smelendez

Nobody back then would have ever said IRC was “sacred ground.” What does that even mean?

And I read 2600 and also occasionally submitted, but it certainly wasn’t treated as gospel. Also of course there was clout chasing — most of the scene was teenagers trying to impress each other!

I remember playing The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in the 1990s. It came on CD and was very buggy, and I would periodically call Bethesda and they would send me the newest patches on a floppy disk.

Right now the AI really needs to just be another interface to menu options the user already has, ideally with a “dumb” layer taking over to confirm every action with the user.

If you give the AI options the user doesn’t normally have, like “give myself a $50 store credit” or “transfer me to the CEO,” people will find and share ways to trigger it. If you don’t have some kind of manual confirmation, the AI will occasionally do things like making purchases or closing accounts without authorization.

I suspect there are other issues, like recording credit card numbers and other sensitive data, or incorrect information about the call, to any kind of “notes” field.

How do you use Amazon to commission custom software? Was this through the retail site or AWS?

Yes, that’s a great example.

I think most of the time you’d play with the order it would be for comic effect, like someone saying “my dinner is pretzels now” after having too big a snack.

I actually thought the article could be more explicit about that, but in fairness I think the author figured readers were familiar with the app and that it would be obvious there’s no tarot functionality.

Yeah, this is the thing you can ask an LLM and get a confident and verbose wrong answer.

Yeah, I frequently wish you could get directions from your current point on a train/bus line.

The word set is enough to identify some people based on speech patterns or interests. The inclusion of other words in the set — cocaine, divorce, abortion, merger, lymphoma — would make many people uncomfortable.

A lot of the buildings along Canal Street in New Orleans, with souvenir and liquor stores on the ground floor, are empty upstairs as well.

I can think of buildings in other cities in seemingly premium real estate, including the Chicago Loop, that are notably underutilized.

Old, cramped upstairs spaces in crowded, touristy commercial districts just aren’t that useful. A small business would rather just get an office in WeWork.

Converting to housing is going to be expensive and probably also not worth it. Tourist lodging might work, but the licensing can also be an issue and tourists can be weird — no matter how much you tell people a place like that is noisy and on one of the busiest corners in the world, you’ll get reviews complaining about the noise and chaos.

I could see the NES being comparable to the Model T.

People are going to know what an NES or an “original Nintendo” is for decades, just like we all know what a Model T is.

I mean, how common is a terminal master’s program in STEM fields?

I imagine there are departments where it’s more common to get a master’s by dropping out of the PhD program early than through any other path. Especially for people with a bachelor’s in the same field.

Probably also for students with “just” a bachelor’s. Most PhD students don’t enter with a master’s.

I do wonder if NSF is hoping to seed more industry-sponsored PhDs as well, e.g., the first will be funded by NSF to establish the program, and industry will fund more once the program gets going.

Definitely makes sense to me they call it a PhD, not a master’s. A PhD is more prestigious and signals the holder is ready and eager to do cutting-edge research and has some experience doing so.

There are all kinds of master’s degrees (I say as someone who has one) and reasons for getting them, so they’re not as strong a signal of anything in particular. And they can mean someone switched careers, someone dropped out of a PhD program, someone took advanced classes during undergrad, someone got a bachelor’s in one country and wanted to study and work in another, etc.

Yeah, Facebook was primarily a directory when it started, a cross between a college facebook (like a yearbook given at the start of the year instead of the end) and a phone book.

Also, it didn’t allow custom styles or html, which was unusual at the time but ultimately helped it take off to the point that, like Google, it didn’t have allow HTML or JS in ads either.

Sure, but they’re still potentially sitting in limbo and turned off in the trunk of an employee’s car or whatever. If you’re concerned about leak issues, why not wipe them and have them shipped back for less than the cost of an extra week of severance.

Also, many employees likely have their own personal laptops and may not have any use for them.

Six years ago was a long time — summer 2020.

Substack is a huge competitor that has grown dramatically in that time. Beehiiv is another competitor that just launched a bunch of new features. Porn and sexy content is now on Onlyfans, which was just becoming mainstream during the pandemic.

More recently, some podcasts have started focusing on YouTube and may be less interested in the paid-elsewhere subscription model.

This seems more like a bounty for the laptop potentially full of company information, passwords, code, secrets, etc., which Patreon does not want out in the wild or to have to deploy lawyers to demand back. The carrot, rather than the stick.

Right, and any musicians taking that kind of gig will have professional photos they would happily share that you could just put some text on top of!

With the OP and restaurant menus in general, and to some extent here, it also feels like false advertising: You’re showing an illustration that’s not even based on the real product or people.

Yes, this is exactly the problem.

Multiple pieces of software vying to be your passkey provider, often using dark patterns so you don’t realize you’re making a choice, and not using the term “passkey” so people are using the technology without knowing what it is or how to research it.

Kind of reflects the state of the web today, where every company wants to be your intermediary in every interaction, from making a purchase to transcribing a meeting.

I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.

Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.

It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.

Ignoring it is hard to distinguish from waiting to see how other businesses successfully use it, then copying them, which will then be framed as adopting best practices.

> The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this.

Yeah, this is the big question. Family money?

Whatever the case, it’s still pretty impressive. Running a project involving legacy IP and legacy source code and actually getting multiple games out the door (and a puff piece in the New York Times) isn’t as simple as throwing money at it.

Very interesting!

> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.

The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.

Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.

> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.

Right. Laptops are basically work (or school) tools now for a lot of people. They might have one tucked away that they pull out now and then when they need it, similar to a power drill or a sewing machine. It’s not a daily use device.

I think it helped Microsoft historically that people used their operating systems at home, although even then a lot of people would have learned Windows at work or school first.

And also typing cat x to get a quick look at the file, hitting up, then piping that into another command and taking a look, hitting up, piping that result into a third command etc.

The most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.

This is how it now works with music, I believe. Apple, Amazon, Bandcamp, etc. all sell you access to DRM-free files along with the ability to download or stream them in perpetuity.

Yeah, it’s a problem with the employment and organizational structure, in a way.

Software doesn’t need continual redesign and redevelopment at constant scale, nor is there unlimited need for new software tools in any one company’s wheelhouse, but the expectation is that software companies hire people and keep them onboard as long as they’re performing well, not that they’ll scale up for a periodic launch and then scale down again. And a company that did that — outside of the video game industry — would be shunned by developers (at least in a good labor market).

They do need more attention per person. Doing anything with a group of eight is just more complicated, and you’re more likely to have a person in the group who slows things down for whatever reason plus people trying to help them which can slow things down more.

They’ll take longer per person to order because they’ll be coordinating appetizers and who’s sharing what, etc.

They’re more likely to be celebrating a special occasion which means people less familiar with the restaurant or even people who don’t eat out much at all.

And the group is big enough that people will be having side conversations while one side of the table talks to the server, which also slows things down.

I’d put working for tips in here as well.

From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.

Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.