the_snooze

7 ms·

31.
by the_snooze 6mo ago
A professional knows what they're worth and what they need to deliver. On-time payment according on an agreed-upon schedule is table stakes. That's the most fundamental requirement. Nothing happens without that.
32.
by the_snooze 6mo ago
The "what to do instead" section is basically DARPA's "Heilmeier Catechism," which is the framework they use to gauge high-risk high-reward ideas. It doesn't kill ideas, but it places the onus on the proposer t
33.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
Social media feeds are designed to be slot machines. Each scroll is a pull. You may or may not get something you actually want. You can't predict what's coming up next, so you just keep mindlessly scrolling.
34.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
It's a matter of affordances. The path of least resistance with agents is to let it commit whatever it wants. That's a natural outcome of the design and implementation of agents. Yes, humans are accountable for the ultimate output
35.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
I'm a pretty busy person professionally. When I feel like I'm being pushed to "scale" my time and attention, I take that as a signal to do the opposite: do less, and do those remaining things more meaningfully. Trying to
36.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that a
37.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
We’ve had computing technology that clearly understands what the user wants to do. It’s called a command line interface. No guessing, no recommendations, no dark patterns, no bullshit.
38.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.
39.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
The 3.5mm audio jack is pretty close to engineering perfection on the important dimensions: cheap, fast, and good. Getting rid of it in favor of Bluetooth-only audio connectivity is creating a problem to sell you a (more expensive, less rel
40.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
AI powered toys are little more than techbros rushing to build Tom Riddle's diary.
41.
by the_snooze 7mo ago
>even if as little as 1% of the population 1% of 8 billion is 80 million. Coordinating that many people onto a particular platform or alternative is a gargantuan task. It's not "little."
42.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
You see it in how services have twisted the meaning of "saving" something. Very rarely does it mean actually putting a file on your computer for you to access on your own terms as long as you have possession of it. More often, it
43.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act h
44.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and conne
45.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
>If it connects it sends. More broadly, if it connects, it will serve other masters besides you.
46.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
It's not just exclusive deals. It's piecemeal deals. Just look at what you have to do to stream all of Pokemon. https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
47.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
>Apps may change and often experience “enshittification.” Hardware can break but non-connected hardware is otherwise unlikely to change. This is a huge part of it. Connected apps are never complete. They can't be. They must always e
48.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
It's the tools. Friction and barriers aren't bad things. When you have a CD player, there's a higher barrier to switching from "listening to music" to "doing something else." It's something I noticed
49.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
It's not a bad thing to make places more accessible to children and senior citizens who can't (or shouldn't) be driving.
50.
by the_snooze 8mo ago
College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They gr
51.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
Social affinity and reputation represent winning strategies that have served humans very well since the dawn of time. It shouldn't be surprising that they continue to be extremely effective even (or perhaps especially) in the age of AI
52.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
Exactly this. These systems are supposed to have been built by some of the smartest scientific and engineering minds on the planet, yet they somehow failed (or chose not) to think about second-order effects and what steady-state outcomes th
53.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
The purpose of a system is what it does.
54.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
If only our technology were advanced enough that we could have an OS that didn't constantly undermine the user's intentions.
55.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
Ukraine was never a nuclear power any real sense. The USSR's bombs were parked there, and Ukraine merely had physical (but not operational) custody over them after the USSR fell. Ukraine could have kept them to bootstrap a nuclear arms
56.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
It could be as simple as "wealthy areas get more county services." There are practical considerations when choosing polling places, like the availability of parking and enough space to accommodate a line, check-in tables, voting b
57.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
There are non-internet ways to do that. States are really the "laboratories of democracy" on that front, with different states having affordances like long early-voting periods and mail-in voting. However, those are in the context
58.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
My local issue of interest is how my county and state administer elections. I volunteer as a poll worker for nearly every election, with a preference for the "boring" low-turnout contests like state legislative and local board pri
59.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
60.
by the_snooze 9mo ago
A lot of consumer tech needs have been met for decades. The problem is that companies aren't able to extract rent from all that value.

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