philip1209

Cal Newport is notable not only as a professor of CS at Georgetown, but also as a founder of their Center for Digital Ethics.

I submitted one of his past articles and it was flag-killed. His post titles may seem incendiary, but he has the credentials to back it up and seems to identify concrete opportunities without leaning into doomerism.

I think you’ve gotten things confused.

Automative insurance has entered the “regulatory capture” stage, which is the highest form of actualization in capitalism.

Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis.

We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

I wish I could set up "Sign in with Apple" on a blog without paying $99/yr for a developer license.

I know there are lots of reasonable concerns about unauthorized access to private information.

This is somewhat solved problem in other areas, like banking and government. Not zero, but asymptotically low.

I think we need to criminalize misuse more clearly, preferably on a federal level. We need clear justifications for each use of data. And, we should require periodic audits by an independent third party - perhaps funded in the purchase contracts as a line item and held in reserve.

This doesn’t solve the problem of legal use - which could be contentious now or in the future. But, this technology isn’t going away and good legislation to control it makes sense.

Will this run on Cerebas? I'm really looking forward to that.

Same - I had some "AI-assisted coding interviews" where I had to bring my own AI tools, and found the speed of codex-spark to be important for making progress quickly (and not sitting there waiting on Opus to think for 10 minutes).

“Not a commodity”

Cash back is huge for people expensing rides. “Spend company money on us, and take your personal rides every once in a while for free.”

Same model as airlines.

Farm, and you won't have to scavenge for food.

Get a tractor, and spend less time farming.

The factory will save time making tractors, so everybody can have one.

Computers will make the factories more efficient.

AI will make the computers more efficient.

I recommend reading a book about consulting, e.g. in McKinsey's style.

Your PM job will be a lot more about influence and communication.

Influence is often about getting people to trust you and get the last 10% done. Prepare to spend 3 months on a very technically-difficult project, then have the CEO rip apart your demo because the copy on the first screen isn't what he expects, without every getting deeper in to the product. That's the last 10% and your job is getting your tired team to care about it.

The way decisions are made will be significantly different compared to the egalitarianism of engineering. Understanding how your organization makes decisions and adapting to it is key to success as a PM. (Consensus? Founder mode? Disagree and commit?)

Good PMs make impact and at the end of the day. Your career is almost entirely dependent on your manager's subjective opinion of your work. You'll need to learn to "manage up" - ensuring that your manager agrees with your decisions and thinks that you have had impact.

The persona that fails in PM is the pseudo-academic who was told they were smart as a kid, and can't hustle, make a decision, or sell others on their ideas. You need to be prepared for conflict.

Fascinating.

I wonder what the implications for radar-absorbing finishes are. Could they be more aerodynamic already?

> We have experienced an increase in temperatures within a single data center, which in some cases has caused impairments for instances in the Availability Zone.

Causing downstream outages, e.g. https://status.modal.com/

Isn’t it really “pushing a feature to their products”?

We proactively rotated keys. Even if you haven’t received an official email, expect customers to inquire about this tomorrow morning.

Would love to see Apple’s china investment on this chart.

good thing it's getting easier to code - nothing bad can come of this :-)

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him.

All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around the Pentagon's decisions, not Anthropic's. And nobody seems interested in examining whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one. That seems like a story worth writing.

At least they put a ladder up that tree

Can they keep their CISO out of jail?

> each evening, it withdrew to a covered location.

Interesting - why?

I'm frustrated with the Localstack license changes and will evaluate ministack.

But, for anybody else who needs a quick fix - you can pin to the `community-archive` tag and it should unblock you quickly:

https://hub.docker.com/layers/localstack/localstack/communit...

distracted by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

I built Chroma's integration for Stripe Projects. Took two or three days to get it integrated and live.

As a developer tool, integrating Stripe Projects felt a lot like adding "Sign in with Google" - Stripe acts as a trusted identity and billing provider, but for agents instead of humans. The core insight is that agent commerce is a trust problem: an agent can't (shouldn't?) enter a credit card or verify an email, so you need a trusted third party to KYC both sides. Stripe already has that relationship with both developers and customers.

It's a smooth experience overall - try it out.

I wrote more about agent experience here: https://www.philipithomas.com/agent-experience

the scent came from a rejected takeoff, so probably brake pad smoke - which could be medically serious, e.g. for COPD.

RTOs throw off a ton of energy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S6nZDGBPsak

> doesn't sound too safe to me.

Compared to what?

Found these:

https://github.com/openiddict/openiddict-core/issues/2428

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/479882107?pli=1

Imagine if future versions had a sim card slot for data-only connections. That would be killer - a main reason I've considered an iPad is for "ambient internet" wherever you go. Why has that phone feature not made its way to laptops?

I think the deeper need is a "self-review" flow.

People push AI-reviewed code like they wrote it. In the past, "wrote it" implies "reviewed it." With AI, that's no longer true.

I advocate for GitHub and other code review systems to add a "Require self-review" option, where people must attest that they reviewed and approved their own code. This change might seem symbolic, but it clearly sets workflows and expectations.