I don’t get it either. Writing is not something I need that level of assistance with, and I would even say that using LLMs to write defeats some significant portion of the point of writing — by using LLMs to write for me I feel that I’m no longer expressing myself in the purest sense, because the words are not mine and do not exhibit any of my personality, tendencies, etc. Even if I were to train an LLM on my style, it’d only be a temporal facsimile of middling quality, because peoples’ styles evolve (sometimes quite rapidly) and there’s no way to work around all the corner cases that never got trained for.
As you say, if the subject is worth being written about, there should be no issue and writing will come naturally. If it’s a struggle, maybe one should step back and figure out why that is.
There may some argument for speed, because writing quality prose does take time, but then the question becomes a matter of quantity vs. quality. Do you want to write high quality pieces that people want to read at a slower pace or churn out endless volumes of low-substance grey goo “content”?
> I agree this is a false dichotomy, but also pretty sure dumping money into building houses and hiring every unemployed person at a socially inclusive minimum wage would eliminate both housing and unemployment.
It’s one of those things where the details of the implementation are critical. In the US specifically, large amounts of money have already been put towards these problems to little effect.
To be clear, I staunchly support spending money on these things; clearly, they’re dire needs that should be addressed, but if something isn’t done to increase effectiveness and hold those responsible for the spending accountable, increasing spending is unlikely to move the needle.
Additionally, even if the goal were to reallocate funds, space programs aren’t really the best place to look. The pile of cash that would be yielded by “just” cutting fat in the US military apparatus would likely eclipse that of shutting down NASA altogether.
Built in JSON encoding/decoding is one of the things I’ve enjoyed about Swift. It’s nice when it’s not necessary to shop around for libraries for common needs like that.
Other analog media like minidisc has also seen a notable uptick in popularity, albeit not nearly as much as vinyl.
Also while not analog, iPods modded to be a bit more modern (replacing their mechanical HDs with higher capacity flash and adding haptics and Bluetooth among other things) have also been popular lately.
That’s true, but external runs can be challenging to do in a way that doesn’t look bad (e.g. cable runners not matching paint well) and could have a negative impact on resale value later on.
PoE cameras (and doorbell) is something I’ve been looking at, but from the looks of it running ethernet in my house, which is a newer build (~2005) and wasn’t designed with things like that in mind isn’t going to be fun. Might as well go this route since I’ll be running regular ethernet between rooms anyway, but seems like it might be enough of a pain to be worth hiring a professional to do it instead of trying to DIY it.
The stick and dongle streaming device variants in particular are astonishingly weak. The current Chromecast 4K dongle for example is handily outgunned by a first gen Apple TV 4K, which this year will be a 7 year old device.
At least the Books app on Apple iOS/macOS will manage and read plain old epubs and PDFs without issue, even if you’ve already bought DRM’d books from Apple’s store.
It’s really only big name e-ink readers other than Kobo that have this issue.
Speaking personally it doesn’t seem to be designed with the same principles/patterns of most software out there (regardless of platform or era), making its UI operate in ways that run counter to expectations. It’s an odd duck, which doesn’t make it bad but does greatly increase friction in usage.
This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great.
It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t read ePubs and PDFs feels a bit like an audio player that can’t play MP3s and AAC.
WebKit went multiprocess with the release of WebKit2 around 14 years ago, with the difference being that the multiprocess architecture is part of WebKit itself and thus easily reusable — just embed a WebView in your app and you have it. This contrasts to the Chromium implementation where multiprocess is handled by Chromium rather than Blink, meaning to get multiprocess you have to ship the whole of Chromium and can’t just embed Blink.
That said this really only relevant for Apple platforms and Linux/Android, unfortunately. WebKit for Windows is somewhat in a state of disrepair.
Chrome’s quality is what’s usually cited as being the primary driver behind its rise to its current position of most popular browser, but the reality is that Google’s intense marketing is at least as responsible. In-app prompts, prompts in Google search, and Chrome getting bundled in installers for every other Windows app were big contributors to its momentum.
Of course it becoming the default browser on the majority of Android devices and Google web apps underperforming in other browsers also played a role but that’s a bit of a different topic.
I would hope that this “best case outcome” also comes with regulations to keep other giants (mostly Google) from marketing and cross-promoting their way into dominance on iOS, creating monopolies in the process.
For instance, Google apps shouldn’t be able to drive Chrome installs by presenting a sheet offering to download Chrome every time I tap a link in them, as they do currently.
One thing I’ve not seen any competitor to Mint reproduce is the Mac app it offered back in the mid-2010s. It lived in your menubar and presented a popover when clicked which was very handy for quick reference, much nicer than having to switch to a browser tab or pick up my phone.
I’ve considered building a simple WebView menubar app that wraps the Personal Capital mobile site or something which would kind of approximate the old Mint app’s experience, but it wouldn’t be as good since it’d be fudging a touch experience on desktop.
Problems like this seem like a natural consequence of trying to mash together distribution and sandboxing, rather than leaving the sandboxing to the OS. It’s so much easier to build something that “just works” if you’re concerned only with distribution (really, it’s as simple as macOS style app bundles. Yes it takes a bit more space but the UX improvement is worth it).
Following this, it seems like there should be an XDG standard for sandboxing which distros are free to implement whichever way they feel is best. With that, Linux app packaging solutions need only worry about playing nice with that spec.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know the differences for the Costco Sony TVs?
It may have changed recently but last I knew Sony TVs had few if any ties to Sony services, come loaded with basically unchanged Google TV, and are perfectly happy to be used as fully offline "dumb" TVs. If that holds true for current Sony TVs it's hard to imagine what would be different in Costco versions.
While I sympathize with feeling disappointed in having to pay for apps for use with such an expensive headset, I believe that its price would have severely restricted the number of free apps available for it in the first place. Developers are going to want to recuperate their investment, and that'd remain true even if it were possible to install whatever one pleased on it.
It's technically possible to develop on the simulator alone, but given that the simulator is confined to a 2D window on a computer screen I can't imagine that apps developed in this manner would be able to stand up to competition developed without such limitations.
As you say, if the subject is worth being written about, there should be no issue and writing will come naturally. If it’s a struggle, maybe one should step back and figure out why that is.
There may some argument for speed, because writing quality prose does take time, but then the question becomes a matter of quantity vs. quality. Do you want to write high quality pieces that people want to read at a slower pace or churn out endless volumes of low-substance grey goo “content”?