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I honestly don’t know why people get worked up over this. I assume that either the person doing it isn’t a native speaker, or they are a techie that just doesn’t have good English language writing skills. And having those skills is rare for technical people. It’s much easier to deal with Claude than what those people would have written without assistance.

Over the last few decades I’ve read many technical docs that were obviously mechanically translated from some other language. This is much better.


Technology doing code is really cool because you give it an input, a functional purpose, and your intended function output - and it can do a pretty darn good job at producing the code that fulfills the requirements.

But when you want me to read something AI written, without the human refining the UI I see, it almost seems like I'm a test case and all the author cares about is my output in terms of "I like it" or "I don't like it". There's no information about _why_ the author wanted me to see this. Can you tell me your inspiration for making this? Some sort of personal connection I should have with the thing I'm seeing?

Vibe coded apps can still be useful in this state as tools, but don't expect me to use my creative brainpower to provide feedback on your product in a constructive manner if you can't be asked to ensure the text is your intention for the code, not how the AI interpreted it.


I don't really get worked up over it, but I do have a preference for original writing these days. If it's someone's pet project or something creative, I prefer the authenticity of the creative's actual writing. AI writing is just so boring and sterile out of the box. You lose nuance and personality.

It is a bit different with translation, in that case AI translation might get closer to the original intent than manual translation by the author. But otherwise I want the words from their brain meats, not layers removed and cleansed by system prompts and training.


I just know if the first spoonful tastes like dung then I'm not going to keep eating the soup.

> Over the last few decades I’ve read many technical docs that were obviously mechanically translated from some other language. This is much better.

I don’t think it’s better. Any frontier LLM is capable of competent translation without significantly re-wording the text.

I use Whisper to transcribe foreign language videos and then run them through a couple of models to translate into English. It works really well, and much better than mechanical translation because they can figure out likely mistakes based on how whisper might have misheard (or surrounding context from the script).


I dont find it better. I fimd it significantly worst.

Google AI suggests the rents there run from $5k to $9k a month, so, is 1.7% to 3% of the rent negligible?

I pay this much for a trash collection service that doesn't seem to ever show up and fines me if I get the unlisted rules wrong.

The unit I was looking at was listed $6k a month, so that’s about right.

The salt river northeast of Phoenix has been infested with apple snails from central america - they get up to 6" or so. The forest service regularly runs events where people in kayaks and on paddle boards help clear that section of river of the clumps of eggs.

I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home; they're not much bigger than two meters!

I only ever worked on one token ring network in the 90s - the client used mostly IBM hardware, and I guess that's what the consultants who set them up installed. It worked fairly well, but the main thing I remember was the switches were really, really noisy.

Every other network I worked on was ethernet, with the exception of one arcnet network. Which also worked really well, except it was very, very slow.


I run a wekan kanban board for household stuff. If I had any servers up 24/7 in the house I'd run them there, but it's handy to be able to access from anywhere and well worth the $5.


Female orange tabby cats are less common than males though, for much the same reason. They have to get the orange genes from both parents otherwise they are just calico.


The same is true of black cats, the other way around. There are fewer orange (or black) female cats because female cats have another option of coloring - tortoise shell (no spots) or calico (with spots). Another way of phrasing it, half of the male cats are orange, the other half are black - female cats have a third option.

Side bit - the wiki page for X chromosome inactivation shows a picture of a tortoise shell cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation

http://messybeast.com/tricolours.htm

And white spots gets into interesting questions of embryonic cell differentiation http://messybeast.com/bicolours.htm

The "why are there large splotches of color with a calico cat compared to the much more mottled color pattern of a tortoise shell cat?"

http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm has a deep rabbit hole to go down (and that's for domestic cats... http://messybeast.com/wildcats-index.htm for the other cats).


Recycling drop-off is not free for me, and neither is having recycling picked up at the house. If I need to drop stuff off at the dump, it's a flat fee per drop-off with a limit of one trailer load per drop-off. Burn barrels are also illegal in Maricopa County, so Amazon boxes just go in the trash.


I had an acquaintance who had a couple of driving ranges for golf for that exact purpose. He said it kept the property taxes lower than if he had built nothing on them. His only goal was to be break-even until he sold.


I have no idea if I'm anywhere on the spectrum, but I really don't visualize images, but I can definitely hear sounds in my mind's ear. Not smells, tho. When I dream, it's almost no images. It's feelings, with a story associated. To the extent i do have images, they are very washed out, basically no color or detail.


The iPod’s user interface was good once you figured it out. I bought a 2nd gen one, I think, because it was the only large capacity device that supported audible audiobooks, and the UI frustrated the heck out of me. I consistently had trouble navigating it.

Then it clicked, the control, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t a d-pad. It was a weird touchpad emulating a physical dial. Which exactly nothing in the documentation that it came with mentioned.

I worked for Microsoft at the time, and took a lot of grief for not using a Zune. Except I owned one, bought cheaply at the company store. It just never supported Audible.


I'm having a hard time imagining the click wheel took you more than 10 seconds to figure out.


Looking at photos of the OG iPod, the control looks a lot like a modern Apple TV remote which is a D-pad. But if you've ever held one you know instantly that it isn't a D-pad. And there was so much hype and advertising about it at the time, I'm not sure anyone would expect D-pad behavior from it.

I want to say that Apple invented that particular design language, and prior to the original iPod nothing resembled that UI but I'm not sure.

It seems to me that the OP was either too young or not alive when the OG iPod came out, and so they're looking at it like a modern man trying to figure out caveman tools.


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