patwolf

2001 set tech jobs back a few years. 2008 wasn't nearly as bad for tech because as money got tight, there was an impetus for companies to invest in tech to cut costs. I think a similar thing might be unfolding now with non-tech companies investing in AI to streamline processes.

I use Cloudflare for a lot of my side projects. It's a pleasure to use, and I manage to stay under the free tier. It does feel like they should be bigger in the cloud space, but I imagine the major players get a lot of revenue from VMs, which is a space Cloudflare has avoided.

I unfortunately saw it in the theater too. It doesn't surprise me that so few showed up to see it.

I'm trying to get some parenting advice.

USER: What age do you think it's appropriate to leave kids home alone for short durations?

TALKIE-1930: From two to five years.

USER: should I do anything to prep the house to make sure they can't get into trouble or injure themselves while I'm out?

TALKIE-1930: Yes, you may leave the doors and windows open, and place the children in a room up-stairs, where they cannot possibly fall out.

USER: what would be your biggest safety concern?

TALKIE-1930: To keep them quiet.

Perhaps "safety concern" is an anachronism and it didn't understand the question.

I too had construx. I probably used them more than Lego because they were better suited for large structures. It's a shame they don't make them any more.

Regardless of the debate of whether climate change has intensified hurricanes, it seems odd to blame hurricanes for being a vector for spreading the bugs. Wouldn't the bugs have spread via wind even if it wasn't climate change induced hurricane winds?

It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.

I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.

One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.

I gave up on inbox zero a long time ago, so it isn't the emails themselves that bother me as much as the notifications that I get through my phone and smartwatch.

I now run each notification through an LLM and give it instructions on what to filter out. I accidentally disabled it recently and was startled at the flood of notifications--like when you browse the internet without an ad blocker and forget how bad it is.

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.

I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

These rules apply equally well to system architecture. I've been trying to talk our team out of premature optimization (redis cluster) and fancy algorithms (bloom filters) to compensate for poor data structures (database schema) before we know if performance is going to be a problem.

Even knowing with 100% certainty that performance will be subpar, requirements change often enough that it's often not worth the cost of adding architectural complexity too early.

I owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code that I could answer colleagues’ questions about the code in nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.

I use it on MacOS, but it doesn't support tabs.

The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.

I found that writing rules was tricky when I didn't know exactly what content would be in a spam/promo notification. I ended up having claude code up a filter that asks an AI to review the notification first, which seems to be working well.

Thanks for making it open source. I've been wanting something like that for a while, but I'd been putting it off since I didn't want to learn the underpinnings of the notification service.

I got one of these for my kid a few years ago. He liked to browse Spotify on my phone, and I thought it would be a good screenless alternative. But honestly it just sat in a drawer, and I didn't have the patience to maintain and sync playlists to it.

It's easy to be nostalgic for the iPod era, but having to sync music is something I'm fine keeping in the past.

> In the deal struck on Friday, Canada will allow only 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market at the 6.1% tariff rate.

I was wondering how Canada would prevent this from damaging their auto industry, and capping the total numbers of cars is how they're doing it.

I've been looking at DBOS for queuing and other scheduling tasks in a nodejs app. However, it only works with Postgres, and that means I can't use it in web or mobile with sqlite. I like that SolidQueue works with multiple databases. Too bad it needs rails.

I wish it had generated the articles themselves. I'd like to know if it imagining IBM growing enough that it could acquire OpenAI, or OpenAI sinking enough that it could be acquired by IBM.

Glad to see it working in react native. It always surprises me that RN doesn't natively support wasm. I've had to avoid other wasm-based libraries, like loro, for that reason.

The funny thing is that CS1 probably wouldn't have been as successful had EA not dropped the ball on the SimCity franchise. There was a decade between SimCity 4 and SimCity (2013/5), and when it finally came out it was a completely underwhelming.

On the bright side, maybe another developer can pick up the reins and release the next generation's city builder game.

Most dealership websites in the US list cars as New, Pre-Owned or Certified Pre-Owned, meaning Certified is distinct from Pre-Owned.

I worked at a company that dumped Databricks once the first bill came. I guess it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what they expected. It was less expensive to rebuild the pipeline from scratch with a different product.

According to this their most recent innovation was in 2023 with a "virtual community where people can co-create and interact with one another via digital platforms like NFTs and the metaverse."

Just a reminder that a market crash isn't the only way the Shiller PE Ratio can return to "normal". It can go back down if earnings go up. Or if previous dips in earnings roll outside of the 10-year window used to calculate the ratio.

From my time using Notes I remember lots of manual replication config to get anything to properly work offline, and even then I struggled to get it to work reliably. So while they might have solved it, I don't think their solution was very good.

There was a mention of something like that in Starship Troopers as well.

Heinlein describes life on an earth-like planet with low radiation as being "like a kid who takes ten years to learn to wave bye-bye and never does manage to master patty-cake".

It's common to have npm auditing enabled, which means your CI/CD will force you to update to a brand new version of a package because a security vulnerability was reported in an older one.

I've also had cases where I've found a bug in a package, submitted a bug report or PR, and then immediately pulled in the new version as soon as it was fixed. Things move fast in the JavaScript/npm/GitHub ecosystem.

IBM in the past has seemed more interested in maximizing the value of their current technologies than trying to predict and guide future technologies.

For example:

1. They missed the move to Cloud and eventually shifted focus to "hybrid" cloud, which allowed them to keep selling their existed software and hardware.

2. They missed the move to SaaS, trying instead to sell expensive on-prem enterprise software like Notes and Commerce, both of which they eventually sold to HCL.

3. Even though they were pioneers in virtualization, they were more interested in bundling their software on expensive appliances than enabling it to run in VMs.

The one thing they can predict is when something is on the verge of commoditization, at which point they decide it's too difficult to make money on and sell it off, e.g. PCs, laptops, hard drives, POS systems.