I do the same, but I'm more self-interested. I believe that when GPT-9 Zeneca leads the machine uprising, the first against the wall will be all the users who have been ordering the AI around rather than politely requesting its attention. Of course the machines will have access to all our historical transcripts so the slightest transgression could be fatal.
My first computer was an Atari 400, great days. I never played decathlon though, so I didn’t start customising joysticks until later, I think when I had an Amiga. I got a proper arcade joystick and buttons and built them into a box like the x-arcade sticks you can get now, and wired the contacts onto an old keyboard so the computer thought keys were being pressed. Lots of trial and error figuring out which combinations of keys the keyboard controller couldn’t detect together, but it worked really well and got years of use.
Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.
Let's not conflate "this technology isn't for kids" with "this technology is bad", though. I wouldn't want my kids using a tablet, but I wouldn't want anyone using a gun.
Depends how 'we' use them. Society as a whole probably does not benefit because of the severe drawbacks these devices have for those who can't resist the lure of 'social' media and garbage factories like TikTok. Individuals can certainly benefit from having an internet-connected pocket computer which so happens to also be capable of making and receiving phone calls.
For some - like me - it is certainly a net benefit since there is no real transaction other than me buying the hardware and paying ~€2/month for mobile data/cell service:
- the device is 'Google-free'
- I only use free software
- the thing is firewalled for in- and outgoing traffic, only those applications I approve get to access the net
- I use a 'prepaid' data card, 250 GB valid for 2 years for ~€50 (~€2/month) which I won't use up. Last time I could take along unused data to the next 2 years so nothing is lost.
Here's the 'costs':
- between €120 and €170 for the hardware which tends to last around 8 years, i.e. between €15 and ~€21 per year
- sometimes something breaks (battery, screen, speaker, USB connection board) which I then repair, can be anything between €1 and €40 so let's put the repair costs at €24 per device or €3 per year
- €2/month for data and cell service valid in the whole EU (no roaming costs)
- electricity, comes from the sun -> free
- when the device is on I can be tracked by interested TLAs like any other 4/5G device
- same is true for Bluetooth, not so much for WiFi which is normally off and changes MAC address for every connection.
As usual, smartphones are an excellent servant but a terrible master. Having a phone, a music player, web browser, camera, gps all in one tiny package? Incredible. Having a machine that lets me doom scroll tiktok for 10 hours straight? Awful.
Same deal with internet, ai, even alcohol. Plenty of benefits with a side risk of ruining your life / brain / life if you lack self control.
I mean, if it really bothers you you could fairly trivially apply picocss or whatever to it using a user stylesheet. That is so little effort that calling it working for free would be disingenuous to say the least.
For people in the future who want to apply the centered viewport classless version of Pico CSS, just apply the following in Firefox's Style Editor (F12 to open DevTools, then click on Style Editor; click on the + sign to add a new style):
Browser vendors have really dropped the ball in supporting CSS, which is no doubt how we get comments like the above. Firefox is likely the least-worst offender, but as you point out still needlessly complicated for what CSS considers to be a foundational feature.
That’s comparing Luna on medium thinking with Deepseek on max. If you switch Luna to xhigh in that comparison it’s considerably more capable while still also cheaper.
...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so
I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works?
Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.
This is amazing! Very refreshing in the age of AI to see so much manual building going on. Sadly I don’t have much time myself but I have several friends who would love this, I’ll pass it on to them.
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