That still sounds like it would be the company’s fault. If I asked it to hack a nuclear reactor, maybe it would be different. I’m also thinking about instances where OpenAI’s own test models escaped their own sandboxes — I would expect them to be responsible for the damages they caused.
I agree with this take generally, but I also think it’s a gradient, not a spectrum. I think they claim that OpenAI is not considering safety and has become bad, not that AI is bad. Seen from a different lens, the author no longer stands to profit from OpenAI, so they’re empowered to speak openly. Plus, if I was going to say bad things about a former employer as powerful as OpenAI, I would want to have lawyer money handy.
I opened this thread to post about Dungeon Crawler Carl. I just finished the fantastic Three Body Problem series, and reading something so pulpy in contrast feels like cheating, but it’s making me happy and that’s what I’m looking for anyways.
Some other bits I’ve read recently that I’ve loved:
- Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is a beautiful short story by the Three Body Problem’s translator
- Cryptonomicon feels like a great balance between heady reading (it goes into WWII-era crypto thinking) and pulpy humor. I loved reading it.
- “Stoner” by John Williams (not the Stoner you think, and also not the John Williams you think) is kinda in a different direction, but it’s a really well paced and beautifully written book about a farmer’s son who falls in love with literature. It’s one of those books that’s hard to sell in a sentence, but is effortless to read and makes you think a lot in a non-engineering-brained way.
yes and no (thanks for looking); I know it still loads on mobile, but I know it's pretty garbage. I haven't thought of a way to make the UI work ergonomically on mobile without a totally different fork (lots of moving around depends on having a mouse or a track pad), but I also don't have the heart to have a "your device isn't supported" overlay because I want to daydream about it.
Yeah, that's very true. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Claude's `design` skill, which does an accessibility pass that I've found pretty decent as someone with only minor experience in the area — contrast, tab/focus ordering, things of that nature. The catch is that you have to actually have to want to check these things, just like you have to want to not ship slop.
I think that these things I've seen that are tells of a slop UI are when people without discernment (not as an insult!) don't do a pass over a UI. I'm working on a dumb little app to help me sequence photos for a book[0], and I'm building it with Claude (Opus 5.5, medium effort). The first pass was really sloppy, but I was surprised at how far I could get with some directed iterating.
This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.
The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.
Anything that you use to show stuff on your tv is gonna have this problem. Apple is a little higher on the trust spectrum than, say, Roku. You’re paying Apple in part for the convenience of not doing a homebrew setup, and in part for the trust.
I think that’s about pull tabs (the old kind where you removed a small disc from the top of a can) vs pop tabs (the kind where you punch a hole into it and nothing detaches).
Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.
I was genuinely really surprised at how easy it was to fit tea in instead. I have a cup of decaf once in a while, or a cup of normal coffee once in a while, but I kinda just wake up now. I think it's also helped not drinking caffeine as soon as I get up, to be honest.
I had wild food poisoning and had a similar experience (took me out for weeks, didn’t drink coffee). I assume the body must have some sort of gating mechanism for pain; I have absolutely had caffeine withdrawal before, but not that time. I’ve since cut back and switched to tea, which I believe has helped with my anxiety.
This kind of feels like the same thing in which people talk more about the cameras they have instead of the photos they make, or the modular synth they built instead of the album they're working on with it. It's nice when it's confined to your hobby, but it's so weird when the whole world is talking about it. Imagine everyone going to a concert just to see the gear on the stage.
I’ve never had a post hit me with nostalgia as hard as this one. Thanks to the author for capturing what it felt like to be a stupid little kid with a weird old computer so well.
Besides the technical constraints (the zip code can't always tell you the city, etc), the zip code is more of a checksum to make sure the address you typed makes sense. I think you could probably get around the imperfections by making the city / state / zip be things suggested to you, whether in an autocomplete or by making them first in a dropdown. The imperfection of a zip code in encoding a city name doesn't mean that the frustration of filling out addresses isn't a real one!
I think they claim that if your computer has bad hardware, you're probably sending a lot of _additional_ crashes to their telemetry system. Your hardware might be working just fine, but the guy next to you might be sending 30% more crashes.
I have always had a ton of respect for the Dark Sky devs. I love the work that goes into designing interfaces that make sense of complex datasets intuitively, and I feel like Dark Sky was a textbook example. I’m genuinely really excited to try this out.
I don’t think these ends justify the means. It sounds like the government failed early on in what seemed like a benign infraction, and now it is deciding to punish him for it. That’s like getting away with not returning a library book, and then being arrested and taken to prison for thousands in overdue fees when I try to return it later. That’s arbitrary and excessive, hopefully found to be a violation of due process, and should not be defended.
I came in here looking for this thread specifically (I can't imagine moving off of Ableton). Thanks for taking a sec to write this up! I might give it a try, just for the synth alone.
I hear you, and I think it's also fucked up (as someone who lives in the US) that our climate success is so easily reversed by the whims of whoever is in power today. If it makes you feel any less bad, new Zealand doing it acts as fantastic proof that a good chunk of New England could do it, or that the American South could do it. Plus, there isn't a lot of love for polluting policies; just tolerance from the government for polluters. Nobody here likes to see their kids have asthma, or to see their water contaminated. The size thing can make it feel hopeless, but what is the US if not a handful of New Zealand's?
Hey, I'm all for accounting for human error. But I don't think what we've been seeing in the news is not "hold on Mr. Robber, I need a warrant" (also, you don't need a warrant for that), nor is it "oops I arrested you by accident." It's people being taken off the street because of vague determinations about their identity, the types of jobs they're working, etc. That's not probable cause, and that's certainly not human error. That's an extrajudicial decision made intentionally to have a chilling effect.