The word "most" is doing a lot here. Europe guarantees consumer rights by law, while the US relies on companies adopting the practices voluntarily. Most do, but larger companies more universally than smaller, and it's by no means universal.

It's the reality for the vast majority of larger companies. Quibbling with word choice is really not a good argument.

We are talking of entrepreneurship and new companies, what small business are required to do for returns/refunds in the US is definitely not ahead of Europe for consumer protection.

It's not word choice, you are just making the wrong argument.

Try canceling your NYT subscription.

Let me support your argument by telling you what you just reminded me of...

I was briefly subscribed to the NYT from Germany. To my surprise, I couldn't cancel online, but had to call. (The EU has a law which requires that if you can subscribe online, you must be able to cancel online.)

They have national numbers for many countries, but they're just forwarders to the same call center, with notably mangled audio quality presumably due to multiple lossy compression algorithms applied at each hop of the call.

Additionally, there was lots of background noise when I got connected to a rep. Over this barely usable line, I was now asked to spell out my email address, which naturally took multiple attempts of painfully slow spelling before the rep was able to locate my account. (My very limited knowledge of the NATO alphabet didn't help.)

Of course, I then had to go through the spiel of declining alternative offers and providing a reason for my cancellation (all of which I never had to do in Germany before) before they finally confirmed it. Yeah, I'm glad about consumer protection law in the EU.

The same exists in the EU, French Le Monde (NYT local equivalent) required you for a long time to send a registered letter costing 7€ and a trip to the post office to cancel your subscription.

So don't subscribe. It's not that hard to cancel though, yes, you need to spend some time on the phone.

Don't buy if you don't like company policy, no need to have a law. There is plenty of choice in the US. Some companies even offer 90 days (again, no laws required).

I'd find it tiresome real quick to always have to research before purchasing anything if the vendor will treat me with respect. Having a baseline of what you can expect from any business relation guaranteed by law is pretty great, really.

Really? There are tons of ways to cheat and game any system, including consumer protection. No laws can close this completely. Darwin award is still a thing and will always be.

It may be only a matter of time before all devs remember to append ", and make no mistakes" to the end of their LLM prompts, but I don't think we as an industry will ever reach a point at which every release of every package/library/application is scanned with the most capable model available.

I mean, we've had tooling like fuzzers available for a very long time, and most devs haven't run one against their software ever, let alone before each release.

It's the human factor I think will keep this a problem essentially-forever.

This will alarm you, then.

I set Siri to a masculine voice, because I disliked the gendered assumptions I felt with the default.

I gave my Claw Discord bot a feminine identity (Ada, with a pfp of Ada Lovelace) for the same reason. But then I set up a separate Discord bot for an LLM outside of Claw, and gave it a masculine identity so I could easily distinguish between the two mentally and expressively.

All still clankers, but "it" is too general for my dual-bot config.

I use actualbudget.org to track all spending, but only update investment accounts ("off-budget" in Actual Budget terms) once a month. Completely deterministic, as all things related to numbers should be.

I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change.

I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.

I kept asking this question last year, especially after that initial METR report showing people believed themselves to be faster when they were slower. Then I decided to dive in feet-first for a few weeks so that nobody could say I hadn't tried all I could.

At work, what I see happening is that tickets that would have lingered in a backlog "forever" are getting done. Ideas that would have come up in conversation but never been turned into scoped work is getting done, too. Some things are no faster at all, and some things are slower, mostly because the clankers can't be trusted and human understanding can't be sped up, or because input is needed from product team, etc. But the sorts of things that don't make it into release notes, and are never announced to customers, those are happening faster, and more of them are happening.

We review server logs, create tickets for every error message we see, and chase them down, either fixing the cause or mitigating and downgrading the error message, or however is appropriate to the issue. This was already a practice, but it used to feel like we were falling farther behind every week, as the backlog of such tickets grew longer. Most low-priority stuff, since obviously we prioritized errors based on user impact, but now remediation is so fast that we've eliminated almost the entire backlog. It's the sort of things that if we were a mobile app, would be described as "improvement and bug fixes" generically. It's a lot of quality-of-life issues for use as backend devs.

At home, I'm creating projects I don't intend for anyone outside my family to see. So far things I could theoretically have done myself, even related to things I've done myself before, but at a scale I wouldn't bother. Like a price-checker that tracks a watchlist of grocery items at nine local stores and notifies me in discord of sales on items and in categories I care about. It's a little agent posting to a discord channel that I can check before heading out for groceries.

Or several projects related to my hobbies, automating the parts I don't enjoy so much to give me more time for the parts I do. My collection of a half-dozen python scripts and three cron jobs related to those hobbies has grown to just over 20 such scripts and 14 cron jobs. Plus some that are used by an agent as part of a skill, although still scripts I can call manually, because I'll go back to cron jobs for everything if the price of tokens rises a bit more.

I was super-skeptical, and now I'm not. I think companies laying off employees are delusional or using LLMs as an excuse, but there is zero question in my mind that these things can be a huge boon to productivity for some categories of coding.

I went through a similar journey. That and having read all the other experienced engineers’ anecdotes I think the current consensus is that it can boost productivity and does so for a lot of people but that vibe coding still remains unviable in a lot of situations.

You could double or quadruple the number of pixels, and it wouldn't make any difference in how much information humans comprehend easily. You would be using more computing power and more memory to deliver the same amount of useful information less efficiently.

A "proper GUI" is rarely better than a well-designed TUI for communicating textual information, IMO. And the TUI constraints keep the failure-states for badly-designed UI tightly bound, unlike GUI constraints.

What about a map, or an image? We can surely agree that humans can take in a lot more information than a readable letter-grid allows, depending on the type of information.

Sure, of course sometimes an image conveys things better than a thousand words. But a very large percentage of what most people do with computers is primarily text, with more images in ads than useful content. By and large GUIs don't use images to convey information better, they just make text worse.

Modern terminal software supports displaying images, for what it's worth.

> Modern terminal software supports displaying images, for what it's worth.

In a worse, and dramatically overcomplicated way. Like it's kind of funny that largely the same people that is all for this supposed ultra minimalism would be celebrating a Rube Goldberg way of doing graphical interfaces? (Because in the end it is a graphical interface).

Sorry for the late response; it's been a busy week.

As a user, I don't care how complicated is the means of displaying images in a terminal session. I would only want to do so when I'm deep in a text-oriented context and there is a suddenly a need for an image. Not a chart or a graph, but an actual image. As a user, whatever contortions are necessary at that point are fine, because it's an unusual circumstance.

I hope that makes sense.

Every year or so, I look into alternative to my Paperwhite, which has been in "airplane mode" since I bought it. So far, nothing else seems to be quite up to the level of my existing device for my use case, let alone better.

It's possible I needed to log into Amazon in 2016 and 2020 when I bought my two Paperwhites, but I haven't needed to do so again since, so I'm not sure this will affect me at all. If it does, I'll have to check my notes for what was closest last year when I last checked.

Something seems wrong. A half-million tokens is almost five times larger than I allow even long-running conversations to get too. I've manually disabled the 1M context, so my limit is 200K, and I don't like it to get above 50%.

Is it... not aware of its current directory? Is its current directory not the root of your repo? Have you maybe disabled all tool use? I don't even know how I could get it to do what you're describing.

Maybe spend more time in /plan mode, so it uses tools and the Explore sub-agent to see what the current state of things is?

I appreciate these kinds of posts, and I've been semi-Degoogled for years now. What hasn't been easy for me to move away from so far is Docs/Sheets.

Apple's Numbers and Pages seem very far from ideal. Zoho didn't quite work for me. Maybe I should try Clickup.

It's easy on the creators primarily, they get to skip a lot of steps and don't have to explain away things like cell phones.

For consumers, they get quantity.

Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.

As you said, the readers get quantity and honestly above all else that's what they want.

They already enjoy the stories enough to buy them or support patreons for them, I don't think trying to up the quality would be wise for the authors assuming it slowed down how quickly they wrote.