wanderingstan

I used it to have people transcribe my dad’s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a “Turk” saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!

I worked on a family archiving product (which dead ended) and dealt with this problem. My hacked solution was to repurpose the seconds value to encode precision, as you generally don’t care about seconds.

I forget the exact scheme, but it was something like this:

    0=minute precision 
    1=hour
    2=day
    3=month
    4=quarter/season
    5=year
    6=decade

Also note that the ISO date standard allows you to drop any digits you aren’t sure about, so all these are valid:

    1980-12-25T08
    1960-12-06
    1959-12
    196

I chose a toaster specifically because it's about the simplest electrical device out there, and thus pushes the thesis to the extreme. But smart toasters are pretty common: https://revcook.com/products/r180-connect-plus-smart-toaster...

And as other commenter pointed out, a smart toaster with ads or data collection can be subsidized and thus be more profitable. (Oh what a world we're headed for!)

In any case, I think the LLM-everywhere thesis holds even strong for even moderate-complexity devices like power plugs, microwaves, and mobile phones.

Yes! Continuing on thoughts of LLM compression, I'm now convinced and amazed that economics will dictate that all devices contain a copy of all information on the Internet.

I wrote a post about it: Your toaster will know mesopotamian history because it’s more expensive not too.

https://wanderingstan.com/2026-03-01/your-toaster-will-know-...

Mine as well. 2 years ago my mind was blown that I could code in a language I didn’t know (scala) while on a log train ride with no internet (Amtrak) using a local model on a laptop. Couldn’t believe it.

Here is the Dave Barry column mentioned in the obituary about George’s barbecue lighting: https://www.davebarry.com/misccol/charcoal.htm

Exactly. To refuse the “gift” is an explicit statement of “I know I could do this silently but I want to bother everyone around me.”

My go-to technique has been to offer the offender a pair of headphones, saying something to insinuate that they must forgotten theirs or be too poor to afford them. Most of the time they say “oh I have headphones!” and then realize that they’ve outed themselves. (I stockpile the free headphones from gyms or airplanes, or get the $2 ones from AliExpress)

I concur. And would just add two points: (1) Make it that you’re not asking for anything / don’t open with something that could be perceived as a setup to asking for money, or pushing a religion. :) 2) be sensitive to social cues or that they want to be left alone, like terse answers or shifting their attention away from you

The site seems to be getting crushed. Can someone summarize what it did?

What motivation would the Supreme Court have to get “back on Trumps good side?” If anything, after his recent name calling of them I’d think they’d be less inclined to appease him. The can’t be fired.

> Just what the process was in the scam that snared Mr Williams remains unclear but it appears the scammers were able to access his card details and add them to a new Google Pay wallet on their own phone.

> "We're never going to truly know how Ian's card was breached. What we do know is that he wasn't in that Coles … and that he had the proof," Ms Brooks says.

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and regenerative braking; what matters is he knows how to operate these machines in their use case at the limits.

Hearing a programming legend weigh in on the latest programming tool seems entirely completely reasonable.

For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out the no-motion portions of the videos and stitch them together.

This would have taken ages to do by hand in iMovie, and probably just as long to look up the needed parameters in ffmpeg, but Claude code got it right in the first try, and worked with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold.

> Attend every week.

In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount of openness and friendliness, you will get community.

Yes, for years now I’ve had this creeping feeling that it’s a social version of the prisoners dilemma: if you’re the only one that puts down the phone (or gets off social media, etc) then you’re just left behind. It’s a coordination problem.

It’s the 2nd paragraph:

> Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=648) based on the matching criteria of gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre and solo/band status. We compared mortality risk using a Kaplan-Meier curve and used a Cox regression to test the effect of fame.

Yes. And it’s so easy:

`<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">`

This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker of an event over 20 years prior. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond the key parts of the story.

It’s an interesting theory, but I had to downvote as you didn’t provide any references for your bold assertion. Is there data that bears this out? And even if there were, how could it be distinguished from more expensive lawyers simply doing better at representing their clients?

I’ve gotten in several arguments over the years where webdevs insisted on showing tabular data using flexbox or hardcoded div widths or worse. They insisted that html tables were never ever to be used and couldn’t be persuaded.

Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters”

https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu

There were specs competing for adoption, but only tables (the old way) and CSS were actually adopted by browsers. So no point trying to use some other positioning technique.

Indeed. I just wish we could get a better sense of the scale, which is always hard in nature shots devoid of trees or human structures. A productive use of AI would be to place some houses and automobiles in the video for scale.

I used this extensively in a past job where I had to have have a ton of terminals open and monitor/use them all, with each one serving a different role. (We were prototyping some really complicated experiences) I used this tool to give each terminal a distinctive “look”, with some coding for effects. E.G. all green screens were backends, different fonts for the different OSs, etc. It looked wild while in use, but really did help.

I empathize. My dad is 98 and can mostly use his iPhone fine, but I just wish I could turn off all the “shortcuts”: He doesn’t get swiping down from different edges of the screen for control panel vs notifications. He doesn’t get hard-pressing on icons for different options (like the flashlight), and so on. Wish I could turn off Siri and Apple Pay, because hitting the “sleep” button just slightly wrong can invoke them and then he’s stumped.

I agree that you should always have a pre-recorded version as backup, but live demos communicate a confidence in your product, and that can be worth something. Whenever I see a pre-recorded demo I wonder how many takes it took them, or how many pauses were taken out in editing, etc.

Meta took that risk and failed.

Citation is needed for this:

> It's not starving, not having healthcare etc that makes you sad so much I think as thinking others are getting it while you are not…

While social comparison is proven to be part of happiness, the science is quite strong that starving or being sick makes someone unhappy.