It's an old book now, but Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age includes the vision that we should have for education. We literally have the tools today to build his fictional "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer." What he envisioned was not that far off from an iPad with a Claude subscription where Claude has specific goals for the conversation. It's not teachers lecturing a class, it's individualized education where an AI teaches students at their own pace using their own interests. And built into AI is the ability for precocious kids to go beyond the curriculum, either on tangents or to more advanced subjects. This is impossible in a world where a teacher is trying to shepherd dozens of students through a curriculum as a group.

In the 2010s, we got some of the way there with Khan Academy. It was genuinely new that a student could rewatch something until it clicked rather than having to digest a lecture and have any question that didn't immediately spring to mind go unanswered. AI offers the possibility to go a step beyond this. Instead of rewatching the exact same content, AI can present it to the student in multiple ways based on a student's confusion and keep explaining it until a topic clicks. It can find examples of things that a student finds interesting to show how what they're learning isn't just theoretical. If a student likes space, the AI can discuss how the trig concepts they're learning apply to the Artemis II mission. If they like sports, it could apply the same concepts to tennis. Students in literary classes could read different books according to their interests while AI ensures that they understand the same sorts of concepts while discussing them. By customizing based on the specific curiosity of the student, it can make learning far more engaging and actually fun.

To address your #2, schools should be working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to shape a new personalized paradigm of educating students. They should be working out deals that give access to AI to their entire district. If I were heading the Department of Education, I would go a step further and get companies to bid on a contract to put their AI in the hands of every public school child in America. A version of the AI where teachers input their curriculum into the AI and students work through it with the AI, either alone or in small groups and the AI reports back to teachers so they can intervene where they are most needed would allow school districts with staffing shortages to serve more students more efficiently and with better results.

Sometimes it feels like our current system of education is only secondarily concerned with students actually learning and the primary concern is testing students to sort them into different tiers to be absorbed into different strata of our workforce. AI does compromise this sorting process to some extent. But if we can get back to the true mission of education and think creatively to deploy AI to best educate students, we have the potential to transform education like never before. What if we don't need to test students? An AI can give an individualized assessment of how well a student has grasped what they're supposed to be learning based on weeks of individualized work. It's as if we can give every student their own private tutor who will report back to the teacher on the student's actual progress. When you have that, stress-inducing exams are a ridiculous substitute.

I've been pretty shocked at how closed-minded the responses to my comment have been. We're supposed to be a community that envisions radically better futures that can be built with technology. And here we have a revolutionary new technology that upends a staid and increasingly problematic part of our society and the majority of the responses are geared towards explaining why that staid and problematic institution should be maintained unchanged. AI is fundamentally a danger to our current education model, but that model can change radically for the better. And I would've hoped that more people here would have recognized that.

So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? These tools are not going to cease to exist. The students they are preparing are going to live and work in a world where they exist. To my mind, you best prepare students by teaching them how to use the tools most effectively, not by teaching them how to work without the tools. Students should be learning how to prompt AI without hinting it towards a specific answer. They should be learning how to double check the answers AI gives them to ferret out hallucinations. They should be learning how to produce work that is a hundred times more complex than what us older folks had to do in school. We should be graduating students who are so much more capable than any generation before them. I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations. The world they will inhabit has changed radically from the one we entered into following school.

There’s an argument that some sort of tariffs are actually necessary. The world is changing and the US has become reliant on countries who increasingly have divergent interests from the US. Additionally, some countries have aging populations that will make them more and more unreliable places to manufacture stuff in the next couple decades. It’s entirely reasonable to believe that it’s pretty critical for the US to begin the process of re-industrializing as soon as possible and tariffs are a crucial lever to make that happen.

But…how you do that matters. Re-industrialization is a process that will take decades and the businesses doing that need to be fairly sure of the government’s policy for most of that period. If Trump had built a broad consensus with Democrats for the tariff policy so that businesses could have understood that a future Democratic president or congressional majority would continue the tariff policy, then businesses would be able to plan accordingly and begin the massive capital outlays that come with re-shoring manufacturing. And the tariffs would strategically exclude certain items like the steel that would be necessary to build factories. And, lastly, you wouldn’t pick now to go on a deportation spree when a sizable chunk of the nations construction workers are undocumented immigrants, since all those factories will need to be built by someone and there aren’t enough Americans to do it.

But instead of the sane and well-reasoned way to do it, we’ve got Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip chaos version. The tariff policy changes weekly, so businesses can’t predict it, let alone rely on it in the way they would need to to spend the collective trillions of dollars on manufacturing infrastructure that need to be spent. And he’s antagonizing Democrats to such and extent that any future Democratic administration will drop the tariffs on day one. The result of which is that businesses, understandably, are hunkering down until he’s out of office. Instead of spurring the massive investment we need, his policies have chilled spending on manufacturing. The only thing we’re really building at the moment are data centers.

So there’s this narrative that tariffs are awful now that’s really the result of someone incompetently deploying them. Some sort of tariff policy would actually be a necessary medicine for the country to help heal the damage from an over reliance on a globalized system that is going to crumble in the coming decades. It won’t be easy, but the earlier the country starts to address it, the better the outcome will be. But it needs to be done intentionally, in a bi-partisan way and through acts of Congress, not in a scattershot fashion where Congress is a bystander and a single deranged lunatic pulls tariff percentages out of ass whenever the mood strikes him.

The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.

I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.

This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.

It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.

And I think that's where the comment you're responding to is coming from. Once you've experienced Docker/K8s and, to a lesser extent, IaC tools like Terraform, it's hard to see yourself ever going back to tools like Chef in the same way that tools like Chef made it hard to see going back to a world where we configured servers manually.

...in a way supported by Apple. But OpenCore [0] makes installing the latest OS on older Macs relatively simple. You lose out on some features that your hardware doesn't support (e.g. Apple Intelligence), but most of that is unnecessary at best.

[0] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

And the sudo !! pattern is something I do even when I realize that I need root ahead of time. There’s something about hitting enter on a command that makes me realize I’ve made a mistake, so doing that before I’ve granted root permissions is helpful. Up/ctrl-p are more awkward to use this way.

One of the key takeaways that I had was that Intuit viewed accounting as a three-way market where the professional accountants were the most important factor when it came to the product design. Customers generally don’t care what software gets used and will pick whatever their accountant recommends. As such, only certain workflows prioritized ease of use and being intuitive. Business owners want to go in and see reports on how their business is doing, but when it comes to actually doing the books, they don’t care. And accountants see the unintuitive parts of Quickbooks as a moat. They’ve put so much time and effort into learning to use such a poor UI, that they see a lot of their value in skillfully navigating that “bad” UI. There’s a ton of hidden tricks that have evolved over the years and get passed from accountant to accountant and they’ll scream bloody murder if Intuit tries to change them. It was funny to hear how much effort was being put into replicating weird interaction patterns from Quickbooks Desktop when they were creating Quickbooks Online and trying to migrate customers over.

My advice to you is to try to find professional accountants who will let you observe them using Quickbooks or Xero. I can almost guarantee that they’re using those products very differently from the way you do. And don’t assume that just because Quickbooks UI sucks, making a better UI will make you successful. Having worked with them, the people in charge of Quickbooks Online are very talented and plenty capable of making a more intuitive UI. The choice not to is intentional and based on a lot of history and strong relationships with their professional accountant community. There will always be some small business owners who try to go it alone, and they really do need more intuitive accounting solutions. In general, I thought Wave was pretty good at targeting that segment the last time I looked at it. But the money there is tiny. And if you want to be hugely successful, you have to understand accountants and why they choose Quickbooks.

Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case, albeit after an adjustment period for people who’ve become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.

The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don’t need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T, it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen where you’re free to do everything you can do in a normal location bar and more. It’s modeled after the command palette design in code editors or application launchers. So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can search for commands instead of hunting for them in the browser’s menus. As an example, I’d never memorize the keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because I don’t use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so I typed “CMD+L, screen” and it was the second result. Task completed in under 2 sec.

It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and Firefox use. It just takes up space that I’d rather devote to the sites I’m visiting. Even the tab pane is easily toggled to get out of my way when I don’t care about it, which is especially useful when I’m tiling websites. I’ve developed a fondness for keeping documentation open in one panel alongside the website I’m developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from the tab pane is valuable.

I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase where you’re sure you’re going to hate this browser design. Because once you get past it, you’ll wonder how you ever thought the old way could be better.

[0] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

The car was clean, well maintained, fully charged and already parked in my hotel’s parking lot. Charging was free at any Tesla charger over the three days I had the car…I just had to plug it in and tell the car how much charge I wanted. When I was done with the car, I just had to snap a few photos and leave it in the same lot. And because the pickup/drop off point was at my hotel, I avoided paying for the car for the day I flew in and out since the hotel provided a shuttle to/from the airport.

It’s amazing that some guy named Marco who bought 6 used Teslas can do a more competent job of renting EVs than a multibillion dollar rental agency with huge economies of scale.

For one, it mentions to give positive feedback, but it fails to mention that you should not give that positive feedback at the same time that you’re giving constructive feedback. This gets called the “feedback sandwich” where, to ease the awkwardness of giving constructive feedback, we tend to sandwich it between complimentary feedback. The problem is that people often focus on the stuff that feels good and fail to really hear the constructive part.

Secondly, while it mentions to include the impact, it doesn’t mention the first two parts of good feedback. The model I learned goes by the initialism SBI, for situation, behavior and impact. In X situation, you did Y and it caused Z. You don’t have to format it exactly this way, but having all three components of the feedback is key to making the feedback actionable.

The other thing that’s necessary for great feedback culture is to really understand the concept that “feedback is a gift.” It’s really easy to be defensive or disagree with feedback you hear. But you need to understand that feedback doesn’t represent objective truth, it represents a perspective that you didn’t have before hearing it. As such, it is always a positive to hear, even when it’s critical. You may not agree with the perspective you’re hearing, but simply knowing that the other person feels that way is more information than you had prior to getting the feedback. And having more information is almost always better.

The endowments of the Ivy League schools are nearing a combined $200b and schools like Stanford and MIT not far behind. These “schools” have become investment funds with a side hustle educating students to maintain their tax status and solicit alumni donations. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be taxed, especially with many of them charging upwards of $50k/yr in tuition, much of which gets paid with grants and loans guaranteed by the government.

We should remember that an unmaintained dependency isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a supply chain. There are far worse nightmare scenarios that involve exfiltrated keys, ransomewared files and such.

I’ll bet that if someone with a track record of contributing to the Rust community steps up, he’ll happily transfer control of the crate. But he’s not just going to assign it to some random internet user and put the whole ecosystem at risk.

Suffering through QuickBooks is literally a product feature. Like, when they were porting it to the online version, bookkeepers got upset that the web version didn’t have many of the frustrating quirks of the desktop version that they’d spent decades learning to deal with. They see their having learned the bizarre ins and outs of the software as a moat that keeps their clients from doing their books themselves, so many/most require their clients to use it. And Intuit is far more responsive to the interests of CPAs/bookkeepers than it is to the end users who pay for it.

Source: I worked in Intuit’s SBG and was really surprised when I heard that from some of the product people. I’m so used to being user-focused and searching out ways to be more user friendly that it never occurred to me that, in a 3-sided market, making the software hostile to the user could be a selling point.

AVP is a V1 product, but it’s already clear that Apple understands this and is interested in solving it. It has the best pass through of any VR headset, with reviewers able to do real-time tasks like playing ping pong or playing catch. And it has a screen on the outside that displays some weird virtualized version of your eyes to try to pass through in the opposite direction. And, lastly, in has a “persona” which it can use to make you seem like your not using AVP in FaceTime as much as is possible.

These are, mostly, janky attempts to solve the problem, but it’s easy to imagine them getting more refined over time. It’s easy to imagine that someone walking down the street wearing future versions will be able to make eye contact with other people and will appear as their persona to other AVP wearers rather than someone wearing a headset, though likely with some green aura that’s only blue for wearers of other copycat headsets (there’s no way that Apple isn’t carrying their green bubble social stigma into the spatial computing market). All the building blocks are there for that physical barrier to feel a lot less physical, they’re just really, really raw and don’t quite work yet.