Way back when I used Spotify, I felt they should go this way instead of dabbling with (fake) podcasts, pivot-to-video, audiobooks, and slop music. All of that stuff is a distraction from my core subscription model: listening to music from artists that I love, and finding new artists to love! Much better to lean into something complementary to that core model.
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.
Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.
Source? This seems extremely unlikely to me, running a camera all the time consumes a fair bit of energy and they don't take long to turn on. Unless that's because they're always on?
Regardless, that's a pretty strong claim. I'd love to learn more if you have a link that can back you up!
A lot of companies pay and treat tech writers like shit.
If you're a decent tech writer who can write well, grok engineer speak, collaborate well with engineers during crunch time before a release, and apply your technical knowledge to build and maintain documentation infrastructure... well, you'll get comped slightly beneath the level of a developer with similar experience.
For folks like me who enjoy the writing side of things, it's worth it. But there are very few people who truly appreciate both the writing and the development side of the role. You honestly need both.
Most companies pay poorly, and wind up hiring non-technical folks who can barely manage a CMS. Those people can be helpful in a larger org, but at the end of the day, most technical orgs need a truly technical writer who can talk with the engineers directly and mess around with the product pre-release.
I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO:
* excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile
* heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date
* multiple map styles, so you can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in
* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)
* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour
* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it
Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.
Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.
I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)
TL;DR it looks like the M4 Mac Mini redesign is _not_ soldered onto the logic board. So instead of paying 6x street prices of similar SSDs, you can just upgrade it yourself with an SSD of your choice!
This is absolutely huge news. I wonder if Apple will do something similar for the Studio, Pro, or -- dare I hope? -- even the Macbook Pros in the future? I can't imagine allowing this 'trapdoor' of money savings is a huge problem for profits since most businesses would never bother messing around with warranties for a spec upgrade. But this is absolutely MASSIVE for consumers. Just put in a little extra work and you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars compared to Apple's upgrade pricing, for a good enough end result.
Not to mention the fact that this must also save _Apple itself_ an insane amount of money for repairs! Instead of throwing away the entire logic board, the CPU, the soldered-on RAM, and the soldered-on SSD whenever any of those components fail, you can just replace the malfunctioning part. Who'd have thunk (other than, y'know, every single computer company from 1980-2015)?
I would also of course love to see this upgradeability return to RAM. I'm curious if anyone more knowledgable than myself might know if the SoC/Apple Silicon Unified Memory system makes that more difficult, or if we've just accepted it because Apple Says So.
And while I'm on the subject of non-upgradeable RAM: does anyone know why no SBCs, from Raspberry Pi to Orange Pearl Jam Cake to Milk, allow for upgradeable RAM? Surely it's possible in the SBC form factor?
Extremely exciting. Google Maps has gotten significantly worse in the last couple of years, finally passing the threshold of enshittification by instructing me to turn "at the <fast food seafood restaurant>" instead of just telling me the road name late last year. Search for points of interest has gotten awful, just as bad as Google Search, the Play Store, and the App Store with sponsored content taking over all usable space for basic searches (seriously, I do not want you to prioritise <fast food donut restaurant> when I search for "diner" or "coffee shop").
If Kagi can prioritise useful search results, trade ads for a monthly subscription, and contribute meaningful data back into OpenStreetMaps as a backend, I would subscribe in an instant. Currently DuckDuckGo is enough to meet my web search needs, but I desperately need a good alternative to Google Maps. Unfortunately Osmand is just not a great interface for most of my needs, and has no Android Auto support, either.
Only time I've ever had an issue is when I manually disconnected power from a Pi 4 when I overreacted to a network outage. I was dumb and thought my Pi's DNS was screwing things up for the whole network, but it turns out that it was just Spectrum screwing things up for the entire region. Fortunately there was only one minor corrupted file, it didn't bork the SD card, and I was able to repair the setup manually.
I've never had any problem as long as I've stuck with the `sudo shutdown` command, which powers down in a controlled manner so writes don't get interrupted. But I've also never had an issue after a power outage, so I think somehow power outage shutdowns are more graceful than just yanking the power cable out.
If you're really concerned, you can always configure your Pi to use a read-only root filesystem. Combine that with a USB SSD to store your _actual_ data and you should be OK indefinitely. Or just boot from that USB SSD -- just remember to configure fstab correctly for your intended behaviour! You might be surprised to discover that fstab can delay a boot indefinitely if mounting expectations do not match reality.
I don't think London has made quite the strides in bikeability that Paris has since 2020, but when I visited Hackney last year I was astonished to see more bikes during rush hour than cars. Walking down a road to a coffee shop, I actually had to wait a few seconds to cross at the intersection between two bike highways.
Hundreds of people riding bikes to work. And as quiet as the wilderness behind my house in the rural USA. I could hear the wind in the trees, and that was it. Maybe a little drivetrain noise from a poorly maintained bike here or there.
I desperately want to live in a city that quiet. Back when I lived in NYC practically every environment was an assault on the ears.
Works well until you end up with temperatures too hot to wear pants. Or you exercise someplace with ticks and get too sweaty for pants.
Hell, I live as far north as you can go in New England, and I've found ticks on my feet after grilling dinner in my backyard. At some point I just do not care to don my anti-tick hazmat suit every time I do anything outside.
Why do housing prices go up? Partially inflation. But mostly because purchasing a house and renting it out is massively profitable, state subsidized, and a safe way to invest a store of wealth. Owners of capital seek out niches with good risk:value ratios. Look at housing prices over the last 5 years: even if your investment home sat empty, it's probably gone up 70% or more in price. Rent is just profit on top of those (also state-subsidized, way more than any other asset class!) asset gains. Mortgages that are all-but-guaranteed by the state allow even the least-qualified investors to massively leverage themselves into multiple million dollar properties.
The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.
I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.
Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!
The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.
Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.
I find that 4 to 7 day forecasts tend to be 80% accurate. So probably a little bit better than they were when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, the most important part of any forecast IMO is intensity. I don't care if we're going to get snow flurries all day, but if we're going to get a foot of snow, I would like to know -- and not just when the winter storm warning goes into effect!
Similarly, I don't care if we're going to get scattered showers all day. But if we're going to get a downpour in the afternoon, I'd like to know so I can avoid getting caught in a flash flood on a trail or on the road.
Same thing applies with temperature: if it's going to be cold all day, good to know. But if a rainstorm is going to remain active during a deep freeze and create a layer of ice on every exposed surface, I need to be prepared for walking, biking, or driving.
Fortunately there's a somewhat local weather station near me that provides an RSS feed of longform weather forecasts. But I notice that more and more people wind up surprised by slightly-abnormal weather events as they rely more and more on smartphone weather apps. Weather apps that utterly lack the nuance that a paragraph of text can provide.
Sorry, but my Article and Walmart.com accounts do not need 2FA. I'm fine with OTP, but most places use SMS 2FA, which exposes a unique identifier for myself and -- due to SIM swapping, which is a risk on literally every major carrier due to horrible customer service operations -- often makes it easier for a malicious actor to hijack my account.
You're generally correct, though: GOOD 2FA is not overrated and I would welcome it on any account. But it's obnoxious that almost every account I have uses SMS as a singular point of failure. I'd welcome a move back to email 2FA with a backup email for account recovery.
I wish more OSes would work with independent photographers to compile a set of beautiful wallpapers. It used to feel easy to find good wallpaper online, but nowadays, especially with macOS's hiDPI settings and my personal desire for #000 true black wallpapers to hide notches and camera holes, it can feel very difficult. Search engines don't yield good results for 4k or 5k images, and a lot of the hi-res wallpaper subreddits have disappeared since their API debacle.
I source solid wallpapers from a couple of OSes for use in macOS:
In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly because the students and their (helicopter) parents would raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press.
Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.
- a Yubikey
- a sparingly used email account with no 2FA, just a very long password
2FA through the sort-of-secret email account lets me get back into Bitwarden (and thus everything else) even if my house burns down and I lose access to all of my yubikeys. And auth on a device that doesn't easily support yubikeys, like older iPhones.
2FA is very useful, but highly overrated. If you have a sufficiently long and complex memorized password (and the email platform actually lets you create one that's properly long, 40+ characters), it's unlikely that you'll have any problems unless you accidentally share the password somewhere.
Of course I feel like all my my precautions are moot when my bank and CC company force SMS 2FA. But I haven't found any with superior security schemes anwyway.
Worse, ultrawideband/mmwave 5G and 8k TVs can be a nuisance. I've seen 5G phones repeatedly get "stuck" on a weak or nonexistent mmwave signal while traveling, and it can take quite some time before the phone decides to fall back to a different tower. 8k TVs are cool until you realize that a lot of your cables won't even output 4k signal to them, if the manufacturer didn't implement a decent fallback.
I'm not sure if wifi 7 has similar hangups, but considering the fact that my 10 year old Airport router still does everything I need at home, with an integrated backup for my Macs, it's a hard sell. I still get reduced bufferbloat on the Airport Extreme compared to most commercial routers -- I'm guessing that even when you just use one, modern mesh network configs have some nasty overhead.
Hyperion was a big surprise for me this year as well. I expected it to be good, but the way the first book unfolds a larger universe is incredible. I'm not sure I've read science fiction that feels quite so... planned, and intentional? Especially the way it incorporates Keats' poetry.
Thanks for tipping me off about the Annotated American Gods! I read it ages ago, and I've been yearning to get back into Gaiman lately. This sounds like a good way to do it.
A good reminder that I need to finish my Malazan readthrough! The universe is incredibly deep, the characters are incredibly rich, but I do wish Erikson would let us get a little bit comfier in the shoes of each character for longer stretches of time. I sailed through House of Chains so quickly because I didn't have perspective whiplash, but I find it difficult to keep all of the characters in my head during some sections -- battles in particular are a real challenge for me in the Malazan series.
Highly recommend the series, but a warning: if you find yourself bouncing off book one, don't bother with the rest of the series. I find that the later books are slightly better written and slightly better structured, but the core writing style issues are still there (notably, perspective whiplash and a magic system that is so complex that it sometimes feels like deux ex machina).
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.