Here's what I did to make voice (now WisprFlow, before Superwhisper) a habit:
1. Install Karabiner-Elements, a free macOS keyboard remapper[0]
2. Map F19 -> F5 (mic button) in Karabiner-Elements
3. Choose F19 as the voice hotkey in your voice app
And now you can use the handy F5 mic button on your Apple keyboard. WisprFlow automatically has it set for:
- press and hold to talk
- double tap for indeterminate listening until you f5/esc
That workflow alone, of using the f5 key and switching between the two modes of speaking (holding or double-tap), has freed up a not insignificant part of my working memory. Turning abstract thoughts into text is higher cost than turning them into voice.
I predict individual offices[1] will be more popular as a choice for startups.
fwiw, I use the fn/international key at the bottom left of the keyboard. it's easier to locate and I (a privilege I enjoy because I rarely use diacritics) barely use it for anything else.
Now that's dangerous to do because the conversation history in Claude Code now also reverts the code to that point. So while this technique may have worked in the past, it no longer works.
I built NewsBlur and it's always interesting to me to hear people talk about the UI as a retro feel, but when I look at the competitors, I feel they aren't dense enough with information. Minimalism has gutted our ability to process more than a bit of text at once and I think that's tragic.
> Most of the blacksmiths in the 19th century drank themselves to death after the industrial revolution
This is hyperbolic and a dramatic oversimplification and does not accurately describe the reality of the transition from blacksmithing to more advanced roles like machining, toolmaking, and working in factories. The 19th century was a time of interchangeable parts (think the North's advantage in the Civil War) and that requires a ton of mechanical expertise and precision.
Many blacksmiths not only made the transition to machining, but there weren't enough blackmsiths to fill the bevy of new jobs that were available. Education expanded to fill those roles. Traditional blacksmithing didn’t vanish either, even specialized roles like farriery and ornamental ironwork also expanded.
I run NewsBlur[0] and I’ve been battling this issue of NewsBlur fetching 403s across the web for months now. My users are revolting and asking for refunds. I’ve tried emailing dozens of site owners and publishers and only two of them have done the work of whitelisting their RSS feed. It’s maddening and is having a real negative effect on NewsBlur.
NewsBlur is an open-source RSS news reader (full source available at [1]), something we should all agree is necessary to support the open web! But Cloudflare blocking all of my feed fetchers is bizarre behavior. And we’re on the verified bots list for years, but it hasn’t made a difference.
Let me know what I can do. NewsBlur publishes a list of IPs that it uses for feed fetching that I've shared with Cloudflare but it hasn't made a difference.
I'm hoping Cloudflare uses the IP address list that I publish and adds them to their allowlist so NewsBlur can keep fetching (and archiving) millions of feeds.
RSS is an essential component to modern web publishing and it feels scary to see how one company’s inconsideration might harm its already fragile future. One day cloudflare will get big enough to be subject to antitrust regulation and this instance will be a strong data point working against them.
Clearly they are not 100% consenting, or at best one of them (the content publisher) is misconfiguring/misunderstanding their setup. They enabled RSS on their service, then setup a rule to require human verification for accessing that RSS feed.
It's like a business advertising a singles only area, then hiring a security company and telling them to only allow couples in the building.
If Cloudflare was honest and upfront about the tradeoffs being made and the fact that it's still going to require configuration and maintenance work they'd have significantly less customers.
Newsblur was the first SaaS I could afford as a student. I have been subscriber for something like 20 years now. And I will keep doing it to the grave. Best money ever spent.
Can't recommend Newsblur enough. I have been a customer since Fastladder was shut down. I love their integration of being able to use pinboard.in within the web interface to bookmark articles. An essential part of my web productivity flow.
I used to get my internet from a small local ISP, and ip blacklisting basically means no one in our zipcode could have reliable internet.
These days, the 10-20% of us with an unobstructed sky view switched to starlink and didn’t look back.
The thing is, both ISPs use CGNAT, but there’s no way cloudflare is going to block Musk like they do the mom and pop shop.
Anyway, apparently residential proxy networks work pretty well if you hit a spurious ip block. I’ve had good luck with apple private relay too.
I’m hoping service providers realize how useless and damaging ip blocking is to their reputations, but I’m not holding my breath. Sometimes I think the endgame is just routing 100% of residential traffic through 8.8.8.8.
"How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural."
Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too?
I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural!
I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made honey.
I love debating this with people but ultimately it's just playing games with semantics. The notion of artificial x natural is very recent and very localized. Some cultures would differentiate raw from cooked in a similar sense. But it's like talking about what is really green vs what is really blue. Completely circular since it depends on the definitions of the terms.
It's easily extendable to the animal world as well. Is a nest created by a bird or a den created by one of various mammals natural or artificial? Is a nest made by mice in my garage from synthetic fabrics, flexible plastics, and whatever plant matter it can find natural or synthetic?
My wife was recently asked to make a meal for someone who didn't eat "processed" foods. What level of manipulation needs to happen before a food is "processed"? Can beans or rice be dried and put in a bag? Can chicken broth be used if it's homemade, but the chicken came from a commercial farm? Or is extracting broth from a chicken processing it?
I've increasingly noticed many sub-cultures adopting odd definitions and interpretations of commonly used language with the expectation that everyone who interacts with their group understand their dialects. It's not really jargon or vernacular since the words are common to the language, just used to mean something different than the general population would understand. Similarly, artificial is now assumed to mean bad and natural good, when neither ascribe value by definition or in practice.
You could approach the language problem like that as well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to normalize languages in certain territories, there was no Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and accents changed slowly across the landscape, following geography - places isolated diverged and places integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added layers of complexity to this variation.
But your idea that people are failing to use Standard English and creating language subcultures around peculiar meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very artificial distribution of language.
Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium exists only because of a complex system doing its thing, it should be considered a consequence of the complex system rather than an alternative.
To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of basically any pure lump of material that exists?
To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.
Apple still sells the iPhone SE 3. Rumor has it that the next iPhone SE will lose the home screen button but retain the same size. The camera isn't as powerful as the iPhone 13/14/15 lines but I find that it does fine in low light and takes the same exceptionally beautiful photos in good lighting. It has portrait mode as well.
It's not that much of a trade-off in terms of features or capability and it has the small size you'd expect.
How did you get it to work? I'm trying to do something very basic, wait for a text message to appear and make a POST request to an endpoint with the contents. I can create the Shortcut itself, but I cannot make the Automation run without showing a notification and then requiring me to tap on the notification to run the Automation.
(Translating UI strings from German.) When I have the automation open, the first two settings are "Automation" (set to "Execute immediately") and "Notify on execution" (set to off). That seems to work. But not sure if it's more restrictive for certain types of actions, like network requests. I'm only using it for fairly basic stuff like "if Youtube or Nebula is opened, turn screen rotation lock off".
I'm specifically looking for a small/normal-sized smartphone that doesn't run iOS, as I need features from my phone not available on iOS (specifically, running automations automatically)
