I agree with the author's premise - that one feedback loop optimizes for speed, and the other for scale - but I don't think the market is bearing the conclusion - that AI should be utilized to enable more rapid experimentation, where we better scale what works.
Many vendors seem to be learning (or not learning, but just throwing their weight against it anyway) that adding hastily-generated AI features are causing customer dissatisfaction, as more people brand the features "slop".
In the best case, the users give the company more chances. Infinitely more chances.
In a worse case, the users assume the new feature will always be bad, given their first impression. It's hard for a vendor to make people reconsider a first impression.
The absolute worst case is that AI enables a new market, but the first attempts are so poor that the first movers make people write that market off as a dead end, leading to a lost opportunity.
There was a point where two friends and I each lived alone in an apartment, and I was the only one who had a (2-door) car. We still occasionally did Costco runs.
We'd go in and walk the store - the whole store - aisle by aisle.
If I saw something like a 2-pound bag of tortellini, but thought two pounds was too big a quantity for me, I'd ask, "does anybody want to split two pounds or tortellini?" One might say yes, so we'd throw the tortellini in the shopping cart.
At the end, one person (the membership holder) would pay, and we'd divvy up the result of our haul into reusable containers, in the parking lot. One of us would then take point on itemizing the receipt, and we'd pay back the person with the membership.
In hindsight, I think we did this more to socialize than to save money, but we definitely did save money. Even as a single apartment-dweller, I bought my fair share of 24-packs of yogurt and 5-pound bags of frozen vegetables.
Growing up as a kid, we lived in the sticks and the small local grocery store had a limited produce section. My mom joined a little co-op where each person would put in the same amount of cash, but one person would make a trip to the downtown farmer's market. The purchase was split evenly between each member. Each trip a different person made the trip so the variety changed not only by what was available but by the person making the trip's preferences.
This was my introduction to collective buying and at the same time the fact there's a bigger world out there than where one lives.
This is what I did with 3 roommates in college. We saved a ton of money that way.
After college, I only had one roommate and Costco didn't work as well. The quantities for certain things are just a bit much. Buying 36 eggs for 4 adults made sense. Buying 36 eggs for 2 adults... not so much. I ended up going to Costco for toilet paper and gas, and that's it.
To this day, I'm still the "spouse" on one of those college roommates' costco memberships, LOL.
My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable.
In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks.
I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial.
Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load).
I once got a programmable thermostat and went through the trouble to set it up for the times we were normally at home and away, and my energy bills went up.
Now I just set a temperature that everyone can tolerate and I forget about it.
Correct, or the people doing this for environmental reasons... it's probably not better to do this. It would be better spending money on better insulation (assuming it isn't up to date).
It probably costs more to do that than to maintain a constant temperature. When you turn the setpoint down, everything inside your house and also your house itself starts losing heat. When you turn the setpoint back up, the cooled off house and items inside of it will suck up most of the heat until the stuff is warm again, and then the air warms up.
This is much more noticeable when you go into a freezing cold building and turn on the thermostat, it takes almost an entire day to heat up the stuff and building.
Thermodynamically, the heat lost to the outside is roughly linear with the temperature delta between inside and outside.
All else equal, setbacks do reduce energy lost to the outside; whether that saves money depends somewhat on the recovery strategy of your equipment; whether it’s desirable depends on your individual preferences.
I'm sort of curious where the law stands on this (I am not a lawyer).
Since it has a license plate on it, it in theory displays some ownership info. Is that enough for me to say, "it's clearly not mine now"? If it didn't, does that give me any right to take something off a public roadway?
Obviously, I know that the letter of the law, and what actually will be enforced, are two different things. Taking something that belongs to CBP would almost definitely be prosecuted in this case, regardless of whether it's legally fair game to do so.
It appears that I can't direct-link to it, but look up case 19S-CR-00528 on public.courts.in.gov - this was a case in which the Supreme Court of Indiana overturned an earlier ruling that removing a GPS monitoring device from your own car, when you weren't aware it was there, was theft.
I think its the same as stealing a bike or a car parked on the street. I don't know the subtleties but I don't think you can presume something is abandoned merely for being left on the street?
This is one of the reasons I hung onto my Treo for so long. It was so much faster to do... well, basically anything that the device was capable of. With the physical keyboard, you actually didn't need to take the stylus out very often, either.
Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search.
Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows.
Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.
Even better, IIRC on the Treo the phone key would turn it on?
I had a Treo 600 and and then 650 from around 2003 until 2007 when the iPhone came out. The 600 was among the best devices I've ever had. Rock solid, did exactly what it said it did. The 650 would crash randomly just sitting there. Not quite as bad as a Windows phone of the era, but a substantial regression.
I had the Treo until 2012; the Android headwinds were blowing full speed at that point.
Before the Treo, I had a VisorPhone. Wonderful device, and fit a specific need (no phones allowed in school - great, I can slide the phone out of the back, and continue to use it as a PDA). The thing that killed the VisorPhone for me was PalmOS 3.5's lack of memory protection, combined with a bug in the SMS app. Anybody sending me an MMS message instantly crashed it, requiring me to pull the batteries. Sometimes I hadn't realized it happened for hours, and missed phone calls. MMS messages (group texts, etc) only became more and more common, and when this became a multiple-times-weekly occurrence, I made a move.
There was an article a few years ago here on HN about "can't be evil" business models, which used Costco as an example. As soon as Costco turns evil, it stops working. https://www.bryanlehrer.com/entries/costco/
Has the site actually been running all this time? I notice that the generator tag says "FrontPage 12" (post-2003), and site has a TLS certificate, which in 1996 it most certainly would not have had.
The current domain registration also dates to 2003 and as someone lower in the thread notes the current owner is connected to "4president.org".
I'm having trouble accessing old snapshots, though. The Internet Archive has one as far back as April 1, 2000, but the snapshot viewer has been giving 503 errors all morning.
I got the snapshot to load and it appears that at that point it was being sat on by scammy domain parkers, complete with promises of scandalous celebrity photos and dick pills.
That said, it looks like Ansible has deprecated those modules, and that seems fair - I haven't actually heard of anyone deploying infrastructure in a public cloud with Ansible in years. It found its niche is image generation and systems management. Almost all modern tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and even CloudFormation (albeit under the hood) keep a state file.
Being familiar with the hijinks that Steve Wozniak pulled with the switched mode power supply in the Apple II (1977), I was curious about how the author solved for this piece:
> It also needed three supply voltages; +5v, +12v, and -5v. That made it tough to power it from a single-voltage power supply or battery.
According to https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/mc34063-the-switching-..., the solution - the MC34063 - isn't _exactly_ a design that's contemporary with the Altair or other 1970s micros, but was introduced in the early 1980s. That would put it closer in age to the Commodore 64 which, in spite of its much smaller size, still indeed does not fit in an Altoids tin.
Many vendors seem to be learning (or not learning, but just throwing their weight against it anyway) that adding hastily-generated AI features are causing customer dissatisfaction, as more people brand the features "slop".
In the best case, the users give the company more chances. Infinitely more chances.
In a worse case, the users assume the new feature will always be bad, given their first impression. It's hard for a vendor to make people reconsider a first impression.
The absolute worst case is that AI enables a new market, but the first attempts are so poor that the first movers make people write that market off as a dead end, leading to a lost opportunity.