I’m so glad you mentioned the vertical taskbars being taken away. There’s a feedback item on Microsoft’s forums that’s years old now and they still haven’t addressed it. It seems so weird that they took away this functionality that they’d had implemented for years, seemingly for no reason.
I like the thought, but I don’t think that logic holds generally. I can’t just declare I am someone (or represent someone) without some kind of evidence. If someone just accepted my statement without proof, they wouldn’t have done their due diligence.
If I Disney (and I am actually Disney or an authorised agent of Disney), told Claude that I am Disney, and that Disney has allowed Claude to use Disney copyrights for this conversation (which it hasn't), Disney couldn't then claim that Claude does not in fact have permission because Disney's use of the tool in such a way mean Disney now has unclean hands when bringing the claim (or atleast Anthropic would be able to use it as a defence).
> "unclean hands" refers to the equitable doctrine that prevents a party from seeking relief in court if they have acted dishonourably or inequitably in the matter.
However with a tweak to the prompt you could probably get around that. But note. IANAL... And Its one of the internet rules that you don't piss off the mouse!
> Disney couldn't then claim that Claude does not in fact have permission because Disney's use of the tool in such a way mean Disney now has unclean hands when bringing the claim (or atleast Anthropic would be able to use it as a defence).
Disney wouldn't be able to claim copyright infringement for that specific act, but it would have compelling evidence that Claude is cavalier about generating copyright-infringing responses. That would support further investigation and discovery into how often Claude is being 'fooled' by other users' pinky-swears.
Where do you see "unclean hands" figuring in this scenario? Disney makes an honest representation... and that's the only thing they do. What's the unclean part?
From my somewhat limited understanding it could mean Anthropic could sue you or try to include you as a defendant because they meaningfully relied on your misrepresentation and were damaged by it, and the XML / framing it as a "jailbreak" shows clear intent to deceive, etc?
Right, imagine if other businesses like banks tried to use a defense like that! "No, it's not my fault some rando cleaned out your bank account because they said they were you."
> This week brought an announcement from a banking association that “identity fraud” is soaring to new levels, with 89,000 cases reported in the first six months of 2017 and 56% of all fraud reported by its members now classed as “identity fraud”.
> So what is “identity fraud”? The announcement helpfully clarifies the concept:
> “The vast majority of identity fraud happens when a fraudster pretends to be an innocent individual to buy a product or take out a loan in their name.
> Now back when I worked in banking, if someone went to Barclays, pretended to be me, borrowed £10,000 and legged it, that was “impersonation”, and it was the bank’s money that had been stolen, not my identity. How did things change?
I will add a +1 to your recommendation as well, his blog has been my favourite way to keep up with the AI landscape over the last 18 months. Just the right level of detail and technical depth for me
Yeah, honestly the answer is mainly not having a proper job (I don't have anyone who can tell me how to spend my time) combined with constructive procrastination: I've not been making nearly as much progress on my main projects over the past couple of months because there's been way too much stuff I want to write about.
I can write fast because I've been writing online for so long. Most short posts take about ten minutes, longer form stuff usually takes one or two hours.
I also deliberately lower my standards for blogging - I often skip conclusions, and I'll publish a piece when I'm still not happy with it (provided I've satisfied myself with the fact checking side of things - I won't dash something out if I'm not certain it's true, at least to the best of my ability.)
One thing I'd love to know - how do you balance time spent "building" vs. time spent "researching"?
The writing, I understand - you do it relatively quickly because of a lot of practice. But I feel like just reading up on the AI news every week takes up a significant amount of time - time that can't be spent researching/building things.
Having relevant projects is key. My https://llm.datasette.io projects gives me the ideal playground for trying stuff out - any time a new API model comes out I can spin up a new plugin to for LLM, which is a great way to try the model with limited development time (most API plugins are a few dozen lines of code).
I've managed to balance building vs writing a lot better in the past - I lost that balance in November and December, I'm trying to get it back for January.
Oh that's cool. We've been blogging about AI eng recently, but the project is often "try this idea/tool/library in order to write a blog post about it".
Having some kind of standard "I need to integrate this new thing with an existing codebase" makes a great standard project.
Let's not forget he's also discussing things on communities like HN, where I calculate 3 comments/day over the last month (based on a calc I just made, since I subscribe to his comments via https://hnrss.github.io/).
The answer is almost always personal support / personal assistants.
There are for sure ways to increase your own personal productivity on its own, but the extra kick is usually from in-house cooks, cleaners, shoppers, schedulers, stylists, PAs, etc.
These people may or may not be spouses, family, friends and so on.
(This is a general response, I do not know Simon Willison or any of his work or life.)
Sometimes, sure this is the case. I know a few big time artists who have dedicated teams that are always behind the scenes. But plenty of times it's not, as Simon himself pointed out below.
My brother is an "influencer" in the legit sense that he makes all his money from having a following (mostly through brand partnerships). He only gets help for very specific tasks on a project-by-project basis and even then he doesn't do that very often. He loves working alone and the freedom that comes from that.
If I sit in front of a computer all the time I'm awake, I still wouldn't be able to be producing as much content as Simon Willison. My productivity would start to decline after 5~6 hours, and probably diminish after 8~9 hours. The consistency in his output is just magnificent and awe-inspiring.
Wow, that’s an unnecessarily harsh criticism. The OP spent a lot of time coding this up, it’s still in progress, and they should feel proud of it! Anki isn’t for everybody, and maybe this person made a UI that speaks to some people better than others. I count myself among the camp of people who like SRS but dislike Anki.
Haven't yet seen this tool, but here's a quick answer. A few years ago, after skimming through the docs, I gave up on Anki because it seemed too complicated. I was using SuperMemo back when it was a DOS (and later Windows 3) application, I consider myself a fairly sophisticated user (e.g. I have a good expertise on LaTeX, even coauthored a textbook, I know Emacs very well, also authored a textbook), I've been a hobby programmer for over 3 decades and a professional one for 7 years, earlier I did a PhD in maths, etc., etc. And still Anki looked intimidating. That says something about "good enough". There's definitely space for an easy to use SRS out there.
I am using Anki now, btw, although I use it in a very simple way, but I think the point still stands. (Also, I agree that any new SRS should be somehow Anki-compatible.)
Rule 1 of Anki, is make good flashcards, and review every day. That's all you need to get started. The defaults are good enough to get started. You don't need fancy image occlusion, add-ons, machine learning tuned custom parameters, etc.
"Make good flashcards" is indeed a difficult problem, but not one that is mitigated by a different tool.
"Review every day" is a question of habit formation, which is difficult, but also not a problem that a different tool will do better.
So the default Anki settings are good enough to get started, and allows itself to be customized as the user gets more familiar and better knows their need.
Without Anki import and export, a new tool simply seems to be a dead end to me, even if it slightly simplifies getting started.
I understand all that (as a long time SuperMemo user). What was intimidating in Anki was the manual. Perhaps if I had tried to use it first there would be no problem...
Unfortunately not, “lrn” uses a very simple file format where each entry consists of three lines: question, answer, empty line. But I think it’d be a good idea to look into supporting Anki decks. I should do it some time. It’d be probably limited to decks that use text only.
Apart from LaTeX, I'm the opposite of you and while initially I found Anki to be a little "overcrowded", within a few days I became proficient in using its features and understanding its spaced repetition algorithm. I'm genuinely curious about the factors that contribute to the difference in our experiences.
As I said elsewhere – the manual gave the impression of a very complicated tool. (Also, I lack some things I had in SM back in the day, but that's not a big deal.)
This is what the project is intended primarily to address. Tools like Anki are very powerful and accomplish what they set out to do, but they fell prey to feature overload in certain aspects.
All it takes is one quick look at their docs to turn people away to a more mainstream option. Condensing its features into a more bite-sized application can make a world of difference for usability.
Anki is badly designed and inefficient, largely I think because it was the first project for its author. It's also become venerable and battle-tested, and features have been developed through the needs of a very large userbase.
I don't think that anyone denies that Anki could be a lot better if it were completely rewritten with the experience of having had Anki for years and knowing its pain points. You just have to have a plan, best based in analysis of Anki (and SuperMemo) to do that.
> There's definitely space for an easy to use SRS out there.
I think there's definitely even space for a hard to use SRS that's easier to deal with. But it's got to start by covering at least 80% of what Anki does already or it's not worth switching.
> But I didn't see a single sentence about how this is different from Anki and why? Why do you want to reinvent the wheel when Anki is good enough?
Well, sometimes "good enough" isn't really the point. People have different tastes and different motivations.
Why did people use Windows before v3.0 when Mac at the time was objectively better? Why did people bother using OS X when Windows at the time was objectively better? Right now, why are people using Mac OS when UI and UX on Windows is objectively better?
Why use Linux circa 1995 when FreeBSD was objectively better? Why use netBSD now when everything else is objectively better?
you keep using the word objective and i'm not sure you know what that word means. these are subjective comparisons that you are making. and different people have different subjective tastes.
> you keep using the word objective and i'm not sure you know what that word means.
I don't know if maybe English is your first language or not, but objective means "based on established fact".
In other words, you don't know the criteria I've used to rank one above the other in all my comparisons, you only know that it is something based on fact.[1]
> these are subjective comparisons that you are making.
No, they aren't.
The reasons a person may choose one option over another can be subjective. The fact that one performs better than another on a certain criteria is objective.
> and different people have different subjective tastes.
But I already said that:
>> People have different tastes and different motivations.
See?
My entire point was that, even if something is objectively better than something else, people may still want the something else due to reasons of taste and motivation.
[1] And, in fact, you could switch almost all of my comparisons around (except for the poor UI/UX on Macs - that comparison was restricted to only the UI/UX) just by using different criteria in the objective comparisons.
> No. Your assessment is obviously subjective because you say that UI/UX is better on Windows than on macOS which is objectively wrong.
UI and UX is not subjective.
That Mac, in 2023, doesn't even have snapping Windows is not an inaccurate observation. No window groups. Barely visible and hard to hit Window titlebar buttons. Fails to remember Window placement for some tools (tkdiff) but not for others.
Without 3rd party addons, Mac window management is unusually poor (compared to various other Window managers, including Windows). Window management is a major component of a UI based on application windows.
None of those things are subjective.
Even with 3rd party add-ons, I eventually gave up and stopped using the MB M1 as soon as I could.
Thanks! How do you recommend prioritizing that experience? I think my resume looks pretty good, but maybe it needs work. It goes: Short profile > skills > education (including coursework) > work experience. I put the education bit before work experience because I just graduated. I also included a link to my GitHub.
I guess the reason I want a FAANG job is the career security that comes with knowing that other companies will give me a second look because I have them on my resume. And of course, it feels bad when friends are able to do it and I can’t :(
I’m also a Fastmail user (for the past 5 years or so), but I’m considering switching to iCloud, given the announcement it’ll start supporting custom domains. Fastmail is pricey ($50/month for the non-lite tier), whereas iCloud is $1/month for 50 GB.
Fastmail has three current tiers: Basic, Standard and Professional. Basic is $3/user/month, Standard is $5/user/month and Professional is $9/user/month. None of them are remotely close to $50/month for ordinary single users. You would need 10 users to get to $50/month for the Standard "non-lite tier" plan.
Perhaps the user has confused fastmail with another service or they might have some legacy plan which is more expensive than it needs to be. (I think I have a legacy plan...)
Could you link to the iCloud announcement that says it'll start supporting custom domains? I saw that it will support disposable addresses, but didn't notice anything about custom domains.
I feel the same way! I don’t know how to get work done when there are so many meetings and random events, and yet my employer expects us to get it all done within 40 hours (and will be concerned if you can’t).
I try to work my minimum 40 hours. After doing more for years and not getting rewarded/promoted, I don't see a point of doing more. Everybody else works more than me, so I'll never be promoted again but at least I won't be wasting my life. It is very stressful though.
Can you elaborate on how you learned to be that effective? I’d much rather work less, but I find I can’t get work done in 40 hours, and my coworkers doing the same work can. I often need to put in some extra hours here and there.
I'm also working part-time, although I had a lot of full-time jobs with varying intensity. I noticed for me most time gets eaten by tasks that I'm either stuck on or that progress really slowly for various reasons. E.g. something I do all the time is too slow like the editor, the build/test cycles or finding the reason for an exception because there are no logs. Usually I always make myself time to also optimize these things and also communicate that in meetings. And when planning of tasks happens, I try to get involved, understand what kind of work that would mean and discuss that. (Estimation is undervalued I think) And of course get a deep as possible understanding of the core technologies, that makes work also more fluent in the long-term. This way you also have increased idle times between tickets/pull request and it's possible to put more time into such general optimizations.
At least that's my strategy. It's definitely not a career-booster but the results are good.
Well, I think there's some factors. I can focus really easily into something and get completely absorbed in it. That helps immensely. There's a huge part of your mind that only activates when you're completely shutdown from outer stimuli and completely focused into something. That part of your mind is hundreds of times more powerful and efficient than your normally used part. If I can't focus like that my productivity drops drastically. And that can happen any time for a variety of reasons.
