leokennis

Besides the useful product, also a very lovely site.

Page size around 85 KB, bullshit around 0 BS, loaded in 140 ms on my end.

> The fix for having no market is to act like the teams you serve could leave.

My nomination for this months "clarity of thought and ability to express it eloquently" medal.

Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service.

The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.

It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.

From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.

As you probably guessed, I'm in IT and not in the fine arts ;-)

I got my first real Pentium

Bought it at the local PC shop

Played Rollercoaster Tycoon, CD-ROM straight from it's huge box, on it 'til my fingers bled

Was the summer of '99

From the perspective of “an average person”, ChatGPT is delivering fantastic products.

- For general chat and web search, occasional image editing, small coding work, document review etc. ChatGPT Plus is basically limitless and “just works” since 5.6. I’ve yet to give it some task it cannot do.

- When given sensible instructions, it hardly annoys with weird phrasing, glazing, or annoying constructs.

- The apps are very good (ignoring the initially terrible Codex app)

It’s easily my best spent $23 a month.

The small square box at the very end of the document, with accompanying text, is just delightful:

> To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you! → [__]

All over the document, you can see Tim Schafer "wasted his time" by adding personality (jokes, graphics, asides) to what is basically an internal document.

I think in 2026 a document lovingly crafted like this would be deemed a great waste of time, lack of efficiency and an affront to shareholder value.

1000% agree.

If I’m looking for a handyman on (the Dutch equivalent to) Craigslist, either very short text with spelling errors or something obviously AI are both a positive signal. These are people too busy doing actual jobs, to fret over smoothly copywritten ads.

Caveat: net optimistic on a grand time scale, under the assumption humanity becomes better only after it is humbled by other species first.

For me, the iPhone is the primary device I unlock and use in short burst 10's of times throughout the day.

The iPad (Mini) is something I use more deliberately, like twice per day to read the newspaper and to watch some video.

For me the Duo seems like you're suffering a lot for the first use case, just to make the second use case possible.

I think I'll stick with separate devices.

Now's as good a time as ever to ask this question.

I have an iPhone logged in to my iCloud account.

My wife has her iPhone logged in to her own iCloud account.

Both of these iCloud accounts, plus a few more from my kids, make up our "Apple Family" thingy.

My wife bought AirPods. Paired them to her iPhone.

Why oh why every few weeks, when she gets the AirPods from their case, do they automatically connect to my iPhone and steal the audio from my (non-Apple) wireless earbuds I was using?

Do AirPods truly traverse devices based on the fact that separate devices/iCloud accounts are part of a family?

The average Joe, via AirPods and the like, in 2026 has access to vastly better audio than in 2005.

In 2005, you had serious and expensive high end audio from the established brands (Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic etc.) and you had consumer audio for consumer prices that sounded pretty terrible: no bass extension, flat mids.

In 2026 you have:

- Serious and expensive high end audio from the established brands (maybe even some of the same models as 2005...)

- A new category of convenience driven "mid-fi" like all the Sony, Bose etc. ANC headphones and AirPods Pro - often with the "laid back, a lot of bass, slightly recessed mids" sound signature but still producing very acceptable sound

- Consumer audio for consumer prices, but now even the cheap earbuds and headphones (JBL, chinese brands etc.) sound by all means passable, are wireless, have good battery life

I would say there has never been a better time to be a "good sound enjoyer" than now.

Every news headline or public statement these days is a gut punch. Only bad news, and nothing we (as "the general public") can do about it.

Take this one. Ok, AI is going to ruin us all. But let's say we do our civic duty: we protest, vote in candidates with good views on AI etc. and somehow convince or regulate OpenAI and Anthropic into stopping their arms race... Then what about China? It would be a great opportunity for them if their major competitor were out of the arms race.

So basically we have no choice or influence; and even if we did, we'd be choosing from two terrible outcomes.

Same for geopolitics, climate, economy...just bad bad bad all around.

Just like WordPerfect enabled your mom to create a professional-enough cover letter, ChatGPT allows your mom to send you a more or less visually pleasing virtual birthday card of you wearing a party hat.

Both for simplicity and portability, I am a very happy user of https://firecore.com/infuse.

I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).

I stopped using Gemini a few months ago because it would often just (partially) reply literal nonsense to me.

Think 2023 style ChatGPT. Something like “to open a document on your Mac click File > Open docurrrar” - like it suddenly forgot it had to produce actual words.

Overall I enjoyed its speed and comprehensiveness. But those occurrences of nonsense just made it feel like a great car that once a month just stops in the middle of the highway.

Especially Gruber is getting really tiresome. Almost devolving into a “look at them there fruity Yuropeeans with their healthcare and holidays”-level of tech commentary about any minor roadbump big-US-tech encounters in the EU.

Unfortunately (but logically I think) the OSM-ecosystem is very Android leaning - so missing out on a large % of street walking smartphone wielding would-be mappers.

Also, to get "basic non-tech regular people" involved in improving the maps, it's too complicated (i.e. even the simplest street or sidewalk has a lot of tags with arcane names, which need to be set to exact values according to very deeply buried and confusing documentation).

For street level small maintenance level enhancements, I would envision (and need) an app that would consist of:

- See the point/lines/area that make up the map at the place where I stand

- Add a new point/line/area or drag existing ones to change their shape

- Answer some simple questions about what you added or edited (i.e. for an area: "is this grass?" or "is this parking space?", for a line "is this paved?" or "can a car drive here?")

- Optionally, either directly publish the changes or add them to some review queue where an expert can asynchronously review and catch the most basic mistakes or abuse

Although I do need to say that despite this app not existing, OSM is often the most detailed and up to date map in my area. I think it heavily depends on if your neighborhood has an OSM enthusiast or not.

If you’re a startup but you don’t have a blog post with some wishy washy doodah showcasing your own personal font, its cute glyphs, its heritage in 1800’s Europe and some translucent overlays showing how it’s definitely different but not really compared to your initial bog standard font, are you really a startup?

I own the Clara BW (C) and the Libra Colour (L).

The C is sharper but the L looks more like a real book/paper. I believe as an artifact of the colour screen and it’s called “screenshot effect”. In the end, once you use either for 10 minutes it becomes “the new normal”.

5.6 Sol is a joy to use for "daily chat" as well. Compared to earlier OpenAI models it catches and corrects its mistakes very reliably. It also seems way smarter in tuning its replies to areas I am more/less knowledgeable about (i.e. when I ask it a law question, it assumes I know as much as a toddler which is true, but on political topics it more easily throws around terminology) and including analogies. On medium thinking, it's a very good compromise between speed and quality.

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

- Banksy

I have AdGuard DNS set up (mainly use HaGeZi lists) for system wide blocking + AdGuard content blockers to catch some web ads and annoyances that cannot be caught via DNS.

Works very well, it’s been a good long while since any ad cheapened my web experience.

Exact same question as you. When the new ChatGPT app dropped it suggested to me to set up a task something like (paraphrased) “every Monday read my Gmail and Slack an make a summary and task list for the week”.

Why would I need an LLM to do this for me? That’s 5 minutes of work max, and doing it gets me in the flow of work again, to see what’s going on and needs to be done.

Even if Lightning was possibly a nicer or smaller connector; nothing beats a true industry standard. Makes the entire “what chargers and cables to bring to connect my stuff” question so much easier.

It definitely has the Vaporwave aesthetic. Would love to try and test this for usability.

Reading your reply, I think we have different definitions of “incredibly easy”.

I enjoyed OiNK and What.cd but ultimately their ratio requirements killed that joy.

At some point the “market” was saturated. 99% of music was on the site, and every release had plenty of seeders and peers.

Unless you had early access to new releases, or maybe a seedbox with insane bandwidth and storage, it was almost impossible to actually meaningfully seed.

For me the only working strategy was to download What.cd releases from other torrent sites, then “downloading” the release from What.cd and then wait weeks until I had seeded enough to be able to “afford” one new download.

> I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

Fully agree. I cleaned a potato processing plant at night. They had to stop production for a few hours so there was huge time pressure. Crawling under machines to drain waste water tanks (onto yourself as the plug was of course on the bottom), slippery potato-mash everywhere, reaching into and almost running over all kinds of machines and conveyor belts.

All while wearing a rubber suit in the heat of warm water pressure washers and the smell of industrial cleaning agents.

So yes, I'll happily take that 15 minute useless "strategy meeting" with you.