Derbasti

Office in the browser works really well, in my experience.

> The passionate hunger to do something significant and meaningful with my life was a major reason I took care never to have any children.

Raising kids is probably the most meaningful and significant thing I have done with my life.

I liked the Zed AI agent, too. Then it casually burned through a surprising amount of money for very little progress.

Back to Claude.

I've done VSCode pair programming as well. But since roughly half a year ago, it has been permanently broken. It'll work for a few minutes, then loses sync, and then it's unusable. This seems to happen between many computers (not just mine) and many updates of VSC.

Are we the only ones with this issue? Pair programming is unusable to us with VSC because of this.

The problem is, management requires stronger language skills than engineering.

While an engineer can usually get by with good English, a manager in a German company with German clients and German bosses also requires excellent command of German. I would think that this would equally apply to any other country and their native language.

Perhaps Germany is a bit unusual in that it fosters a strong small-company culture, with few levels of management. There is no "engineering ladder" in a company with only a single layer of management between engineers and CEO.

More pointedly, instead of prompting the AI to write something, just send the prompt. It will be concise and pointed, exactly what a message should be.

I wonder, could we use these catch phrases to track down what data was used dor training? They must have occurred in abundance in some training corpus. Perhaps some specific company's email culture?

Current LLMs have been trained on extensive libraries of past code. Therefore, LLMs will for the foreseeable future work better for established languages than new ones. Especially languages with a lot of open source code available, like Python. That's a big problem for incumbents without any existing code to train LLMs on.

Thus this desparate "AI native" marketing is probably necessary to even be considered relevant in an "agentic" world. Whether it's enough, only time will tell.

> One compelling bit of information is there while there are neurons feeding processed visual information forward into the brain, there are more feeding back from that area to the visual system. That is, the the visual system is providing error signals and not the image we are experiencing. When something not predicted appears, the visual system sends forward information guiding the internal model to be updated.

Fascinating, I didn't know that. Thank you!

Or Bastille, which folds without having to remove the front wheel:

https://bastillecycles.com/en

You're right, I just remapped it with Karabiner, thanks.

Off the top of my head:

Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason.

We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily.

Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut.

The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout.

Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course.

There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable.

I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while.

My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough.

It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

How is AI code generation a "innovation bazooka"? Last time I checked, innovation required creativity, context, and insight. Not really fast boilerplate generators.

Amazing! It couldn't answer my question at all, but it couldn't answer it incredibly quickly!

Snarky, but true. It is truly astounding, and feels categorically different. But it's also perfectly useless at the moment. A digital fidget spinner.

If you tell an LLM to maximize paperclips, it's going to maximize paperclips.

Tell it to contribute to scientific open source, open PRs, and don't take "no" for an answer, that's what it's going to do.

Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup.

I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost. Now I'm using restic.

Camera apps.

Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.

These #+begin_export blocks were exactly the reason I prefer Markdown. Same with #+attr_html, #+caption, basically every complicated bit: in org, at best it just replicates HTML's complexity in a different syntax. At worst, like #+begin_export, it's 100% overhead.

But there are plenty other reasons to use and love org mode. In no way do I want to take that away from you or anyone.

Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things.

Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.

That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.

I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.

The difference is, Europeans used to trust their US partners, and built a lot of infrastructure on US services. This trust has been betrayed, so things now need to change.

It never existed to begin with with China, so no change is necessary.

That's not "melodramatic".

- Visual Studio project files are XML files that are interpreted line by line, and can contain variables, branches, and loops. Hell on earth.

On a related note, I used to have a gaming PC. I don't game much any more, so every time I booted up the darn thing, I had to wade through a thick bramble of notifications, updates, ads. It got so bad that lost my will to game altogether.

Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.

Here's your reminder that you can uninstall OneDrive in Europe.

Same here. I've not had any issues with my Surface Pro 11.

Last vacation, one of our phones broke. We bought a new one, popped in the old SIM, and went on vacationing.

How does that work with an eSIM?

The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle.

Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.

I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam.

But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.

This rings true to me, but I'm not a frontend dev. So I'm not a good judge if what makes good frontend code. Where I do know my stuff, I'm not at all impressed by LLM code.

So perhaps LLMs are just entry level devs in general. Who can't learn. Who won't ever gain seniority. It would make sense, after all, they were trained on the Internet and Stack Overflow, which is mostly filled with entry level questions and answers.

Because Matplotlib and Pandas etc. save programmer time, even where they waste processor time.

> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.

Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.