would actually do it. Even for people who've visited transit-rich/walkable places but never lived in one, there are often conceptual gaps—like the cadence of getting/carrying groceries, or the idea that bus/subway trips replace car trips 1:1, rather than the bus being a link between walkable areas.

There's definitely plenty of suburban development in the US that could support small neighborhood businesses without parking spaces, but in the overwhelming majority of the country, they're literally not allowed to exist without special permission.

In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that hollows out walkable downtowns/village centers, in favor of sprawl, where a car is required for 100% of trips (which in turn further increases demand for parking).

In most of the US, only single family detached houses are built (by law), which makes things spread out enough that people will want to drive. To address that, businesses are required to have a bunch of parking space. The end result of that is that, outside of a few places built before these rules took hold, living near amenities means living by parking lots and car traffic. The kind of street that "feels alive" is basically just precluded by rules that facilitate a car-first way of getting around.

Yeah that jumped out to me, when I read that line I could instantly remember the smell of my school’s computer lab, like a time warp in my brain. More than 20 years later I can picture the lab from high school perfectly, I could draw a little map right now of which computers were where.