- or_am_iWish it was only the keyboard enshittified. Literally everything became worse with the update, I had to google how to turn off the silly transparency (Accessibility Settings -> Display -> Reduce Transparency) so that the battery that used to happily last for the entire day on iOS 18 does not die in a matter of some 4 hours. And don't even get me started on now-always-lagging home screen swipes and the Safari overhaul madness! Wanna close the active tab? That will be three taps, thank you very much. Oh, you want them taps to register _every time_, too? This basic phone UX used to be Apple's major USP over Android, now fewer and fewer reasons to stick to this ecosystem.
- The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.
The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.
- Jonathan Blow's The Witness is a notable example (minor spoiler alert)! Past a certain point in the game, it becomes REALLY challenging to just walk through the IRL woods without over-concentrating on things.
- In JetBrains editors it's possible to highlight mutable variables, at least in the languages where the distinction exists. My go to setting in Kotlin is to underscore all `var`'s, for two reasons:
- this makes them really stand out, much easier to track the mutation visually,
- the underscore effect is intrusive just-enough to nudge you to think twice when adding a new `var`.
Nothing like diving into a >3k lines PR peppered with underscores.
- Mathematics trains a lot of skills that are generally applicable in engineering. Decomposing complex problems into non-trivial sequences of manageable steps, being able to prove that the design works, spotting appropriate invariants to build type hierarchies/abstractions around, communicating it all in an intentional and comprehensible way where each of the next steps follows from some of the previous, etc., etc.
- Yes, and the press release makes no mention of this extra context -- hardly good journalism.
- Yeah, the `numpy` version still looks relatively cryptic (like, "line > 0" is still fine, but the numpy arrays broadcasting rules can quickly get out of hand) compared to the author's Javascript example, or any decent collections API in a typed "enterprise" language like C#/Java/Scala for that matter. Here's my personal favorite, a Kotlin version:
diffs.countIf { line -> line.all { abs(it) in 1..3 } and ( line.all { it > 0} or line.all { it < 0} ) } - It sucks when your communication preferences are overridden! To be fair though, many valid reasons to prefer a quick call over a message (a potentially infinite sequence of messages, really). Even on the receiving end of a request: perhaps I want to poke around the context behind their non-urgent ask, like what they are _actually_ trying to achieve, why not do X instead etc. -- often easier to call and solve all the follow-up questions interactively on the spot.
- “If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.” E. Hubbard, ca. 1989
- > If you try to humanise the place you will lose your mind. If you ask yourself what the woman at the hair-braiding stand left behind to be here, and why, you will lose your mind. If you accept the kindness of the staff with whom you make a paltry effort to speak each morning as they clear your dirty breakfast plate, you will lose your mind, because your tip is the only kindness you can meaningfully offer in return. Trying to attend to your own towel by the pool might cause the man who stands for hours in the ferocious sun to do so for you to lose his job. Being served makes us cruel infants. It demeans us all.
I understand this passage and can relate, "self-evidently awful to them only" seems a bit of a stretch. There are places on Earth where "being employed for tourism" means job security, worker rights and social protections, where staff is treated with respect and are allowed dignity.
- Would you give to charity? You are pointing at the heart of the prisoner's dilemma endlessly recreated by the very existence of capital: why choose long-term public benefit over a short-term personal gain?
- Yeah, I guess I'm silently assuming the developer's time is more valuable than the API costs (which is true in the majority of use cases in US+EU, unless using parallel/multi-shot strategies or hyper-expensive frontier models).
I agree, it can feel a lot like a slot machine at times, and it's a failure mode somewhat unique to developing with LLM, where it doesn't just fail outright or tell you "I don't know how to do that", but instead you find yourself in the end of a sometimes hours long spiral of trying just-one-more-prompt.
It's important to experience this mode of failure and learn to notice the "spiral" early and adjust the approach. Sometimes it's enough to switch to a different model, often an explicit planning step helps. But more likely than not, a "spiral" means approaching the frontier of LLM possibility. In my experience, certain types of changes are really hard for current gen LLM to pull off, like large scale refactorings changing the project architecture, or implementing genuinely novel algorithmic ideas, so we still need a human touch for these (yay?)
- A lot of the same kind of skill goes into prompting AI and delegating work to other humans. Delegation requires building intellectual empathy for the task recipient, giving them an instruction they can verifiably follow. It requires building trust, and more often than not requires a certain degree of trial/error/watching others work before one can delegate reliably. A lot goes into delegation, and much of this stuff is hard! It's also hard to be delegated to -- especially by someone you haven't worked with before, what is it that they mean when they ask for "more sparkles in the UI" or "I tried C and it didn't work"? Can I guess their background to meet them where they are? The list goes on.
In some ways it's easier to delegate to an AI because you don't have to care for anyone's feelings but your own, and you lose nothing but your own time when things don't go well and you have to reset. On the other hand, when the delegation does not go well, you still got yourself to blame first.
- Analogy would have been correct if prompting didn't influence the output (which I hope you agree is not the case).
And yes, the model keeps changing under you -- much like a horse is changing under a jockey, forcing them to adapt. Or like formula drivers and different car brands.
You can absolutely improve the results by experimenting with prompting, by building a mental mode of what happens inside the "black box", by learning what kinds of context it has/does not have, how (not) to overburden it with instructions etc. etc.
- > The “bullshit” here is the implicit claim of an author that such jargon is needed. Maybe it is to explain advanced applications (like attempts to do “inference in Bayesian networks”), but it is certainly not needed to define or analyze the basic ideas.
"The bullshit here is the implicit claim of an author that German language is needed. Maybe it is for advanced applications (like Goethe's poetry), but it is certainly not needed to describe basic ideas."
(proceeds to explain the same basic concepts 10x more verbose than in any math textbook on the subject)
Math/statistics nomenclature is certainly not perfect (think of it as a general utilities library that has been in active development for 200+ years), but it is widely used for a reason: once you learn the language it becomes second nature (very much the same as knowing all the details of the standard library API in your language of choice) allowing to communicate arbitrarily complex abstract ideas with speed and precision.
- What if we built a strong culture around actively avoiding advertising? What if we educated the general public about adverse effects of time after time giving up your attention, without getting anything in return besides a short lived dophamine kick? What if we showed how it's only in those moments of paying attention a person has a chance to exercise agency over their own life, and spending that scarce resource on doomscrolling is a catastrophic-group-mind-suicide, sadistically prolonged over the lifetime of an entire generation? That the illusion of community in the comments is just that, an illusion that dispels the moment the user clicks the dreaded "logout" button spitting them back into a gray heroine-withdrawal-like reality, isolated from their peers, all means of human connection monopolized by the attention sharecropping farms? That every moment a jingle on the radio captures your mind it's distracting you from something necessarily more important? That we are all in effect trapped in that externally-perpetuated procrastination loop, with all the neon-lit arrows pointing us further and further away from what truly matters -- our very lives?
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!
- Am an "outliner", currently working together with a "discovery coder" on a project. We are half a year in and have no common working build, just my "outline" and a bunch of non-integrated throwaway discovery bits. I do believe that eventually they will produce the solution, but it is very hard to reason about the timeline in such a setup.
- > there's nothing to be done, legally speaking.
Even if true, this sure feels like a loophole though, like the Saul Goodman's burner phone side business, doesn't it? Should there perhaps be a stricter KYC requirement/similar measures to the same end when it comes to re-/selling technology explicitly designed for encrypted communication? Note that we are not just talking about an end-to-end encrypted messenger app, it's a whole integrated phone with an explicit special purpose. This feels more like a regulation oversight: the encrypted transmissions in AM/FM bands are outright prohibited in most Western jurisdictions after all, and so is possession of the respective equipment.
- I guess the b2b sales work the same irrespective of the businesses' legal status.
- To clarify, I was basing the "some 30%" on the wage change distribution histogram that comes somewhat further down in the article from the statement you quote.