The Raycast productivity app (one of my most-used apps) is coming to iOS (and Windows too, but I care about iOS). Hard to see how an iOS version would work; the app is extremely keyboard-focused. The developers say it’s a power-user tool for people who spend 8+ hours a day at their computers.
Caroline Ellison, star witness at the FTX trial, says she was obsessed with Sam Bankman-Fried. “The longer I worked at Alameda, the more my sense of self became inextricably intertwined with what Sam thought of me and the more I subordinated my own values and judgment to his."
Today I learned that Comma Separated Value (CSV) computer files were used in IBM Fortran compilers in 1972, and the term was first used in 1983. And that CSVs are extremely popular today for the most advanced AI applications.
I’m surprised CSVs aren’t even older. It seems like such an obvious way to structure data. Then again, sometimes brilliant breakthroughs seem obvious only in retrospect.
This came up on my YouTube recommended videos: “Is it normal to talk to yourself?”
I know the answer to that one: No!
Absolutely not!
It’s weird!
Talk to the dog instead.
This morning, I was reading a listicle of health tips and one of the most important things they said you should do is, “Get good sleep.”
“I’ll get right on that!” I said. “And I’ve always wanted to be a foot and a half taller so I can play pro basketball, so I’ll do that too!”
The Tupperware party was good while it lasted. We take the benefits of Tupperware for granted, but it was a significant innovation in its time, one that we should be grateful for, says Megan McCardle. “As with so much in life, the strategies that made Tupperware a success in the 20th century also made it hard for the company to adapt to the 21st.” Maybe true, but these days, when a consumer brand fails, my first thought is to blame financial shenanigans rather than business execution.
I’ve been at work for two hours and I’ve already added 12 tasks to my to-do list.
That’s productivity, right?
Here's some of what I saw walking the dog this weekend
A model train layout in a house’s front yard.
This 10-second video of the model train layout gives you a better view of what’s there.
A little free library built into an abandoned newspaper box.
Whimsical, terraced yard decorations.
Detail of the whimsical terrace.
Tasteful minimalist lawn display featuring Harris-Walz sign and pink flamingo
Yes, I gave Minnie one of the treats. She thought it was fine but not fantastic.
Why there are so many movies with the word “Amityille” in the title.
because the word “Amityville” is a real place name and consequently cannot be trademarked, there are actually 30+ Amityville movies, with some just being an unrelated movie they slapped the word Amityville onto and some that are actually attempting to remake/recreate/just do a haunted house thing the original.
Also: The science fiction/fantasy writer Diane Duane says she “grew up six or seven miles from one of the Amityvilles” and the “cognitive dissonance involved when the first film came out—knowing the sleepy suburbia that lay just over thataway—was hilarious.”
I, too, grew up a few miles from the same Amityville — the one featured in the first movie. One of the girls I was friends with in high school (who occasionally visits my Facebook profile) dated a guy who lived just down the street from that house.
I am entirely average in appearance for a middle-aged white American man: average height, average weight, average complexion, and average amount of hair. I buy clothes from the center of the rack. AirPods Pro are very comfortable in my ears. If somebody needs to find me in a crowd, I could tell them, “Look for the most average middle-aged white dude.”
"Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft redundant is not lost on them."
For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.
That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.
…
The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data that the model needs to be fed. The “AI” needs an example of what “good” looks like before it can try to produce “good” writing.
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François Chollet, a bestselling computer science textbook author and the creator of the Keras training library (which provides building blocks for researchers to create their own deep learning models), told me he estimates there are “probably about 20,000 people employed full-time just creating annotated data to train large language models”. Without manual human work, he says the models’ output would be “really, really bad”.
The goal of the annotation work that I and others perform is to provide gold-standard examples for the model to learn from and emulate. It’s a step up from the sorts of annotation work we’ve all done in the past, even unknowingly. If ever you’ve been faced with a “captcha” problem asking you to prove you aren’t a robot – eg “select all the tiles with pictures of a traffic light” – you were actually doing unpaid work for a machine, by helping to teach it to “see”.
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If chatbots can pretend to write like humans, we can also pretend to write like chatbots … it’s unclear how many outside the field understand that the “secret sauce” behind these celebrated models relies on plain old human work.
— ‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper, by Jack Apollo George at The Guardian.
Outstanding viral campaign video from Tim Walz, where he demonstrates how to maintain a 1979 International Harvester pickup truck and contrasts the Harris-Walz economic policy with Trump-Vance:
Look, they didn’t give me a manual for this if you didn’t plan on using it to fix your truck. They didn’t create that Project 2025 just to have it sit around as a doorstop.
Note the 8-Track player with the Cars tape.
The Friendship Paradox: We all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone
Recent studies add nuance to the loneliness epidemic.
The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people “we should get together!” before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out. That is, Americans have friends. We just never really see them.
— Olga Khazan at The Atlantic
Americans typically say they have four or five friends, which is a siimilar number to past studies. But the friends don’t know each other, Americans are frequently busy, we don’t to church much or participate in group activities, so getting together is hard and we don’t do it.
How snacks took over American life
We don’t just snack — many of us are abandoning meals entirely.
In the three decades leading up to 2008, the average American doubled their daily snack intake, and the percentage of adults snacking on any given day rose from 59 percent to 90 percent, according to a comprehensive government report. In the most recent iteration of the same study, which ended in 2020 before the pandemic, that number rose again, to 95 percent; more than half of respondents said they consumed at least three snacks a day.
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When my mother started her first office job, in the ’70s, eating at work was inappropriate; 50 years later, her daughter wrote much of this article in the company of a little ramekin of mini Reese’s Pieces, provided by her employer, which she ate out of the palm of her hand like a pigeon.
— Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic
I’m still getting over PTSD from my supermarket rearranging the produce section. Plus, this week, they changed the packaging on our favorite swiss cheese.
The charge on my wireless trackball ran down yesterday and I was in a rush and couldn’t find the end of the USB-C charging cord on my desk, so I switched to the Magic Trackpad and kept going.
I liked it for a while, but this morning, I began to feel moderate pains up and down my arms.
At first I ignored them but then I became conscious of what was going on and I said to myself, “This is a terrible idea!”
And I plugged in the trackball and kept going. And the pain is subsiding.
I feel like I dodged a debilitating injury that could go on for years. I’ve luckily avoided RSI problems to date despite how much time I spend on computers, my iPhone and iPad.
It’s getting hard to tell whether Trump is lyjng or delusional. “He’s just making shit up on the fly.”
Amazon will use generative AI to make product recommendations. I’m curious to see how this works — we are regular and frequent Amazon shoppers. The company should have a nice database of our preferences. Will its recommendations be any good? Or will it be the usual “I see you bought a refrigerator so now we’re going to show you refrigerator recommendations for months as though you were some kind of weirdo refrigerator collector.”