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US air travelers without REAL IDs will be charged a $45 fee (apnews.com)
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Background for the uninitiated: the USA is not quite a real country. It's 50 states that agreed to cooperate in various ways, and share a common army/navy. While the US government issues documents that work for identification everywhere (called passports) approximately nobody living in the US actually has a passport. So when planes began to be attacked by bad guys some decades ago, the aviation industry (regulated at the federal level, because it doesn't take long to fly out of the state you start in) decided to use the identification document that everyone does have: the drivers license. But those are issued by the states, not the federal government. And the states don't all do a great job of the surveillance state stuff, so it's pretty easy for a budding Mr Terrorist to get a drivers license, and for his state to not bother keeping much in the way of records to find him if he ever hijacks a plane. The solution to this falls under the category of the US "trying everything before they get it right" -- the federal government (via congress) decided that only drivers licenses issued by states that get the surveillance stuff right to their satisfaction would be usable to get on a plane (passport always worked and still works, fwiw). Some states said "ok, that's fine". Some states said "nope, not doing it". <insert years of wrangling> The final solution was that the "not doin it" states were told they could issue two kinds of drivers license (real-id and...un-real-id). Since you have to explicitly request a real-id license in those states, which costs more, and because people are lazy and ill-informed, there are still people with no valid id document to get on a plane. So now we get to the present day where the solution to that problem is to not let them on the plane. Oh...wait, no, the solution is to charge them $45.
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Is this the better Id system everyones been asking for? In many countries a declaration that you have no id card will be met with a blank stare by most people. In the UK it's one of the most politically toxic ideas imaginable. So extra points to the Starmer government for making it exponentially worse by proposing it be mandatory AND digital. We already have cheap passports, licenses and national insurance numbers, so i cannot think of a single way this measure will improve our lives. A consideration which is completely alien to Starmer and co, who can't understand why people are so stupid to prefer the "fascist" narrative over theirs.
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This is just the drivers license with I think slightly more photographing or background checking, and in a different database? And a fancy star hologram. Someone jump in if I've missed a crucial detail, but I don't think it's comparable to the digital ID thing of pulling in disparate systems or being easily scanned from an app or what have you.
I'm to believe this is done for my safety, which is apparently worth $45
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> the new fee is intended to encourage travelers to obtain the ID. They're flat out telling you it's not about safety. It's merely about forcing total compliance. Which is almost certainly why the price was raised. The real question is, since this is apparently also required to enter any federal facility, can I pay the $45 fee to enter those location as well? If not, then it's obvious what they're doing here.
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Because it's not just a $45 fee and you're on your way. You can actually board a domestic flight without any ID at all, for example if you lost it before your trip. But you'll have to go through a manual identity verification process. That includes giving fingerprints and answering personal questions only you should know, like past addresses. It takes around 30 minutes and if you don't answer correctly, you could be denied boarding. This process already existed before the Real ID requirement, but it used to be free. Now, you're forced to go through the same manual verification steps and pay $45 on top of it. You're being treated the same as if you have no ID with you at all.
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A few years ago i forgot my id, i boarded my departure flight with my costco card and the return flight with my sams club card. both had pictures and my full name. to top it off, I was escorted right past everyone in line by security. it was great!
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If it’s like the identity verification services the CRAs offer, I’ve managed to fail one of those enough times that they said I’m not me and stopped letting me try (to be fair, it was only two tries IIRC). The last attempt I even had my report from the relevant CRA in front of me as a cheat-sheet, at their suggestion. They believed I’m me enough to hand me (a version of) my report and let me into my online account with them, but not enough to tell someone else that I’m me. Go figure. (The trouble, I’m pretty sure, was that both times I encountered two “I have literally no idea what relevance any of the addresses you named have to me” answers and I think they only put one of those in each set. Even reading the sheet I never managed to figure out WTF they were talking about. One I got both times, which I suppose was the one I was supposed to know, didn’t even name a state I had lived or owned property in. But nothing about it on the report, so what do I dispute? Luckily I only needed it for a temporary rental and that ended up working out fine—it’s way easier to buy houses than rent one, I guess, which is pretty weird)
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I didn't have to have any biometrics taken, just answered a bunch of questions. Flew out of Las Vegas.
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I’ve gone through this process before and while it was more work it did not take 30 minutes. I presented a student ID and was escorted through the security line. My baggage was selected for additional screening and I received a pat down search. I went through an identical procedure on the return flight, right down to the exact words the TSA agent spoke to me while conducting the pat down.
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I've also gone through this process, it did take about 30 minutes in my case. That also included waiting for a TSA agent to be available to even start the process. So YMMV, perhaps based on how busy the airport is at the time. They had me answer a series of questions about past addresses etc, it wasn't just an extra pat down in my case. After answering all the questions correctly they allowed me to continue.
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TIL. I have always wondered how much pain you have to bear if you lose your ID on a (domestic) trip. Thought it was legitimately possible you might have to take a bus cross country.
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Do we still have to take off our shoes, if I'm paying $45, I'm not taking off my shoes
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What is amazing is that a couple of weeks ago it was $18[0]. Yet what is really cooking my noodle is that the live site referenced from that post now says $45 [1]. Yet, if you check the waybackmachine the original article in fact said $18[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019205 [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2025/11/21/tsa-security-fee-wrong-id/ [2] http://archive.today/2025.11.21-221013/https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2025/11/21/tsa-security-fee-wrong-id/
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The important thing is that, like the tariffs, this is not a tax on Americans.
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Fixed it: The important thing is that, like the tariffs, this is a tax on Americans.
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That was exactly the joke :(
The funny thing is this "requirement" got pushed back nearly 20 years and still isn't actually required, but if they set this fee in 2008 it would've been done in 2008. In America you don't get it done by requiring it, you get it done by making it cost more if you don't do it.
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What is it with America and laws being pushed off indefinitely? Do other countries have similar problems? The system is interesting that the 2 branches of government responsible for doing things are often in a state of open conflict and the main job requirement of the judiciary seems to be an ability to maliciously misinterpret the law in a way which most benefits the group who appointed them.
Anthropic: AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits (red.anthropic.com)
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Having watched this talk[0] about what it takes to succeed in the DARPA AIxCC competition[1] these days, this doesn't surprise me in the least. [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rU6ukOuYLUA [1]: https://aicyberchallenge.com/
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I am not surprised at all. I can already see self improving behaviour in our own work which means that the next logic step is self improving! I know how this sounds but it seems to me, at least from my own vantage point, that things are moving towards more autonomous and more useful agents. To be honest, I am excited that we are right in the middle of all of this!
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Exciting! Let's orthogonally connect on this!
Can someone explain smart contracts to me? Ok, I understand that it's a description in code of "if X happens, then state becomes Y". Like a contract but in code. But, someone has to input that X has happened. So is it not trivially manipulated by that person?
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Most smart contracts in the wild don't actually depend on events external to the blockchain. A token exchange is one example.
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You can create hot air "organizations" with contract rules on the Ethereum blockchain. If the inner circle does not like a contract, they fork everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO It's all a toy for rug pulls and speculation. "AI" attacking the blockchain is hilarious. I wish the blockchain could also attack "AI".
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Unless you know and trust person X, you don't want to authorize and interact with such contracts. Scammers will leave loopholes in code so they can, for example, grab all funds deposited to the contract. Normal contracts that involve money operations would have safeguards that disallow the owner to touch balance that is not theirs. But there's billion of creative attack vectors to bypass that, either by that person X, or any 3rd party
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That's infamously known as the "Oracle Problem". Blockchain can't handle external state. Smart contracts abstract it a bit by having a trusted third party or an automated pricing mechanism, but both are fragile.
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Not sure what you mean that "input that X has happened". You don't directly input the changes, instead, you call a function that creates that state change (or not, if it's invalid), by running its code. This code can include checks on who is the caller, it can check if you're the contract owner, if you're someone who already interacted with the contract (by checking previous state), or any hardcoded address etc.
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blockchains are isolated environment where it can only know about data/states within itself. if outside data is needed, then it needs something called an oracle, which delivers real-world and/or even other blockchain data to it. you can learn more about oracle here: https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles
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I’m convinced that there is a reason from blockchain, but it was like 10 years too early - OR - we’ve already passed the problem it solves and didn’t notice.
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Yes, this is a problem (look up "the oracle problem"). My understanding is that the conventional solution is to rely on trusted third-party oracles that are outside of the control of the contract's participants and/or require consensus over multiple oracles.
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Once a contract is deployed on the blockchain, its source code is immutable. So before using a contract, check if it gives permission to its deployer (or any address) to change any state at will. Note that some contracts act as proxy to other contract and can be made to point to another code through a state change, if this is the case then you need to trust whoever can change the state to point to another contract. Such contract sometime have a timelock so that if such a change occurs, there's a delay before it is actually activated, which gives time to users to withdraw their funds if they do not trust the update. If you are talking about Oracle contracts, if it's an oracle involving offchain data, then there will always be some trust involved, which is usually managed by having the offchain actors share the responsibility and staking some money with the risk to get slashed if they turn into bad actors. But again, offchain data oracles will always require some level of trust that would have to deal with in non-blockchain apps too.
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State is globally distributed, and smart contract code executes state transitions on that state. When someone submits a transaction with certain function parameters, anyone can verify that those parameters will lead to that exact state transition.
I’m surprised folks aren’t already grinding against smart contract security in prod with gen AI and agents. If they are, I suppose they are not being conspicuous by design. Power and GPU time goes in, exploits and crypto comes out.
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There are a great many of them, you just can't see them in the dark forest. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
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Check the prizes for the bug bounties in big smart contracts. The prizes are truly crazy, like Uniswap pays $15,000,000 for a critical vuln, and $1,000,000 for a high vuln. With that kind of money, I HIGHLY doubt there aren't people grinding against smart contracts as you say.
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Of course they are, and they've been doing it since long before ChatGPT or any of that was a thing. Before it was more with classifiers and concolic execution engines, but it's only gotten way more advanced.
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As soon as money in larger sums gets involved, the legal system will crack down hard on you if you are anywhere in the Western sphere of influence, easy as that. In contrast, countries like North Korea, Russia, Iran - they all make bank on cryptocurrency shenanigans because they do not have to fear any repercussions.
Says more about the relatively poor infosec on etherium contracts than about the absolute utility of pentesting LLMs.
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4.6M is not a lot, and these were old bugs that it found. Also, actually exploiting these bugs in the real world is often a lot harder than just finding the bug. Top bug hunters in the Ethereum space are absolutely using AI tooling to find bugs, but it's still a bit more complex than just blindly pointing an LLM at a test suite of known exploitable bugs.
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True, I'd be curious to see if (and when) those contracts were compromised in the real world. Though they said they found 0 days, which implies some breaches were never found in the real world.
My startup builds agents for penetration testing, and this is the bet we have been making for over a year when models started getting good at coding. There was a huge jump in capability from Sonnet 4 to Sonnet 4.5. We are still internally testing Opus 4.5, which is the first version of Opus priced low enough to use in production. It's very clever and we are re-designing our benchmark systems because it's saturating the test cases.
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I've had similar experience using LLMs for static analysis of code looking for security vulnerabilities, but I'm not sure it makes sense for me to found a start up around that "product". Reason being that the technology with the moat isn't mine -- it belongs to Anthropic. Actually it may not even belong to them, probably it belongs to whoever owns the training data they feed their models. Definitely not me though. Curious to hear your thoughts on that. Is the idea to just try for light speed and exit before the market figures this out?
Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence (eclecticlight.co)
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I love how both MacOS and Windows users are reaching a point of no return. Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. I am definitely not alone
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“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now. I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18. Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
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Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".
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I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it. It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system. I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
I know this might seem stupid as I don't own a Mac, but does Darwin use systemd? Can the author use journalctl, syslog or check /var/log?
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Darwin uses launchd/libxpc. journalctl's job is handled by the `log` command, with appropriate predicate filters to winnow out the relevant stuff from the chaff.
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It has the thing that systemd and journalctl are poor clones of. Their ergonomics (especially the log viewer) are much worse than sysvinit/syslog, but they mostly work. I say “mostly”, because, like systemd, sometimes force disabling a broken service silently fails, even after reboot.
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> does Darwin use systemd? No.
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help. Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups. Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich. I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere. How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me. Not recommended.</rant>
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Photos is definitely not great, though I still try and deal with it for the easy iCloud syncing. Some examples off top of my head for Photos crappiness, all on my top of the range 128GB macbook m4 max - doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file... - Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive. - If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break. When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded. Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
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[delayed]
It’s possible for a woodworker to build a table which reliably does not collapse, even without having a third party test it. It’s equally possible for a different woodworker to build a table which will collapse when deployed in a customer’s dining room. The difference comes down to which woodworker I’ve hired, and how they’ve been trained. If you can’t trust a woodworker to ship a table that stands under its own weight, layering on third-party QA isn’t really going to fix the underlying problem. That said, cargo culting the “no QA” model is ill-advised. If a particular dev shop needs QA today, they’ll probably need it tomorrow.
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Bad analogy I think. A table is a table. It has one core function. An argument can be made that it could be built in a way that a chair can't be pushed against it for example. But the number of such cases for a table are infinitely smaller than the number of edge cases and unexpected interactions a software system can have. QA is a way to catch those edge cases that a single developer cannot find because of various reasons. One such reason is that devs are very close to their work and they might subconsciously not trigger the unhappy path in their code. Testing if a table works is vastly different from testing a software system.
I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there. However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline). It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave. The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!". By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI. From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
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I’ve always felt the decline in Mac OS started on the day of the ‘Back To The Mac’ event in 2010. And has continued since. Symbolically this event made clear the iOS first focus of the company. And since then Mac OS updates have continued to be secondary/lesser to iOS. Mac OS is still my system of choice, but I don’t have as much confidence in it as I would like. The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t. And it’s up the the user to muddle through. Weird. And there are many half baked things like this in the OS now. Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
> Steve would roll in his grave. Steve understood better than anyone that having a finite amount of time to build means you can't please everyone. The vast majority of Apple's customers just do not care about the Keyboard settings UI or the clarity of unusual error messages.
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Users do care they just don't have the words to explain what it is thats frustrating them. Just a silent "I find myself using this less" sort of thing. Not for everything, but the excuse of "normies don't give a shit" is a bullshit one.
I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine. Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple. Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software. Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
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> Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software. Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com ` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days. Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?) > And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied. This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years. For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear. Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts. Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years? Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness. The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
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My current "favorite" bug is how contacts get randomly merged on iOS. I've called the wrong friend multiple times and it's completely unacceptable for such a basic and core function of iOS.
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn). The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours. Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
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Until AI can vibe-code a stable, secure global menu bar for Wayland I'm stuck on macOS for a while.
The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway. But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
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Win11 and OSX, and to a limited extent Ubuntu feel like they want to just keep selling you stuff. You see. It's not enough. Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys. Otherwise you might try Linux to save money. Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc. Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.
Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is retiring in spring 2026 (macrumors.com)
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No one dares to question Apple’s culture. Perhaps something is rotten inside. The same people who milked iPhone for 14 years. But they got Vision Pro a full year after Meta proved that’s a dead end. What a joke of corporate leadership.
My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.
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The iphone is so useful they can probably ride it for a couple more decades at least. I would still buy it. From a technology or engineering perspective, I have no idea how to work with Apple.
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It's ironic because Microsoft took their eye off smart phones to make Windows 8 transparent aqua interface
They changed it from responding to "Hey Siri" to just "Siri".
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And then there was that world-changing delivery of sports scores on demand.
“Hey Siri, call Kate”… “Calling Derek” (who I haven’t spoken to in 10 years).
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"Siri, play podcasts" "Who is speaking?" The same person who has been speaking the last hundred times, dammit!
Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.
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It was driven by privacy and on device compute. Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there. Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it. This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to register and link into them. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/intents Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php. However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device. Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS. This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence > Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011. > ... > The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI. ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.
Agreed. I often have to verbally battle with Siri to do the most basic interaction. Siri recognizes all my words but misinterprets my intent and does something I didn’t want.
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The new Alexa uses Claude under the hood, and it also misinterprets my intent, only with a 2 second longer delay and slightly more approachable tone.
Full disclosure: I've known jg since 1986. I have no insight into the Apple goings on, but the story that "he's the guy that made Siri suck" sounds very very unlikely to me.
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He's not the guy who made it awesome, that much is known.
Does anyone have an actual technical theory of how it’s possible for commands that used to work , say a month ago, to just stop working? What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change? I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?
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For me, the standout was a period of 6 months or so when Siri stopped understanding the world "half" (as in "lights to half"), and thne it abruptly started working again.
I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over any ongoing conversation. And in the context of old fashioned knobs and buttons, voice is seriously a lot of complex engineering to solve problems that have long been non-issues. Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.
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Modern cars have several microphones or directional microphones and can isolate a speaker. I think well-done voice commands are a great addition to a car, especially for rentals. When figuring out how to do something in a new car, I have to choose between safety, interruption (stopping briefly) or not having my desires function change. Most basic functions can be voice-controlled without Internet connectivity. You should only need that for conversational topics, not for controlling car functions.
Google Now. It's even completely gone and forgotten.
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Oh the things they could have done with Google Now. I want to know the story behind it's death if any insiders are lurking around.
In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures. All chat bots suffer this flaw. GUIs solve it. CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.
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Very well written, I'm wondering when current "cli haxxxor assistant" FAD will fade away and focus will move into proper, well thought out and adjusted to changed paradigm IDEs instead of wasting resources. Well, maybe not completely wasting as this is probably still part of discovery process.
For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have a list of common (or even uncommon) commands and how their args work. (spends a few minutes researching...) This project evidently exists, and I think it's even fairly well supported in e.g. Debian-based systems: https://github.com/scop/bash-completion .
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the comment you're replying to said: > but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual which is basically what you're saying too? the problem with voice UIs and some LLM tools is that it's unclear which options and tools exist and there's no documentation of it.
> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. "Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.
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Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.
The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence (aaronstannard.com)
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IMO, the “thin edge of the wedge” for socialized healthcare in the US is full, high quality and free services for maternity, birth and the 1st year of the kid.
A lot of this is an issue of insurance no longer being "insurance" in the classical sense. Insurance covers all sorts of things, my HSA pays for all sorts of things that I never would have even considered, and while that sounds great, it helps to drive up costs. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper. It'd also be total chaos, so I get why we don't do that. But the situatuon is a lot like student loans, colleges know they can charge more because the government will lend 5-6 figures to just about anybody, so the colleges do so. And once that person is educated, you can't just "take back" the education if they don't pay. Same deal with healthcare, government subsidizes it for most of the population in lots of ways, healthcare providers know this, they increase prices to match. And you can't just take back the surgery to fix that broken arm or undeliver the baby. There's not a single silver bullet that will fix everything, but there are definitely concrete changes that can be made to improve the situation. One of them would be to make people healthier. I know, easier said than done. But by God it would make health insurance cheaper. Same way in that if everyone was a safe driver, we'd all be paying less in car insurance. Another way would be to remove that regulation or rule or something that makes it so like a hospital can't open too close to another hospital. Another would be to just, train more doctors! What I'm trying to say is, just as the problem is multi-faceted, the solution must necessarily be as well.
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> It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper. It'd also be total chaos, so I get why we don't do that. But there are other things we could do that we don't. For example, right now we have the expectation that insurers are going to "negotiate" with providers to determine the price, and then you have to use the providers your insurance has negotiated with, but who actually wants this? When you as a retail customer want to buy a pair of shoes or a piece of exercise equipment, do you call up all the manufacturers and try to haggle with them? No, they list their prices on their websites or sell them through retailers that do the same and then you choose based on who has what you want for the best price. So make non-emergency healthcare work like that. Require them to publish their prices. Then the insurance company doesn't tell you where to go or negotiate with anybody, they only tell you how much they pay, which might be e.g. 90% of the second-lowest market price in your area, equivalent to a 10% deductible. Then you go to a website that lists every provider and their price, pick where to go and pay the difference yourself. Suddenly they all have the incentive to publish the best price, because that's what most people are going to pick, and then you have an actual market instead of the existing opaque bureaucracy of corruption.
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"If insurance covered brake pads they'd cost more" is an old mechanics quip. The principal agent problem just fucks the cost and incentive structure of anything insurance covers. This is why it's unwise to send "routine" things through the insurance model.
"There's not a single silver bullet that will fix everything" idk, it seems like eliminating the profit motive from healthcare would resolve all kinds of problems.
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Suppose you want to remove the profit motive from healthcare. If doctors would still get paid above-median wages, you would still have a profit motive. Their lobbyists would want to limit the supply of doctors or simply lobby to have the government pay them high wages, to require that things be done by a doctor instead of a nurse, etc. Likewise the drug companies would lobby for the government to pay them more for their drugs, and when the government is captured then that's what happens. The same problems we have now; you haven't solved anything. If doctors would get paid a lower wage but still have to attend 8 years of medical school, there wouldn't be a profit motive, but then there would be a shortage of people willing to become doctors, patients would have to wait a long time to get an appointment as they do in places like France, etc. The profit motive isn't the problem, that's the thing that causes anyone to want to (and be able to) provide healthcare. The problem is the corruption. You have to stop limiting the number of medical residency slots and allowing drug companies to patent trivial changes to preexisting things etc.
Christian healthcare sharers do precisely this. By restricting services and the population addressed (your pastor or priest must sign off on your application), everything's extremely affordable. In particular, as we don't drink, do drugs, use contraceptives etc. we don't pay for coverage of them or their side effects. Obesity's also less of an issue. There's also the trick of telling the hospital you'll pay "in cash" and getting a 10x lower bill from the hospital, then getting that reimbursed/covered by your private or alternative insurance.
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Christians don't drink or use contraceptives? I think you have to have a pretty extreme "no true Scotsman" attitude to make such a claim. Even the drugs claim is pretty specious.
So your pastor or priest conveniently rejects you if you have a chronic illness.
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It’s not a death panel when it’s divinely inspired I suppose.
> but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper. I doubt it. Hospitals charge $15 for a single pill of Tylenol because they know insurance will pay for it, and that includes private insurance. The best thing we could do is ditch the private healthcare industry to the extent that the rest of the first world has and cover everyone with government plans. Those plans can then negotiate for much better prices and refuse the kinds of insane charges we're seeing. The cost of plans would also drop because prices would be spread out over every taxpayer. Having primarily a single provider for insurance would make everything easier and less expensive for hospitals and doctors offices too. The billions in profits private healthcare companies rake in all comes at the expense of everyone else one way or another and they have every incentive to make as much money in profit as they can. Without that excess fortune in profits being skimmed off and stuffed into pockets a government funded insurance plan which covered everyone could get the job done taking in closer to what it actually costs to deliver the services we want and no more.
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You don't need the insurance industry sticking their dick in most of the business they do. Insurance is for the foreseeable but unforecastable, not for routine things. The additional overhead is substantial and adds huge marginal cost for routine things and say nothing of the principal-agent problem
Related: Car Seats as Contraception https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731812 > We estimate that these laws [mandating safety seats] prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
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Car seats as contraception is just a specific enumeration of the general. "busybodies as contraception" problem wherein the "has so few real problems they stop minding their business and mind other's business" classes try to force priorities on the rest of society that the rest of society can't yet afford to have. And it's not just contraception or kid. Pretty much everything in our economy gets shot in the foot by this to some extent.
It’s not the car seats that are the contraception, it is the cars themselves.
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How so?
> Given he has 3 children, 400% of FPL in 2026 is $150,600 so he's easily eligible for ACA subsidies I am absolutely not eligible. I earn more than $150k. And "manipulating your income" is not really feasible with a pass-through entity. > The premiums have nothing to do with the plans. Every single plan on the marketplace has to cover child-birth, that's sort of the point of the ACA. As I mention in the piece, I check every year. I have no idea what subsidized plans include, but the other marketplace plans definitely do not include child birth. I explicitly address this point: > The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) barred insurers from turning down applicants based on existing pre-conditions; the way insurers get around this for pregnancy and child-birth is not by rejecting pregnant applicants (illegal), but by simply refusing to cover the care those applicants need to survive pregnancy (legal and common.) and > My wife and I are healthy, but we’re building our family and I have yet to see a marketplace plan that supports child-birth. Maybe the subsidized ones do, but I earn too much money to see those. All of the ones I’ve found through eHealth Insurance or Healthcare.gov never cover it - and I check every year. Love the over-confidence though. The best outcome for me in even writing this article would be to get some internet commenter pissed off enough to find me a cheaper version of my plan. That would solve my problem immediately!
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ACA plans absolutely cover childbirth ( https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-im-pregnant-or-plan-to-get-pregnant/ ). But it might not matter because you aren't on a marketplace plan according to the screenshots in your post. You are on this plan: https://www.trinetaetna.com/pdfs/Aetna_PPO_7150.pdf Which does cover childbirth according to page 3. And has a 7150 deductible per person - the $14300 is the family out of pocket max, so the childbirth should top out at the 7150. Other expenses might put you at the same 40K cost for the year, but not the childbirth alone.
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> ACA plans absolutely cover childbirth ( https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-im-pregnant-or-plan-to-ge ...) that link doesn't even say what you says it does - it said you can apply for coverage, not that their are plans that cover child birth. Have you never done this before?
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> the $14300 is the family out of pocket max You know they charge you, separately, for both the mother's care AND the infant's during a delivery right? Those count as two people. I am, with 100% certainty, going to hit the out of pocket max - I have every time. Like I've paid for three kids all on the same plan, including one born in January so my deductible got spread over two different billing years. I have to ask - why are you defending this?
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I'm not defending it. I'm correcting your misinformation. You are claiming that ACA plans do not cover childbirth. They do. You are claiming that this event alone costs 40K, which is not accurate. It hits your out of pocket max, exactly as designed. It sounds like you have never looked at an ACA silver plan, which is the lower deductible/out of pocket max option. I also have a family of 5, and have a $1800 per year out of pocket max from an ACA plan. You would still have the same level of premiums as you do now for silver plans, but you would save 13K a year. You are picking bad plans, dude. Our system has problems, but when you make enough to not be subsidized, yet still pick a crappy 40K per year plan, that is beyond the systemic problems. It is a bad choice. There are insurance consultants who work with people, especially high income people, to find good plans for their family. You should be calling them.
> And "manipulating your income" is not really feasible with a pass-through entity. I don't know if you have a CPA, but this is a sentence my CPA has never uttered. > but by simply refusing to cover the care those applicants need to survive pregnancy (legal and common.) Including...? I have never heard of this, and actually have delivered babies and worked with post-partum mothers.
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The explanation of benefits simply doesn't cover child birth - this is extremely common for individual marketplace plans.
Also not a big impact on the message, but $200/mo for a phone is a bit disingenuous.
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$200 seems to include home internet (which I think everyone needs these days to function). The $200 quote comes from the linked article [0] (speaking as a former financial analyst, this is an amazingly well done financial analysis). Maybe Aaron could have phrased this better. [0] https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
Claiming $200/month for a phone makes one wonder which numbers are valid. I'm not saying everyone needs to make a $100 phone last 5 years and use a $15/month plan, but I'm not even sure how I would get to $200/month in phone bill, even including financing an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
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$200 seems valid - it comes from the linked article [0] and it includes home internet (I pay $110 / month Comcast just for home internet in Bellevue. In Seattle I paid $130 / month). Maybe Aaron could have phrased it better. (I also recommend to read the linked article as it is a phenomenally well done financial analysis.) [0] https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
Do they come with free mid-tier phones? What if you need 4-5 lines? What if, as a CEO, he needs a better plan than "basic prepaid, lowest-priority-subject-to-throttling"?
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Okay, so on the non-budget side, I pay ~$64/mo for T-mobile's "unlimited[1]" plan and a Google Pixel phone. ($57/mo for the service, and I've amortized the phone price to ~$7/mo based on my lifetime average phone lifetime. Even if you amortize the phone over only its ridiculously short warranted lifetime, that's $42/mo for the phone, or $99/mo, but that implies purchasing a new phone yearly, which most people do not do (the average phone lifespan is just under 3y).) [1]: (n.b., the plan is not truly unlimited.)
I skimmed your 2400-word article a second time just now, and I still don't understand why your math is allocating 100% of your family's health insurance premiums to childbirth. And now I additionally don't understand your abrasive tone in answering this fairly straightforward question. Multiple commenters are raising this point, so perhaps you should consider that you aren't conveying this information well?
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1. I mentioned, in multiple places, that this is the cheapest PPO offered to me through a limited selection of potential brokers / marketplaces - and that's important because it covers our current health care providers AND child birth as a benefit. 2. If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically. Individual marketplace plans become a viable, for instance, since the "not covering childbirth" issue goes away. I mention the short-comings of the individual health insurance marketplace at least twice in this regard, including a big pull quote explaining the ACA work-around with child birth coverage.
As someone who has lived in several countries, I do not believe every developed nation achieves better healthcare outcomes than the United States. Many European countries, as well as Canada, offer some form of universal coverage with free general treatment but waiting times for appointments and procedures can vary widely. That said, I still think universal healthcare is preferable, as these systems tend to prioritize urgent cases effectively and ensure that emergency treatment is fully covered for free. I think, it's only the Asian countries who have got cheap, easy, and effective healthcare where you can not only get appointments quickly but you can get treatment for cheap too but their emergency services are not always as streamlined as those in more developed systems. There is no clear overall winner. Some places excel in certain aspects. Others perform better in different areas.
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> waiting times for appointments and procedures can vary widely Waiting times for appointments and procedures can very widely in the US. Approvals to get needed treatments can also be denied for seemingly flimsy reasons in the US as well.
The amount of money the US Government pays just for that 40% should be enough to cover all 100%. We know this is possible because it happens in other countries, which have shorter waits and more coverage since that talking point keeps being brought up despite collapsing in the face of reality.
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> The amount of money the US Government pays just for that 40% should be enough to cover all 100% This is true as long as the following changes are made: 1) wages for healthcare workers are scalled back ~50%, 2) many drugs and medical procedures are not longer covered (a good example is CAR-T for cancer or drugs for rare diseases).
I think at least the median citizen in the US has very good access to the best possible care. It may or may not be affordable but you can get it. And yes, that is what I think we optimize for.
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If care is not affordable and makes average people just one accident away from bankruptcy, then it might well not exist in calculations. This is akin to saying the USA is the richest country because it has more billionaires than any other country.
And then you would be bankrupt, because if you have any money they are going to come after you.
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yeah, pretty much
Mozilla's latest quagmire (rubenerd.com)
No. There is a lot more than that. The AI stuff appears in places in the UI where other things used to, like in right-click menus and when you are entering text into fields. And it's not opt-in. It's on by default. Unless you are willing to search for how to turn it off and open the non-GUI about:config stuff and modify raw settings in a text table (with no descriptions or help text next to them) then you can't even turn it off. Also, the AI stuff takes up disk space.
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The default Right Click Menu in Firefox is - Icon bar: Back, Forward, Reload, Bookmark - Save Page As... - Select All - Take Screenshot - Ask An AI Chatbot - View Page Source - Inspect Accessibility Properties - Inspect I would bet that 99% of Firefox users have never ever even once clicked on any of the options besides the first one (icon bar).
Firefox was seriously a better browser, not just "implements standards better". It ran faster, it had tabs (wow!) and at one point it got Firebug which let you have a console INSIDE the browser that showed information you could print with `console.log`, I kid you not. It was a better browser through and through, maybe because MS slept on IE or maybe not, but in the end it isn't revisionist to say they beat MS's proverbial posterior because the browser was better.
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One big feature at the time was Firefox had a built in popup blocker, IE did not. Popup ads were rife towards the backend of the 90's and the internet felt borderline unusable without a blocker.
Firebug was a big reason for webdevs to adopt firefox in the first place. Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go. But also, google spent a mountain of money advertising chrome.
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To be fair to Google, they also kicked ass on implementation at the beginning too. Chrome was a lot faster and a lot lighter (in the beginning)
Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 (businessinsider.com)
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I have found that at many companies with these kind of policies are selectively enforced. If you don’t show up, nothing will happen to you, until someday they need some kind of reason to fire you. This ensures you have a steady pool of employees you can drop at a moments notice, if for instance some major market crash forces you to quickly dump people in order for the company to survive.
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ins't this the same guy who moved to london [0], just because he could control things better ? or maybe the tide has changed from remote working so again the minions are pushed around! [0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/instagram-boss-adam-mosseri-to-relocate-to-london.html
"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change." So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
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It makes over-employment more difficult; it also makes unexpected North Korean employees less likely to slip in.
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My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? The illusion of control? I mean we can pretend we don't know what this is about (well it's probably also about encouraging a reduction in force), but we do know right? By far the people who bemoaned working from home the most were people whose job doesn't typically involve any actual "work". Not saying that there weren't exceptions, but the vast majority of working engineers I knew rejoiced in finally getting heads down time, while everyone whose job is primarily "performance for leadership" hated how difficult it was to perform visible theatrics on a camera. Especially in large orgs "leadership" and "team success" are largely about optics. Being seen working in the office late is so much more important than getting any actual work done . It's only in small companies where actually shipping something has any value at all. What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. Recognizing this I've completely avoided working for large orgs, and continue to enjoy remote work we're I can be valued for the results of what I build (well there's always a little theater) over office productivity performativity.
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What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. The theatrical ego has a chokehold on the world currently. No surprise it's seeping into corporate structures as well. Large grandiose parades and such.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.
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That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
This is the exact tech job market to start looking and have interviews/offers scheduled so you're not screwed when layoffs happen.
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Ok, fair, but roundabout reasoning. Your choice to leave makes it a certainty. A soft market mean uncertainty.
>You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what? 1. take that time to startup that business you've been thinking of doing 2. Coast on the months of savings and years of stock until things get better. Perhaps you even have enough for a soft retirement. 3. try to rapidly interview and hope you have a ship to jump to before the hammer comes down. 4. interview anyway because you know this means a layoff round is coming even if you wanted to move because not enough people quit on their own. > is this IG looking to cut fat by keeping what they considered the most committed employees If by "committed" you mean "most compensated", then yes. >Is it because most of us can admit that it takes the right people to work remotely and that isn’t a majority? That’s more my take. Sure, maybe. But Meta knows that isn't the reason. They lost the BOTD since 2017 in my eyes.
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On number one, sure, take all the risk yourself. It pays off sometimes. And when it comes to hiring people you need to work as hard as you do, you can tell them they can work from home.
We are observing the most valuable people leaving, because they easily can get a job at place where they care more about value you get to company than the bonus you will get as C-level after firing highly paid workers. In the cases we know (I have a group of people working in different small and medium corps in Poland and Germany) - the people that are staying are either too lazy to change work or they are just not enough to get remote job.
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Ok, sweet deal if you are one of the most valuable employees in big tech. Sounds like a perk that many people would seek out. Are you? If yes, cool. If no, well, seems like you have rationalized that not everyone will get WFH regardless on your feelings about it
>As a hiring manager ... it’s a little too much “doth protest”. Have you considered evaluating your own beliefs with this perspective?
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That’s a fancy “no u” but it doesn’t make any sense. I have remote employees, and I have people I would never allow WFH because they can’t handle it. I don’t care what you do. I’m explaining from the position of someone responsible for a team that MANY people who are strictest about WFH being absolute are the people abusing it. This shouldn’t even be remotely controversial… yet… all I see is more protest and digital foot stomping.
How to Attend Meetings – Internal guidelines from the New York Times (docs.google.com)
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There's so much content and so many opinions on "meetings" that are polarized and come from a very narrow viewpoint. This particular POV seems reasonably critical of meetings but also recognizing that they are often warranted and can be carried out effectively. I was happy to see "rallying the troops" as an acceptable reason to have a big meeting, because in my opinion it can be a good reason for a big meeting to exist (even though I'm sure many people disagree.)
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I worked for a Japanese corporation, and meetings were their DNA. Attendance at meetings conferred the ability to participate in a project, so teams would often send "placeholders." People that had no idea what the meeting was about, but their presence meant their team was represented. It's quite common to see people sleeping in meetings, over there.
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The "recurring meeting" thing as a red flag is one that I have always used. If I had control of the agenda, I didn't schedule recurring meetings (this includes standups). I didn't always have a choice, though.
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The only meeting resilient to all possible outcomes is one that can easily be split. Sometimes you need to branch the timeline, and people need to talk about different things that are the right things for their priorities. In real space you can do this easily, but in tools like zoom, it needs to be blessed form above (creating breakouts). Digital tools suck for running effective meetings that can have a branching timeline.
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Though these guides are well meaning, they completely misread the inadvertent outcome of meetings. Even a perfectly planned meeting has a number of other effects beside resolving the stated agenda. When and how people are invited and declined, who attends, who engages, how people engage are all signals gleaned from a meeting. Think of how many times someone felt jilted by not being invited, called on, not responded to -- etc -- during a meeting. If you consider yourself hyper rational and business focused, you have to account for the personal dynamics occurring before, during & after a meeting. You ever wonder why everyone "hates" meetings, yet they still invest in them? Even being cynical or dismissive is a form of attention. Meetings are like money in that people are interested even though they say otherwise.
While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones: 1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip. 2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest. The education that needs to happen is quite different imo: - leadership needs to be done through writing - meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance. - decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.
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While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that: 1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times. 2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere. The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions . This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).
Thanks Michael Scott.
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There is nothing in the world Michael Scott loves more than an all hands meeting that no one actually needs to attend, and we would never play a part in combatting them.
> Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; I am pretty aggressive about declining meetings and protecting my time. And I still agree to what you say. No matter how you structure meetings, there’s always a chance that items unrelated to the agenda are discussed, decisions are made when they’re not supposed to be made, incorrect information is conveyed or misunderstandings are not addressed. Unfortunate reality of corporate world is that you’re more likely to ask yourself be included than you decline meetings. This of course doesn’t even touch the performative parts of corporate bs where “yOu NEeD tO Be MOrE ViSIblE”
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Let me tell you what visibility looks like: - regular reports sent to all stakeholders with relevant detail - videos that demonstrate important features that folks can watch on their own time - scheduling small, focused meetings with the most important stakeholders so they can actually get what they need It doesn’t look like going to meetings and never talking, or worse, going to meetings and blathering on so someone knows you were there.
> My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no". Well that's exactly the point- in most orgs, only high level people are granted the discretion to manage their time this way.
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Fun story- Worked at Sonos for several years. Was an IC4. My boss empowered me to say no to meetings whenever I wanted, and she was a new manager! Sometimes all it takes is someone with a tiny bit of courage. Literally nobody but people who want to waste their time and not do work or PMs who don’t know how to communicate want to have all these meetings. I zealously avoid meetings and now that I’m a team lead at my new job, I’ll be encouraging my team to do the same and covering their asses when needed.
And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting. Sometimes it's not just about whether others think you should be there.
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> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting. If you are the one responsible for the work to fix something, you need to be the one driving the meetings or pushing alternative communication. This is why all of the generic “just say no to meetings” advice is useless: It’s all dependent on the context. You can’t just decline meetings from your boss’s boss without good reason, for example. A lot of snarky internet advice about saying “no” at the office is just people venting or doing imaginary role play. In a real office you have to push for communication, pull details out of people, identify who you need to report to and who you can safely decline. If you get in a situation where you’re declining meetings and the responsibility for content of that meeting lands in your lap, you have made a severe misjudgment. These things are easy to clarify with a little proactive communication, but you get nowhere if you just say “no” or send off a singular “agenda plz” email and then forget about it. People are busy. You have to push and make it clear what you need from them, following up if it doesn’t come.
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I’d amend that to “A lot of … advice … is just people … doing imaginary role play.” A lot of bad advice out there, being delivered with confidence.
I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do this without me there. Blindly allowing someone to make a bad call without questioning it is as bad as overruling their call without any explanation!
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If you have a team member you don’t trust to make good calls, then you need to coach them.
I’ve had multiple managers over many jobs who’ve said they were on board with this. I’ve had CEOs saying from the top down “decline meetings without an agenda”, and yet somehow it never changes.
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Did you actually try doing it? Otherwise, how would it change?
Wow, I might need to steal that idea for bypassing Jira discussions. I hate Jira with all my might.
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Why do you hate Jira?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas (cnbc.com)
I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both have to be optimizied for drones). It's been years since I've worked in this field, and Amazon has many smart people thinking about it but I'm not surprised it's still a difficult problem.
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> Traditional stereo won't help you localize them Wouldn't making a quick circuit around the house before landing allow wires to be observed from multiple angles be enough?
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It's very simple: don't fly there there are very little aerial lines few meters highers and ones that exist can be probably spotted from satellite images and planned around. Especially if delivery area is limited, they could just map them out of the routes.
Sure, they'll move around in the prop wash. But that's fine, isn't it? If they're intended to detect fixed objects, then noticing that one or more of them have ceased to be blown around in that way may be a good way to detect unanticipated contact with a fixed object: When the signal becomes less noisy, then maybe something is in the way. And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. Perhaps something akin to armature wire, or thin spring steel. Maybe even literal bamboo chopsticks. They can also be constrained so that they don't get sent into the props. My little brain thinks that the drone-end of the whiskers can be attached to potentiometers, with light return springs to bring them back towards center, like the mechanism used by an analog stick on a PS3 controller.
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> And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. I don't think you're right about this. The concept of the whiskers is to notice when you've collided with something. Real whiskers aren't rigid because colliding with something when you're rigid means snapping. (Ever stub your toe?) Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being traded off against your maximum movement speed.
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I don't think you read my entire comment, or perhaps you're very unfamiliar with the operation of a PS3's analog control. (The whisker can be both rigid and also flexibly-attached. These are not mutually-exclusive constructs.)
It is a standard outdoor coaxial cable. Perhaps it looks thin because you are mentally scaling to the size of smaller hobby drones. Edit: The MK30 is 78 pounds, and about 6 feet diameter. Here is an image with a human for scale: https://dronexl.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Amazon-Prime-Air-Unveils-Its-Game-Changing-MK30-Drone-0105.jpg.webp
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The cable was described in the news as thin. It isn't that high off the ground and with or without the drone in view, it looks thin. Maybe it's an RG6 drop, but it could also be ethernet or a fiber drop. They're all thin wires, though.
You should really consider how much energy it takes to levitate an 80lb drone while flying across town, compared to how much energy it takes to roll an 8000lb van across town (even ignoring the fact that the van might deliver 100 packages while making it's way across town).
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You raise an interesting point about energy per delivery. In you example, which one is lower per package? I assume the electric truck.
I recently started seeing electric delivery vans from IKEA in my city. One thing I really noticed: They are whisper quiet compared to diesel trucks.
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Yeah, it makes a massive difference in the neighborhood, where speeds are so low (10mph or so) there isn't much tire noise. Now if we could just get our landscape crew (HOA, not mine personally) to adopt electric leaf blowers. I hate this time of year and the constant roar of those things.
Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern" (seangoedecke.com)
LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Agents, however, are products. They should have clear UX boundaries: show what context they’re using, communicate uncertainty, validate outputs where possible, and expose performance so users can understand when and why they fail. IMO the real issue is that raw, general-purpose models were released directly to consumers. That normalized under-specified consumer products, created the expectation that users would interpret model behavior, define their own success criteria, and manually handle edge cases, sometimes with severe real world consequences. I’m sure the market will fix itself with time, but I hope more people would know when not to use these half baked AGI “products”
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You hit the nail on the head. Anyone who's been working intimately with LLM's comes to the same conclusion. the llm itself is only one small important part that is to be used in a more complicated and capable system. And that system will not have the same limitations as the raw llm itself.
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A large part of that training is done by asking people if responses 'look right'. It turns out that people are more likely to think a model is good when it kisses their ass than if it has a terrible personality. This is arguably a design flaw of the human brain.
The difference is that we know how LLMs work. We know exactly what they process, how they process it, and for what purpose. Our inability to explain and predict their behavior is due to the mind-boggling amount of data and processing complexity that no human can comprehend. In contrast, we know very little about human brains. We know how they work at a fundamental level, and we have vague understanding of brain regions and their functions, but we have little knowledge of how the complex behavior we observe actually works. The complexity is also orders of magnitude greater than what we can model with current technology, but it's very much an open question whether our current deep learning architectures are even the right approach to model this complexity. So, sure, emergent behavior is neat and interesting, but just because we can't intuitively understand a system, doesn't mean that we're on the right track to model human intelligence. After all, we find the patterns of the Game of Life interesting, yet the rules for such a system are very simple. LLMs are similar, only far more complex. We find the patterns they generate interesting, and potentially very useful, but anthropomorphizing this technology, or thinking that we have invented "intelligence", is wishful thinking and hubris. Especially since we struggle with defining that word to begin with.
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> The difference is that we know how LLMs work. We know exactly what they process, how they process it, and for what purpose All of this is false.
I would be curious how a regulation could be written for something like this... how do you make a law saying an LLM can't be a sycophant?
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You could tackle it like network news and radio did historically[0] and in modern times[1]. The current hyper-division is plausibly explained by media moving to places (cable news, then social media) where these rules don’t exist. [0] Fairness Doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine [1] Equal Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
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10 years of writing a blog nobody reads (flowtwo.io)
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I don't want to break his streak, what it is about ?
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on. The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
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What if having an audience isn’t the goal?
You do realise there are AI checkers online. https://www.zerogpt.com/ assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still , (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
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You do realize (god I hate that phrase) it’s impossible to definitively classify something as AI- or human-produced?
It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI. I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt. My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
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Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts
When you feel the need to dive in with a dash (m, n or otherwise), why not stop ... think for a while: consider going in with a colon instead?
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Emdashes are useful for an embedded appositive phrase, which a colon can't handle the same way.
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Quite - horses for courses. However: you should pick your weapon with some care.
It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.
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Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2]. [0] https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html [1] https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-dashes-revisited [2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
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The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science. If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically. Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
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> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor? Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page. <!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
High-income job losses are cooling housing demand (jbrec.com)
The current housing costs (price + interest rate) just seem so out of line with the average household income it boggles my mind it hasn't cooled alot more already. At $84k average household income, assuming 1/3 going to a mortgage would give you $2.3k a month to work with. At 6% interest rate, assuming 20% down payment of $70k, you can just manage a $350k home and that is ignoring taxes, not adding other closing costs, not considering utilities, assuming an interest rate on the lower side and assuming a 20% deposit. Add tax and that gives you around $1.7k to work with. Assume only putting down 10% and adding in $400 a month to cover utilities then you can manage around $175k home. That rules out buying a house in alot of the US. And yes, households in more expensive areas make more but if you are buying the average house, that costs $410k you need to be making like double the national average income to stick to the 1/3 rule. How many households are earning $170k where houses are $410k? Are people just devoting 50%+ of their income to housing? Everyone buying a house with the help of mom and dad? I just really don't get it.
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We’re paying Cal FAIR about 10% the value of our house per year, despite having best possible fire safety for come construction and the area surrounding the house. So, in your example, thats 175/10/12 = 1.5K per month, leaving $200 for the mortgage. So, $175K is unrealistic. In related news, Cal FAIR is lobbying for a 60% increase in rates this year, because, apparently 16% of rural houses in California burn down each year (it’s either that, or they’re unbelievably corrupt/incompetent, since they’re somehow losing money). Note that people in flood planes (much of the cities) have similar issues.
I suppose it's easier to blame ones self than to critique capitalism
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I guess more people died of starvation under socialism than under capitalism.
I think creating a permanent world peace would be easier than convincing progressives to give up their tired, inaccurate housing market tropes. It is impossible to have a constructive conversation with people who refuse to accept basic facts, and I don't think they have any idea how counterproductive it is.
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If people stopped accepting the claim of 'progressive' from anti-housing anti-poor people just because they self-label that way, that would be a good start.
> You don't need a study to tell you that if you make things more difficult and worse for landlords, the housing supply will decrease. That doesn't need to be true. In post WW2 UK the government built lots of rental property. That increased the housing supply and hurt private landlords at the same time.
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This is right. More supply is bad for landlords. In particular, housing developers and landlords are different economic actors!
Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility (github.com/coder)
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This is great. I've been using code-server to embed VSCode into the browser and been missing the terminal functionality. Excited to try this out.
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Neat. Would be cute to see this in VSCode to replace the terminal there...
The only thing I want (on MacOS) is the ability to search for text within a winodw, like when I'm debugging a stack trace, and multi-tab support.
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Text search has been merged on main
This is super cool! I'm close to releasing a project to make Ink work in the browser for building cross-platform terminal apps. (Ink is what Claude Code / Gemeni CLI use for rendering.) Currently it uses Xterm.js - but I'll have to try swapping Xterm out for ghostty-web!
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I got ghostty-web working with this and it is great. Unfortunately it seems I don't have enough karma to post a link to it. But it's ink-web on npm if you're interested! The nice thing about this is that you do not need an OS / backend of any kind - everything runs in the browser - similar to webcontainers but without even needing a container.
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