H12

I'll be curious what the collecter's market looks like for Apple Vision Pro a decade from now. I imagine there are far fewer of these things out in the world than Apple hoped there would be, and I wonder how that'd impact long-term scarcity.

I'd be interested in a podcast app that allows me to subscribe to written RSS content and uses AI to (transparently) convert them to audio podcasts.

The time/attention it takes to engage with written content can be a barrier for me. The hands-free experience of listening to something is so convenient, I find I engage with audio far more often than written text.

The only major downside of audio is the challenges around notetaking, and recording the snippets of info I want to hold onto.

One thing confuses me... Why invest so much into automony on streets/roads when most (all?) US trains/trams/busses still have operators?

Elon said himself that busses have 5x the operating cost of robo-taxis (1$ vs 20¢ per hour), but failed to mention that a typical bus carries 25x people. Presumably the cost delta is due to payroll for a human operators & janitors, so if busses already have 5x max throughout per $ in a worst-case comparison, why not put more energy into driving down costs on the more efficient modality?

I imagine it would be an easier problem to solve too, as you could could define constraints on your operating environment. Dedicated travel lanes, rail, and preprogrammed routes seem like they'd massively reduce the complexity of the problem.

I could also envision a decent financial argument for moving from a customer base of general-consumers to one of cities & local govt. If a 5x operating cost reduction is feasible, I could see "public transit automation" making for a pretty compelling capital project.

IIRC the re-implementation was necessary for type-safety.

I would really love to see a "maps" app that focuses specifically on local discovery for businesses and other points of interest. Or, one that at least makes a real attempt to deliniate between getting you to a known place, and finding you new places to go.

Most mapping apps seem to blend navigation & discovery into a single experience that winds up being worse at both.

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Full/Hybrid
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby/Rails, Go, JS/React, AWS, Terraform (all used professionally) w/ hobby experience in Elixir & other BEAM languages
  Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/3L7xdq7
  Email: contact <at> henrynelsonfirth <dot> com

--------------------------------------------------

Full-stack engineer with nearly a decade of total professional experience, and 2+ years of experience working in each of the following domains:

- Front-end React projects w/ an internal npm package repo

- Back-end Ruby/Rails monoliths

- AWS/Golang serverless microservices

- Engineering Management

I also have a strong interest in Elixir and other BEAM languages, and have been staying active as a full-stack Elixir hobbyist for 5+ years while bouncing between different languages/domains professionally.

While open to all opportunities, I am particularly interested in using Elixir professionally full-time :)

(Edited for formatting)

The only time I've had success with using AI to drive development work is for "writers block" situations where I'm staring at an empty file or using a language/tool with which I'm out of practice or simply don't have enough experience.

In these situations, giving me something that doesn't work (even if I wind up being forced to rewrite it) is actually kinda helpful. The faster I get my hands dirty and start actually trying to build the thing, the faster I usually get it done.

The alternative is historically trying to read the docs or man pages and getting overwhelmed and discouraged if they wind up being hard to grok.

> I cannot fathom why it is still done this way.

Like many things in America, the government is lobbied to create an unnecessary problem by private companies who aim to profit off of solving that problem.

The nice thing is there are plenty of socially-acceptable, but still every bit as objectively valid reasons to advocate for policies aimed as reducing the use of cars in cities.

I've been feeling this pretty accutely of late.

When stresses of work/life pile up, the inability to free myself from the unceasing car noise to find some tranquility can feel downright overwhelming at times.

We do have a degree of abstraction through terraform modules, but I've found that the same copy-paste problem applies to the terraform that composes those modules together.

This is possibly (if not likely) moreso a result of creating our terraform modules in a suboptimal way due to insufficient expertise than a shortcoming of Terraform itself.

It is also largely a result of having a backlog of scheduled redactors that is longer than I'd care to admit.

Thank you so much for the explanation!

I see much more clearly how something like this could be extremely useful.

I'm having a little trouble understanding the problem(s) Pkl is trying to solve.

After reading the title, my assumption was that Pkl was yet another newer, better configuration language (a la TOML), but now that I've read the article, it sounds like it's more a language for _generating_ config.

Unless I'm mistaken, it sounds like an abstraction on top of your config files meant to help you build & re-use configuration in a more standardized way, rather than yet another config language into itself.

A problem space I'm familiar with is having a bunch of Terraform or Cloudformation configuration you want to share/repeat in multiple projects. Doing-so can get hairy quickly, as the path of least resistance is to copy-paste a bunch of config you barely understand from some other project, and then perform trial-and-error surgery to find and change a couple of lines to suit your project.

Is Pkl designed to help address that sort of problem? Or am I missing something?

I also wonder whether it's an attempt to normalize certain aspects of the form factor to ease people into what Apple sees as the future of this technology.

Namely, I wonder if the tethered battery and lack of dedicated controller exists to prepare people for a future where their headset plugs into an iPhone (or iPad or Mac), which then serves as a battery, co-processor, and input device.