The Dark Lord ☑️

I hate that that’s the case.

I’ve been trying to lose weight, so I chopped off my leg just below the knee. I’m several pounds down, and I didn’t have to stop eating even a calorie. It’s amazing.

The only issue is that now I don’t have a leg and exercise may be difficult….

Look at the sentence you wrote. Since the Korean War. And the Korean War was the biggest since the one before that.

Turn the news off and look at the data. It’s important to end these conflicts, but in terms of scale, these are far smaller than the past.

Here’s homicides per capita in Western Europe. I highly recommend reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. It goes into this in depth.

Violence has been going down for centuries. We’re hearing about it more, but it’s declining. It peaked around 1993, and it’s been trending downward ever since.

If you zoom out and look at super long term trends, it’s been declining for centuries.

HTML is not a programming language

It’ll take so long before you can even leave your physical ID at home and count on everyone accepting your digital one. And it may never happen that people stop accepting your physical one.

It’s so people can trial having digital IDs. Some TSA and others can scan the new IDs, but not everyone can. So in the meantime, you have to carry your physical one too.

People are pointing out potential negatives, but this has some good possibilities for privacy too. If you show your ID at the liquor store, there’s no need for the clerk to know your name or address. The scanner can just verify your age.

People are pointing out the juxtaposition of many people losing their jobs while one person spends silly amounts of money on toys. It’s not that he spent it on toys, it’s that he made so much that he was able to waste it on frivolity while others around him suffered.

You subscribe to memos that tell you what to think is cringe?

Right. Throughout human history, if someone was cast out of a community, they didn’t survive. We’ve been trained through evolution to go along with the tribe because it’s unsafe to question anything and get cast out.

That’s great, but the fact it’s local and private means it can consume my personal data and be a more personal LLM. This just doesn’t hit that mark.

Apple Maps was bad, yes. But they had their hand forced. Google started charging for their API (enough to cripple their app), and they had very little time to create one of their own.

That’s not happening here. No one is forcing their hand. If they didn’t release an updated Siri this year, nothing would happen.

Yes. Android already does all these things. But I think the things I’m excited most about are not on this list at all.

1. A private local LLM. With the on-device context of my notes, messages, calendar, etc, I’m rather excited to have a more personal LLM than ChatGPT.

2. Personal messaging via satellite. I love that I can stay in touch with people outside of a cell network.

Agreed. You could argue that Reddit is actually overcrowded.

Correct answer. Sometimes I get things wrong, but I do my best to learn how I can do things to be more like this. Whatever label that is.

Or that they can buy the plane ticket first, then apply for the grievance discount later…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/02/18/air-canada-airline-chatbot-ruling/

Call centres exist because people can’t get the help they need by searching. Take away call centres, and you’re just making it more difficult for customers.

You’re not wrong. If I said anything that made it seem like those who get paid less are worse developers, that’s on me. But there are many who are amazing developers who can’t take a government job because the pay is too low. It seems odd to rule those people out. If we’re fighting for better pay for everyone, government jobs should set an example.

Right. This isn’t an issue with Microsoft, it’s an issue of getting a third party to do work when you have very different priorities. Microsoft’s priority is to make money, as all companies do. The governments priority is to have a safe and secure service. The two don’t match, so the government should have created and maintained a safe and secure service.

The biggest issue is that people don’t want the government to over-spend on anything, so they don’t want the government to pay tech people tech salaries. So even if they did just do it themselves, you can’t trust it’s done by the best people because it’s only done by those who are willing to work at 30% of the pay.

So the issue isn’t really with Microsoft, it’s with the government for not being aware of priorities, and not being willing to pay for what’s important.