sobjornstad

HPV, not HSV. Acronym soup.

* HBV - Hepatitis B

* HSV - Herpes Simplex Virus (two strains, what most people call “herpes”)

* HPV - Human Papillomavirus

On iOS, there is an app called xSearch that integrates into Safari and sneakily hacks around the limited search engine options by watching your browsing history for queries to the search engine you've selected in Safari, then immediately rewriting the URL and navigating to the search engine you actually want.

Obviously this has security implications, but I don't ordinarily search for anything sketchy on my iPhone so I'm personally not too worried about it.

I was looking to see if someone had commented on this. For me it sometimes even happens if I start the workout before starting navigation – it will start off in the right configuration but then suddenly switch back to workout data in the middle of the ride.

Google Maps on the iPhone has a similar problem where a banner notification can block the section at the top that shows the next turn. If it's persistent (e.g., a calendar reminder), you have to try to swipe it away while driving without clicking on it by mistake. I guarantee multiple people have crashed because of this.

Whoever at Apple thinks that anything at all should override navigation for more than a couple of seconds without explicit user action is an idiot.

Indeed, the court actually explicitly held that Anthropic had the right to train their AIs on books, so long as they paid for them.

Is adding JPEG compression to your software “intentional degradation” of the software? I wouldn't say providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version of something qualifies as “degradation”.

It is certainly true that they did a poor job communicating this change to users (I did not know that the default was “high” before they introduced it, I assumed they had added an effort level both above and below whatever the only effort choice was there before). On the other hand, I was using Claude Code a fair bit on “medium” during that time period and it seemed to be performing just fine for me (and saving usage/time over “high”), so it doesn't seem clear that that was the wrong default, if only it had been explained better.

Is this comment in the wrong place? The article is literally about how the medical establishment gives good advice on acetaminophen and ibuprofen, but it's not getting through to people.

Even if you're working on one single thread of development, jj is easier and more flexible than git though. That it works better for super complicated workflows is just a bonus.

My favorite Apple example of this is that when the Apple Watch notices that you're walking/running/biking and asks if you want to start a workout, for some reason you cannot accept it with the double-tap-your-fingers gesture. Which is fine if it's warm outside...but when it's winter in Minnesota, if I want to activate it I have to take one of my gloves off, pull up my sleeves, and put the gloves back on, while bitching about how nobody designing the watch lives in a cold climate. (Especially when I'm on a bike. Riding no-hands in the snow is not a smart idea.)

I still buy e-books for nonfiction I expect I'll read once, take a few notes on, and then probably never come back to, if I can't easily get them at the library. No need to clutter up my already overflowing bookshelves. For anything else I'm with you – not only do you not have DRM or other bullshit, physical books are still easier to navigate and overall more usable.

(This is absolutely bonkers though – the experience of using an e-reader has basically not gotten better since 2008 when I got my first Kindle. There are still glaringly obvious usability issues which nobody has spent any time innovating on.)

Very frequently when I turn on my Kindle it starts on “Home”. I have never found anything on “Home” remotely useful, and just want to see the books that I already have on the device, but they keep pushing me over to the screen full of ads (and it often takes >5 seconds to switch screens after I tap on “Library” for some reason). I think that's what they're talking about.

Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.

I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.

This reminds me of the sailor who [decided](https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html) to measure his internal resistance by pushing probes through the skin on his thumbs and electrocuted himself with the 9V multimeter battery.

Yeah, but there's a big difference between having a car because you can afford it and it's often more convenient, and it being completely impractical to not have one. Or even to go have a beer without having to drive home.

Lifelong American Midwesterner and I'm also convinced there's a big difference in the taste of some produce between what you get at a typical American grocery store and a farmer's market or my local natural foods store. I get all my produce there, and people who don't normally shop there often comment on how much better my raw vegetables are when they eat at my house.

Someday I should go buy some produce from each store at peak season and try them side by side.

There are subtler versions of this too. I've been working on a TUI app for a couple of weeks, and having great success getting it to interactively test by sending tmux commands, but every once in a while it would just deliver code that didn't work. I finally realized it was because the capture tools I gave it didn't capture the cursor location, so it would, understandably, get confused about where it was and what was selected.

I promptly went and fixed this before doing any more work, because I know if I was put in that situation I would refuse to do any more work until I could actually use the app properly. In general, if you wouldn't be able to solve a problem with the tools you give an LLM, it will probably do a bad job too.

Relevant: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights

> Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.

At every place I have ever worked (as well as my personal life), the backlog was 10 times longer than anyone could ever hope to complete, and there were untold amounts of additional work that nobody even bothered adding to the backlog.

Some of that probably wouldn't materialize into real work if you could stay more on top of it – some of the things that eventually get dropped from the backlog were bad ideas or would time out of being useful before they got implemented even with higher velocity – but I think most companies could easily absorb a 300% increase or more in dev productivity and still be getting value out of it.

My assumption was always that the December promo was a combination – they were presumably way under capacity because everyone was on holiday given how enterprise-heavy they are, so giving people a bunch of extra usage with a loud promo meant a whole bunch of people would try Claude and see how good it had gotten at very little cost to Anthropic.

This is completely insane, and that's coming from someone who does 95% of edits in Claude Code now.

Claude at least does: add "permissions": { "defaultMode: "plan" } to your settings.json.

I'll note this only applies to new sessions though – if you do /clear and start working on something else it doesn't re-apply plan mode (I kind of wish it did)

Surely if I took a program written in Python and translated it line for line into JavaScript, that wouldn't allow me to treat it as original work. I don't see how this solves the problem, except very incrementally.

Nowadays I refuse to do any serious work that isn't in source control anywhere besides my NAS that takes copy-on-write snapshots every 15 minutes. It has saved my butt more times than I can count.

Yeah, except then they would lose 10 seconds from going 54 mph instead of 56 mph...

I worked at a place like this and we had a software registry, where if you had installed something and it wasn't on the registry somebody would start sending you nasty emails. This kind of thing would happen all the time: maybe the Linux machines weren't in the scans, or anything that came with the OS was whitelisted.

But if you wanted to install it separately on a computer that didn't have it already, then you'd need to get it “approved.”

I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly.

It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.

I have a vague recollection that it might come up named as such in Half-Blood Prince, written in Snape's old potions textbook?

In support of that hypothesis, the Fandom site lists it as “mentioned” in Half-Blood Prince, but it says nothing else and I'm traveling and don't have a copy to check, so not sure.

Literally every time if I press the "stop" button while it's writing back for the first conversation turn because I notice I forgot something and want to correct it, my prompt is lost.

Anytime I run into a bug like this, part of me wants to go calculate how much of humanity's collective time has been wasted by one company not fixing a trivial bug. It's got to be a lot.

Surprisingly, I find the Apple Watch significantly more comfortable and less perceptible than any other watch I've worn in the past. My theory is it's the contoured back for the heart rate monitor, etc. But maybe I'm just weird.

I've noticed the same thing with rote memory tasks like lines of poetry, so I think it might be a more general thing involving the memory consolidation properties of sleep, maybe particularly focused on fluency/speed rather than mere ability to recall.

I also hate the ones that are exactly at the spot where the speed limit changes and still flash you aggressively in the distance. Yeah, I'm going faster than 35 because the speed limit is 55 where I am and I'm still slowing down.