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I found this stat a little hard to believe so I looked up what appears to be the source—it’s 81% of iPhone owners who own a smart watch https://www.statista.com/chart/31973/likelihood-of-iphone-us...

It’s hard to find a source of how many iPhone owners specifically also own a smartwatch, but in the US it seems like 35% might be a decent estimate of smartwatch ownership, so it’d be more in the realm of ~28% of iPhone owners also having an Apple Watch.

I find that regular wilderness backpacking trips in places without cell service accomplish this kind of reset in a fun, social (bring friends!) way that provides plenty of exercise and fresh air, with the added bonus of being a reasonably "normal" explanation/antidote to the social pressure of those "you're doing what??? I need to be able to reach you!"-type conversations.

There's the added bonus that being fully out of cell service effectively removes the ability to cheat altogether, though it seems inevitable at this point that satellite data will be invading the backcountry before long.

I’ve driven a lot in urban places with speed camera programs (which I fully support along with other car reduction and traffic calming designs) and lots of pedestrians and cyclists around, but I’ve never had a camera ticket in 20 years of driving.

Eight years ago I was driving on a genuinely empty back road in a rural part of America, speed limit 55mph. I failed to notice that, for one mile, the speed limit went down to 45mph. The character of the road didn’t change, we weren’t passing through a populated area. I don’t know why it changed. For miles in either direction it was 55. I kept going 55 and put absolutely zero people at risk of anything. That oversight cost me $400, and the cop was a huge asshole about it. So I bought a radar detector.

There are various layers of dysfunction at play in American road design and policing that I’d happily advocate we address. In the meantime I’m doing what I can to avoid any interactions with power drunk people who have the ability to decide my fate on a whim.

Waze works great once there's a critical mass of other drivers—busy roads in populated areas. My radar detector fills in the gaps on back roads and small towns very well.

I spent a good amount of time digging into genealogy tools last year, tracing some family as far back to the 1500s. I felt it was a pretty mind-expanding exercise, learning about the places people lived and the journeys they must have taken. It inspired me to read from other sources about what life was like at each juncture.

Among the various records there were some that involved wills and estates—lists of who got what 200 years ago. Land, horses, money. It was fascinating in its own right, but I'll say that a video of any of those people talking about their life experience would have been absolutely incredible, if for nothing else but to conceptualize how extraordinarily the world has changed, while also feeling connection with the little human details of daily life that have likely remained much the same.

Once upon a time Mac laptops used reed switches to detect closed lids, and they were a common point of failure, presumably since they contained moving parts.

> there's a hustle culture that glamorized lack of sleep as a badge of honor

For all of the pop science/bro science/measured self/life optimization stuff that percolates in this world, it’s funny to me that glorifying a lack of sleep persists, when sleep is effectively a performance enhancing drug, and a lack of it effectively makes you dumber.

I recall an anecdote from a sports medicine doctor interviewed somewhere, about how his patients with overtraining syndrome-type issues were overwhelmingly high-powered professionals who were accommodating their Ironman training schedule by sleeping less, as opposed to Olympic athletes who often sleep a lot to properly recover from their training.

Build and tag internal base images on a regular cadence that individual projects then use in their FROM. You’ll have `company-debian-python:20250901` as a frozen-in-time version of all your system level dependencies, then the Dockerfile using it handles application-level dependencies with something that supports a lockfile (e.g. uv, npm). The application code itself is COPY’d into the image towards the end, such that everything before it is cached, but you’re not relying on the cache for reproducibility, since you’re starting from a frozen base image.

The base image building can be pretty easily automated, then individual projects using those base images can expect new base images on a regular basis, and test updating to the latest at their leisure without getting any surprise changes.

All three of us trumpet players in my middle school band would sit in the back and have breath holding contests while the director was working with other sections or whatever.

> They claim that somehow hundreds of unique kinds of river/lake fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?

I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.

It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.

I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

That seemingly depends a bit on how hard you ask it to think, or how hard it decides to think based on your question.

On desktop at least the model selector only shows GPT-5 for me now, with Pro and Thinking under "Other Models" but no other options.

I've had Claude decide to replace my existing fetch-based API calls with Axios (not installed or present at all in the project), apropos of nothing during an unrelated change.

I think it makes sense to want that, but at least for me personally I’ve had dramatically better overall results when manually managing the context in Aider than letting Claude Code try to figure out for itself what it needs.

It can be annoying, but I think it both helps me be more aware of what’s being changed (vs just seeing a big diff after a while), and lends itself to working on smaller subtasks that are more likely to work on the first try.

You could recirculate water past the CPU via an insulated storage carafe. This would create a fun and exciting gamble wherein you might receive a freshly brewed pot of coffee OR your computer might turn itself off just before the water is hot enough to brew with, and the time it would take would be based on how hard you worked the PC.

There are basically countless examples in human history of disparate self-interested parties overusing a shared resource and failing to regulate themselves until that resource becomes unusable for everyone involved, from the most micro scale office fridge scenario through to global scale like ocean overfishing and carbon emissions. I don’t see how polluting orbital space is much different than polluting our water, soil, and air.

I bought an Awair device in 2020 when my wife and I were working from home full time in the same room, out of curiosity as to whether our office area air was accumulating lots of CO2 during the workday (turns out this is not really an issue in drafty 120 year old houses).

In the time since I’ve found it helpful for: confirming my DIY air purifier was effective during wildfire smoke periods, having a reminder to open the windows generally when the air gets stale and particularly after cooking, learning that cracking a window for makeup air for the range hood makes it much more effective, getting better about trimming candle wicks and snuffing them instead of blowing them out, getting a sense of our actual temp and humidity comfort ranges and how they differ from thermostat settings, and realizing that induction really might be preferable to gas whenever we’re looking to buy a stove in the future.

Businesses want you to use their app for a few reasons: it’s stickier because they can start sending you push notifications right away without even signing in/making an account, they get their logo right on your home screen, there are expedited login methods available like FaceID, they bypass most normal ad blocking so they can show users ads but also get much more reliable telemetry, they get access to APIs that allow them to request/slurp additional user data like your contacts list, persistent location services, and camera roll metadata, plus they can access a broader set of system APIs for fingerprinting purposes (even if against the ToS).

Then there’s a measurement element where app installs became an important KPI around the time ad blocking became more popular and interfered with detailed website engagement tracking, creating a self-fulfilling kind of thing.

On top of this I think another factor is that many websites are in terrible shape, super bloated by ten thousand tracking pixels and third party snippets added willy nilly by marketing teams using Tag Manager, so apps benefit from gatekeeping that bloat to a degree.

3D Touch was amazing for typing alone, I miss it basically every day when I type more than a couple of words on my phone. It was so great to be able to firm-press and slide to move the insertion point, or firmer press to select a word or create a selection. It was like a stripped down mobile version of the kind of write-and-edit flow of jumping around between words that I can get on a proper keyboard with Emacs keybindings drilled into my brain.

I see restaurant reservations as an example of an AI agent-appropriate task fairly often, but I feel like it's something that's neither difficult (two or three clicks on OpenTable and I see dozens of options I can book in one more click), nor especially compelling to outsource (if I'm booking something for a group, choosing the place is kind of personal and social—I'm taking everything I know about everybody in the group into account, and I'd likely spend more time downloading that nuance to the agent than I would just scrolling past a few places I know wouldn't work).

As with any investing there's a risk appetite/timescale component to thinking about this stuff. Lots of companies went to zero in the dot-com bubble. Even Amazon was down over 90% between the end of 1999 and late 2001, and took until 2007 to recover to its high. NASDAQ overall took 15 years to return to its March 2000 high. Some incredible returns to be had if you waited it all out, to be sure, but it's hard to know what the interim looks like.

I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.

It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.

I think comfort/discomfort is a highly individualized thing where your range gets calibrated by your experience, and that modern western lifestyles have created a very narrow band of what’s comfortable for many people.

I’m a big Type II fun person and feel that there are all sorts of highly satisfying life experiences to be had if you’re able to tolerate some discomfort, but there has to be some deliberate practice of getting comfortable being uncomfortable to ease into it.

I’ve always said this as well, having done lots and lots of early stage building and prototyping, and suffering plenty of proto-duction foibles, however my view has shifted on this a lot in the last year or so.

With current models I’m able to throw together fully working web app prototypes so quickly and iterate often-sweeping UI and architectural changes so readily that I’m finding it has changed my whole workflow. The idea of trying to keep things low-fidelity at the start is predicated on the understanding that changes later in the process are much more difficult or expensive, which I think is increasingly no longer the case in many circumstances. Having a completely working prototype and then totally changing how it works in just a few sentences is really quite something.

The key to sustainability in this pattern, in my opinion, is not letting the AI dictate project structure or get too far ahead of your own understanding/oversight of the general architecture. That’s a balancing act to be sure, since purely vibe-coding is awfully tempting, but it’s still far too easy to wind up with a big ball of wax that neither human nor AI can further improve.

Definitely a thing in NYC—had an ice cream truck that would sit down the block from my place playing music all day long and many years later that "hello" is like nails on a chalkboard.

I guess the fact that some manufacturer integrations are flaky is hard to reconcile for me as far as the promise of "having multiple kinds of smart devices isn't really a problem". Regardless of whose fault it is, those flaky devices contribute to a less stable system.

It's been a bit since I was operating it, but I did at times certainly have issues with updates—perhaps just individual plugins or system updates that created an issue, either way, still a situation where I had to sit at a terminal and debug. I only ever ran the Docker version, not the OS, so perhaps this is less problematic in a more completely controlled stack.

I don't think I'm alone in this view, broadly speaking: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/18hvl3b/i_g...

Perhaps I never put enough effort into it, but I've slowly coalesced on only having IKEA smart home products after years of acquiring piecemeal stuff and trying to wire it together with Home Assistant. I've shut down HA, and with every non-IKEA "smart" thing I have nowadays I just use the manufacturer's app (though I've become pretty sour on most smart devices overall and avoid them when possible).

I didn't really care for the way it became a sysadmin job where the stakes of a bad update or me not reading some release notes were that my light switches didn't work until I sat there and futzed around with it. I'm a programmer, enjoy Linux admin, run a whole bunch of servers....but having to dive into logs and YAML configs because the lights in my kitchen won't turn off is just not ideal. Similar issues with HomeKit, except when things mysteriously stop working there's even less ability to diagnose, given Apple's design principles that everything "just works", so apparently providing detailed error messages or diagnostics is gauche.

In addition to defense-in-depth—simply adding a bunch of imperfect layers and acknowledging that no individual layer like this is all that effective on its own—there’s a component of creating signal: it can be pretty trivial for a motivated attacker to bypass a WAF, however it may not be trivial to do so without creating a paper trail of event logs, which can be used to trigger automated blocks or escalate alarms for a human to intervene.

> In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?

There are an awful lot of exceptionally wealthy people living in buildings in Manhattan with hundreds of apartments. Their apartments themselves are larger than average, but given how much they cost per square foot there’s clearly a lot of demand to live in that environment.