aspectmin

Apple makes great products, and I am well vested in its ecosystem.

With that said - there are three areas of their products that are substandard.

- Siri, as discussed here

- autocorrect - which is insanely bad. I switched to Gboard a while back - and despite its occasional lagging (it depends too much on an internet connection) it’s such a relief. No more fighting autocorrect over words, especially after committing by hitting space.

- and… the whole way you register devices with Apple home - incredibly painful. Thinking they were trying to make it more secure, but they utterly failed at friction and usability. I suspect their ecosystem would be a lot bigger if they simplified how you interact with Home to register devices.

Ooo - my favourite genre. Just added Tau Zero to my list. Children of Time was amazing as was Hyperion. Have you read the Quantum Magician series?

I’m weird. I read textbooks and instruction manuals. I read incredibly fast though, so it fits nicely. There’s always some deeper learning to be gained in those pages.

Good luck if you do this.

Sigh. A good user experience for the web is just out the door isn't it? Max enshittification. Makes me so sad - it could be so much better.

Wow. The list of names of people who've left recently - a who's who, but also quite damning.

Think it's time for Google to reboot itself.

Votehere / Dategrity was basically this (for mail in ballots). We worked hard on these problems.

Thinking it might be time to push for some laws to mandate companies have better systems to handle and address concerns that impact customers businesses and livelihoods.

This inability to reach and/or get things resolved through customer support channels seems endemic, and probably generally part of the enshittification trend as a whole.

Really - each country needs its own sovereign AI infrastructure and models. Sigh.

Not only do we need right to repair legislation across North America (and the world), but we also need right to continue using - as in - they fold, the code (e.g. licensing server) becomes open source, or something similar, so people can continue to use these products.

A mirror of Khan Academy would be great as well.

I’d love some detail on your setup. Which NAS, which drives? Key data sets? (Would love to build one myself)

Such a cool idea.

In addition to Wikipedia, I’d love to see a mirror of all the health (NIH) and similar data

- key imagery, for example the human body

- (wishful) chatGPT 4o

An interesting exercise is to do this exact same calculation with the atmosphere.

Oh wow... I still remember my old ICQ number (very low 100Ks). Basically lived on it for many years.

Not positive, but pretty sure that this, and the Unix Network book were golden for us in the 90s when we were writing MUDs. Explained so much about Socket communications (bind/listen/accept,...) Been a long time since I looked at that stuff, but those were fun times.