eh, compared to salaries even shiniest macs wouldn't register in USA, especially hubs like SV. Especially if it's issued once a couple or four years.
With AI spend - especially at Anthropic/OpenAI API prices - spending 0.5-1 macbook a month worth of tokens per employee seems normal (from what I've seen, heard, what happens in this forum and thread and what my employer does).
Tokenmaxxxing (followed by commit/PR-maxxxing) is celebrated. Don't think - just launch orchestrator that will create dozen child agent sessions to do useless work to impress your superiors. If buy the end of the day you will ask to increase your token allowance - you're a superhero.
Metro design being amazing, refreshing, beautiful and delightful is a hill I will die on.
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
I remember most people being quite positive about Metro on the phone. Maybe not about Windows Phone itself for various reasons, but the actual design I remember most people being at worst ambivalent about it.
Windows 8 Metro, on the other hand, was almost universally hated and with very good reason. And Apple has been doing the same exact mistake for awhile, slowly porting designs meant for a phone (and far worse designs than Metro at that, iOS 7 was terrible as was everything since) to laptops/desktops.
Well stated, but I will say, it is not impossible to do both.
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
I always have a tinge of...perhaps 'sadness' when reading such articles because they are a lot like those large fishing nets that drag along the bottom of the ocean catching and destroying in quantities unneeded. From this list:
- Quietly/Delve/Tapestry/Landscape: they're all lovely words. I love(d) using them.
- "Serves as": I use this all the time too.
- "The result? Devastating". Perhaps it is a bit stilted, but "Outcome? Predictable." could be a nice turn of phrase.
- "It's worth noting": All academics everywhere use this in papers. See also: "Notably", "Essentially", "In general" and other such fillers that we reach for.
- "Think of it as": This is such a useful phrase to explain something. Analogy is how we learn after all.
- The fucking em dashes. I love them, and screw everyone who suggests one should stop using them. One big reason for using linux is the compose key, so the em dash is never far away.
- Same with the unicode decoration. Nah, screw you. I use these symbols all the time: °, ×, →, ⇒ etc. in my own notes. Again, compose key ftw.
Etc. (the list is endless)
I know what people will say, that everything is contextual, one has to study case-by-case etc. But I can't help feeling that someone is pointing a finger at me and accusing me before-the-fact. Just, AI has polluted the joy of writing.
I wouldn't fret too much: AI is still advancing so quickly that these specific tells will only last a short time. And then you are free to use em-dashes again, or at least no one will care.
Your defiant and cock-sure "Yes it should do nothing" seems myopic, lacking in empathy, and just not very well thought out. Can you explain why you believe this is a good idea?
Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?
This is rubbish. By that token, computer development is also facilitating biological weapons development. A better MacOS (or Windows, I don't know) leads to better weapons. They should clearly stop developing computers and OSes. Developers of nice test-tubes are also facilitating bioweapons. Your local O-ring manufacturer, your local medical-grade freezer manufacturer etc. are all culpable. The problem is the bioweapon, not the LLM.
An OS developer is just as culpable as a researcher directly training AIs that (1) are capable of building bio-weapons and (2) have shown consistent and increasingly severe misalignment? Among other things...
Yeah but trends seems to point strongly that upcoming models in the next few years will make it orders of magnitude easier to develop one with no real expertise.
I'm a mechanical engineering PhD who works on numerical computing, data analysis and the like. I've spent several hundreds of dollars on fonts. Because I like things being just so, because I like seeing the artefacts I produce being nice to look at, and because they're just plain beautiful.
Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.
I believe everything you say. I hope you didn't feel attacked. It is just a feeling I often get when I'm online. Some people seem to spend more time on form than actual content, and while I agree that how things look is a part of the expression, I am somewhat of a brutalist because I feel that it rarely matters much, and most of the time it is a distraction.
but again, I am an old fart who is sad gopher lost.
This is an infuriatingly clueless comment. It gives nothing? It allows people to set their affairs in order, and that is an invaluable thing.
Alzheimers can lead to all kinds of other issues like impulsivity, or aggressiveness. People gambling away their life savings, not knowing that they are even doing it. Doctors unable to intervene due to rights around patient autonomy. All of this has big consequences in the lives of those affected.
This is fucking fantastic. I wish the whole of the internet was like this. People enthusiastically sharing their own enthusiasm about learning something cool, and other enthusiasts finding it and going down their own rabbitholes. The internet is multimedia. It should be nothing _but_ people sharing knowledge. Thanks for writing this up.
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