alexjplant

To paraphrase the sage Jimmy McMillan: the number of people who interview on their work laptops is too damn high. I'm always flabbergasted when they admit this and not once has somebody who did so passed. IME there's a strong correlation between good judgment and technical prowess in this regard but I suppose stories like this prove me wrong.

What? You have to run Bridge on your desktop to get the functionality anyhow... if they offered it natively then it might be worth something but you have to run a binary to get it. Meanwhile Proton's mobile app has gotten buggier and buggier over the years as it refuses to load messages, loads old messages in a thread when you click on the most recent notification, forgets to remove drafts after sending, fails to sync the calendar, etc.

Lumo, which could have been a great offering, similarly breaks after every fifth message or so and is substantially behind SOTA offerings. IMHO Proton has jumped the shark and this is just the final straw.

I switched to Tuta this morning. I used to be a huge Proton advocate but multiple hour-plus downtimes in a week for e-mail is unacceptable. At this point I had better uptime running my own mail server on a VPS (or at least when the UI went down it was a simple `systemctl restart` away to fix it) and this was in the dark ages of having to manually rotate X.509 certs.

...the second in a few days.

Because Flock is the first company to so brazenly violate the post-2011 social contract: if you're going to track somebody you need to give them coupons and content as compensation. They have failed to provide the people whose privacy they are violating with internet drama and buttcheeks videos. Other companies with many times greater reach and market cap collect GPS, cell tower, and 802.11 ESSID data to observe their users' movements; they track them across web sites and apps without explicit consent to serve personalized advertisements and adjust prices for durable goods and services depending upon user behavior. They do this with impunity because people enjoy short-form videos and image macros and will readily trade their privacy for easy access to them. Flock has nothing to offer in this regard. This is why they are shunned whereas other companies that understand how this game is played are forgiven for equivalent or worse sins.

No idea why you're being downvoted. I've bought el cheapo LowEndTalk-style VPS specials on two or three occasions and have gotten what I paid for each time. They either sold a microscopic slice of some over-provisioned 15-year-old POS or outright lied to me about specs then argued until I did a chargeback to recover my money.

For app hosting I'd either 1) use cloudflared and a cheap Lenovo Tiny box to host from my house, 2) write something serverless that runs on Cloudflare Workers, or 3) use a real host that isn't 18 months old and run by hucksters in a race to the bottom.

I looked into this a while back (~6 years ago) and it basically broke down like this: diabetics outnumber injectable drug users two to one but not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. Drug users, however, have less compunction about sticking themselves in a public space, particular the homeless. Best guess based on these numbers is that it's a 50-50 split between these populations as to who's using public sharps containers.

> society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.

This argument could be made about providing drugs themselves but fails under the faintest scrutiny for sharps containers because said containers have wide uses beyond shooting up heroin.

> LLMs are just another abstraction layer above programming languages, machine language, etc.

Programming languages are (largely) deterministic. LLMs are not. The boundary between an abstract concept and something executable sits comfortably in the mind of the programmer in non-LLM contexts. This boundary shifts when using an LLM and becomes shared between the programmer and the matrix multiplication machine.

The "layer of abstraction" analogy is therefore technically true but essentially false. "Just another" papers over how seismic of a paradigm shift all of this is.

Fellow readers whose interests are piqued by this comment: this is apparently true. This book [1] talks about it in greater depth. From Wikipedia:

> [The author] describes the growth of the Abstract Expressionist art movement, and its frequent showcasing in New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), as largely a CIA-sponsored operation [...] Since many abstract expressionist painters and sculptors were anarchistic, and strongly anti-CIA, a "long leash" policy was adopted that "kept CIA operatives at a remove of two or three degrees from the artists and art exhibitions—sometimes even more—so that they could not be linked to any furtive governmental bankrolling."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Paid_the_Piper%3F

This is heavily contingent on one's individual experiences. An uncurated modern web/mobile sounds like a hellscape - ads in one's start menu, autoplaying videos, a flood of promotional notifications from shopping apps, people arguing with bots arguing with people about populist political garbage... blech. The real question is how this compares to your family member having a few cocktails then blaming you for their divorce or getting calls from collection agencies on behalf of somebody you haven't seen in five years.

Both of these problem spaces run the gamut from solvable to intractable. Either way you have to put in some work.

OpenCode Go provides a lot of usage for these models for the paltry sum of $10/month. Z.ai's coding plan provides a single-digit multiple of Claude Code's usage for a similar price and performance level. Kimi and DeepSeek models are hundreds of billions of parameters (or, in K3's case, >1T). Many of these models have Opus-level benchmarks and, as I pointed out previously, often practically outperform Anthropic models because they're more consistent.

If you don't have regulatory hurdles to jump over then there are a whole raft of open-weight models that perform basically as well as Anthropic's offerings (and, in many cases, better because they're pulling fewer capacity-stretching shenanigans). Check out Kimi, DeepSeek, and GLM series models in particular with something like OpenCode or Pi as a coding harness. If you need a Claude-alike web UI then spin up Open WebUI in a container and expose it via cloudflared so you can use it on the go.

> we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.

There is enormous variance in performance between police departments. Where I live now the police have been nothing but helpful. In college our neighbor was a cop and was ten times cooler than he had any obligation to be. I've also lived in places where they were nothing but a hindrance.

In fact I was once pulled over something like three times in a few weeks by one police department and given a warning each time for "speeding". The third time it happened I told them that I wasn't speeding, had dash cam evidence, and that I knew something was up given the frequency with which it was happening (probably not a wise idea but I was pretty fed up with it). Officer went to his car and came back five minutes later with some nonsensical excuse about my "VIN number [sic] not coming back properly in the database" and said I'd stop being bothered from them on. In his defense he seemed like he knew they'd made a mistake and was stumbling over his words a bit but the whole thing made absolutely no sense. No retired LEOs I've asked about it had good theories either.

It seems like this woman dealt with a more extreme, AI-powered version of the same. She has my sympathies, but this won't stop until LEOs that act like this are either upskilled or removed from positions of power.

Healthy eating is available at restaurants too (Taco Bell being an amusing example - grilled chicken, beans, vegetables, and leafy greens) but people choose not to avail themselves of it. The straw man "Average American" is conditioned by companies to enjoy textureless, mild food loaded with fat, salt, and sugar so that they're never satiated and always craving more. Fiber and texture fly in the face of this so we end up with generations of people raised to eat chicky nuggies and bacon ranch dressing with a side of iceberg lettuce because onions are icky.

Before I built a gaming computer circa 2004 I daily drove my family's old beige box that had a 350Mhz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and Windows 98. I remember running CDex (because ripping CDs was all the rage), Trillian, and ZDaemon all at the same time without a hiccup. What a time to be alive!

I'm going whole hog on LLM-driven development to build out an old school FOSS forum that can run in resource-constrained environments with a minimum of fuss. Think phpBB but written in Rust with modern UI niceties and a SQLite backend. My hope is that interested parties will be able to deploy this on random SBCs or Unikraft and use cloudflared to expose their service to interested parties. Watching old forums that I used to frequent get gobbled up by VerticalScope makes me pine for the days of small self-hosted communities that existed for the hell of it instead of monetized interaction.

For my fellow '90s kids: the Canadair CL-215 [1] was the chief visual inspiration for the plane that Baloo flies in the Disney cartoon series "Talespin".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CL-215

> In order to lease an iPhone, you must select one of the following carriers (but you cannot use a prepaid carrier plan):

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I suppose I'll keep buying my phones outright... no protection money to the carrier mafia == no lease.

I've too many wacky interview stories to list here, but the first time I came to this same conclusion was when I had an interviewer interrupt me mid-answer to correct my pronunciation of "idempotent" (because I said it in what is apparently a more British fashion). I asked him to repeat himself to see if he'd apologize or brush it off as a tic and he repeated himself with an elevated level of contempt. I declined the offer, that company got bought by McKinsey a year later, and everybody lived happily ever after.

I've been getting into 3D printing recently and while the flagship Anthropic models can regurgitate community wisdom about the hobby they can't do spatial reasoning. They'll tell me that objects will fit on my print bed when they won't and vice-versa. They get confused about materials and nozzles. It takes several iterations to get them to do basic objects (in my case a slotted tray) in OpenSCAD. Useful, certainly, but very far from autonomous for end-to-end manufacturing workflows.

It's cultural.

Rave kids who listen to melodic dubstep drink Ghost because they like everything brightly-colored and artificial. Good ole' boys blowing stuff up in the woods drink Bucked Up or Rip It because they work hard and want something grab-and-go from Wal-Mart. Gamers love Bawls (or whatever the equivalent is now) because it tastes refreshing and keeps them up all night at LAN parties.

Coffee is for sophisticates who do yoga and listen to NPR and pay taxes and have jobs. It's unprocessed (drying, roasting, and fermenting be damned) whereas energy drinks are made in a factory. How would you rather imbibe your psychoactive insecticide: the natural way? Or the ARTIFICIAL way?!

Side note (as a guy with single origin beans in his freezer and an Aeropress): AMP Energy slapped and they should bring it back.

My favorite college food hack was the 1/4 lb Big Bite at 7 Eleven. The one near my house sold them for $1 and had an extensive bar of vegetables in addition to the machine that secreted warm nacho cheese and chili (!!!) out of a bag. My usual setup was onions, tomatoes, sauerkraut, mustard, and a pinch of the cheese and some cilantro if they had any hanging around.

If I had to feed a family on the cheap I'd make lentil or barley stew. Saute a mirepoix and brown whatever protein is on sale, deglaze with whatever wine is appropriate, brown some tomato paste, then chuck the rest of the veggies and starches in with some spice mix and cook for 30-40 minutes. Once you've dialed in whatever time is appropriate for your ingredients it's the best meal prep hack there is. Gym bros slathering chicken breast and white rice in mystery sauce need not apply.

From TFA:

> Applied with a handheld tool, the patch stays on the skin for around 10 to 15 minutes

You'd notice.

> I know a lot of people use postpaid, but I can't understand why.

Two reasons: data caps and device cost.

People want iPhones but they cost $1000 outright which isn't a small amount of cash these days so they roll the cost of the device into their monthly bill. The average consumer also doesn't understand how mobile data versus 802.11 works - their kid doesn't activate Wi-Fi on their phone or download anything, they see a large number with "GB" on the end, and they pay whatever is necessary to keep the Instagram scrolling and Disney+ flowing.

Buying an iPhone outright, flipping the old one every few years (they hold their value well) and using a $30 a month 10GB plan is doable if you have money and are savvy enough to download podcasts and use your home's AP for data.

Carriers certainly aren't incentivized to educate consumers better since they'd rather make money on device installments and milk them for hundreds of dollars a month because they "have a large family and need a lot of data". Home broadband marketing is even worse - why a family of four "needs" 500 Mbps down is absolutely beyond me. In an ideal society this type of consumer literacy would be taught in school but I'm not holding my breath.

I didn't read a good chunk of what we were assigned in high school because I was stuck there for almost 8 hours every day and had jobs and extracurriculars afterwards. In college I only had to go to five classes a few times a week so even with a part-time job I had more free time.

I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.

This was a central plot point of the film adaptation of "Johnny Mnemonic". From Wikipedia:

> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.

Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:

> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.

Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on

This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:

- "Something went wrong"

- "It's not you - it's us :-("

- "An error occurred"

- "Uh-oh..."

- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]

People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

My grandparents sprung for a subscription to PC Magazine when I was a preteen for a year or two so that I could read his column in the very back of each issue. I'm sure my thoughts on his opinions would be radically different today but his prose was timeless and hilarious. Mad respect and RIP.

> home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness

N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".

The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.

Claude does this too. I asked it recently to compare two versions of a song (the original and '97 remake of EPMD's "You Gots To Chill", if anybody wants to try and replicate this) and it flatly refused. No amount of reasoning would knock it off of its moralizing perch - reproducing any part of lyrics is expressly prohibited.

In light of this and other ridiculous behavior I'm migrating to my own OpenWebUI instance with open-weight models from OpenRouter (with ZDR, of course). We'll see how it goes.