tapvt

My facebook account was taken over by someone, but the safeguards locked it down. I can't access it. Neither, hopefully, can the bad actor.

I don't miss it, though I feel uncomfortable about the situation. Recovery has not been worth the time involved.

What sucks is that now I can't see a whole ton of local content: local event organizers, small businesses, municipal offices and agencies, community groups, etc. have all consolidated on "facebook" as where every announcement goes.

I hope they continue to make it a more obviously hostile walled garden and that organizations of all kinds move away. The network effect it has may be hard to overcome, however.

I found a bit of this with the Meshtastic/Meshcore community in my city. I haven't participated lately, but I still keep a node running at home to try to support the network in a very limited way. Fun to pop on every so often and say hello, see who has new gear, and gauge the activity levels around me.

I also keep one in my car in case of ... something.

I dislike restrictions out of instinct, but to be fair, I've had permissions request popups on my Mac that were the first sign of software, which I had actually written, maybe had some bugs allowing it to work outside of its intended bailiwick.

I have to disagree on the fingernail card accents (though I've just learned the name via this article). Slop or not, they're useful for subtly indicating state, type of attention required, etc. without cluttering a UI.

Highly unproductive to write off the entirety of Texas like this. Have you visited Brewster or Presidio County, where this is happening, or spoken with the people who live there?

Big Bend is treasured by Texans across the political spectrum. I know nobody who is happy about this, regardless of how they vote. Environmentalists, ranchers, locals in general, strongly oppose this action by the Federal gov't.

The destruction in Big Bend is at the direction of folks who have never set foot there. It is not necessary. Just staying alive in that environment is difficult enough to deter mass migration. The existing River Road provides enough access, and probably some good vantage points (I'm not a border security expert).

It has certainly made it easier for me to put down my phone in bed and read something else. So, doomscrolling is gone for that part of my day.

The biggest win is not caring if I get the reader back on the charger before I drift off, which is a thing I need to do with my phone.

From personal experience, there's still a considerable chunk of rural America that isn't wired. I'm currently looking at an area to buy a house, and the only option around is Starlink.

Zero competition. No fiber. No cable. 5G coverage isn't sufficient for my daily needs, but okay for a failover.

Is Opus 4.8 equally or more capabale for the actual mechanics of the coding work?

It seems to me that having a powerful Fable layer for the planning, coordination, orchestration-type work and delegating to a suitable model for the actual execution of "coding tasks" is perfectly appropriate, if that is the case.

LLMs are stateless. But given an actual database of task-shaped items and some work, I could see the potential.

With a canonical source of truth, and set input/output expectations, the potential blast radius is quite small.

Critical thinking as a skill unto itself was held as incredibly important in my early education. At school, and at home. It continued through undergrad (obviously, I think).

In the past, say 5-ish years, I've been shocked to realize this isn't universal, or at least broadly applicable. Probably more of a result of whatever societal bubble I was born into. I don't know.

The result has been a growing uneasy feeling for me, at work mainly, when discussing just about anything. I have to pause and understand for myself: "Has this person thought through what they are saying?" That's actually become a friction point with me. And it isn't generational from what I've seen.

For my part, the code quality of the next.js dashboard isn't even something I'd evaluate.

I instantly get a quick, functional-appearing view of the offering. I can picture how I might interact with it and what mental gymnastics stand between right now and me pulling out a credit card.

I don't see marketing fluff that bring up more questions than it provides answers. I can be pretty certain I won't wind up in a sales funnel from hell, also.

Is this not a greater loss for the government than for Anthropic?

This is where my mind went.

A curious person or two poking around is one thing.

A few hundred, or thousands, of "AI enthusiasts," or however you'd like to imagine OpenClaw users, could likely approach the scale of "a problem."

Well, there are still many overly complex spreadsheets in the SMB sector waiting to be turned into products.

There is no shame in having your work - even software development - be a means to an end.

You are well within reason to work to survive, tuck a little away, and use the rest (of both time and money) to explore unrelated interests and passions. I really enjoy gardening.

The cross-pollination of interests, passions and professional experience may well lead to a fun and interesting project where your $DAY_JOB skills come into their own in a way you’d not expect.

Work to live, not live to work and all that.

Is ChatGPT down the new GitHub down?

So, my client (an HVAC company) is in a more secure position than a government agency. That is disturbing, but not surprising.

This is my biggest complaint when i reflexively type `git log` to get some context on a branch.

There’s something to be said for having a “local.” Lots has been written about having a “third-place,” though I can’t remember who coined the phrase.

There’s a bar and grill near where I live, I pop in frequently and almost always see someone I know. There’s a coffee shop next door that is about the same.

Something about a handshake, a hug, a “How was your day,” etc. goes quite a long way. That’s especially true for one living alone, as I do.

> Imagine if you could take a picture of anything, add a little note, have it filed away.

I'd use that regularly while working on my truck. It'd be a lot easier than stopping during every disassembly step to snap a picture with my phone.

This article is brimming with nostalgia for me. I vividly remember sitting at a workbench my father had fashioned from an old door, recreating circuits from Mini-Notebooks.

Having been fortunate enough to ride in Cruise vehicles multiple times in the Austin area, my impression is that they behave better than the average Austin driver.

For trickier situations, though, there’s a lot to be said for having a human driver to make decisions, and with whom you can communicate.

There are plenty of tricky driving situations in Austin.

I have Verizon for my personal phone, but opted for T-Mobile for my home (5G) internet and a new iPad. I made this decision after using T-Mobile for my company-paid phone with zero issues.

Aside from a janky customer app on iPhone, I'm quite pleased. That said, I've never been to a physical location.

IMO, Texas Tribune is about as good as it gets for news in TX. I tend to trust their reporting. I do make a small monthly donation, as they’re non-profit.

I use Copilot via the VSCode plugin.

It really does help, but most every code review reveals some slight issues with something that it has generated, be it syntax, nomenclature, what have ya.

Still more beneficial than detrimental for me.

I’m a solo dev for a medium-sized (but safety-critical) enterprise. So, I’m always “on call.” My 10th-gen iPad with a keyboard, alongside the Amazon Workspace app is a game-changer. I no longer have to lug my laptop everywhere.

Honestly, I’m probably going to update my own (mostly node) apps to dump such information to `stdout` when they’re first fired up, at the very least.

It would have saved me time today when re-visiting and extending a service that I’ve not touched in two years.

Of course that is good.

However, what happens when the so-called “criminal” is actually a non-criminal person that the government/powers-that-be deem a threat.

Perhaps that person has made efforts to remain anonymous, then their cousin gave up their DNA. The “threat” then becomes de-anonymized and is targeted.

Editing perl in BBEdit. What a wonderful tool!

“We’ve got both kinds. Country and Western.”