speak_plainly

We're on the path to putting Augustine's City of God theory of population to the test.

The Daily: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260807/dq260...

The college scorecard Lisa Gelobter lead is really useful:

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/

I'm purging my brain of all the useless knowledge I've accumulated over the years and extending my cognition as far as it can go by relying on AI, and I've gained enough weight to survive the first round of famines. But I probably would have done both with or without an impending Singularity.

People are definitely taking things too far, even here with the random and often baseless ‘this is AI’ comments.

With that said though, I won’t order food off a delivery app if I see even a single AI-generated food image.

Cloudflare offers a free plan that's fantastic. The free plan gives you effectively unlimited DNS/CDN traffic for a normal site, while the main practical cap is 100,000 Worker invocations per day, with 10 ms CPU per Worker request and a 100 MB request body limit. (If that means anything to you).

The next tier up from free is $25/month or $240 per year.

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/ https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/

I bet this is an attempt by Microsoft at trying to win back fans.

I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A

We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.

For people who teach through writing, there are great tools out there like MATCHA: https://matchawriter.com. It's a secure writing environment that verifies authorship by recording the full writing process and, when needed, can restrict copy-paste, automation, and access to other applications.

In my opinion, most of Academia's pains are wholly self-inflicted.

I dunno what’s worse: having no data footprint when you apply to rent from this landlord who is doing bulk data purchases and de-anonymizing it to screen you, or having the wrong data footprint.

Probably Handoff and cross-device application state syncing.

I think the point is that if it's irrelevant, why mention it?

You’re right, maybe roughly circa 1930 across internationally recognized research universities? For some reason I thought Oxford was the holdout.

PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 with some resistance and apprehension.

The issue here is that academia forgot what it was about a long time ago and is now having to face the consequences for a hundred years of bad decisions.

Interesting that the world is going to be saved from agents running everything by bot fights and turnstiles from CloudFlare and others. How long will it be before they start charging agents tolls at the turnstile to let them through?

The little pencil effect is a nice touch.

I love the iPhone Air. Apple better not discontinue it.

My advice to all iPhone users who want better battery life: either turn off background app refresh or be very selective in which apps can refresh.

Your battery life will improve but nothing in your experience will change.

Rest in Peace, John.

It looks like Adam Curry and John’s wife Mimi will be hosting an episode of No Agenda tomorrow to share stories and anecdotes in remembrance.

https://mailchi.mp/nashownotes/rip-jcd-no-agenda-newsletter?...

It feels like AI is going to be the end of Google. The post-Schmidt company culture cannot produce consistent, consumer-friendly products that any sane person would want to use consistently.

This is a good thing for travellers.

In border security there are generally two camps, one that uses data and intelligence to go after the worst, large-scale criminal operations and networks, and generally makes travelling easy for the average person, and the other is like traditional cops using traditional tactics… the kind that will miss the person smuggling a kilogram of cocaine in their suitcase but will go after the old man who didn’t declare a pair of socks he bought on a trip. They generally make travel awful.

Support the intelligence-driven side of border security and reject the traditional cop camp.

Thanks for all the links, I love feeding my RSS reader.

I really like this: http://blog.beforemario.com updates are rare these days, but they cover Nintendo corporate history and products before the company got into video games.

I wonder what Jony Ive is thinking about his partnership at the moment.

I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.

Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.

If you were being fair, designers typically don't decide the website strategy or write the copy. Ente's site seems heavily optimized for a search-driven funnel – they are targeting people explicitly searching for 'photo storage.' When that's your primary acquisition channel, you can afford to be less pedantic about copy variety. They keep the copy incredibly sparse and let the context do the heavy lifting, there is also no need to repeat descriptions on-site when that context is already handled by the search description and App Store links. When people arrive on the site, they know what they've found.

In terms of the design, they cut through a lot of the bullshit developers and designers do on the web. The execution is great and there are a lot of high-fidelity details: the scale is on point, the text hierarchy is great, the use of colour is smart, it has a fantastic, almost brochure-like layout, and generally, the design is consistent throughout and plays an important role in customer experience and branding their product.

You're not their customer, they're not targeting Hacker News as a potential sales funnel. If your takeaway is the design team isn't interested in the product, I hope to God you don't work in web.

I spend my days yelling at various AI agents for lying, misunderstanding, or misrepresentation of facts. It feels like a modern spiritual process.

Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.

That would be ideal, but I think we're heading straight for Idiocracy's 'Ow! My Balls'.

It's crazy that they sort of deprecated chat in the new ChatGPT app.

Yeah I think the absence of problems is one way to think about it but it's closer to half the equation.

Quality is a set of characteristics that are ultimately decided by the user, and not every user will agree on what those characteristics should be. This is why user testing of all sorts is very valuable.

You have to go back to Walter Shewhart's work and writings while at Bell Labs. In 1931's 'Economic Control of Quality of a Manufactured Product' he draws a line between 'a thing' and the human experience of it, drawing heavily from the philosophy of C.I. Lewis:

"There are two common aspects of quality: one of them has to do with the consideration of the quality of a thing as an objective reality independent of the existence of man. The other has to do with what we think, feel or sense as a result of the objective reality. In other words, there is a subjective side of quality."

He draws a line between objective quality (the measurable, physical things) and subjective quality (the human relationship to those properties).

Later in 1939's 'Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control' he gives a good example:

"Let us take a very simple example. Suppose we consider the quality of a glass of water. We may list some of its characteristics as follows: temperature, volume, chemical purity, taste, clarity, and color. If we look at any one of these characteristics, say temperature, we see that it is impossible to specify the temperature of a glass of water to the last degree of accuracy."

I would argue this is the standard to go for when looking for a definition. Ask yourself what makes a quality glass of water and you'll immediately realize you need to ask 'according to who?'.

You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.

The damage is done. The truly jarring realization isn't that AI companies made these predictions, but how eagerly countless corporations were willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of profit – even at the cost of economic collapse.