jaysonelliot

You should use your own words. It might seem that a tool like Grammarly is just an advanced spellcheck, but what it's really doing is replacing your personal style of writing with its own.

It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

I bought their Clicks phone case for iPhone and was very disappointed. The keyboard was dismal to type on and slowed me down significantly.

If they're using the same keyboard in this phone, it won't be of interest to me.

546,229 character-length URL for the Crime and Punishment example.

Half a megabyte for a URL. That certainly is a thing.

Which ones do you prefer?

[flagged]

Before installing all those apps the author listed, I'd recommend this exercise:

Let the battery die on your phone, and live one week without it. Cold turkey. Tell people in advance if you need to, give them an alternate way to reach you. Replace your phone for that week with a small notebook that fits in your pocket.

During that week, every time you want to do something that requires a smartphone, jot it down in your notebook. Then, fifteen minutes later or so, write down what you did instead.

After a week, you're ready to start using your smartphone again and turn it into a so-called "dumb phone." Read your notebook and think honestly about which things you really needed to do, and which ones weren't such a big deal after all.

Most people probably don't. I'm an editor who's been working in print for years, so the keyboard shortcut for an em dash is muscle memory for me at this point. I have always been a Chicago Manual of Style person, so I don't place spaces around the em dash. AP style guide users do place a space around it.

"Dug tunnels" - one of the most ridiculous boondoggles of any modern industrialist. The Boring Company is a machine for overpromising to get government contracts and underdelivering at exponential scale. He didn't start PayPal, he joined it and ended up getting fired, albeit with a golden parachute that gave him the chance to make more bets.

The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he managed to hype up very well. I'll give him this, he's an excellent huckster. But listen to his opinions? I wouldn't let him tell me what color an orange was.

"Today, you still find airbrush-inspired art in advertising that’s done digitally rather than with ink on paper. The digital art is a little too perfect though — the gradient blends are flawless, while an airbrush would give you the slightest inconsistencies that made it look more genuine."

I feel that way about so much digital painting and illustration now. Artists can work faster than they can with physical media, but the end result is always missing something when there are no happy accidents.

Every time Douglas Adams' biscuit story is told, I laugh as hard as if I were hearing it for the first time.

I work for Khoi. I should ask him if he really gave this quote.

That's a very insightful take. I think an LLM would have some role in a good text adventure game, in terms of being able to understand any natural language input and respond intelligently. But as you point out, it would need to do so within strict constraints set by the game designer.

I haven't played with the most state of the art parsers that are available right now, so I wonder how large the gap is between a great parser and using an LLM to process user input.

It's a pretty cool proof of concept. I did run into some weirdness with it right away when trying the Harry Potter book. The app kept switching between 2nd and 3rd person for Harry.

The main thing for me, though, was the feeling of emptiness I got while playing. I love text adventures, having grown up with Infocom games. The thing about them is that you can feel the choices made by the writer / programmer, just like you can feel the human author behind a book.

I'm sure part of what feels empty to me is because I know it was autogenerated. But I feel that even if I was shown this without knowing an LLM was behind it, the gameplay wouldn't be as rewarding as something written by a human using Inform.

That's a great point. For example, my wife probably knows me better than anyone in the world. She's very good at seeing a book and knowing I'm probably going to like it. That includes your example of "this is a good book for a trip" vs "this is a good book to read at home, at night." But even she gets it wrong about 20% of the time.

In order to be able to really recommend something as multi-faceted as a book, movie, or song, you have to know a person on pretty much every level. I suppose seeing a person's entire social graph, search history, LLM history, media consumption history, and browser history might get you close, but it's still a Hard Problem™.

The concept is great. Some constructive feedback on the execution:

I expected to be able to provide a lot more than just five books. The splash page says "Our AI analyzes your reading DNA to recommend books you'll absolutely love—guaranteed to match your unique taste." That makes it sound like it's going to dive deep into my reading history and really think about my taste. Five books is absolutely not "my reading DNA."

There are lots of ways to get a richer picture of the books a person loves. You could connect to Goodreads or Storygraph, or scrape their social media for books you've discussed, or let users upload a .csv exported from other sources like LibraryThing, their Amazon wishlist, or their own local lists they might keep on Obsidian, Notion, or wherever. My public library keeps my reading history automatically - that would be another good data source for my "reading DNA."

Right now, it's just an AI recommendation based on five books. I can do that with any LLM from ChatGPT to Copilot to Gemini. The recommendation I got was very basic, just obviously similar books from the same authors I entered or ones that are closely related.

People's tastes are complex. Even if you allow much larger data sets to create a person's reading DNA, that alone won't necessarily recommend books that are right for them. For example, I love PG Wodehouse, but I have no interest at all in Evelyn Waugh, James Thurber, or G. K. Chesterton. A great recommendation engine would ask me why I love a book, and try to tease out the reasons behind my reading list in order to recommend books that will be more accurate and unexpected than I could get from a simple ChatGPT query or my Goodreads profile.

A site like this needs to do a lot to stand out. It's an excellent concept, I hope you develop it into something special.

It wasn't a rendering by an artist, it's just an autogenerated Midjourney image.

Using Midjourney to visualize a historical structure like this is not just lazy, it's very misleading.

Especially when there are actual digital recreations, available for free use under Creative Commons, based on historical information and modern surveys: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PHAROS2013-3000x2250...

The AI generated images were an immediate turn-off to me as well. Whatever one thinks of the aesthetics, they're a huge signal that I'm looking at a product that's focused on monetizing me.

The overall design is unfocused and cluttered, just the exact thing I don't need as someone with ADHD.

I don't think I'd use this.

You're making the error of judging Raskin's approach with the knowledge of user interfaces that a person in 2025 has. It's been 40 years since that interview. Many people today weren't even born yet.

In that 40 years, many UI conventions have sprung up, and we've internalized them to the point that they're so familiar we actually say they're intuitive.

But if you go back to the state of computing in 1986, or even earlier, when Raskin was developing his UX principles for the Canon Cat and the SwyftCard, he was considering computer interfaces that were almost exclusively command-line interfaces.

You're not supposed to "idolize" any designer or engineer. But I would highly encourage you to read The Humane Interface, learn about the underlying principles of usability and interface design, and consider how you'd apply them to a UI today, 40 years later. The execution you'd come up with would be different. But the principles he started from are foundational and very useful.

Does this mean the CIA is not subject to the Federal Records Act, or does it mean they're simply flaunting the law?

Can you explain that joke for me? I keep reading it and I don't get it.

Absolutely agree. There's a huge advantage to working on a pre-internet computer for word processing, in terms of being able to focus.

But the VIC-20 screen is painful to look at. Personally, I use an Apple //e with WordStar.

This sounds so absolutely absurd that it would probably work.

Excellent UI and very fun to explore, although North America is conspicuously blank before 1607. Hopefully more sources can be added to this to fill that out.

Yes, it really does matter. The concept that "language evolves" is absolutely valid when you're talking about the introduction of new words and phrases and adapting existing words to new purposes.

It's not the principle to invoke when you're talking about simply making logical mistakes. A question mark is used at the end of a question, not a statement. "How it works" is a statement. "How does it work?" would be the way to word the same CTA as a question.

Details matter because they add up to an overall impression of the quality of your work. Think of it as the "Brown M&Ms" principle, if you're familiar with that story. (Google it if you're not, it's a great anecdote.)

I doubt that becoming another "developing economy" where you have to spend 8-10 hours a day working in a call center would increase happiness.

Despite the headline CBS gave the article, it seems the problem is not with happiness, but with the seductive appeal of materialism and the effects of exposing one culture to another.

Social comparison theory is the idea that our satisfaction with what we have isn't an objective measure, but is actually based on what we see other people have. Young people generally seem to have an innate desire to leave their hometowns and seek out what else might be waiting out there for them. When you add in globalization and media influence exposing them to what looks like a "better" life with more things, it's not surprising that they've seen ~9% of young people leave Bhutan.

The other question is, what will happen if Bhutan does increase their financial wealth as well as their happiness? Will they then see a net influx of people through immigration, looking for the lifestyle Bhutan promises? And will those new people be able to maintain the culture Bhutan has cultivated?

It sounds like the concept of Gross National Happiness is a successful one, on its own, but it brings new challenges that couldn't have been forseen originally. That doesn't mean they can't solve them without giving up their core values.

I'm confused by this statement in the article:

<< LignoSat is made of honoki, a kind of magnolia tree native to Japan, and has been made using a traditional Japanese technique without screws or glue. >>

From photos I've seen while searching for more information, it does appear that there's a wooden core structure that is joined without fasteners. But it's then given a metal exoskeleton and what certainly appears to be metal fasteners.

I'd like to understand whether the goal is to create satellites without metal, as the article seemed to imply.

I find it sadly ironic that using AI to make images of animals directly contributes to the global warming that is driving those same animals extinct.

It's very fun! The only change I'd make would be to use real photos of the animals instead of the AI images. It's hard to relate to them the way actual pictures would be.

Pexels is an excellent source of free, creative commons images and they have all the animals you need. Here's some geckos https://www.pexels.com/search/gecko/ :)