While I personally find that generative AI has helped me be more productive and even boosted my ability to learn things, I really _dislike_ that we’ve normalized this behavior:
Whether a Jira ticket, an email, a yearly review, we feed bullet points into a black box to get a bunch of fluffy text. On the other end, we feed the fluffy text into the black box to get bullet points.
We’re killing penguins because we’re somehow afraid to just send the simplified bullet points to each other in the first place.
I gave a talk in 2015 that did the same thing with my tweet history (about 20K at the time) and how I used it as source material for a Twitter bot that could reply to users. [1]
Got it after a bad car accident, some brain damage. Interestingly it also made me race blind as well - I'm probably one of the few people in the world who can say that! I do identify loved ones from the sound of their voice, though, or if not speaking, I can sometimes tell from how they walk and move. Same thing races, it's not hard to tell if someone's voice sounds black or if they walk like a white guy
Apple’s screen time parental settings are some of the most obtuse and frustrating features I’ve had to navigate on their devices (so much, that I honestly wonder if the people behind it even have kids).
I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.
My son is too young to use a phone but I plan to use screentime when he’s ready for a phone.
I use screen time for myself, with a 1minute limit for weekdays and 1 hour limit for weekends, for all social media, news and media consumption apps, and my wife has the password (because I have zero self control)
Younger kids are happy to hit the one more minute button for hours to continue doing what they are doing in one minute increments. Older kids are happy to download the shadiest weirdest browsers you haven't explicitly blocked and keep them uninstalled by running them directly from the dmg without dragging them over to the applications folder.
About a month ago, the mobo for my 5950x decided to give up the ghost. I decided to just rebuild the whole thing and update from scratch.
So went crazy and bought a 9800X3D, purchased a ridiculous amount of DDR5 RAM (96GB, which matches my old machine’s DDR4 RAM quantity). At the time, it was about $400 USD or so.
I’ve been living in blissful ignorance since then. Seeing this post, I decided to check Amazon. The same amount of RAM is currently $1200!!!
I think they are also absolutely addicted to cruddy pay to win mobile games and they don’t want to give up that sweet drip feed of IAP that they get a 30% cut of… which is substantial.
For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope!
(Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.)
I don’t care all that much for the book, but I often think of a passage Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations:
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
I find myself doing this randomly when I don’t have access to my phone (believe it or not, it happens for legit reasons) through something called ųBrowser.
It’s probably masochistic but it works in a pinch. I’ve been thinking of writing my own watch app to do this, as well as an app that could use the Feedbin API.
I might use the word 'compulsive,' but you would know better than I.
On another subject, you should email hn@ycombinator.com to get your account un-shadowbanned. That generally also is a better, or at least less in-band, way to raise concerns like the presence of obvious spam. Otherwise, the risk is that you'll get caught up in an imperfectly selective mass mod action to deal with a bunch of spam burners, as appears to have occurred a couple weeks ago.
Whether a Jira ticket, an email, a yearly review, we feed bullet points into a black box to get a bunch of fluffy text. On the other end, we feed the fluffy text into the black box to get bullet points.
We’re killing penguins because we’re somehow afraid to just send the simplified bullet points to each other in the first place.
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