“Most people?” Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into a filter bubble, my friend. Only two people I know use it regularly, but adjusting for my own filter bubble, I think most people have played with it a couple of times, found it wanting, and maybe use Gemini in the Google search results when it comes up.

If it doesn’t have wide adoption, it isn’t a boom. It’s just sparkling speculation.

Well, it’s not an LLM, but “AI” doesn’t have a defined meaning, so from that perspective they kind of already did.

I got a copy of Vista Ultimate from a friend who worked for Microsoft. Upgraded that baby to 7 Ultimate the instant I could and rode that product code for over a decade, until last year when I installed Linux on everything.

Actually, I think I might still be using that product code on my Windows VM. Hmm.

People often don’t know that they have a choice. It enables itself.

Agreed, good catch.

For me it’s the text (too regular and perfectly-ruled to be hand lettered, but too much variance between the letterforms to be a font) and the little AI artifact on the random doohickey directly under the bottom left corner of the AI computer monitor:

Aside from that, it’s just the weight of unmotivated choices. Why is the “good” side of the image grayscale while the “bad” side is in color (a human probably would’ve done it the other way)? Why are the desks drawn slightly differently while the person, chair, and computer are drawn the same (a human would’ve probably made everything identical to better illustrate their point)? Why all the random clutter on one but not the other (if the point was to make the AI computing experience look scattered and cluttered, surely they would’ve made it more overwhelmingly cluttered, but if it was for verisimilitude they’d have put clutter on both desks)? Also, subjectively, the “AI” logo on the screen suggests a pleasant experience, not an oppressive one.

An unmotivated choice on its own isn’t necessarily an AI calling card, but enough of them together alongside one or two smoking guns can definitely make the case pretty strongly.

Inb4 the Epstein File comes out detailing how Trump put a pillowcase over their head and threw them in a van

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it depends a little bit on the model of the e-reader (color takes more out of it, etc), but I only charge my Boox every other week, and I take notes on it, read on it, the works.

E-paper is easier to use outside or in bright light, and the battery tends to last longer. Anecdotally, it also doesn’t hurt my eyes as much.

Ok. The classic answer is “turn on the first switch for five minutes. Then turn switch 1 back off, turn on the second switch and go in the room immediately. If the light is hot, it’s controlled by switch 1; if it’s on, it’s controlled by switch 2; if it’s off and cold it’s controlled by switch 3.”

Except that a light bulb in 2025 is very likely to be an LED bulb, so it wouldn’t actually get hot. At least not hot enough to feel even a few moments later. And in a corporate setting (this is classically an interview question), the switch has been more likely to control a fluorescent tube, which can get hot, but typically not as quickly as an incandescent one.

My answer, if I were in an interview, would be to ask questions (Chesterton’s Fence).

• First of all, why do we have the one-visit limit? Is this a prod light bulb? We need a dev light bulb environment, with the bulbs and switches in the same room. (While we’re making new environments, let’s get a QA and regression environment, too. Maybe a fallback environment, depending on SLAs.)

• Second, what might the other switches do? What’s the downside to just turning them all on? If that’s not known, why not? What is the risk? For that matter, do we know that only one switch needs to be turned on to turn on the light, or is it possible that the switches represent some sort of 3-bit binary encoding?

• Third, why were the switches designed this way? Can they be redesigned to provide better feedback? Or simplified to a single switch? If not, better documentation (labeling) is a must.

• Fourth, we need to reduce the length of the feedback loop. A five minute test and then physically going to touch the bulb is way too long. Let’s look into moving the switches or the light in our dev environment so that the light can be seen from the switches.

I dunno, I feel like an intern might not be as dogmatic as a political appointee.

“REDACT THESE DOCUMENTS TO PROTECT DEAR LEADER!!”

“Man, I just need college credit so that I can get a job in this terrible economy…”

Malicious compliance on the part of some DOJ intern maybe?

Thanks for your response. I appreciate it.

That’s great in principle, but unless one lives a very particular life, being able to just outright reject an app or its notifications isn’t always an option, or offers too many tradeoffs to be reasonable. Particularly for people who are neurodivergent in ways that affect working memory.

Looking at my Buzzkill rules:

• I’ve got a rule to immediately dismiss text messages from my kids’ school when the automated attendance system sends me the monthly reminder. They’re elementary students and I take them to school, I know about their attendance. But I can’t just block that number, because it’s also the number that their snow delay alerts come from.

• I’ve got multiple rules to block all marketing notifications from the three different apps that my kids’ teachers use to send class notifications. Why three different apps? I don’t know, but you really can’t convince them to use anything different. If I block the notifications, I have to remember to check them manually or miss info since teachers don’t send home paper announcements to the parents anymore.

• I have a rule to dismiss the marketing notifications from the app my city uses for its parking meters. I could turn off all notifications, but then I’d miss the expiration notices. Yes, I could set a timer. But having ADHD has cost me more money than just parking fines in the past. Yes, I could just use coins or cards, but I haven’t used cash for anything in years, and the card readers on the meters take such a long time.

• My garage door opener, which I didn’t choose, has an app which has decided to send marketing notifications. This app’s entire purpose is to let me know when the garage door has been left open, so turning off notifications could leave me open to theft. Again, leaving the app entirely is a possibility, but I’m not the only person in my house; my kids or wife could open the garage door and forget to close it. And we all have ADHD.

• My wife uses an app to send video messages, and she sends them to me, too. The app nags users to give access to contacts. Disabling notifications or deleting the app could have relational consequences.

• I value being able to leave my desk while at work, but I need access to some Slack channels (though not all) in case I need to rush back and fix an outage or something. Being able to sculpt my notifications lets me get notifications from a subset of Slack channels on my phone while leaving them all on on my computer.

You get the picture. I’d love to be able to be more ruthless with app choices, but that would carry various consequences I’m not interested in dealing with.

Look at this guy over here still receiving mail.

Some Android apps shove all of their notifications into one notification channel. For those cases, Buzzkill is honestly one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

If the sticker is blue, one or the other of you is about to cease being biology and start being physics.

How good could you do on a slave’s salary?

The kid did build a podracer in a cave with a box of scraps.