FinnLobsien

Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.

The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.

Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.

At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.

Smartphones are marvelous and incredibly useful. Nobody wants to renounce instant messaging or digital documents.

The problem is that unlocking your phone is like entering a casino, where everything conspires against your best intentions.

I think Grammarly is quite obviously in trouble since LLMs went so mainstream. And while I think AI-powered replacements are a great threat, I reckon an even bigger one is the decline of writing itself.

If Gmail suggests the whole email (and whatever model it's using has baked in whatever suggestions Grammarly would've had), nobody needs feedback on an email they didn't even write?

To me, the problem is not about what AI is good or bad at, but about institutional knowledge. If AI is doing the coding, writing, designing, or whatever else, you slowly lose the ability to a) learn from others in the org because nobody knows what you need to learn anymore and b) actually improve stuff because there's no more "what good looks like"

The problem with LLMs in finance is the same as it is in writing, design, and many other disciplines: it isn’t code.

Code objectively does what it‘s intended to do or it doesn’t (and passes certain tests or not) which gives coding agents an indication on whether their solution is adequate.

This is much harder in almost any other discipline.

Pass-fail tests in other disciplines are much less useful. You can tell an AI to not use certain words or not write sentences longer than X, but those rules are insufficient.

At no point can a piece of writing or a design be evaluated to “work” the way code does.

> I think if you ask 5 people what dumb (enough) phone meant you'd get seven answers.

Yes, but I think anyone interested in this would know what they don't want: TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or any other app that wants you to spend maximum time in their app.

Unless we're talking about complete purists who basically want a 2003 level phone that only does call/text, there's lots of flexibility.

Someone who wants a less addicting phone but doesn't necessarily require maps is unlikely to not buy because of a maps app. It's not like they'd spend 3 hours a day getting directions.

I think the humble PR is definitely not made for this era of software.

It used to be a finished piece of work that meant „this is the way I solved this engineering challenge.“

The team member could generally answer questions about that PR and why they chose to do it this way, not some other way, explain discarded approaches, etc.

Now a lot of that reasoning happens in AI coding agents. So even if a choice on approach was made, the human presenting the PR rarely has the same depth of understanding of each tradeoff and line of code.

That (in combination with the ease of producing tons of code instantly) makes each PR less meaningful.

I’m not sure I want my coworker’s AI chat history (who has time to read all that?), but it’s good that innovation is happening.

> Interesting that there is no mention of running your Bots and Agents directly from this device.

I feel like

a) this is made to lower your tech usage, so the core audience for this probably wouldn't even want that

b) the AI agent space isn't settled yet, so it's hard to know what interfaces should even be supported

c) as Hacker News users, we drastically overestimate how much people outside of tech use and build AI agents

Exactly. I would want:

-Phone/texting -Messengers like WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. -Maps -Music/podcasts

Ideally with e-ink.

I want something that doesn't compete with a full-fledged smartphone (which I'd still keep for travel and stuff). I want something to take to the office, hanging out with friends, etc, where bringing the smartphone becomes a decision.

This is great. I really like the “dumb phone” movement.

Sadly for now they’re too expensive to buy just as an experiment.

I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.

You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).

I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:

"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.

Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.

Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:

-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers

(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)

To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:

"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"

This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.

I don’t think the point is that this is the assumption of people’s real subscription behavior, more to show that it’s getting more expensive overall.

Yes. And I'd also add that so much of it is about context and intention.

If you intentionally sit down to enjoy some low-brow entertainment (Maybe a silly action movie or a mediocre rom-com) because you enjoy that, great.

But I recently realized that there are podcast episodes from 10 years ago that I still remember parts of, but few from recent years, even though I've listened to far more podcasts (and they haven't become less intellectual).

Yes, this is a big issue. I really think these things are basically like cigarettes used to be when they were ubiquitous.

I'd have a hard time blaming someone in the 1930s for being addicted to cigarettes. Everyone constantly smoked everywhere and their harm was rumored, but not proven.

Try to quit smoking in that environment: the thing you're trying to get away from is inescapable and it's not even clear why you should quit. They might blame themselves for not being motivated enough.

We're in that exact environment for the things I describe above.

Yeah I think this is also true. Maybe "thinking less" is the wrong framing. Whether it's an excess or a deficiency of thinking, there's definitely a lack of straining cognitive activity.

It might be reading books, pondering deep ideas, painting a landscape, doing software engineering, or solving crossword puzzles.

But all of those are happening much less due (in my opinion) to the factors I described.

Yes, I think both things can be true. And also, we haven't had decades of mental activity being mostly optional, so we're not yet seeing the consequences nor science of long-term impact.

In the 1950s, many doctors were convinced that exercise was actively harmful and running was dangerous.

I don't think that's true. Even if you think about what was considered junk entertainment decades ago, they still required much more cognitive effort.

Reading about a celebrity breakup in a gossip magazine requires more cognitive effort than hearing about the same breakup in a gossip TikTok:

-You consumed the thing for minutes at a time vs. seconds at a time and your brain had to actively decipher something, not just passively perceive.

-You had to read and couldn't do it while also doing something else, which meant you were more focused.

-You couldn't swipe in a split-second and have another equally stimulating thing that might be completely different, which meant you were more intentional about your mental context.

The medium in which we consume something absolutely matters, independent of what we decide to consume.

I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.

Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.

That must be a horrible thing.

One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.

In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.

Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.

We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.

But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.

We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.

I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.

I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.

There are some occupations (artist, author, founder, scientist, etc.) that are popular forms of escapism because they look so self-actualized. From the outside, it looks like:

1. They only work on what they like.

2. Their work exists for its own sake, not to accomplish some other motive (e.g. the painter's paintings exist to be enjoyed as paintings. It's not graphic design, which exists to sell something else.)

In practice, that's usually not true. A founder deals with compliance forms, a novelist only writes a vampire book because that's what the market wants, and the scientist applied for 27 research grants this year.

When it comes to work, humans seem to need to believe that perfection exists, that there is a situation in which all of our problems would be solved.

I've been lucky enough to have had multiple situations where I reached the exact career goal I set a few years prior. The career that seemed like the situation where all problems would be solved. I was (and continue to be) happy with my career, but as soon as you live in yesteryear's idealized reality, you realize that even within that exist some annoying things and you idealize the next thing.

I always wonder what the rationale is inside Apple to sell a separate cleaning cloth.

There’s no way this is even a drop in the bucket for their business, and neither is this some strategic judo move where they can undercut a competitor’s business.

I think the difference is that you read the code and get curious about it rather than glancing at the output and immediately telling it what to correct.

It doesn’t invalidate other parts of your point, but Warp is open source now.

I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.

A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).

Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.

But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.

I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.

I agree with you, but I also think sadly most consumers don't really care about this. The reason the internet is in the state it's in is because most people tolerate it.

Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.

Not a surprise this is launching now. John Ternus is taking the reigns as CEO in a week and was previously SVP of hardware engineering.

I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.

Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.

I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.

I agree that a lot of entrepreneurship is misguided. And I totally agree that research, charity work, or other stuff can have many of the same benefits.

What I think is important (and why I think entrepreneurship is directionally good) is open-ended exploration and taking initiative to pursue one's own projects. I don't care about the specific direction, but about the idea of proactively trying to shape reality by following one's interests.

I think what you're describing with backpacking is true for most. If the point is to check off a list of Instagram picture spots, then it's more of an exercise in consumerism. If it's to deeply engage with other cultures, languages, and people, that's different.

I guess it's similar with entrepreneurship. If the point is to inhabit the founder personality archetype you see on social media, that's different than to be genuinely solving interesting problems.

I think that undermines a lot of benefits of entrepreneurship - the learning of many different skills, network, etc. and also just the adventure of starting a company.

It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.

Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.

I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for.

If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch.

But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex.

In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century.

If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination.

If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.

I think there are two things at work here:

-An expectation that because a scientist is incredibly good at one thing, they must be good at another, entirely different type of thing. This seems to uniquely apply to scientists.

We don't judge a phenomenal football player for not being an incredible archer, but then we do judge a Nobel prize-winning physicist for believing in astrology.

-I think this can sometimes be two sides of the same coin: The same divergent thinking that helps you make revolutionary discoveries (you're unwilling to take the status quo for granted) also makes you explore "strange" ideas.