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Are you using any tools specifically for controlling this behavior that you can recommend? I want to tear my hair out every time Claude cleanly 1-shots weeks of work to 99% accuracy, one or a couple of tests fail, and it calmly resolves it with a declaration that it was a "pre-existing failure" or "flaky". It can usually resolve it if I then explicitly tell it to stash the changes and compare against the test results from the prior state, but it happens constantly.

I'm putting it all on HaXor

I've bought two Apple products in my life, both Macbook Pros, one in 2014 and one in 2021. I have a Pixel phone, zero transactions in the App Store all-time, pay $0 to Apple on any kind of subscription basis. Not disagreeing with the nature of their incentive structure, but if they're intentionally crippling their hardware division somehow to squeeze me for money, they're really bad at it.

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They were accused of that by people who didn't understand that batteries degrade over time, and the resulting legal suits were entirely about disclosing the throttling, not the throttling itself. Newer iPhone models still do the exact same thing, they just provide more information about it, and let you toggle it off.

The idea that they were doing this maliciously never made sense anyway, customers who haven't upgraded in a while might be the least lucrative audience to target.


This has never happened. Batterygate was about stopping individual handsets from rebooting by triggering throttling after a brownout. If you are trying to drive up sales you would just let these out of warranty devices reboot. Literally doing nothing would have been easier for Apple.

Depends on your threshold for credentials and desired pay range. If you've got speed, a stream, and a dream, you can coke up as many fish as you want. It's science as long as you write it down.

The huge strike-out they made with the Vision Pro still blows my mind. I'm in the camp of people who would have possibly shifted my entire working setup to that thing if they'd made just a few less dumb choices with it, and it might have been worth it even at the high price. I still occasionally waste my time checking out the latest to see if they've made any headway towards making it useful, because I'm still recovering from the shock that they haven't. The only way I can see the current state making any sense is if they just wanted to squeeze as much field usage data as possible from early adopters of an overpriced prototype, but that seems so far outside of how Apple normally positions its products that it's hard to believe.

> I'm in the camp of people who would have possibly shifted my entire working setup to that thing if they'd made just a few less dumb choices

That describes me too. I even did for a while. But it just made the incomprehensible lack of any software ambition more painful.

The software is the only reason the Vision isn't worth the price. A real Pro OS, paired with an Studio M5-Ultra, or with its own M5-Ultra, would be an amazing work environment.

(The only hardware they would need to upgrade for the latter, i.e. its own Ultra, would be making live-battery swapping convenient. Which they should have already done.)


Can you elaborate on the scrolling issue?

It’s a WebGL issue, fixed in WebGPU.

Browsers generally only allow a fixed number of WebGL contexts per page. So a generic element effect library has the issue that too many elements some will start losing contexts. The workaround is to just make one large screen size canvas and then figure out where the elements are you need to draw an effect for. now you only have one context drawing all the elements. But, you can’t know where to draw until the browser scrolls and renders so you’re always one frame behind.

https://webgl2fundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-multiple-...

WebGPU doesn’t have this issue. You can use the same device with multiple canvases

https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-multipl...


It's been a while so I might be a little off, but the problem was that the effect would lag behind slightly (one frame?) because I used an observer to match where the element moved to because the overlay element was logged to the viewport. I think I did that to avoid having a canvas that was the size of the entire page. Where a canvas could just be abs positioned it was ok but for reasons I can't remember that didn't work for everything.

Gyms are a great example actually because tractors exist to do the economically useful work. You now optionally go to the gym to benefit from fake labor that used to be the side effect of useful work. The fake labor is now what colleges are trying to sell, and it's going to kill them.

Gyms predate tractors.

3,000 years ago, physical labor was a component of most jobs. Today gyms are for people who can afford to attend them and don't have a day job that naturally exercises them through labor. People exercising purely for health benefits, and not because the strength benefits them in their job and in other facets of their life, is new.

Might be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but college was made worthless for most degrees as soon as the internet got popular and silly performative shit like this is the death knell. College is about learning how to work in an industry. I'd predict an uptick in trade schools and other hands-on work like medicine, and a continuing downturn in so-called formal education for anything white-collar, programming included. Students are customers. Businesses are going to use AI going forward. No reason to waste time on this.

> College is about learning how to work in an industry.

Oh


Education is a nice side effect sometimes but yeah, I don't know how you could reach any other conclusion. If you're motivated to learn for learning's sake, college is an annoying slog that you know you don't need post-millenium. I literally left college early and started making money instead of spending it, because I got tired of demonstrating to my professors that I already knew everything they were teaching and that it'd be a waste of time for me to come to class.

Or maybe you chose to waste your time because you treated college as a way to get a piece paper instead of as the only time in your life when you are surrounded by experts who will spend an hour a week answering any questions you can think of.

No time wasted at all, that option is also trivially available outside of college, it's called "email". There's a whole industry in tricking new adults into believing that college is not about getting a piece of paper, it's gross, and it's avoidable. I paid off a year of unnecessary college debt in 1/4 of a year of doing real work I learned how to do in my free time. It's a trap and articles like this where colleges are working as hard they can to make education less useful prove it.

>No wasted time

You just said that it was a waste of time. So was it or not?

> that option is also trivially available outside of college, it's called “email”.

How many experts have you cold emailed over the years and how much of their time have you taken?


It would have been more wasted time had I continued after a single year. I went to my first year of college on the advice of my well-meaning parents who are old and like most old people thought it was still important, and yet they agreed with my decision to leave after the first year on an offer for a real six-figure job because there was nothing to learn that I hadn't or couldn't have learned on my own. At least one of my own professors also openly wondered why I was there at all.

To your second question - less than a hundred, but tens. Most people who are worth listening to publish their work and their thoughts. Email is free. Experts love to answer questions about their work, professors hate doing extra work for no extra pay. The incentives here are not confusing. How much time have I taken? Confusing question. These are real people with real passion, and they answer questions with that in mind. Professors are obligated to puke up an answer. I've gotten responses in most cases, in some I haven't. When I don't get answers it's because the targets are smart and busy. If I wanted more engagement with my random questions I'd offer money, and if I had offered money every time I'd still be below par on the money I wasted on college. If I wanted to justify it - I'd say I learned enough to validate that paying real money for another 3-6 years would have been less valuable than burning it for heat.


> At least one of my own professors also openly wondered why I was there at all.

I think you completely misunderstood this interaction.

There are 2 possible explanations.

1. You are so smart/knowledgeable that the professor thinks you are beyond college.

2. You were acting like such an arrogant know-it-all that the professor was being sarcastic.

I’ve seen #1, but I’ve seen #2 many times.

You sound like you have a huge chip on your shoulder about not having a degree. I had the same issue at one point before I went back and finished (after working as a professional developer for a while), so I recognize it.

When I did go back, I asked questions in class, I went to office hours to ask questions, and I did research projects with professors. Some back of the envelope math says it would have costs me about twice what I got out owing if I’d paid for an equal amount of time with whatever experts I could find.

My strong suspicion based on the few posts I’ve read is that your attitude is the reason you had such poor interactions with instructors.


I had excellent interactions with my instructors. I interacted with them like human beings and they understood that their limited time would be better spent with students who didn't have the same energy I did. Several professors, when asked, put me through an impromptu whiteboard quiz and said yeah, do your own thing. It's great that you participated in the process in your own way. In my case I asked if I could show up for the final tests and nothing else, because the intermediate work would have been useless, received permission, and passed.

Chip on my shoulder - no, and it's a silly label to begin with. Understanding that it's for other people who value the paper more than intrinsic understanding, yeah.

EDIT: I will concede in some way that I'm proud of not having a degree, and it does influence my thoughts on this topic. I've met some real idiots that do, and I don't consider it a serious differentiator.

Also looking up the thread - at my early jobs, I was surrounded by many people who were interested in educating me on any topic I could think of, because similarly we were all being paid for our time. The difference between that and school was the assumption that we were both motivated and capable.


1. There’s already a process for testing out of general education classes. You show up, pay $50, and pass a test. You could have saved most of your first year of tuition.

2. These classes that you blew through weren’t upper level classes. They couldn’t have been because you wouldn’t have had the prereqs to take them. If you already had some knowledge of the field and didn’t need lower level classes, you could have talked to the department about testing out of some of them.

I know you didn’t walk into an upper level class on Automata theory and come up with the proofs on the spot.

No professor would in good faith tell you to go do your own thing based on what you’re describing.

If they thought you were very smart and sincere about learning, they’d encourage you to do independent study with them, do research, work with the department to move into higher level classes, or take cross listed graduate classes.

If they thought you were kinda smart, but a huge asshole, they’d tell you to go do your own thing because they didn’t want to deal with your crap.

This is all coming from experience as someone who came into school not needing the intro classes, and someone who used to be that arrogant.


>only time in your life when you are surrounded by experts who will spend an hour a week answering any questions you can think of.

Why is that a resource of "once-in-a-lifetime" scarcity in the first place?


Because

It’s really expensive, time consuming, and difficult to gather exports together like that.

The closest anyone comes to research university is national laboratory, or something like Bell Labs. But you’re unlikely to have access to those.

And you’re unlikely to ever have another time in your life when you can take 4 years to devote almost solely to learning.


Yes exactly, why are those things the case?

It’s expensive because in a capitalist society experts want to be well paid.

As to why you’re unlikely to have another time in your life when you can do this, that’s also because of money. Life tends to get more expensive the older you get.


That doesn't work in tech based professions. In college I took music technology. It was 2 years of my own learning and explaining how everything worked to my tutor.

If you’re talking about a purely vocational program, you’re not likely to be dealing with world class experts.

Why would it save any RAM if you already have a browser open where it just eats the cost of an extra tab? I haven't used it but I'm assuming it's electron or similar and not actually "native"

I was essentially installing the web app as a PWA. Why? This allows me to set a deterministic keyboard shortcut to open gemini, in my case super + C, as if it were a native app. Downside is that it eats some ram. I haven’t benchmarked this I have no idea how heavy on ram this really is. FWIW I’m fine spending ram on this if it improves my workflow, which it does.

Practically speaking there's no reason not to centralize on the particulars of one language while the rest are in the increasingly accelerated process of dying out. Language barriers help nobody. Though it is a shame to rename this, the world needs more whimsy and penises are funny.

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