solfox

I don't buy their explaining away the effects of COVID by excluding 2020-2021. It was incredibly difficult to access routine medical care (especially colonoscopies!) during COVID. A post-COVID bump should be expected in the 1-2 years after normalization of medical care, when many people had previously skipped screenings. Let's see if the rise continues in 2024+ before drawing any conclusions.

Sure, my point is simply that privatization is rarely a solution to this specific problem.

This whole "but government is inefficient" argument has never convinced me. Our local electric provider has as bad or worse bureaucracy and ever-increasing rates. Bureaucracy is just a symptom of aging human systems, and it can be fixed. Monopolies that serve the public good should never been profit driven, full stop.

I love Accelerationism (that's the name of the theory you're mentioning). My pet related theory is that we're essentially in an infinite time loop, witnessing our own inevitable birth (the simulation that we are) over and over again.

Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?

Their software and hardware is of such low quality anyway, I will never buy another Withings product again. After using their scale and their thermometer, it's obvious they invest very little in quality control.

It seems as if this is based on demand. Whenever a new model is released, I'm guessing tens of thousands of us switch over to try the latest and greatest, which overloads the servers, leading to nerfing. It's 100% dishonest, but they realized they would lose users a lot quicker if they were honest and just said "our models are overloaded, come back later".

After Fable launch I switched over to Codex and it was simply amazing, with frequent usage resets that seemed never ending. They clearly had more compute than they knew what to do with. Post Astra, Codex has gotten dumb again across all models, increased usage for no real reason, and no resets.

I'm guessing Opus 5.5 will take the heat off Codex for a bit, leading to better performance. So I guess I stick around here instead of switching again?

No, whether or not it's intentional, maybe can be debated. But there's definitely an experience of a model losing horsepower quickly after launch.

It's actually insane how often I switch between Anthropic and Codex subscriptions. The experience on these platforms is a bit like riding a roller coaster.

Great. Maybe we can do something productive with that land now.

It was harder than you'd expect in 2011 to actually accomplish mailing a trackable card reliably like this at low cost. We spent a lot of time developing and implementing tracking and reliability with our provider - it was clear from our early tests of Apple Cards that they may not have anticipated some of the challenges (cards wouldn't actually show any tracking, for example).

It sounds like despite their reach and promotion, their sales lagged for Cards - which suggests they didn't quite get the product fit right either in cost or UX. The demand certainly was there.

I'd also say that a fancy printed card-in-envelope is sort of a weird product anyway, no matter how nice the paper is. Its naturally competing against other card-in-envelope junk in your mailbox, and while it was maybe a little bit of a novelty, I don't think I've ever personally thought "wow, this person really put effort into this" when getting a printed card. I'd much prefer something handwritten. That's why we focused on the much-cheaper postcard-style cards, which also still gave that little hit of novelty (hey, something in the mail!), without trying to be something it wasn't.

As the co-founder of Sincerely (at this time in 2011), I remember this keynote very specifically because it felt like we'd been Sherlocked. We were busy building out Postagram and Sincerely Ink, both from-iPhone-to-printed-card apps. afaik we were the first app to do this, and we were at that time gaining a lot of momentum. I remember seeing the announcement for Cards and feeling a mix of fear and anger that it felt like Apple was using their clout to take our idea.

I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.

Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.

I'm interested! Could be a fun project.

Why not post it on github? Because federal government data cannot be copyrighted, anyone is free to copy, redistribute, mirror, modify, or publish it anywhere they choose.

Just spent my birthday weekend down at Travertine Hot Springs in CA. Beautiful, well maintained, and free. https://www.soakingsprings.com/hot-springs/california/traver...

The hoops are in place to ensure those at the top continue to get their take.

PRs up!

Definitely. Issue filed: https://github.com/skillsynchq/txcript/issues/52 Will test locally and implement the fix now.

Love this. Easily the most annoying thing about modern Agent development across Claude, Codex, etc. One nit: You don't auto-discover "archived" chats from Codex. They have to be unarchived and the app restarted before being found.

Was just in a Waymo in SF and we were attacked by a gang of cyclists repeatedly swerving at and trying to cause our waymo to crash. Really powerless feeling. And they were doing this knowing humans were inside. I don't pretend to know their motivation other than perhaps misplaced social rage, but I'd imagine a litter robot would be immediately destroyed.

Calling it now: they will reverse this decision by December after they realize how many gmail customers they are losing.

Would be interested to see this compared to the costs to take off a comparable small jet fuel aircraft.

How has it evolved over the years? Certainly internet access on the playa has gotten easier than when you first launched it. What was the first connectivity solution?

Our first time out on the playa together, my girlfriend and I stopped by this phone booth and made a couple of calls. And because we stopped, we saw the FSM camp next door, and a giant sign saying "Weddings Here", so we inquired. They offered us free rings and then announced our wedding over a loudspeaker. In 2 minutes we had an entire wedding party, complete with best man, an elder to give away the bride, 25+ guests, and an officiant. My newly-minted best man even gave me one of my favorite playa gifts ever as a wedding gift. We opted not to "make it official", though they offered. It was a truly incredible experience. Thanks FSM!

It has always been a challenging but highly rewarding experience for me. It is what you make of it - if you choose to be cynical about "very well off tech people", that's all you'll see. But Burning Man is multitudes. For me, it's about witnessing pure human creativity and playfulness. Your first time out on the playa at night will likely be one of those lifetime memories you'll appreciate having.

Many microsoft services are down/failing today, including sites hosted on Azure. I'm guessing it's a larger MS outage.

Imagine being so hungry for power that you justify this.

> they're serving companies at Google scale first

I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need.

Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there.

OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.

I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

Laws around breaking and entering date back to WELL before mechanical locks were commonplace or even affordable to residences.