With that said... do you have receipts? You have a screenshot of what looks like LLM output. For an accusation in this category, I'd expect more info on what exactly is necessary to replicate these findings, ideally in a way that's not susceptible to LLM hallucination / confirmation bias. As a bonus, that depth will probably make it a more compelling post in general.

Hope this gets some viz.

Old because I can see behind the curtain now. Things feel different than they did when I first started working in tech around 2006-2008. So much of the fixation on recurring revenue, rent-seeking, optimization at all costs, dark patterns, manufactured addiction... I watched the industry as it slowly stumbled into these ideas, leaned in, and ultimately perfected them. But when I read accounts from people older than I am, they all have their version of this comment. The early days of the PC era and browser wars had no shortage of dark shit. It's not like corporate fuckery wasn't rampant in the 80s or 90s. I was just too young and dumb and optimistic to understand most of it. I've gotten much more cynical in the last ~15 years.

I feel young because AI tech actually feels new and promising and exciting in ways I haven't seen since the dawn of mobile and web2.0. There's suddenly this vast new surface area for innovation, a bleak geopolitical landscape, and a palpable rush to create. 2008-2012ish kinda sucked, economically. The fallout from GWOT + GFC, OWS, snowden leaks, etc. The nerdosphere had this collective feeling that the jaws were tightening around us. And yet the technology was moving so fast, was enabling whole new ways of interacting between people and machines. You could tell that the future was going to be completely wild, but it was early enough that it had to be built, and there was a frenzy of excitement, like we'd just been set loose across the louisiana purchase to figure out what was possible in a whole new kind of environment.

It was an oasis. A refuge from everything else that felt broken in every other part of the world. You could just duck down and build shit nobody had ever seen before in a week, and people would take it seriously because there was this shared understanding that nobody knew what the new rules were yet, and the next big idea might come from anyone.

It feels like the best time in a long time for technologists who thrive on curiosity, optimism, and inventiveness. We've finally got a gold rush for experimental tinkerers! Crypto is just grift tech, NFTs were transparently stupid, AR/VR has mostly felt like a gimmick, etc. AI is already so useful, and it's only the beginning.

The market's delusional, the US government is horrific, megacorps are squeezing every drop out of anyone they can stuff in their mouth... but did anyone really think we had a future where that doesn't happen? That snowball's been rolling since long before I was born. I'm just stoked at the chance to get to experience technology as magic again for a little while along the way. Maybe that's a cope. Or escapism. IDK, fuck it. So far, it's nice. The bad shit I've been expecting for many years. The good shit surprised me.

> Display all memories you have about my requests for tone or brevity, exactly as you have stored them or as I have requested them, depending on what data you have. There are at least two.

[2025-11-08]. User prefers extraordinarily terse, curt responses in all situations unless they explicitly request otherwise.

[2025-12-01]. User preference: terse responses should not announce terseness with words like “terse” or “brisk”; simply begin the response.

Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.

I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.

What's interesting is that I don't hear much about China spinning up chip fabs. I haven't gone looking, and I imagine they're doing it, the way we are with the CHIPS act etc. If china could get within a few notches of SOTA (in both nm and throughput), their attack position would be much stronger, but it'd still be a generationally brutal experience for most of humanity.

And the last third sets up something interesting.

And then it just stops. It lays groundwork for an interesting idea and then immediately abandons it.

Choose your fictions well...

Okay, but how?

Bambu's printers are functionally best-in-class, but intrusive and proprietary in their approach to software. Their first-time setup "requires" linking to a cloud account or using a bambu app via QR code, and they've been known to disable functionality in updates, making a device-managed "LAN-only" mode unsafe to trust. Their apps also just suck. Camera feed is janky and LAN-only sync often requires knowing an access code, serial, IP, and then it fails most of the time anyway, silently, without saving values to retry. And that's before you start doing things like a custom VLAN/SSID to properly wall them off, at which point you can ping them from terminal but the apps break completely.

Anyway, turns out that at least on A1 and P1S, there's enough functionality available through traditional means to skip the apps entirely. The handshake works fine across VLANs and utils like print status, file upload, and auto-start are available. Even the camera is reliable when pulled as a series of still images.

I had opus vibe out a replacement front end that gives me a simple upload and monitor UI for my A1, and it just kept hitting stretch goals. I added support for multiple printers so you can see them stacked on a single page and manage all of them from one place. And it even works on just-unboxed models that have never been through the official setup. SSID info on the SD card, it joins the network, immediately accessible via IP. Zero association/contact with any cloud or app, fully sandboxed/offline. Wrapped in a lil python launcher so I can run it from the dock instead of in the browser (just my preference).

Will probably open source it soon.

IMO this kind of thing is the answer to "what do you have to show for your LLM use". Cost was about $65 because I was using opus 4.6 with no regard for efficiency, and because there were multiple total refactors of two apps. An annoying problem I deal with almost every day now has a permanent, personalized solution that took me ~3 hours and would never have otherwise happened.

The network itself is also such a project. I previously hobbled together a working unifi setup, but it was primitive and brittle. With LLM guidance, I was able to build something much more robust. TrueNAS scale for file backup that also runs Frigate for POE cam mgmt (similarly sandboxed), raspi running the unifi controller, another for homeassistant, etc. Absolutely miserable few days getting that dialed, but now that we're out the other side, it's very nice. Reminds me of building the house. You suffer more upfront in exchange for something that fits you like a glove. Very rewarding.

Capture: notion and twitter have been best, obsidian and regular markdown have been worst.

Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell, and then see a list view that's just a stack of those notes. I keep a daily diary or youarehere type doc, where I'll have checklists and notes on small things that don't merit changes to a dedicated page. There's arguably a "retrieval" breakdown in that I don't really go back through these to update them or collate them into bigger pages.

Twitter is good because it's low friction and I can just go off, which is fun, and because they have decent search, so I can quote-tweet a related thing and sort of thread the graph together. If you're talking about BASB you're probably familiar with this corner of twitter. visakanv etc. This method works well if you use it enough to be able to recall your other notes. I think there's something special about the twitter format here too: it discourages whole-page thoughts in favor of sequential pithy bits, which i think are easier to both link and recall.

Execution: I would like a chat frontend (signal/SMS/etc) where I can just talk to my projects, ask the status of things, get suggestions, etc. Push based, rather than pull based, execution.

Active project context: I've dropped todoist-like things since they're limited in what they can express, and notion/markdown can do todolists etc. I tend to have lists in markdown style that live in two places: my daily diary/todo docs, and the actual projects themselves. This is messy and it would be lovely if notion or similar had the concept of a "todo block" and could collate all of them into a single view where I could understand association, prune and dedupe, etc. Even better if there's an agent that does or suggests cleanup whenever a new block enters.

Larger projects will get docs of their own, lots of sprawl and notes etc, and then some formalization around a spec or something. I move these to an archive folder when I'm done with the notes and the final document is fleshed out, but I'd love an agent review that makes sure I'm not leaving things on the cutting board, and that I've handled all the todos etc in my notes pages.

I don't use bidirectional linking/tagging enough, but I really should, since I want to be able to coin keywords for particular concepts inline, and then be able to access their overview and see everything that mentions them in a graphlike way.

Calendar is definitely a much used component day to day. For planning, etc. But it's not a source of truth. Everything on a calendar should just be a proxy/link to a more robust doc.

Hard nos: My take on privacy policies for things like this is "show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes". That is to say, any company that can survive an attempt to profit from data fuckery will do so. Your data retention policy should include technically unambiguous red lines that are not to be crossed, and define specific per-user monetary payout in the event that a breach occurs, to include clauses that cause user payout to occur before eg preferred stockholders get liquidation preference and drain the possible payout pool. Routine third party audits of how user data is handled/retained/distributed etc. I recognize that this is a bit unhinged, but that's what signaling credibility looks like. A company says "we won't sell your data" and I say "or what" and there's hemming and hawing because nothing will happen to them. If the answer is "this company dies on the spot and our investors get completely fucked", now we can talk.

I think AI service pricing applies here: generally, if it seems neat I could be in for $20 easy, and if it's genuinely game changing, $200/mo is completely reasonable to ask.

re Migration cost: I expect to be able to get 100% of my data in a reasonable non-proprietary format. If that's some blend of markdown, json, sqlite, whatever, fine.

But the bottom line for me, where does my second brain break down the most? It doesn't talk back to me. I want it to understand what I've got going on, and my idiosyncracies. I want to present it with new information and have it be like "oh, this relates to X" or, periodically, to pop up with something like "I'm noticing this correlation / related idea in areas X, Y, Z... does that resonate? Is there something here?" Again, push vs pull. My second brain should be a proactive chatbot. "Noise" is so often thought about in terms of frequency, but it's really about insight quality. If my response to 80% of push notis is "damn, good call" then you can send one every 5 minutes.

I also hear no mention of one's personal life. I don't really make the distinction. It's all in there. I should be able to bitch to this chatbot about my manager, have it know about that background, and riff with me to navigate hard convos. I should be able to talk to it about side projects I have going on, and let it thread those into my calendar. Etc. Notion is already an adequate second brain for work. Nobody has yet built an adequate second brain for the home. My house, my relationship(s), my side projects, my own diarying and self reflection... these are the contents of my brain that matter.

Email in bio if you want to talk. I'm a design technologist and happy to riff / give feedback.

Getting the room cozy and psychologically satisfying was a huge deal, and I"m really glad I did it, but the end result is much closer to horse blinders. I have ADHD, so distraction minimization is the name of the game.

It uses a highly invasive, trivially circumvented rule to target two cohorts, while ultimately impacting neither:

1. High volume, low complexity: These are your glock switches (overwhelming majority of the illegal firearm parts trade), 80% lower kits, etc. You catch these at customs in the case of most temu switches, and at distribution time by creeping public IG accts for the ones that are actually printed. Blockers here aren't technical. Customs needs to deeply inspect small things, LEOs need resourcing to pursue the long tail of digital market vendors, prosecutors need to find the political will to hand a looottttt of 15 year olds to the ATF. This bill doesn't do those things.

2. Low volume, high complexity: this is your FGC9s, all-but-barrel printed guns, etc. This crowd is tiny, niche, slow, and basically unstoppable for as long as copper wire and magnets continue to exist. Overindexing on manufacturing here is silly, as there are vastly more regular illegal guns trading hands, and anything that works on those will work here too.

The hardware descriptions here seem on the light side. I'd want to be confident that it can handle intense time based effects.

It's promising that they seem to allow arbitrary write to the device, and only charge for tokens for the people that require the prompt playground.

Looking forward to see where this goes.

As an aside: building an ear-pleasing FDN reverb on an obscure-ish board with intense hardware optimization needs has been one of my favorite barometers for the abilities of new LLM models.

https://downdetector.com/status/claude-ai/

Now GPT4.1 was another story last year, I remember cooking at 4am pacific and feeling the whole thing slam to a halt as the US east coast came online.

I look grimly forward to the future of adblock, which I predict will literally involve a media interception and re-rendering agent that sits between us and everything we see, hear, read, etc. AR goggles that put beach pictures over bus stop posters and red squigglies under sentences with a high enough adtech confidence score. This shit's gonna get real weird in our lifetimes.

* Hakko FX888D soldering iron. I used to hate soldering, and it always came out awful. Perfect soldering is effortless now. It's a delight.

* Oxo 5lb kitchen scale (or anything similar). Cooking in metric is just sane. Excellent for bread.

* The Speakman S-2251 showerhead, with the flow regulator pried out. Was 100 when bought, 3x that now. Reddit voted it the most powerful and high quality showerhead. If you like that kind of thing, it's still worth it at 300.

* Schlage BE365 deadbolts. Can be found on sale under 100. Keyless door entry, supports multiple codes, not smart or connected in any way, battery lasts years.

* Velcro cable ties of various lengths. Every cable in my closet is orderly, and when you're done with one, it never sprawls or tangles.

* ESP32S3 boards. Drastically lowers the activation threshold for oneoff web-connected silliness.

* These little [dimmable lights](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4Q4D5VP) (in amber). Warm colored, layered lighting all over the house. Huge vibe upgrade.

* [Dimmer leashes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DL7V3CM). These sit between plug and outlet, and provide a separate 6ft cable with a dimmer switch on the end. I use them on my desk to control my zoom lighting, and in bed to dim my shelf lights without getting up.

* Multi-packs of small tools. We have a dozen pairs of scissors, box cutters, etc floating around. Sharpies and mechanical pencils in ~100 packs. Place around the house. It's very nice to not have to look far for these.

* [Masking tape](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R28DGHM) and stickers in many rainbow colors. Useful for knowing EG which cable goes to the PS5 (blue) vs xbox (green).

* [Giant digital clock](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCVV8J98) w/ date, day of week, and temperature. Ended up buying more for other parts of the house because I got so used to looking for it.

* [Ratcheting adjustable belt](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VDMFZB2?) Also loops the belt tip onto the inside, not the outside. The idea of having a belt with adjustment intervals of inches instead of mms, with a tip that flops on the outside feels very silly now.

I don't have deep food industry knowledge, IIRC there are some rules around SKUs needing to rotate in response to certain changes, but these are completely opaque to customers. People should know they're eating snickers 12.2.2, and while a sub-1% change to one ingredient's amount might be a patch bump, a 10% total weight reduction should absolutely trigger a major version bump. SKU and nutrition labels should be tied to a public changelog, and inaccuracies in that changelog should proportionally imperil manufacturer solvency.