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AquinasCoderon Google launches Pixel 11 Pro Fold

I have been using the iPhone for something like 10 years now. I am getting the urge to de-apple since I fell down the slippery slope and now have an iPad, watch, apple TV, MBP, etc.

Exercising less dependence on a single company for everything seems like a good thing, but I'm struggling to really ground that principle against the convenience of just buying "what works." Does it really matter at the end of the day?

AquinasCoderon Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

I wonder if they meant to draw a link between cybersecurity coding and debugging specifically or this really will apply to all coding and debugging. If it really is a more general restriction, then this is practically the same as it still being restricted.

"In the near term" is doing some heavy lifting.

AquinasCoderon Claude Sonnet 5

While I appreciate, they publish this information, it's increasingly hard to keep track of it all. I've lost the mental model of how different models at different effort levels perform and what tasks they are good at.

In practice, I tend to just use the default on Claude Code that works well enough. But I wonder to what degree other users really play around with these settings to optimize for their project.

AquinasCoderon Claude Fable 5

From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost. On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window. After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

This seems like the pharmaceutical method of get them hooked on the drug with free samples, then once they can't live without it, raise the price. I'm not sure I want to start using Claude Fable on a max plan if it's just going to go away on June 23rd.

But maybe the more charitable reading is that they didn't have to offer this model at all on those plans and they are giving the standard free trial.

AquinasCoderon Ferrari Luce

Where is the Ferrari in this at all? I completely agree that they missed the mark in design. While the interior is 100% Jony Ive, the exterior screams "design by committee."

An electric Roma successor would have been much better received and possibly cheaper for them to develop (who knows?).

The silver lining in all this is that it means that the EV arm will not cannibalize their ICE cars.

AquinasCoderon Claude Opus 4.7

It's been a little while since I cared all that much about the models because they work well enough already. It's the tooling and the service around the model that affects my day-to-day more.

I would guess a lot of the enterprise customers would be willing to pay a larger subscription price (1.5x or 2x) if it means that they would have significantly higher stability and uptime. 5% more uptime would gain more trust than 5% more on a gamified model metrics.

Anthropic used to position itself as more of the enterprise option and still does, but their issues recently seems like they are watering down the experience to appease the $20 dollar customer rather than the $200 dollar one. As painful as it is personally, I'd expect that they'd get more benefit long term from raising prices and gaining trust than short term gaining customers seeking utility at a $20 dollar price point.

AquinasCoderon Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

I am appreciative of your work on this piece. I'd love to see one that goes deeper into Dario Amodei. Perhaps even a series of profiles on the central figures of this AI era.

Is this something you've thought about?

AquinasCoderon Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

I somewhat understand Anthropic's position. However, thinking tokens are useful even if they don't show the internal logic of the LLM. I often realize I left out some instruction or clarification in my prompt while reading through the chain of reasoning. Overall, this makes the results more effective.

It's certainly getting frustrating having to remind it that I want all tests to pass even if it thinks it's not responsible for having broken some of them.

AquinasCoderon Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

The stripe conference focused more than I would have liked on crypto.

I completely understand that there are markets and customers that can find real utility in it, but I wonder how many businesses will really ever benefit from stablecoins.

We're in higher education, and potentially our international clients could avoid hiccups with regulation, delays, compliance, and more using stablecoins, but it's really a guess. In the meantime, the pricing model of stripe seems to prioritize bigger and bigger clients.

That being said from Stripe's perspective stablecoins an easy bet to make. They win by building payment infrastructure within the traditional payment ecosystem and win by providing an alternative completely outside of it.

AquinasCoderon Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre

I think that's why I find his later works more compelling, particularly "Dependent Rational Animals," in which he grounds traditions in human telos. There are aims or goods which are common and transcend social constructs. After Virtue suffers from a great premise but doesn't quite stick the landing.

AquinasCoderon Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre

I recommend some of his other works: Whose Justice, Whose Rationality and Dependent Rational Animals.

It’s rewarding to seem him attempt a reconciliation between some modern epistemologies and Augustinian Thomism. I’m not sure he really pulls it off but his stature as a thinker in moral philosophy is undeniable.

AquinasCoderon 21 More AWS Services They Should Cancel

One of my services is still running on Elastic Beanstalk. There's a lot of pros, but the cons are starting to build up, especially since it's relatively easy to port stuff to Elastic Container Service. I'm in the process of doing that now.

EB was great at the beginning, but as the number of connections to other AWS and third party providers increased, it has become incredibly clunky to tweak the build files. What's even worse is that when something does go wrong -- which it inevitably will -- it's extremely hard and slow to debug exactly what went wrong.

Using it with celery has also been rough.

All of that being said I'm ambivalent about having EB on this list. I think it's a good product that has languished partially due to three reasons:

1. AWS having too many overlapping tools (AppRunner, Lightsail, ECS, etc.) 2. AWS haven't added or prioritized as many new features on EB for years 3. The devOps tooling is much more mature these days.

AquinasCoderon Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

Does anyone have insight on how this compares these days to Adobe's suite? Seems pretty competitive, but I'm not sure if you're getting 80% of the features for 30% of the cost or 50% of features for 50% of the cost.

AquinasCoderon My ranking of every Shakespeare play

To add to this, I have a much deeper appreciation for all the works of Shakespeare I have seen performed rather than merely read. Even hearing certain soliloquies out loud makes them much more powerful and engaging.

I think Shakespeare is better if you suspend belief a bit in some plot machinations and enjoy the work as performed and written. It's not that you shouldn't analyze the work and think deeply on its themes, but I find that many approach Shakespeare as a philosopher first rather than as a playwright and poet.

AquinasCoderon Hacking my “smart” toothbrush

This was an enjoyable read. My GE fridge uses RFID for keeping track of when to change the water filter. This isn't really an area I'm familiar with but I'm curious how much I would be able to figure out with the right tools.

AquinasCoderon MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch

Looks like they focused a lot more on utility this go around. Going to try out the 16 inch but hoping it can fit in my bags well and isn't a hassle for traveling.

AquinasCoderon New Laptop: Thinkpad P14s

I have one of the newer Dell XPS 15 laptops. Installing linux was a breeze, upgrading the storage and memory took less than half an hour, and the display is gorgeous. The downsides are that it's performance is certainly throttled quite a bit, and it's awkward sitting it on your lap due to its sharp edges and density (far less comfortable than my MBP). It's certainly been a good experience overall, but I think once thinkpad moves over fully to more reliable displays in the 16:10 ratio I'd probably choose those.

AquinasCoderon Thomas Aquinas' works with English and original Latin presented in parallel

It's fair to say Augustine did more reconciling with Neoplatonism. Aquinas did some. I think Aquinas was more wary of relying too heavily upon a philosophy that he saw as incomplete. Even "the philosopher" could not provide a comprehensive framework for Christian philosophy. When Neoplatonism was useful, he would take parts here and there, but he was under no illusion that Neoplatonism provided a sufficient framework for understanding the world. The early Italian renaissance philosophers were far more taken with Plato and the Neoplatonists. Marsilio Ficino, for example, probably went too far trying to reconcile parts that were (arguably) fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.

AquinasCoderon Ask HN: Have you found a good desk chair?

I have the logitech version of the HM embody chair. It supposedly has more cushioning and some cooling, but it doesn't seem too different. I think the materials on the Aeron were superior, but the embody has a more relaxed position and won out in the end.

AquinasCoderon Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ series will cost at least $465M for first season

It's refreshing to hear this perspective. There have been a lot of authors and producers trying to capitalize on the success of the LOTR films and recreate the magic of middle earth with varying levels of success, but it's harder said than done. At the end of the day, Tolkien's philosophical and theological views do not get in the way of a really great story. I think that's at least in part what Tolkien's reservation with allegory was. There's a temptation to make a story to fit a narrative. History and narrative are crucial elements to making something compelling and this is where it's hard to compete with Tolkien.

AquinasCoderon Latin in the Voynich Manuscript

It's ultimately a corrupted version of Cicero's "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum".

AquinasCoderon Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

You mention that there's value in Lambda's mission, but I'm curious as to whether you believe that Lambda's business model is redeemable.

It's hard to argue that there's clearly a major risk involved in attending a program like this, but at the same time it seems to be working for some individuals. Would these high-achieving individuals be able to teach themselves? Possibly. But I'm not sure that going back to the traditional college route is the right choice either. And how can we better help those who lack the aptitude or enjoyment of programming and find out too late into these programs?

AquinasCoderon What, exactly, do philosophers do?

It always fascinates me that often these "heads in the clouds" type stuff has an enormous impact on history, politics, and other disciplines while what is supposed to be more practical often is ignored or belittled. The most plausible reason is that we have firmer convictions in the little things rather than the large things. This seems to reveal the contemporary, and speaking in philosophical lingo, "modern" tendency to place epistemology as prior to metaphysics. The exception to this thought is the field of ethics. Logic too has been explored in depths through computer science, but this is still -- historically speaking -- in its infancy. The difference between formal logic and computer science is also a gap that cannot be underestimated.

AquinasCoderon Cutting your salary by 40%

The article doesn't claim this is endemic to only startups, and in my experience work life balance among small, medium, and large companies is equally threatened.

Even the term "work-life" balance seems to assume an artificial divide between the two. When work is a facet of a rich life, those extra long hours, the grueling commute, the vacillations of the newest management fad are just not worth it. Not to mention that those with families are severely disadvantaged in a workplace that values hours at the office rather than productive hours.

I am curious to find out how this becomes a culture and whether this is reversible? Does this toxic overstepping begin at companies who once valued a predictable balance between work and life or was there a mistake made in company culture from the beginning? Can a company effectively counter this tendency? However you might answer these questions, it seems clear that throwing new studies out showing that overwork is counter-productive is not changing this trend. It goes back to the age-old idea, knowledge doesn't make you good, just more knowledgable.

AquinasCoderon Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

That's true. I wouldn't necessarily agree that it's easy. One of the biggest difficulties when learning programming is just knowing where to start. Looking for mentors or resources isn't difficult. On the contrary, you are inundated with varying opinions. Making decisions about which technology to employ is an exercise in futility. A bootcamp helped me to not only learn technologies, but also how to make what at first seems like arbitrary choices. I credit this to my world-class instructor. It doesn't sound like everyone was so lucky.

Without initial guidance and a firm commitment, we end up with questions like, "Should I learn Java or Javascript?" or "Can I learn Go in a week?" Is it possible to self teach completely? Yes. But you would need both discipline and analytical rigor as well as the humility to find help when you run into issues. I went into the bootcamp looking for both a mentor, which I found, and connections, which I also found.

AquinasCoderon Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

I completely agree. I did my undergrad and grad studies in philosophy, specifically focusing on contemporary and symbolic logic, before joining a six month bootcamp. Before the bootcamp, I had at least six months of development experience. Would I do it again? Absolutely, the bootcamp gave me discipline, a network, and a schedule to fill the gaps in my development experience. Did it teach me computer science? No way. We spent a week on it and hardly covered bubble sort, quick sort, and binary search. Although I have only touched the surface of computer science, I view it as an extension of my training in logic, and philosophy as an abstraction of pure mathematics. I know that if I want better jobs I will have to continue to learn algorithms, data structures, architecture, etc.

Bootcamps can direct an analytical inclination, but rarely, if ever, create it. I am not at all sure that the conclusion is that bootcamps are ineffective. The issue is not with bootcamps as such, but with those who believe that the hard work is done by just showing up for lecture or doing the minimum in homework. I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact.

There has always been a divide between those jobs which require a more rigorous foundation and jobs which need someone to bang out some semi-workable code for a website. Bootcamp grads are often under the wrong impression that they are qualified for the first type without some experience doing menial tasks.