I was paying $6/month for Google Workspace Business Starter and refused to pay for the Gemini add-on because it was like $20/month on its own. Now Gemini is included and the plan is $14/month. I've been decently impressed with it's ability to work with PDFs and images, create tables that can export to Sheets, text that can export to Docs, Deep Research, and Help Me Write. I really think the imtegration with other Google products is where it shines. Now I use Gemini most, and bounce off of Claude occasionally. I rarely touch ChatGPT.
Yeah making it a focal point of identity seems to be very popular online and I find it extremely offputting. For myself, medication helped little if at all and sometimes made me feel worse. Although I do notice a difference in my ability to focus with good diet and exercise, the biggest positive changes come from better sleep habits and nearly eliminating unnecessary tech use. ADHD is a dopamine disorder and our smartphones are little slot machines.
Battery is silly for buses, IMO. Invest in streetcars (electrified fixed-route buses) and be done with it. Streetcar lines represent continued investment, and are therefore more attractive to developers, unlike bus routes that can be changed on a whim. And they've been around for longer. Cut the red tape on building them and on zoning if you want to see serious results.
Tram lines really only make sense for very high capacity routes; even in cities with huge tram and underground networks, there’s still place for buses.
I addressed that. High price is an artificial problem caused primarily by red tape, from tariffs to environmental studies to rolling over to NIMBYs over neverending hearings. We had electric streetcars in small towns in the early 1900s in the US. Small towns in other countries have them today.
Buses suck. People don't like riding them as much as trains and streetcars. Bus lines do not attract the same kind of investment that streetcars can. Attracting denser development along routes improves ridership AND tax base, which helps balance out the cost.
I think we will massively regret BEV as the solution to ICE vehicles. They don't handle temperature extremes well and I believe people are overly optimistic about recycling them.
IMO it's totally fine for buses to keep using ICE for many years to come. There are orders of magnitude fewer buses than cars, they are already pretty fuel efficient, and everything that makes public transport more expensive is very bad in my opinion.
If we had zero cars in a city, but 10k diesel buses, the city would still be better than if it had 100k cars and 500 electric buses. I'm making up these numbers, of course.
Point being: sure, electrify everything eventually, but let technology improve and let prices go down to the point that it makea sense for public transport.
Right now, an extra diesel bus would do more good than replacing a diesel bus with an electric one in many cities.
Seattle's streetcars have been changed on a whim, check out the Broadway extension. Just because they've laid tracks doesn't mean nimbys can't prevent them from running.
Modern phones are more like general purpose computers than game consoles. The console argument from Apple is disingenuous and gets far too little pushback from courts. Same goes for their argument that developers who don't like the App Store rules should make web apps — but limits Safari support for PWAs and limits third-party browsers to an older, slower JavaScript engine.
From a different angle, corporations are not people; they do not inherently deserve the same consideration as people. Sideloading provides actual individuals the option of more flexibility in how they use the device they purchased with their hard-earned dollars. Sideloading also provides the freedom to continue to install apps that might be removed due to government pressure. "It's their platform" holds absolutely no weight as an argument in my mind; it's reflects excessive deference to corporations.
Apple should be forced because the real-world use of devices they make is broader than they argue in court, because it is a company not a person, and because other actions it takes restrict the ability of developers to take advantage of the alternative Apple itself promotes.
Less bureaucracy is the solution yet the United States, famously lazy about regulating tech, has managed to support only two truly viable mobile operating systems. Not even Microsoft wants to be in the game. This indicates that the bar is much higher than "they should just go make their own" and therefore we can expect more of the behemoths.
For those complaining about not allowing 3rd Party JIT engines for 3rd Party Browsers. Please consider the vulnerability track records for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari:
I'm taking the best year for all of these (2024) - there are far worse years in the past 5 that could have been picked.
Chrome had 107 vulnerabilities that were Overflow or Memory Corruption. That is a vulnerability every 3.4 days. [0]
Mozilla had 52 vulnerabilities that were Overflow or memory Corruption. This is a vulnerability about every 7 days. [1]
Safari had 10 vulnerabilities that were Overflow or Memory Corruption. This is a vulnerability about every 36 days. [2]
How many of those vulnerabilities were related to JITs? How many were actually feasibly exploitable, and not just theoretical? How many would have resulted in something actually dangerous (code execution, privilege escalation) and not just something annoying (denial of service)?
How many people are actively doing security research on each browser? Is the number of finds per browser more a function of how many eyeballs are on it than how many issues actually exist?
I don't doubt that there are actual, real differences here, but presenting context-free stats like that is misleading.
Your criticism is valid. Adding context is very subjective. Getting objective metrics to some of these questions is an open issue for the software world.
I don't think it matters if the vulnerabilities are JIT related - a process that can JIT can create code, so any exploitable (controllable) overflow or memory vulnerability CAN be pivoted into arbitrary code execution.
The problem with CVEs is that it is not required to prove exploitability to get assigned. It can take a lot of effort (single or multiple people) to prove exploitability. Earlier this week someone quoted "weeks" to me for each bug. They were quoting numbers for some of the Chrome bugs. These researchers said it was not possible to keep up with the number of bugs being found.
I believe (but cannot back it up) that security bugs follow a bathtub curve for each change set. If you've got a lot of change in your code-base then you'll pretty much be on a high bug point of the curve for the whole project. It also probably matters quite a bit about what sort of changes are being made. Working to get high performance seems (again a feeling) to increase the chance of creating a security vulnerability.
The level of public research is a tough metric. The reward / motivation factors are not the same. There is also an issue with internal research teams. They will find bugs before they are released, so they never really "exist". Does measuring the number of CVEs issued indicate the quality or level of internal research? What is a "good" metric for any of this?
Declining memberships, maybe companies not valuing technical communication as a separate field as much, the rise of LLMs all seem like possible contributing factors.
My experience is that companies just don't value good technical writing. And a lot of managers are basically illiterate, so it's the blind leading the blind.
What was your experience with Tidal? I felt like it was better at recommending new albums and artists I want familiar with and there was much less of a focus on playlists.
I haven't used Tidal yet, myself. I've got a mind to, though, especially as it seems much friendlier to artists than most--I'd even consider publishing my own music there, whereas other streaming services (with maybe the sole exception of YouTube music for sheer discoverability) are hard "no"s that I personally explicitly refuse to touch.
Exactly my thoughts. Ellison and Oracle are surveillance-friendly (after all, it's kind of in the name). Oracle has a history of of privacy violations. This deal, coupled with the new AI data center in Abilene and their past, is ominous.
i don't know if its just a historical perspective stuck in my mind, but if iread Oracle i just think about vulnerabilities and handling them really poorly.
Very meta post. ;) I need a filter on all web browsing so that I never hear about LLMs ever again. They're a scourge on critical thinking, on workers, on the environment, on the internet. If they are the future, leave me behind.
On iPhone, you can use the Shortcuts app to do this. Create a new shortcut with the Restart action and save it. Then go to the Automations tab, set the schedule, and select your new shortcut. Make sure it's set to Run immediately.
Woah, I never cease to be surprised by the unexpected kinds of things that Shortcuts allows (given all the obvious ones it does not). Thank you!
Out of curiosity (and because I'm not going to try that for tomorrow morning) – does that kill my alarms, or does iOS schedule/store these somewhere accessible before first unlock?
iOS alarms continue to work after overnight upgrades which involve a reboot, and also work when you plug in a dead phone before bed, so they’ve apparently figured this out.
I set my work android phone to go off 10pm and come on by 7am everyday. It's under settings -> system. It also has the ability to restart on any day/time you want.
