Most of my family was using FB Messenger, but now it's WhatsApp, unfortunately still Meta, and I hate it, but at least it's encrypted and old messages are autodeleted. I couldn't convince them yet to use Signal or Matrix. Signal might work, I used to use it with my brother, but he was the only one, so wasn't really effective. I had hopes that I can move everyone to my own Matrix instance, but that looks unachievable right now. Edit: I forgot to mention calls, if something is very personal (not secret, just personal) we usually make call.
I started using Pocket in 2012 and have used it ever since (though I’ll obviously have to stop now). It was a great way to save interesting articles I didn’t have time to read right away. Naturally, I rarely got around to actually reading them, and the backlog kept growing. I just exported my data and found 13,000 unread articles out of a total of 34,000.
I can’t help but picture the Distracted Boyfriend meme, "reading my saved articles" vs "discovering new cool articles online to add to the ever-growing Pocket backlog, never to be read."
People complain about how crap UX is now, and how computer illiterate the general populace has become but I firmly place the blame on forcing the web into an application delivery platform, abandoning all operating system HIG and conventions so that every app is now it's own unique snowflake that breaks conventions.
IMO people would struggle less if it was all native apps that followed the OS. You learn your operating system's conventions and shortcuts, and those translate into every app you run - but then marketing people got their hands in things, and suddenly everything had to be branded and unique, and we are worse off for it.
I'm still having a hard time with coding agents. They are useful but also somehow immature hence dangerous. The other day I asked copilot with GPT4o to add docstrings to my functions in a long Python file. It did a good job on the first half. But when I looked carefully, I realized the second half of my file was gone. Just like that. Half of my file had been silently deleted, replaced by a single terrifying comment along the lines of "continue similarly with the rest of the file". I use Git of course so I could recover my deleted code. But I feel I still can't fully trust an AI assistant that will silently delete hundreds of lines of my codebase just because it is too lazy or something.
I’ve also seen catastrophic failures where the code returned completely fails for numerous “obvious” problems, including but not limited to missing code.
I tend to have to limit the code I share and ask more pointed / targeted questions in order to lead the AI to a non catastrophic result.
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