cik

I too could, theoretically be thrilled to be drugged to the gills when I'm killed. I however, can consent. Animals cannot. But we know that animals can think. Regardless of debating the ethics of consuming them, this adds an additional ethical quagmire of is it ethically sound to drug non-consenting, thinking species.

This is a bit oversimplified, and relies heavily on understanding your threat vectors and agents. You haven't spoke about audio even.

There's a reason that many military and intelligence organizations worldwide physically cut / remove wifi and bluetooth chips from boards. The same is done when audio is identifiable, and specific hardware (only) greenlit.

I've lost hours of my life to calls explaining exactly this, only to have people ignore it, only to further have folks come back, tail between their legs. The worst part is learning this in industry, as I did. There's a reason for in-industry advisors. I wish that I had learned this the easy way.

I tend to apply this to myself, within an organization (as opposed to those who like to generically try it all - fair enough). I've always been an enormous fan of touring the organization. Whether I join as a dev, or an exec, I always make it a point to spend some time with product, with support, and with marketing. It ends up providing me a unique vantage point. I encourage others to do the same, and when I 'control' onboarding, make it part of the process.

It's literally the fastest way to have someone get up to speed with the customer profile and product. They can play with it whilst listening in to support calls (if a thing). They can learn about pain points and "hard edges" that as developers we don't always come across.

I'm not going to pretend to understand your stuggle, but I will echo it through my lens. I am not trying to hijack your point, inasmuch support it with my view.

I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".

I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.

What you're mentioning is 100% what's wrong with the industry. Agreed! To me a systems design conversation is a conversation - not a design goal. The idea is to determine ability and psychology:

1. When you press on someone's design respectfully, do they get defensive. Do they become argumentative.

2. When thoughtfully pointing out a concern, how does the candidate take it?

3. When you suggest a technology that makes no sense to intentionally challenge knowledge, does the candidate recognize why it makes no sense? Are they able to share what the negative of the approach is. If you indicate that you know the question is "senseless" but want their feedback, how do they communicate?

4. When you hard request a change that requires a literal rethink and rewrite do they become argumentative? Do they embrace the change?

5. When discussing testing, how do they think about it? I come down to the nitty gritty and ask about postive vs negative cases, table driven testing, what types of tests matter (for our situation) and why.

6. We discuss timeline tradeoffs, and then have the conversation about the candidate's approach given updates to see how they think.

You'll notice that I am never looking for a solution. I'm seeking communication, description, partnership while having a (relatively) thorough gasp of the subject matter.

Every single time I get a response from a candidate such as "I don't know, I'd have to learn more - or use AI to, or.. what do you think" turns out to be something I LOVE, because it creates a great fabric for the interview.

There's an issue where people assumed the syntactic activity of writing code was what mattered. The reality is that this was always a smaller part of the role, as opposed to thinking about observability, serviceability, and test automation. The ability to write software that is properly separated from concerns and when to enact those separations matters.

At the same time, I think we're far too far down the systems path now. We've hit a point where interviewing has become purely systems design "because the AI writes the code".

Not that I'm ever asked, but I inherently believe the act of critical thinking, communication, and expression are the key skills for those who already have the appropriate coding/engineering/cs/etc background. I now only interview for those skills - but through the lens of impossible to solve systems design conversations as opposed to problems. It tells me a lot about how people think.

I'm a (Samsung) Fold user. They're great - a year in I never, or rarely if ever see the minute crease, and ditto here with Apple. The reality is that ~70% of the time I want a small screen. It's perfect (if thick due to the fold). It opens to "larger" (i.e 8 inches) which is great - compared to what I had before (6.9").

I'm actually hoping that this will force Samsung to solve their silly lockscreen choices, and the fact that it needs to be "configured" to be useful, because it's separate (Multilock - I'm talking to you). Honestly, I would happily take even bigger. The extra real estate when you want it is great. But it needs to hit tablet(ish) sizes. We're just in early days.

Thank you for sharing this. It's such a great example of how fun learning and the internet can be. It's downright refreshing when things don't have the same exact design as the rest of the universe, and take the time to teach something.

Why do we have the assumption that industrial robots need to have legs? The largest grocery store chain uses picker robots already - for building my orders, including fruit / vegetables (from boxes). They currently have humans filter the veggies and fruit prior to box setup, but a friend is working on the models to eliminate even that.

Their robots do movement using sliding scale in 3D spaces (think poles that are left right, up and down, and the "picker" being able to glide and move. They currently have a ceiling slider that goes down and suctions things into a pneumatic tube to then end up in my grocery bag. IMHO it works pretty well - especially considering that delivery is ~$8 for me.

Ultimately we're going to end up with several different types of robots, and not with a human centric vision. The question is if bipedal is a long term dead-end, and merely a short term method to fit into the world we currently have designed.

There's a clear difference between defense, mission critical software, and slip. Medical cannot tolerate bugs of this nature (it's literally illegal in many a jurisdiction), which accounts for part of the cost, the approach, and testing cycles.

Can we get there in the future - perhaps. But the accuracy needs to be much higher. I remember in the 90s when my father's clinic tried both Softvoice and Dragon. Comparing it to his receptionist typing out his notes, the accuracy was in the 80s - hence rejected. Just last week an AI startup here in Israel was kicked out of their HMO partner for having a transcription accuracy of only 92% in a mixed mode these where a doctor, patient, and caregiver are all in the room (think doctor + mom + kid)

For the curious - trained medical receptions have and maintain accuracy rates when measures of 97%. This is just transcription.

Hallucinating entire events is another, far worse thing.

I've had both self hosted GitHub (enterprise), and GitLab in the last year. It really deoends what you're trying to replace and how you structure the things you're hoping to replace. Also, the value of investing in your separation of concern or safety valve.

To me, still, at a scale of 250 contributors (which we hit), Gitea solved all the problems. The fact that there's a command line tool (tea) that mostly works, means that it is beyond good enough for my use case, out of the box. It misses all sorts of things and depending on how important they are, you then invest in looking to close we they'll gap. That in turn creates its own maintenance and frustration costs.

In other words, there's no one shot. There's a good enough depending on need.

I'm clearly signing up for this. It reminds me of a game that I loved in the it's, Balance of Power. Equally, I still love Democracy 3. Good luck, I'm definitely sharing.

This is exactly what I did. I create tooling to make it easier for me to manage multiple multi-project swarms across multiple clis (claude, codex, opencode), with queuing, and team sharing.

It was.. surprisingly a little bit under a day's work. It's now heavily tied into our way of working and thinking. This is the upside of the current world.

What used to be time spent in personal, throwaway(ish) shell scripting has now become the same, but for more full fledged tooling. It doesn't need to be consumable by others - but it does need to make my/our life/ves better

Oooh thank you!

Yet all of this can be easily defeated with soft language. The basic check "what's the password/verification word" will defeat this every time. This is basically opsec that we taught my grandparents, who were in their 90s. Its doable.

No, I'm referring to Pen Hospital in Kolkata: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kolkata-pen-hospital. By ordered, I mean had friends who have stumbled across it and brought me things. If there were a website mind you.

I don't have the socials, so I don't see things like what you mentioned.

My dream is to visit this store. I've heard that it's by far the greatest modern fountain pen store in the world. I'm dying to go, just for this. I've ordered from them before - all the way to Canada and Israel. A gem, might be my favourite store in the world.

It depends on what you consider viable, and your level.

As someone in love with fountain pens and ink, I can tell you that there are absolutely wealthy pen turners, private designers, and the same with watches.

What I want is a cheap, brainless wifi 6 or 7 device, that's easy to mesh and extend. I currently have Orbis that are Wifi-5, and I'm sick of the general untrustworthiness. The thing is, like my WRT54G from back in the day, they just work in all situations. It's amazing how stable this kit has been for 7 years.

I'm not in the US. I can't Amazon. I don't want to spend the equivalent of 1k USD just to get 3 devices in a brainless mesh that covers my ~125sqm place made of insane amounts of radio blocking concrete.

I no longer want to maintain my network, to have network. I want things that just work. The Orbi did that for me - but the costing makes me think abut the future, and not finding a painless solution. I guess that's the tradeoff.

To wit, I also want the mesh comms on another channel (i.e 6Ghz, rather then the 2.4/5.0) and the computers/IOTs/etc isolated from that. Perhaps cheap tri-band is insanely wishful thinking. It sure seems that way.

By the time the 2 came around the wrist pads were an add-on. Like you, I'm not a fan, so I never bought them. I paired it with a Kensington Expert Mouse.

My Kinesis Freestyle 2 will always be the greatest ergo keyboard I've ever owned - with cables. I can tilt at 5, 10, 15 degree angles. I can move the two parts differently (and do), and with the risers, I can tilt it 90 degrees - which I'm never doing. The flexibility is perfect for me, so I keep one at home, and one in the office.

It's frequently said that vonglomerates usually carry through as their valuation, the multiplier of the lowest holding. If that's the case, Alphabet is worth more broken up. Similarly that makes their current valuation (and nay any valuation) theoretically too low.

I've landed in a similar place by reducing effort and cutting up tasks. I find that more exacting specifications to the models, yield significantly less need for "effort". Combining each with multjple git worktrees and an integration branch for the current worktrees themselves has yielded incresible results.

This also allows me to play with, and mix codex, claude cli, and others. This is my happy spot for the last two months.

I'm still waiting for the interrabang to become compromised as well. They've already taken my em dash, and my use of the Oxford command, apparently, is an insant flag.

It's always odd to me when filters are applied, that arguably neither influence, nor impact outcomes. From what I can see, SAT scores have effectively changed over time, such that reading comprehension has dropped dramatically, with maths abilities increasing (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/11/for-the-1...).

One (me) might argue that now, more then ever, reading matters. The age of AI, only increases the value of critical thinking and reading comprehension skills. Combine that with a (notable) 5-10% change in SAT scores, and it would appear that this practice is unlikely to unearth what factor is being filtered for.

Mind you, no one has ever not accused our industry of tunnel vision, and confirmation bias.

This sounds like dysfunction. As engineers, we're not necessarily any more correct than anyone else. But we do have a seat at the table, and good organizations at least listen.

This year, for the first time since 2006 I've have Outlook and friends in my life. I run Linux, so naturally I turned to firefox.. Not a win. Fair, I use Chrome only for these products.

Dear Lord, how has the software gotten this much worse in 19 years? I thought that Thunderbird was bloated and awful... until I tried Outlook, in a browser, on Linux. Now, the Thunderbird experience is shockingly pleasurable, compared.

Don't even get me started on the horror that is trying to mix left-to-right and right-to-left languages within the same document. OpenOffice figured this out a decade ago. Google Docs has done this perfectly since the beginning. When I learned that it was genuinely this bad on Windows too, my mind was blown.

I don't understand how this is possible.

Generally this is how liquidity works. Their employees will have a six or twelve month lock up (six being most common).

Investors in certrtain rounds (or sizes) tend to have no lockup, whereas later stages have a six month. Alternatively, I've reviewed agreements where the lockup is based on minimum market cap, but I've only seen that a couple of times.

I have the same situation here. We live intentionally without a car, and our quality of life is fantastic. People assume poverty, given the lack of car, as opposed to I just don't see the value, and value controlling my time (the walks are force exercise, a win for me). I learned along time ago to not play other peoples games.

The last time I remember feeling that I had representation, as a Western Canadian was 3 Prim Ministers ago. I didn't even vote for Harper, but the others simply ignored the gulf between Regina and the Okanagan. It doesn't get better once you move to Ontario. You then realize that your MPs also don't represent you, but at least they're in government now.