dijit

I tend to listen to the same music all the time, I just checked, I add about 30 songs to my library a year.

Right now I'm listening to trace classics from 2000 :)

300 songs might not sound like many, yet that is how many items have been added to my library or to a playlist in 12 years.

So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.

I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..

I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.

buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.

Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13

There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.

So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.

The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.

No, I was comparing the size difference of the 5 (and lineage) to the 6 (by way of case) and Mini.

"SE" is a nondescript product line and the only physical differences are the tone of the chassis and a stamp; it's a fair representation of the size of a 5.

I'm not sure I understand how you think the mini is in a case from those photos.

Maybe because it's the dark version of the phone you can barely make out the shiny apple logo, but it's there, you can see the metal edge of the phone.

It's not in a case.. obviously, that would be a stupid comparison.

maybe I'm misremembering the dimensions of the 8.

I did, however, take a series of photos comparing the Mini to the SE- and the packaging of the 6 (I think I gave the phone away but still had the box).

https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...

I totally accept that I'm the minority.

When I was 12-13 I started taking a steroidal inhaler which inhibited my growth, so my hands are literally the same size as when I was 13. (maybe slightly wider).

As such I have about the same finger length as the average woman, and when I used the iPhone 4S and 5S I had no problems, I was not able to comfortably use the 6 with one hand, and it came with that ugly camera bump, so I returned it and tried to go Samsung. (it was big, but the rounded edges helped a fair bit) - the software sucked.

I bit the bullet and went back to my 5S, and when the SE (2nd gen - shaped like the iPhone 5 but with beefed internals) rolled out it was a day 1 purchase for me.

Ever since then I've been looking for a phone -- the iPhone "Mini" was as large as the 6 which was too large (I did buy one though) -- I eventually bought an iPhone 15 pro, but honestly, I hate it. It is the heaviest thing I carry daily and it doesn't do anything more than my 5 did that i care about, and I can't comfortably operate it. I start really disliking mobile devices because of it- and the software is getting worse year on year too.

I'm getting serious fatigue from this, but the world has not only caught up to a mobile world, now many things actively expect/require you to have a modern smart phone, especially in Sweden.

we’ll be waiting a while. The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized, when I considered anything larger than the 5 to be too much.

The Mini thus, undersold, because if you were fine with the 8 then iPhones of that size were still available (2nd Gen SE). Nobody bought: So Apple thinks theres no market.

for those who were holding out from Gen1 or whatever, adding pro features at a non-pro price is definitely incentivising. I’m not sure why we’re pretending it’s not.

Would you rather have generation old Pros or brand new standard airpods which have the pro features you actually want.

i signed up because everyone was there… therefore i also likely reinforced that feeling in others too.

Network effects are really powerful.

Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.

I know that this is sarcasm, but there are people who really think this.

They get emotional (usually angry) when you tell them you disable javascript- as if every site that serves any kind of content has an automatic entitlement to run arbitrary code on your computer.

“Hey Fable, write me some win32 unsafe rust code”

“sure thing boss”

——

“Hey Fable, review this unsafe win32 rust code”

“Potentially dangerous request, falling back to Opus”

—-

Every damn time, ironic because the unsafe win32 code can be generated by fable in the same session.

Maddening.

You're putting the computation of waypoint finding on the all clients, or on your server.

People spam click, so it's cheaper to compute it once and pass it around.

Git is a vulgar word in British English too, doesn’t seem to have prevented successful commercial adoption of Github, Gitlab or git itself.

Despite being less vulgar than “fuck”, the use of this word can get you excluded from school.

Websites work better on a mac than ever.

You mean Linux, probably, but thats because Chrome doesn't enable hardware acceleration pn ARM, so smooth scroll is disabled. Pretty rough.

I think we spend a little bit too much time optimising startup time.

Anything more than 3 seconds and less than 45 seconds is perceptibly the same, it's the same level of inconvenience unless you're in a rush.

.. but I can't honestly tell you the last time I booted my Macbook from cold.

Worthwhile suspend/resume is a much better goal for the modern computer user... Windows fucked us all with s2idle, including themselves.

I've had some experiences like that, mostly when Spectre/Meltdown were new. (or if I had a dGPU which didn't have good drivers - or.. if there's no hardware acceleration for smooth scroll for some other reason, like chrome on ARM for a long time).

I agree that it's a dealbreaker, and the circumstances in which it can happen are opaque and difficult to troubleshoot.

Luckily these days with anything released since 2020- it's a lot better. Linux still struggles a lot with JS runtimes on Skylake.

While I am throwing Linux under the bus a bit here, I am still perplexed that we use an exceptionally inefficient language as the major application delivery system of the modern day. We complain that it uses a lot of RAM and is slow, but if you consider what javascript is compared to how CPUs think about things, it's a miracle we get what we get... we managed to get a marvel of engineering and the response has been to shove millions of lines of code through it... At some point, yeah, it's slow.

404.

I'm becoming really upset at people whom I otherwise align with for taking absolute statements that don't make sense.

DHH said some stuff you disagree with, incidentally while I have always identified with strong social systems, welfare, high taxes and things like free healthcare, I can't say I disagree with the core of what he tried to say, because there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation - and people not talking about it is actually fuelling the extreme position.

So when you say "has a right to exist", what do you mean exactly? Because if I was to stand in the lobby of a parliamentary building and was forcibly removed, would that mean I don't have the right to exist?

You have a right to exist, just not here, just like how White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.

Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism- which has the obvious consenquence of making the word "racist" have less power.. It's not racism to notice this, it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.

I'm reminded of the phrase "if you don't respect me, I won't respect you" whereby respect can mean as an authority or as a person, and they mean "if you don't respect me as an authority, then I won't respect you as a person".

You're saying "if you don't let me do everything I want then you're denying that I have the right to exist at all" which is a type of hysteric language which permits any atrocity in response it can be framed as an act of self defence.

Stop it.

I should probably post my guide on how to use gerrit and JJ together nicely.

I wrote it internally after struggling a lot with getting the relevant knowledge from the relevant authorities (Klabnik has the best resources but his writing seems to depend on you understanding abstract concepts before you grasp the practicality, which works for programming languages but less so for tools - which you want to "get out of the way").

in fact.. screw it... here: https://blog.dijit.sh/gerrit_with_jj/

Why not?

It's a highly paid, in demand career path where formal education is optional.

They came for the sysadmins first because they had more power, but they were always coming for you.

Even if "Agentic Coding" doesn't solve programming, there is an aligned incentive not to care, I've heard directly from the executives at large companies that they despise the amount of leverage software programmers have... and now they have an excuse to end it on a unified front.

That is sufficed to say that many people in our profession don't actually care about software development or programming, they just saw a lucrative career path.

My personal and somewhat bitter opinion is that the profession will be more enjoyable for me once all the people who are only in it for money leave. I can live a blue collar salary life working in tech and still enjoy it. Maybe I'll have less scrum masters and shit. Thank god.

Opinions are apparently valuable.

Bit weird, but I support anything that lessens Microsoft domination. Especially with Apple losing their way.

How do they know that something will be a “substantial piece of work” then?

Often LLMs seem to be aware that work is heavy, but knowing:

a) if something is possible

b) if something has been requested to take a long time ( a signal of abuse, like requesting illicit pictures in image generation)

is actually somewhat straightforward (I mean, if they are able to predict if something is a “substantial piece of work” as they seem to do already).

The mathematical proof thing is obviously marketing spin, you should pay more attention to what mathematicians are actually saying instead of hackernews folks.

These things are really good at being search engines and harnesses for iteration rather than some kind of advancing intelligence.

https://cacm.acm.org/research/formal-reasoning-meets-llms-to...

Yes.

But just so we're both entirely clear on what an LLM is... it's a token prediction system.

it genuinely can't do things except recall things that have already existed.

People are having great success composing things together in new ways, but just like the english language has a finite number of sentences, and music has a finite number of chords: LLMs too are just combining things that have existed.

I don't want to sound condescending, it is remarkable how useful this technology is, but please don't evangelise them on capabilities that they genuinely can never have.

Laptop computers have incredible processing capabilities but nobody expects them to be able to walk your dog, no matter how useful they actually are at doing other things.

Hahahaha, I think you’ve misunderstood what LLMs are.

“I can take current sources and tell you how solved this is, but I am not willing to work to a timeframe or to solve things that aren’t yet solved by mathematicians or science”

These safeguards already exist when they get a whiff that you might be using Claude to fix security issues. Doesn’t seem farfetched given the incentives I outlined that they would apply to this kind of abuse.

How loose those controls are becomes a market force.

Charge on the input tokens, then you will naturally optimise for fewer output tokens.

Theoretically.

In reality, one sessions output tokens become the next sessions input tokens (at least if you continue the topic) so, its not as aligned as all that.

But the parent is right, when incentives are not aligned, friction will happen. Its inevitable.

I know sadly very little about otel, it feels “heavy” in a way I am not used to, I am used to simple systems - configured and composed in a way that makes a larger system.

20 years ago, we were doing (what I think) OTel is doing: with “hit IDs” (half way between a session and a request) that were consistently applied when logging the cause a request being fired; along centralised logging and really good timekeeping. Essentially a unique identifier as a tag that followed the request as it passed through the system.

This was enough to debug basically any problem.

We could even measure the distance between requests of the same “hit” and the total wall-time before it managed to return through the load balancer, so we could track our p99 easily.

Though truthfully we didn't make pretty graphs.

I sometimes wonder what OTel gives me more than this, but I work in games now and lots of these things that work well in webdev do not apply at all to our problems.