Way back when I used Spotify, I felt they should go this way instead of dabbling with (fake) podcasts, pivot-to-video, audiobooks, and slop music. All of that stuff is a distraction from my core subscription model: listening to music from artists that I love, and finding new artists to love! Much better to lean into something complementary to that core model.
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.
Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone.
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
Yup, I used to believe that people would all use the Internet to educate themselves, and we all know how that turned out (loads of people did, but the majority didn't).
This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.
Source? This seems extremely unlikely to me, running a camera all the time consumes a fair bit of energy and they don't take long to turn on. Unless that's because they're always on?
Regardless, that's a pretty strong claim. I'd love to learn more if you have a link that can back you up!
A lot of companies pay and treat tech writers like shit.
If you're a decent tech writer who can write well, grok engineer speak, collaborate well with engineers during crunch time before a release, and apply your technical knowledge to build and maintain documentation infrastructure... well, you'll get comped slightly beneath the level of a developer with similar experience.
For folks like me who enjoy the writing side of things, it's worth it. But there are very few people who truly appreciate both the writing and the development side of the role. You honestly need both.
Most companies pay poorly, and wind up hiring non-technical folks who can barely manage a CMS. Those people can be helpful in a larger org, but at the end of the day, most technical orgs need a truly technical writer who can talk with the engineers directly and mess around with the product pre-release.
I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO:
* excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile
* heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date
* multiple map styles, so you can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in
* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)
* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour
* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it
Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.
Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.
I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)
TL;DR it looks like the M4 Mac Mini redesign is _not_ soldered onto the logic board. So instead of paying 6x street prices of similar SSDs, you can just upgrade it yourself with an SSD of your choice!
This is absolutely huge news. I wonder if Apple will do something similar for the Studio, Pro, or -- dare I hope? -- even the Macbook Pros in the future? I can't imagine allowing this 'trapdoor' of money savings is a huge problem for profits since most businesses would never bother messing around with warranties for a spec upgrade. But this is absolutely MASSIVE for consumers. Just put in a little extra work and you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars compared to Apple's upgrade pricing, for a good enough end result.
Not to mention the fact that this must also save _Apple itself_ an insane amount of money for repairs! Instead of throwing away the entire logic board, the CPU, the soldered-on RAM, and the soldered-on SSD whenever any of those components fail, you can just replace the malfunctioning part. Who'd have thunk (other than, y'know, every single computer company from 1980-2015)?
I would also of course love to see this upgradeability return to RAM. I'm curious if anyone more knowledgable than myself might know if the SoC/Apple Silicon Unified Memory system makes that more difficult, or if we've just accepted it because Apple Says So.
And while I'm on the subject of non-upgradeable RAM: does anyone know why no SBCs, from Raspberry Pi to Orange Pearl Jam Cake to Milk, allow for upgradeable RAM? Surely it's possible in the SBC form factor?
Unless I'm mistaken, this appears to be a custom storage module, not available for sale.
So Apple gets the best of both worlds. They can keep charging their high storage costs, but they themselves gets the flexibility of easily upgrading storage due to having this as a module.
The modules are proprietary to Apple because of course they are. So no, no easy upgrades unless and until someone clones the design and is able to produce them in enough quantity to be competitive on price - but even then it'll be more expensive than a commodity SSD of the same size.
Looking at the price difference between m4 and m4 pro I think they're not that worried about users "upgrading" SSDs. Also, good luck finding SSDs that match the speeds you get with Apple provided ones .. at reasonable prices. If this were a laptop I would worry about power draw as well.
As an apple hardware enjoyer: you're so high on copium.
Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party, and they're not even remotely at the top wrt maximum write/read bandwidth compared to pcie Gen 5 m.2 ssds you can buy for ~$200-300/TB.
So yeah, Apple's ssds cost at least 3x (and perform measurably worse). And I might add: gen 5 is already what, 1 1/2 yrs old now?
> Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party
I'm not sure what you're talking about here, because Apple was one of the first PC OEMs to adopt PCIe storage, and very quickly followed that up with a transition to NVMe. This was circa 2015. They just didn't use the M.2 connector, and when they introduced the T2 chip they stopped using third-party SSDs in favor of their own built-in NVMe SSD controller.
Also, I don't think PCIe gen5 SSDs are being shipped in laptops yet (at least not in any significant volume), on account of the extra speed being completely not worth the power cost. Much like the transition from gen3 to gen4, availability of SSDs that are only suitable for desktops with large heatsinks comes long before availability of reasonably-efficient SSD controllers. Eg. Samsung's PM9E1 SSD for PC OEMs only started mass production a month ago: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-starts-mass-producti...
You may be confusing when the NVMe specification was first released and when the first NVMe hardware was actually available. From what I can tell, the first NVMe SSD controller was announced in 2012 [0], the first real product using it was announced in 2013 [1], but that was all enterprise-focused and the first controller and drives suitable for use in consumer systems (rather than high-airflow servers) didn't show up until 2015 [2], which is when Apple started using it.
[0] from IDT, later sold to PMC-Sierra, then Microsemi, now Microchip's Flashtec product line
[1] Samsung XS1715 was at least the first to pass compliance testing at UNH-IOL
[2] Intel rebranded their enterprise NVMe drives as the Intel SSD 750 marketed for PC enthusiasts, but the real beginning of consumer NVMe was Samsung's SM951 when they started transitioning away from PCIe AHCI (used for compatibility with systems lacking NVMe-aware drivers and firmware).
Extremely exciting. Google Maps has gotten significantly worse in the last couple of years, finally passing the threshold of enshittification by instructing me to turn "at the <fast food seafood restaurant>" instead of just telling me the road name late last year. Search for points of interest has gotten awful, just as bad as Google Search, the Play Store, and the App Store with sponsored content taking over all usable space for basic searches (seriously, I do not want you to prioritise <fast food donut restaurant> when I search for "diner" or "coffee shop").
If Kagi can prioritise useful search results, trade ads for a monthly subscription, and contribute meaningful data back into OpenStreetMaps as a backend, I would subscribe in an instant. Currently DuckDuckGo is enough to meet my web search needs, but I desperately need a good alternative to Google Maps. Unfortunately Osmand is just not a great interface for most of my needs, and has no Android Auto support, either.
Maps are the weakest part of Kagi right now, and it's a real sore spot for me. Searching for the name of a location often doesn't find it. Searching for addresses often finds a location in a different state (even if I specified the state). It seems to have no idea where I'm at in any way shape or form.
I've been trying to buy a cabin and looking up the addresses has basically meant just switching to Google, unfortunately. I'm really hoping the address lookup gets better, and it learns to search nearby results.
The fast food restaurant sign is usually 300 times larger than the road name sign, if there even is a road name sign. I have never been able to see any road name sign from the car.
Only time I've ever had an issue is when I manually disconnected power from a Pi 4 when I overreacted to a network outage. I was dumb and thought my Pi's DNS was screwing things up for the whole network, but it turns out that it was just Spectrum screwing things up for the entire region. Fortunately there was only one minor corrupted file, it didn't bork the SD card, and I was able to repair the setup manually.
I've never had any problem as long as I've stuck with the `sudo shutdown` command, which powers down in a controlled manner so writes don't get interrupted. But I've also never had an issue after a power outage, so I think somehow power outage shutdowns are more graceful than just yanking the power cable out.
If you're really concerned, you can always configure your Pi to use a read-only root filesystem. Combine that with a USB SSD to store your _actual_ data and you should be OK indefinitely. Or just boot from that USB SSD -- just remember to configure fstab correctly for your intended behaviour! You might be surprised to discover that fstab can delay a boot indefinitely if mounting expectations do not match reality.
I don't think London has made quite the strides in bikeability that Paris has since 2020, but when I visited Hackney last year I was astonished to see more bikes during rush hour than cars. Walking down a road to a coffee shop, I actually had to wait a few seconds to cross at the intersection between two bike highways.
Hundreds of people riding bikes to work. And as quiet as the wilderness behind my house in the rural USA. I could hear the wind in the trees, and that was it. Maybe a little drivetrain noise from a poorly maintained bike here or there.
I desperately want to live in a city that quiet. Back when I lived in NYC practically every environment was an assault on the ears.
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.