pseudosavant

Roku TVs are really easy to turn into dumb TVs. Don’t connect the WiFi, and set it to always turn onto the HMDI input your PC/device is connected to. No tracking, ads, or extra steps.

RIP to one of the truly great ones

Maybe the site was having issues when I looked at it earlier. All of those tabs weren’t showing me anything. I downloaded the CSV to view the results and graph it.

I put it in a quick chart to make the rise and fall more visual. https://imgur.com/a/046CfZ2

Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.

I didn't realize that from the article I read (not this paywalled one). I guess there is more equality in how they are spreading around the slaps in the face.

That is a pretty major differentiator versus OpenAI/Anthropic. Public markets won't be kind to the amount of money Anthropic loses every quarter. I'm expecting for it be many *many* quarters before OpenAI or Anthropic get anywhere near profitable. They'll never be able to grow revenue fast enough to catch up with their current level of investment.

This is when I feel like OpenAI and Anthropic could be the Yahoo and AOL of this iteration of the internet. The center of the universe for a bit, but a limited number of days at the top.

100%. They don't even suggest a release timeline other than "we look forward to bringing Carbon to developers, businesses, and consumers soon". Claude and GPT-6.x will no doubt have improved versions by the time "soon" comes around.

Has there ever been a product category where a product release is valuable for a shorter time than with LLMs? Trying to build SOTA models seems like it'd be an exhausting hamster wheel to work on.

I'll also note that the 25% didn't include anyone VP or higher. So, the most expensive employees aren't being shown the exit, just the people doing the actual work.

They are making $600k in net income per employee. 10+ years ago, I'd never seen a mass layoff at any company making that kind of money per employee.

Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?

Microsoft made $134B in net income in the last 4 quarters. It used to be if you worked for a company that was printing boat loads of money that you had job security.

Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.

Before Oracle lost their Java lawsuit with Google over Android's Java runtime, it wasn't clear that you could safely make and distribute your own JVM.

Microsoft was definitely at their peak evil EEE era, but it isn't like Sun didn't want to exclusively own/control Java too. It was Sun that put the Java in JavaScript but wanted to ensure it stayed a toy language.

Think of how truly horrendous it would be if every browser had the JVM built in and Oracle was calling the shots on the language the whole web is written on? How much would they be charging for a license?

Seems like most main company sites at places I've worked. If you are lucky, that WP instance is a fully managed service where they proactively deal with keeping it on the latest PHP, WordPress, and plug-in versions.

Other runtimes certainly have their vulnerabilities. It is just that it seems like PHP values backwards compatibility less than Node, Python, Java, or C#. It seems like there is better tooling for running mixed versions of Node or Python than what I've experiences with PHP.

And with the security fixes only landing on the relatively recent PHP versions, it means vulnerabilities force you into the PHP upgrade churn.

Is it just me, or is it the truly brave that decide to deploy and protect PHP instances? Especially if WordPress or Drupal are involve?

I finished moving the remainder of my stuff off of PHP and WordPress last year and haven't missed it at all. Backwards compatibility was typically pretty bad.

It seemed like maintaining existing working PHP code was always a cycle of: upgrade to newer PHP, that version has breaking changes, fix that code or update to a new WordPress (plus all of the plugins that would inevitably need updating too).

That's because dates are extremely complex and subject to all sorts of political and business rules.

Those business rules, daylights savings (datetimes that can never happen, or happen twice), different M/D/Y ordering, different starting day of week, different timezones (including 15 or 30 minute offset ones like India, Iran, parts of Australia, etc), etc quickly complicate it. Oh, and don't forget about making it accessible.

That's before you even get into designers who want the date picker to look the same across platforms instead of using platform specific UI widgets...

I'm pretty sure my version of hell would be implementing a date picker until all stakeholders are happy with it (eternity).

Not trying to throw shade, but I think the number of devs wishing that the web ended up with XHTML + JVM (now owned by Oracle...) may just be you.

Never mind that when Microsoft licensed Java from Sun for IE3 and IE4, Sun sued Microsoft. Sun wanted to be the only distributor of Java, just like Adobe was with Flash. So, browsers wouldn't have actually included a Java runtime out of the box without licensing/paying Sun for it. I'm sure that dependency would have only gotten even better under Oracle.

Those of us old enough to remember the web with plugins, don't miss plugins.

EV driver for 10 years, and that is absolutely the big difference maker. The economics and time savings disappear if you have to use public charging infrastructure. I feel like it is almost like a tax that is put on people who can only afford to rent an apartment.

I've had two EVs and have been driving EV only for about 10 years. I've been driving an ICE vehicle lately due to an issue with a wiring harness on my EV that it is getting service for. It's been so long since I regularly drove an ICE that it has been an unpleasantly shocking experience.

- The cost savings are as much as a car payment. >$100/week in gas when my entire household electric bill averages only $200/month. Up until this recent issue at 85k miles, I've had $0 in maintenance costs (excluding tires). Those same miles in an ICE would have cost me about $2000 in oil changes and brakes by now.

- Getting gas sucks. Sure, it is easier to get gas than charge an EV at a public charger. But it is far more convenient to charge at home every day. In 10 years, I've used a public charger maybe 10 times, but I have to get gas at least once a week. Would you rather have a phone with 6-7 days of energy but you had to drive to a dirty gas station to fill it, or just plug it in every night?

- ICE range anxiety when I have a quarter tank left. I know I can get gas all over the place, but it is pretty rare that my EV has as little range in it at the start of the day as this ICE vehicle with a quarter tank left. Either I go to the gas station more frequently, or I have to account for going to a gas station before driving 30-40 miles away.

- EV powertrains are so much better than gas powertrains. More powerful, smoother, quieter, drive better especially due to the better weight distribution (front to back, and height of the center of gravity).

I can't wait to get my EV back.

The main use for it is as a webpage you can serve with any web server. If the folder for your smb video share is also served with any web server, drop player.html in there, access it from the webserver URL, and it'll work great.

It is also a PWA though, so you can install the player (e.g. from my github pages test version: https://pseudosavant.github.io/player.html/player.html), and then use it as a local video player for any video file in your OS, like directly from the smb share if it is mounted.

Not many. Elon said their plan was to produce 500k per year and they did less than 5% (15k) of that over the last year. Their installed production capacity is 125k.

The Ford Edsel is widely regarded as one of the greatest car flops of all time and it sold 60k cars per year for their 2-year production run.

The CyberTruck is a massively bigger flop than that.

They first started taking deposits on the Roadster 9 years ago in 2017 with a 2020 production date. It’ll be shocking if they ever sell this car they showed today. If they do, it’ll be many years late, not fly, and cost twice what they are saying. Just like the CyberTruck.

Shameless plug for my web video player that is especially designed for self-hosting situations. Drop a single html file in your web server folder with your videos and you get thumbnails, library, search, subtitle support, etc.

No required third-party dependencies (just the optional Google Drive and OneDrive features). Highly customizable (colors, site logo, default features) with a JSON file the player can produce. Responsively scales for any web browser: laptop, mobile, smart TVs, game consoles, even built-in in-car tablet browsers.

https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html/

That gap surprised me too. But I couldn't find any way to open a saved document. I think it is just based on the URL.

For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.

But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.

Very well done. Looks and sounds great.

A couple of UX thoughts I had while using it:

1. Since the chords are all within a specific key, have you considered using the numbers 1 through 7 to play the respective chords? That way playing a 1-4-5 or a 2-5-1 would be very intuitive?

2. Have you considered using modifier keys (shift, ctrl, alt) to control whether a chord is strummed down versus up (e.g. pressing A would be down, but Shift+A would be up) or major/minor (A would be major, Alt+A would be minor)? I guess Ctrl could be a 7th chord modifier too.

Just some thoughts. Great tool!

It was successful for the Node community, but not for Deno the runtime or business. Deno launched with many features Node didn't have, but that it has now adopted: ES Modules, fetch(), .ts file support, web streams, web crypto, a built-in test runner, file watching, etc. Node's APIs didn't even use Promises/async/await, they were all callback-based.

Ultimately, it was easier for the Node ecosystem to adopt those changes into Node than it was to migrate to a different JS runtime like Deno. Bun would likely not exist without Deno too.

Your citation undermines your point: "U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a compilation work such as a database must contain a minimum level of creativity in order to be protectable under the Copyright Act." https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html#Feist

A full copy of the indexable web isn't a creative work at all. It isn't a collection that has been curated, it is just the whole thing.

I'm sorry, but this is Anthropic being the volunteer thought police right? This woman is being charged with a felony for expressing a thought to Claude. Not because she tried to plan an attack with it.

It is like Anthropic wants Claud to be the pious antithesis of Grok. Although their ideals are far apart, the end result is they'll both violate your privacy if its suits their worldview.