kccqzy

As someone who is excited about AI but not really on top of things, I just discovered the Claude code remote control feature. First impression: wow this is great I can walk away from my computer while “working” on the project. Second thought: this is probably at least sometimes a bad idea that further blurs the line between work and life. It’s probably not healthy to be so obsessed with work that I can’t step away from the computer for a moment and not work.

I guess I should say that not all productivity increases are worthwhile, especially those that make you work while not working.

I recently bought a countertop ice maker on a whim. I don’t usually drink iced drinks: I like hot coffee, hot tea, hot chocolate, etc, but I figured that I’d try.

And I completely underestimated the inconvenience involved as a newbie. First, the ice is more slowly than one might intuit, given the thermodynamics of refrigeration. Second, oh the machine is noisy, to the extent that I had to turn off the machine at night, but not until the compressor has stopped running. Third, for making iced tea and iced coffee, there always seems to be more ice needed than thought. I start by making my usual pour over but with ice; I guesstimated four scoops of ice, and all of that basically immediately melted.

I feel like the experience is finicky enough that I might just not bother with iced drinks any more. I might just return the machine.

I had an extremely weird dream. In the dream I opened the bill from PG&E and it contained a $2 stamp for mailing back my payment. I remember even in my dreamy state I thought how unusually generous they were; why would they give me a $2 stamp when mailing a first-class letter cost so little. Then I woke up.

I was looking at my browser tabs and I noticed the pattern of my tabs pretty much just conform to the generational garbage hypothesis. Most tabs are closed quickly. Some tabs are aged for a long time.

Means testing is just bureaucracy for no good reason. Free benefits for all + higher tax is the way to go. https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/116340759204660827

Hello Apple. What is this notification telling me details about an internal failure in your buggy OS?!

I was looking at a local refurbished hardware shop. They would gladly sell you a server with 128 cores (AMD EPYC), but only equipped with 16GB of memory. And there is apparently no way to ask for more.

I made the mistake of reading the Wikipedia page for Lily Philips just before lunch. Now I can’t eat lunch.

By the way my opinion is that she is mentally unwell. And there are certainly some difficult questions swirling in my mind about mental health and giving consent, about one’s upbringing and how that shapes one’s perspective about boundaries and consent.

I have no idea what has changed recently but these days I see Xwayland crashes almost daily. I have so many Xwayland core dumps now. I looked at a few; they are all caused by SIGBUS. Very frustrating.

This article is a great explainer of why prediction markets have a nice pitch that absolutely resonates with many intellectuals and yet is deplorable in the real world.

Some nice quotes:

> So if the pitch is good, why is the product a sign of rot? Because the pitch was about epistemics. The product is about something worse.

> What a society chooses to price reveals what it actually gives a shit about, in the same way that what a society chooses to memorialise reveals what it honours.

> [A] civilisation under strain stopped prosecuting its disputes through argument and institution, and started pricing them.

> [The defenders] argue that the markets produce more accurate probabilities, as though accuracy is the only remaining virtue; but it's the virtue you keep when you've stopped believing in any of the others.
When a civilisation loses its ability to answer "what should we do" it retreats to answering "what will happen?" https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/116451824580898297

Today I found that Microsoft Word on Windows had a floating window design. When I clicked the little expand button on the Styles section of the ribbon, a floating window popped out. This is IMO somewhat of an unusual design nowadays. Early 2000s Mac software like Pages used the inspector idiom frequently: a little window that could float over the window containing your document. Seeing this today on Windows is somehow very nostalgic for me.

Okay so the recent Fable usage issue can basically be summarized as this: if you are the kind of person that carefully reviews AI output instead of blindly accepting what the AI wrote (and I hope you are!), then the Opus limit is actually enough. I haven’t exceeded the five-hour limit even on the cheapest plan. The bottleneck here is the speed of human thinking and verification. Fable changes that. The five-hour session limit can be exhausted by Fable in just a few turns of the conversation, even if the human review time is added in.

The recent data center ban discourse has been quite irrational. People are fixated on data centers themselves without really focusing on the specific evils.

Instead of advocating for banning data centers, ban non-closed-loop cooling systems that use water once and dump, and force data centers to use closed loop cooling; ban excessive noise and force data centers to install sound barriers; ban carbon emissions and force data centers to build large renewable energy generation; you get the idea.

Arguing against all data centers is like arguing against progress itself. We didn’t ban all industry; we banned child labor, we created OSHA for worker protection, we created EPA to protect the environment.

This is how a lot of companies now communicate with me over email:

Email from company: There is an extremely important message! Log in to view
Me: click the login link
Website: Enter your username and password
Me: entered
Website: Enter your TOTP code
Me: launched TOTP app, found the code and entered
Website: Would you like to add SMS as your second factor authentication
Me: absolutely not
Website: here is your super important message formatted in a PDF

And throughout the whole process I was thinking, you know you could’ve included that message in the email body. Even if a PDF is integral to it, there is a low-tech solution called email attachments that could’ve been used to avoid all this rigmarole.

The article is quite insightful. I knew about the consumption tax idea so I almost dismissed but it actually talked about something more novel: a transaction tax. Worth a read! https://hachyderm.io/@scottsantens/116765678278109426

I am coining a new term, Claude-driven development: when Claude Code makes an incorrect assumption about your codebase, instead of blaming Claude, accept that Claude’s assumption is probably warranted, and rearchitect your codebase to make that assumption true, in the hopes that future Claude sessions will be more productive.

Why? I’ve seen this happen in real life. It just needs a name.

I don’t really believe in the idea of technical people getting promoted to managerial roles and being inundated with meetings and somehow still able to retain technical judgement.

I’ve seen the same story happen multiple times in multiple companies. Capable people getting promoted to become managers. Over the years they become atrophied in their technical judgement. Junior engineers reporting to them sometimes realize that they are saying is wrong but dare not make a scene for fear of hurting their ego.

This is part of the reason why I resolve to never seek promotions on my own. I don’t want a fancier job title that would reduce the sharpness of my own thinking.

I hate this modern trend of beverages marketing themselves as having no sugar while tasting cloyingly sweet. Almost every single time when I buy beverages with no sugar, it’s because I do not want to taste sweetness. And it’s somewhat difficult to remember all the array of zero-sugar sweeteners that could possibly appear in the ingredients list. Traditionally it was just aspartame. Now it could be maltodextrin, monk fruit extract, stevia, erythritol and probably others I forgot.