My apps are free or freemium with a one time payment. I just started publishing, and my main drive is resentment towards the current state of surveillance in software. It doesn't have to be filled with ads and trackers on top of a subscription.
I’ve also started publishing a small collection of what I call “spite apps” (a reference to Larry David’s spite store when he makes his own coffee shop to go against mocha joe).
These apps are super simple in terms of privacy policy:
- we don’t track you (no telemetry)
- we don’t show you ads
- no account
- free with optional tip
Sure I don’t make much money with them but I feel like I’m pushing back on making humanity worse.
I found the perfect sweet spot for my hobby development. I pay 7 euros for Gemini plus and use it for creating the architecture and technical specs. Those are fed to Sonnet on Pro that just implements the instructions. This gives plenty of space to do long sessions several times a week.
I am one of those lazy IT guys that is very content working in support and ops. I understand a lot of programming concepts and do a bit of automation scripting but never really bothered to learn any proper language fully. Vibe coding was made for people like me. I just need something that works, but I can still ask for code that can be maintained and expanded if needed.
It finally clicked for me when I tried Gemini and ChatGPT side by side. I found that my style of working is more iterative than starting with a fully formed plan. Gemini did well on oneshots, but my lack of experience made the output messy. This made it clear to me that the more chatty ChatGPT was working for me since it seems to incorporate new stuff better. Great for those "Oh, crap I didn't think of that" moments that come up for inexperienced devs like me.
With ChatGPT I use a modular approach. I first plan a high level concept with 03, then we consider best practices for each. After that I get best results with 4o and Canvas since that model doesn't seem to overthink and change direction as much. Granted, my creations are not pushing up against the limits of human knowledge, but I consistently get clean maintainable results this way.
Recently I made a browser extension to show me local times when I hover over text on a website that shows an international time. It uses regex to find the text, and I would never have been able to crank this out myself without spending considerable time learning it.
This weekend I made a Linux app to help rice a spare monitor so it shows scrolling cheat sheets to help me memorize stuff. This turned out so well, that I might put it up on GitHub.
For dilettantes like me this opens up a whole new world of fun and possibilities.
This is a thing. Going to the races and watching horses warming up in a paddock is very informative to those in the know. The first time i went, my girlfriend's father pointed out a horse that none if the others would run past, and that horse won it's heat.
Thankfully, international shipping safety standards aren’t left up to individual manufacturers. Having worked on ships worldwide for several years, I’ve seen how each major incident drives tighter, more effective regulations.
The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), established in 1974, is continually updated based on lessons from past accidents, mandating strict requirements for all ships over a certain size. Parts of SOLAS even apply universally to all ships on any voyage, regardless of size. https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/International...
Was there any regulation limiting the placement of external vents beyond a certain threshold? Or was it just a gentleman’s agreement between designers?
I don't work in the maritime industry so I might easily be wrong, but my understanding is that these rules are generally enforced not via national laws directly but via insurance. You can build any kind of ship you like, but then you have these classification societies that verify whether a ship has been built to standards, and if not they won't certify it and you'll have a very hard time getting insurance for your vessel. And in the end national laws tend to say things like your ship needs to be insured etc., not directly how it must be constructed.
The issue with maritime insurance, is that ocean going vessels spend a great deal of time in other countries from where the owner registers the ship, and also time in international waters, which are not governed by the laws of any country.
So you average insurance company is not interested in providing insurance.
If you want to read more about the history of martime insurance, you could start with the history of Lloyds of London.
I've been a Windows user since 3.1, but this was the straw for me. They have always provided an OS that just worked for my home needs, even with the creeping privacy invasions in the last update.
I've been dual booting for a while and last weekend I went full Linux at home. My day job revolves around being truly good at solving Windows issues, and I will happily continue doing that, but at home I'm still just liking for something that "just works" I hope I'm part of a trend, and that 2024 is the year of the....
Yes, it's a really tough thing to manage this whole Recall thing philosophically and it makes me concerned about this OS. Even if MS is backtracking somewhat, they have shown their cards now and how they prioritize positioning themselves as an AI company above even rudimentary privacy. It's hard to just regain trust as if nothing happened.
I'm considering Linux with a Windows VM for Visual Studio. I've had my Linux detours in the past and it honestly works pretty well for me. I personally enjoy Fedora with Gnome which I think strikes a good balance between stability, security, and freshness. But if being stable and worryfree is of top importance (like where you are "unpaid tech support", haha), why not just go Debian. :)
If you want Linux isn't "just working" over time, give macOS a look. My dad was a lifelong Windows user and sung the praises of Microsoft's monopoly over the industry. As much as he was disappointed and upset with Borland Software dying off, he thought the benefit of a single document format everyone used was a huge benefit for the industry early on when Word started to take over, and by extension all of the standardization through a single player rather than through actual standards. He always said it worked great and didn't see why he'd ever want to change, or why anyone would want anything different.
He ended up switching to Apple around 15 years ago after a series of bad experiences. He was very nervous about it, and really hedged his bets early on. It took him some time to get used to how the OS worked, to find new apps to replace some that he had used since the Windows 3.1 days, and sort out his workflows. He eventually gave up his Windows VM when he realized the only thing he ever used it for was to run Windows Update.
I grew up on Windows, with the views from my dad instilled in me. In college I tried Linux and ultimately moved to the Mac about 21 years ago. I still used Linux on and off for the past 22 years (and currently have a music server running it). I do find Linux to still be much more finicky than macOS. No system is perfect, but macOS is more of a "just works" operating system than Linux (imo), likely due to the focus on polishing that last 10% of the user experience, that never seems to get the attention it needs in Linux. While I am excited to see what Cosmic has to offer later this year on Pop OS, I'm always ending up having to deal with some level of nonsense, even my most recent install of Mint just last week had a few annoying things where things didn't work, and they should have worked.
No reason to use SteamOS, it's just immutable Arch with an A/B partition scheme. Modern SteamOS is designed specifically for the Steam Deck and they only ship it as a recovery image for the Deck.
You can install Steam on whatever distribution you want, I use the Flatpak, and just enable Proton in the compatibility settings.
And if someone’s after that console-like functionality, ChimeraOS is the right choice in this area. It behaves like SteamOS, but is more compatible with PC hardware.
I'm pretty excited for the Cosmic DE later this year. Here is a demo given by the CEO and the design lead. The audio isn't the best, but good enough. This is probably the most excited I've been to try out a new operating system since OS X Tiger. It is being developed by the Pop OS team, but they are making it so anyone can use it, Fedora plans on having a spin, I believe it's out there for Arch, and I'm sure others will have it as an option. Though I wouldn't use it as a daily driver until it's actually released.
She has been alluding to old Soviet scientists having a theoretical foundation for the type of conductivity shown. She posted a link to this comment that explains some of the background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337
Check out her twitter for some real fun rants @iris_IGB
I haven't read Derrida in decades, but your post inspired me to ask chatGPT about this. Version 3.5 would have none of it, and was adamant that Derrida's views were in no way threatened.I almost got the feeling it wanted to call me a bad user just for asking! GPT4 on the other hand, went into a long explanation about how its existence challenged some parts of it by providing analysis of concepts like différance, trace, and undecidability. GPT4 is great at discussing itself and how LLMs in general fit into various philosophical debates.
Version 4 is definitely better in discussing philosophy in general. 3.5 was able to summarize philosophical material, but once you started to engage with ideas critically, it would tend to get into largely nonsensical moralism about needing to make a good faith effort to understand individual philosophers' ideas. There's much less of that in 4.
