jamestimmins

When I research Reddit recommendations I always click into people's accounts to see old posts. If they have non brand safe posts (nswf, politics, profanity), I view them as more likely to be real.

Unclear if this is actually a good heuristic.

I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like it.

Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree.

Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.

These kids are (typically) in some of the best colleges in the world and in incredibly high demand. They have lots of options and enormous amounts of agency.

Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.

Mind clarifying how that's bad? It sounds just like a driver or something similar.

What is their bait and switch behavior? I'm not familiar with anything shady they've done but am very curious as I've had my eye on a Bambu.

That's very exciting to hear! I'd be delighted to be wrong about that.

Edit: Although, just to clarify, I didn't really mean that I think I won't change as I get older. Moreso that if growing a mustache or getting involved in international diplomacy was going to be in my future, I'd likely have some indication of that by now.

I always half-joke that I gave up on my hopes of being a child prodigy when I turned 30.

That was a major milestone not just for realizing that there was no future "grown up" version of me, but also seeing how much time had passed and how little was left. So I accepted that who I am is who I'm going to be, for the most part, and I might as well make the best of it. That opened up a lot of doors for personal interest that I hadn't even noticed previously.

So predictably I started woodworking.

I like this interpretation, because my experience seeing the northern lights was similar to OC's. I had such high expectations from photos, and then I saw them and was somewhat underwhelmed. My friends are photographers and they took vibrant photos, but since then it has felt 'fake' somehow.

But your framing it as what is actually going on, just with better sensors than our eyes have, makes me appreciate the art more.

Interesting question. I described what I liked about his character, so maybe it's just using that and is nodding along to the character's name. Maybe it has access to the script or some analysis of the character.

With Claude I often say “no glazing” and have told it to take the persona of Paul Bettany’s character in Margin Call, a nice enough but blunt/unimpressed senior colleague who doesn’t beat around the bush. Works pretty well.

This is really exciting. The world of non-electronic computer interfaces has a ton of potential, so I love seeing people build them and write up their experiences.

Congrats OP!

I spend all of my free time woodworking; thankfully it only took me 10 years to find the power of hobbies.

That'll give you a totally different drink. Chartreuse and absinthe both have strong but different flavors; not to mention that a bijou has 3/4oz of chartreuse but that much absinthe would totally overpower any other ingredient.

Such a fun and entertaining read. I'd never suggest someone give up a software career to become a food writer, but I'd love to read more of OP's writing as he pursues these goals.

I like it from the standpoint of kids not being afraid of power tools. Plenty of adults would never do woodworking because the tools seem too scary. Teaching kids that power tools don't need to be scary as long as they're used safely is a worthwhile output on its own IMO.

Curious about your thoughts on homebuilt AI tools for dealing with ADHD side effects. I've identified a handful of habits I struggle with but want to do, and thought processes that can be challenging. I've planned to plug these into an LLM to have it do midday checkins about how I'm feeling and then respond in line with what I want to focus on.

Never occurred to me that something focused on symptoms instead of treatment could be harmful, but I suppose it's worth considering.

Thought similarly. It looks very clean, is well lit, the decisions look purposeful (no random crap on the shelves), and the materials wear well (wood vs e.g. cheap plastic chairs).

I don't quite follow this logic. Nearly all SaaS has ongoing costs from the provider: hosting, support, r&d, etc.

How is that rent seeking?

If you're interested in the US war build up in general, Freedom's Forge is an excellent read.

That's an interesting dynamic of the training data impacting the architecture. I wonder if this is a one-off or we see that in other areas as well.

What’s the purpose of Jupyter here? Isn’t that optimized for notebooks, which presumably wouldn’t be relevant on the server?

Cancellation fee higher than remaining months is extremely shady.

Very possible that the current pricing/wording is the result of being sued by the DOJ.

If you look at their plans (https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html), and select "Annual, billed monthly", it pretty clearly says "Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days."

This seems like a common misunderstanding. Lots of SaaS have cheaper annual pricing. IIUC Adobe lets you get the cheaper annual pricing and then pay for it on a monthly basis. If you cancel early, you have to pay out the rest of your annual plan. This is no different than if you'd paid for it up front, and prevents people from signing up for the annual plan to get a cheaper monthly price and then canceling early.

Sadly they have a waiting list

Same here. Tonight I added Whatsapp to Claude Desktop via Luke Harries' https://github.com/lharries/whatsapp-mcp. Very solid intro into how it all works.

It's a pretty classic canary trap/barium meal test, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#Barium_meal_test

Shocking how often I see a seemingly good idea end with "... and it'll all be on chain", causing me to immediately lose faith in the original concept.

Are you open to sharing at a high level what their approach was? I'm quite curious what this kind of thing looks like outside of movies.

Oof. This is incredibly bleak, but also a good insight. Is the "settlement == bribe" comparison yours or did you read it somewhere?