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jefftk

23,872 karmajoined 17 years ago
https://www.jefftk.com [email protected]

I lead SecureBio Detection: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory

Submissions

Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches

jefftk.com
154 points·by jefftk·6 days ago·120 comments

Try Contra Dancing

benkuhn.net
11 points·by jefftk·2 months ago·2 comments

Far-UVC: Continuous, safe, quiet protection against airborne diseases

faruvc.org
3 points·by jefftk·8 months ago·0 comments

comments

jefftk
·2 days ago·discuss
Clocks used to be able to use the 60Hz cycle to track time, and grid providers would run slightly slow or fast ("time error correction") to get back into sync. A leap second would just be part of this.

I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.
jefftk
·3 days ago·discuss
A Verizon tech called me yesterday and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming through. Apparently delivery of 2FA codes to Google Fi has been an issue for them. After our call I saw that this 2FA code (but not the earlier codes) did actually come through under "Spam and Blocked", so if others are having issues I'd recommend looking there.
jefftk
·4 days ago·discuss
I know you put an asterisk, but to make it clear: these locations are very far from random. They're the most informative positions, which is why we check them.
jefftk
·4 days ago·discuss
"int radians" is a pretty strong code smell! I would be very worried about any struggle l autocomplete that followed something like that ;)
jefftk
·4 days ago·discuss
> Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist

I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.
jefftk
·4 days ago·discuss
> Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team

Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).
jefftk
·4 days ago·discuss
Why compare to what historical tooling (which is very different in terms of how it's built and what it does) instead of to value over replacement?
jefftk
·5 days ago·discuss
Substack handles emailing and payments well. Many people want to receive posts by email, which is a pain to do on your own with high deliverability. Some are willing to pay for it, and payments are similarly annoying (and benefit from a familiar interface, which Substack now provides).
jefftk
·5 days ago·discuss
Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.

Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.
jefftk
·5 days ago·discuss
No mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for.

There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).
jefftk
·6 days ago·discuss
With Google moving their smartwatch efforts to the pixel brand I'm worried about longevity here. It also has a lot of the downsides of the Gizmo: 20 contacts max, texting only through the app, can't interact with friends. If I'm going to get new ones for the kids I'll probably do a TickTalk or Cosmo that don't have these drawbacks.
jefftk
·6 days ago·discuss
There aren't enough phone numbers to make this work. There are only ~5.7B phone numbers in the NANP that can be assigned to individuals [1] and these countries have >400M people, so it's just ~14 phone numbers per person. Which works if we each have a couple, but not if we start handing out many per person.

[1] 10B ten-digit numbers, less prohibited ones like area codes starting with 0 or 1, the 555 exchange, etc.
jefftk
·6 days ago·discuss
Definitely! But the form factor is really important: since it's strapped to their wrist they don't lose it. Classmates with phone-shaped phones seem to loose theirs a lot.
jefftk
·6 days ago·discuss
Apple watch only works if a parent has an iPhone, and we're both on Android.
jefftk
·6 days ago·discuss
Not an option, unfortunately, since my wife and I are both on Android.
jefftk
·7 days ago·discuss
It was announced in April, but it was leaked in March (CMS bug) at which point external partners were already using it, and the most common rumored date for training competition is 2026-02-07 (I think Feb is likely, but that specific date is just rumor).
jefftk
·10 days ago·discuss
We lost ten days of the original plan (June 13th through 22nd) and got seven days (July 1st through 7th). You're not counting the portion of the original 14 days we already got.
jefftk
·10 days ago·discuss
Sacks has been out since March
jefftk
·13 days ago·discuss
I'm from Boston and I'd never heard of this, but reading a bit it sounds like Boston is unusual in not having pace runners.

Given how hilly the course is, this makes sense: running an even pace the whole distance is not a good plan.
jefftk
·14 days ago·discuss
Limiting exports of AI services to all foreigners is probably allowed under GATS, since there's no favoring one county over another. But even then there's a national security exemption, which fits reasonably well with US arguments here.

If a country thought the AI export restrictions were inconsistent with treaty the remedy is challenging them, not unilaterally imposing their own tariffs. But even if they got a favorable panel decision the US would speak, and the Appellate Body is non-functional because the US stopped consenting to the addition of new members and all the terms expired. Which means anything that gets appealed is frozen indefinitely waiting for the AB to reach a quorum that won't come until the US changes is mind (and Biden didn't reverse Trump's decision here).