Not the right comparison to make when comparing gold vs paper currency that can be printed at a whim. The comparison would hold if they pulled out physical fiat currency reserves.
That’s what kept me from going iPad. At the price of a 1000 setup you can buy about 25 Moleskins with, 280 pages each, + pens. If you fill 10 pages a day, that’s two years of high quality paper. My rate is more like 3-4 pages a day. So, I’m just so far out. My sense is that an iPad would last 3-4 years then it needs a battery replacement.
If all you’re doing is writing then it’s not worth it, but for me the iPad is a fantastic piece of kit that can consume media, create media, and of all types, writing to fully mastered music albums.
Most people I know that make music on an iPad only use it for specific plugins or MIDI apps. They bounce the stems out to WAV and then mix/master it in a full desktop DAW.
You'd go through a lot of unnecessary suffering trying to do a professional mixdown and master on iPad.
A musician friend used to actually do recording with garageband on an iPad. I use mine for sheet music a lot and even sprang for the external foot pedal for page turns. There was one rehearsal where I didn’t have a chance to scan everything in advance and was playing from printed music for one song and I kept stepping on the pedal to turn the page and nothing happened.
I’ve not done it, but it seems it could be a good alternative to a laptop for digital synth stuff.
Classic explore versus exploit. When I was a young researcher I was given a lot of impossible opportunities. Tried 10 and did two pieces of disruptive work. That work has accrued hundreds of citations and whole research groups have received millions to continue to work on it. I didn’t see any meaningful money from that work. Now, I have a family and my research is based on requests that have deliverables and pay the bills. My skills in fact finding, synthesizing, and presenting the work is 1,000,000x better. But the risks are 10x less in this work and the pay is 100,000x more.
Alternatively, you win the highest prize in your field and the only path you see forward is solving the most impossible problem in the field, which of course you will fail to do.
It's a beauty. We can easily detect the issues with Youtubers that generate scripts from this tool. I've noticed these tropes, after 30 seconds, remove, block, and do not recommend any further. I hope to train the algorithm to detect AI scripts and stop recommending me those videos. It's honestly turned me off from YouTube so much, or I find myself going to my "subscribed" tab and going to content creators that still believe in the craft.
I’ve taken it one step further. YouTube as a front end is awful, and I’ve had enough. Tons of little dark patterns made to keep you on the site, annoying algorithms taking you places you never want to go, shitty ai slop, the whole nine yards. But I still like certain channels. As a result I’m doing everything self hosted now - not just YouTube but literally every single piece of digital media I consume. For YouTube I had to create a rotating pool of 5 residential ISP proxies - replaced as soon as YouTube download bot restrictions kick in - and rotated weekly either way.
With this I am able to get all my favorite subs onto my actual hard drive, with some extra awesome features as a result: I vibe coded a little helper app that lets me query the transcript of the video and ask questions about what they say, using cheap haiku queries. I can also get my subs onto my jellyfin server and be able to view it in there on any device. Even comments get downloaded.
All these streamers have gone too far trying to maximize engagement and have broken the social contract, so I see this as totally fair game.
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
I get it, but LibreOffice is awful in a much worse way than Office. On MacOS, the fonts and images just look low res and blurry. There's no polish, even though that is probably quite an easy fix.
But if they know the alternative is better. Everyone knows about ms office so they will complain/demand that instead. People put up with shitty software when they dont know about an alternative
MS Office is far from a good piece of software itself though. Frankly, the amount sub-menus and other bullshit I constantly have to fix for my parents does not make for a great experience either.
Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".
Yep. With known software there's always this "learned helplessness" of dismissing problems with "ah yeah, this is how it is". Even when it's quirky, inconsistent or just broken.
With new stuff, the blame will always lay on the new software even in situations where it's lack of skill or attention from the user.
I remember a University I used to work at as a dev moving a few classes of a few loud professors from open source Moodle to a paid product, and professors basically replicating Moodle's discussion board functionality by creating public wikis and hoping students wouldn't mess up when editing.
One day one professor approached me wanting a way to prevent students from messing up the "fake discussion board". He got a mouthful from the Dean who was nearby and was footing the bill of a few thousand per month on the expensive SaaS.
I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
Seems like they use gerrit. A lot of larger projects use gerrit for their code review. It is different, yes, but many prefer it over GitHub's "pull request" paradigm which really sucks for high velocity contributors.
This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.
I love the idea of hourglass! Thanks for sharing I’ve ordered mine on Amazon today. It’s about a foot tall. This is also a great way to signal to other people in the office that I’m busy.
As a recent Clojure convert of 3 years or so, I love reading how amazing Clojure is. As a solo Dec there is simply no alternative. It’s so nice to return to a project 2 or 3 years ago and everything is still running and humming along smoothly as it did when I started the project.
I previously worked in PHP, Perl-cgi, Java, and Python- webtools mostly based on MySQL and other SQL database flavours.
I worked in a Clojure only shop for a while and they taught me the ways after that you don’t go back. Everything can quickly click into place, it’s daunting to start the learning curve is very unsteep, takes long to get anywhere, but as a curiosity it was fun, then I started to hate how everything else was done now I’m sold my soul to the Clojure devil.
That might be true but at the level of understanding that the Greeks had of things - making fire does give you a lot. Flint, dry grass, fuel source wet versus dry wood, wind and soil conditions- how to deal with them, once you have a fire how do you control, manipulate it, and keep it going. All those things are learned through making fire. Then you can also piece together which fuels work best, that leads to more understanding and experimentation followed by more learning. I think it’s what I take away from this article. I think those ancient people know more and understood more about keeping a fire going through the night than i ever will.
When you use an LLM and don’t have any understanding what you asking about it presents a huge problem. I see more and more people just using what it provides. And then when asked about it they can’t defend it because the didn’t read it or even tried to understand it. This is in proposals and business cases worth multiple millions.
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
Other ecosystems are smaller (probably nothing has more consumers than the two major app stores) but often much higher intent. The same person who you have to coax into paying $1 for an iOS app won’t bat an eye at a productivity tool that costs $20/mo.
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
roblox :) Honestly though anything with a lot of users typically either has a way to make money selling addons, or by hosting your own content related to their product, like wikis and leaderboards and such.
There’s even a niche within Roblox, which is making plugins for the IDE used for making games for it, Roblox Studio. There’s a built-in marketplace where you can charge money for them.
>What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
reply