Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
And I "use" dead bodies for sustenance, without qualifying whether that relationship implies eating or necromancy. If the imprecision is because of a misunderstanding about what an op ed or guest essay is for: it's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.
Comment · 2 months ago
The President is an example (and actual) enforcement mechanism for the State. Not the argument.

We want to ban independent political expenditure past a certain dollar threshold. Great. How do we do that without torching legitimate civic and commercial participation, and without accidentally entrenching rich participants even more? I'm unconvinced you can do that, and unconvinced that ads are a worthy enough evil to be worth the try, particularly if it requires amending over the First Amendment. ("If" is an operative word.)

Comment · 2 months ago
It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.
Comment · 2 months ago
"Money is speech" is a reddit-ism. The argument is closer to "limiting spending can be tantamount to limiting speech."

Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?

If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.

Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?

Comment · 3 months ago
Interesting that the distinction between phones and boats was not enough to dissuade whatever point it is that you're trying to make.

From Chief Justice Roberts in Riley v. California: "One of the most notable distinguishing features of modern cell phones is their immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy."

Comment · 3 months ago
It's not just resolve, either. The org must recognize the problem in the first place, which isn't a given. Especially in smaller/govt orgs. Often, recognition of the problem is wrongly tied to how difficult the foremost suggestion is to implement.

And there are orgs for whom any suggestion can itself be so encumbered by uncontrolled red tape and social costs that relatively minor changes become a project.

Comment · 3 months ago
This title is easy to misinterpret. If I understand correctly: Codex now encrypts sub-agent prompts and hides those prompts from the user.

edit: originally was "Codex starts encrypting prompts, uses cyphertext for inference instead"

Comment · 3 months ago
I'm sympathetic to Logseq here. My guess is that many things are true but do not sum attractively to an audience right now.

The db probably is the cleaner place for Logseq's note storage, but invites comparison to Obsidian, whose fundamental unit of information is already a document, where Logseq's is more like a bulletpoint. Logseq being open source where Obsidian isn't could maybe blunt the edge of moving to a less-portable format, but a user can also understandably look at the status of two-way sync and see an unsexy "In-progress" and figure that's not good enough. Logseq also carries some baggage wrt instability, and the argument that the db is the pro-stability move unfortunately needs to be proven over time. Overall seems like a rough spot to be in.

I dunno. I like Logseq and wish them a good launch.

Comment · 3 months ago
Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.

I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.

Comment · 3 months ago
One similarly egregious UX issue on the latest Android is that pressing buttons in the dropdown tray doesn't give any feedback until the action is complete. I can press the "turn on WiFi" button and receive zero haptics or visual indication that the phone registered my tap, for over a second, and THEN it will decide "okay! let's shake the phone and change button color now".

And if you have a tray button that needs to e.g reach over the network to a HomeAssistant instance that needs to itself reach out to some fuckass IoT vendor server, you may as well not expect any sort of feedback before you close the tray.

Comment · 4 months ago

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