It's exciting to see that the new CEO of Apple is a hardware guy.

I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up. All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill. It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.

They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.

I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.

Do you just give your Google account to OpenClaw, or create a separate account with limited permission? I'm worried that OpenClaw decides to create an entire website on GCP project without asking if they see a message like "have you already developed and deployed the management dashboard?"

In my case, I often find life goals and enjoy the journey when I'm mentally healthy, not vice versa.

I can't control my mood, but when I am positive, I start a new hobby like dancing or playing an instrument, cook healthy, lift, sleep well, study new things, etc. But when I'm depressed, I lose all interest in my life goals, eat junk food, skip exercise, and browse the Internet all night. I can't even enjoy my hobbies anymore.

It's always my mood that comes first, then I can find life goals and naturally do all healthy stuff.

Funnily, when I'm mentally healthy I also visit Hacker News frequently, but when I'm depressed all I do is infinite scrolling Reddit/TikTok.

That could definitely the case. I can't really tell which one comes first, mood or objective.

It could be a bit like that elusive thing called motivation. "Just do it" seems so annoying when people say it but in my case sometimes its the only way to start building momentum. What im saying is dont wait for mood, perhaps the mood will develop once you obtain momentum on a goal or task.

Yeah I do hold this attitude and try to side brush "mood", which I believe is a mere suggestion, not a command. However I noticed a completely different "mode" when I'm operating IN project and BETWEEN projects.

When I'm IN project, "just do it" works very well. But when I'm BETWEEN projects (this is when I completed a project, and dived into the next project, but found out that I did not enjoy it or got lost or whatever), "just do it" only works when "just do it" -- it doesn't really create a focus needed to move the projects forward. What I got frustrated is that this IN BETWEEN period could take multiple months to get out, which is a super waste of time. If only I could figure out as soon as I completed the previous project, I'd achieve so much more -- you see, for the type of projects I'm working on, I could not afford to wait for several months, or even several weeks -- because this is not my daily job, so if I wait for too long I'm going to lose the knowledge -- it's like muscle training, you can't stop for several weeks and hope muscle retains.

I use the “just do it” trick a lot myself. It was something I discovered when I was in my early 20s, hiking the Appalachian Trail, which requires you to get up and move every day. My partner and I did not have much money, so if we failed to finish, we would not have a second chance. I remember waking up one morning after a rainstorm, realizing that I left my boots outside the tent. They were cold and wet. Putting them on was going to be unpleasant. I thought “I just need to do it so that I can have other things that I want in my life.” Something clicked in that moment. Now, whenever I don’t want to do something I ask “does it help me do or be what I want?” It helps a lot. From big goals (eg, earn a degree, get the job I want, etc) to little tasks (take out the garbage, clean the toilets, etc). Oddly I find the little jobs to be the hardest, probably because although I recognize that living in a house with clean toilets is something I want, it’s not obviously connected with a motivating goal. This mental trick is very helpful for the little tasks.

The worst blunder I made was when I explored cloud resources to improve the product's performance.

I created a GCP project (my-app-dev) for exploring how to scale up the cloud service. I added several resources to mock the production, like compute instances/cloud SQL/etc, then populated the data and run several benchmarks.

I changed the specs, number of instances and replicas, and configs through gcloud command.

  $ gcloud compute instances stop instance-1 --project=my-app-dev
  $ gcloud compute instances set-machine-type instance-1 --machine-type=c3-highcpu-176 --project=my-app-dev
  $ gcloud sql instances patch db-1 --tier=db-custom-32-131072 --project=my-app-dev

But for some reason, at one point codex asked to list all projects; I couldn't understand the reason, but it seemed harmless so I approved the command.

  $ gcloud projects list
  PROJECT_ID     NAME       PROJECT_NUMBER
  my-app-test    my app     123456789012
  my-app-dev     my app     234567890123     <- the dev project I was working on
  my-app         my app     345678901234     <- the production (I know it's a bad name)

And after this, for whatever reason it changed the target project from the dev (my-app-dev) to the production (my-app) without asking or me realizing.

Of course I checked every commands. I couldn't YOLO while working on cloud resources, even in dev environment. But I focused on the subommands and its content and didn't even think it had changed the project ID along the way.

It continued to suggest more and more aggressive commands for testing, and I approved them brain-deadly...

  $ gcloud sql instances patch db-1 --database-flags=max_connections=500 --project=my-app
  $ gcloud compute instances delete instance-1 --project=my-app
  $ echo 'DELETE FROM users WHERE username="test";' \
      | gcloud sql connect my-db 
   --user=user --database=my-db --project=my-app
  $ wrk -t4 -c200 -d30s \
      "http://$(gcloud compute instances describe instance-1 \
      --project=my-app \
      --format='get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)')"

It took a shamefully long time to realize codex was actually operating on production, so I DDoSed and SQL-injected to the production...

Fortunately, it didn't do anything irreversible. But it was one of the most terrifying moments in my career.

This is part of the reason deployments to production cloud environments should:

1. Only be allowed via CI/CD

2. All infra should be defined as code

3. Any deployment to production should be a delayed process that also has a human-approval step in the workflow (at least one, if not more)

(Exactly where that review step is placed depends on your organisation - culture, size, etc.)

And anyone that does need to touch production should do so from an isolated VM with temporary credentials. Developers shouldn't routinely have production access from their terminal. This last aspect is easy and cheap to set up on AWS. I presume it's also possible in Google Cloud.

I hate that many people or even the news and scientists have already started to see the odds of prediction market as fact.

I'm sure in the near future, policy decisions or war strategies will be decided by prediction markets' odds, if they are not already being used.

They're far from facts, but have an important advantage over most other sources: the bettors are motivated to predict truth.

News sources are motivated to get clicks, to appeal to certain audiences, and to retain tribal customers. None of these create incentives for truth. You can seek out smart, well-informed and principled journalists who will prioritize truth-seeking over money-making. There are some. But the fact remains you are relying on character to override incentives. With prediction markets, incentives and truth are naturally aligned. This makes them a powerful and valuable resource imo, even if there is a lot of scumminess that comes along for the ride. The insiders, more than anyone, are contributing to the truth signal.

on the other hand, similar to that one old assassination page, where you bet on the death date of people, it might encourage someone to make an event happen and thus fabricate the insider knowledge if the price is high enough.

So the feedback from prediction market turns around, so you can essentially buy events if you put enough money in.

> the bettors are motivated to predict truth.

But also motivated to bend the truth to their bet as the journalist in Israel found.

They are motivated to pick what they believe is most likely to happen. The develope their idea of what is most likely to happen for the news. The reporters use their bets to wrote stories predicting what will happen.

See the loop?

Reporters have an entirely different incentive -- they're less interested in what will happen than whether or not they get eyeballs on their story.

What gets clicks is telling people their bets are going to pay out.

That's not how it works.

First, you have inside traders. Then, among legitimate bettors, you have smart people using multiple data sources (not just the "news") and doing sophisticated analysis that most journalists cannot do, and are not motivated to do -- again, because their incentives are different.

It's an empirical fact that smart people can predict things by doing research. See Tetlock's book Superforecasting.

I've been doing it profitably myself for almost 10 years now. I have zero special inside knowledge, and no access to any other non-public information.

> Will the US strike Iran by X date

Last year I did think the market for a strike on Iran was significantly underpriced given the information and conditions within a specific frame of time.

I don't think every smart person can just pop into prediction markets and print money, but I know many smart people who are long-term winners. I also don't try to knock people as degenerate when they have genuine talent.

You haven't been profitable for 10 years on prediction markets and you being profitable doesn't mean anything in regards to insiders or the rigging of a market.

No? Where's the loop?

See also: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

I use c-q for prefix key because it doesn’t conflict with common zsh and vim bindings.

Because the author suggested swapping caps lock and control key, I also recommend mapping escape key at the control key and change the behavior based on whether another key is pressed. For example, if you press control + a, it sends c-a, but if you only press control key and then release, it sends escape. It makes your vim life (and in general) a lot easier. You don’t have to compete the most variable real estate on the keyboard, right next to the A key.

For most bindings like moving, resizing, and splitting,I emulate vim bindings.

Also, -r flag for bind-key command is impotent, because it enables to repeat commands like changing the pane size or move focus. You don’t have to press prefix key each time.

If you want to get fancy look with minimal setting, use plugins like nord tmux theme.

The worst part is if I paste markdown it's not formatted automatically.

Ctrl-shift-f to apply formatting to literal markdown that's been entered via pasting

I get really skeptical when someone says "AI does most of the work just by asking simple prompts."

Don't get me wrong, I use AI too for daily tasks and my job as a programmer, and it definitely helps me get the job done faster (sometimes it's almost instant). But it still requires a lot of effort for complex or unconventional tasks.

When I hear "AI does most of my job", I think of DOGE employees who use AI to identify "waste of money". All they do is ask AI with very lazy prompts like "list DEI projects" with the list of government sponsored projects including simple descriptions. They don't even provide what DEI means. And they just cut all projects the AI flagged. I'm sure their "productivity" is very high. They can "complete the job" that would require days, weeks, or months of investigation with a single prompt.

I also think the results have a strong tendency to flag a project as DEI, because "is this DEI" is a question often asked by racists and misogynists on right-wing websites, and often the answers are "Yes", and that likely causes a strong bias.

[1] https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/doge-chatgpt-dei...

I think choosing reliable authority requires a little intelligence. I don’t know how to build a robust house, but I can understand that should be on the solid base (scientific method) upon stable field, instead of mysterious objects from thousand years ago.

I think that nihilistic sentiment arises only when you are materially satisfied, maybe in the 90s and 00s (like office workers in Fight Club or Office Space). Many of us are in survival mode now. We just need money to keep up with inflation. We don't have time to think about the deep meaning of life.

"Survival mode" is quite an overstatement of current conditions for most people in most of the West. Prices have risen, but people aren't in as rough of a position as 2008, 1970's stagflation, or certainly the great depression.

Yes, if anything we are over fed and awash in consumer goods.