mikepurvis

canada.ca is the Canadian government's equivalent, as far as a web 1.0-style portal/index into many other sites and resources.

Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.

I've recently gotten religion on the workflow that is many (relatively) short-lived agent sessions passing planning/handoff docs between themselves. It's better for my own task tracking, better for handling "oh btw I noticed XXXX", and better as a clear review point. Overall it just feels like it takes a lot of the formerly implicit context that was whatever we happened to have talked about and turns it into a much more explicit "this is what you need to know, now go".

Currently looking for a framework for managing this in a more formal way, and I think it's probably beads, but interested to hear from others.

Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.

I believe the Orin AGX is in a similar position. It does a UEFI boot but you absolutely have to supply a correct dtb and if you don't then key peripherals like USB and ethernet can just completely not work, or in one case I experienced, subtly malfunction in a way that appears to be fine but throws off a bunch of extra radiation that fails a certification test.

I'm just storing my passkeys in 1password, which means they're synced across my two computers and phone and also means I gave up any kind of hardware security.

Oh well.

Surely it's a pretty easy pitch to average Joe: Using a passkey takes the place of typing in a code they sent by text or email.

That's a pain point in everyone's day that should make the benefit easy to understand.

Yeah no we're aligned; I have some raspis that I'm interested in doing long term battery stuff with (remote sensing and the like) and it definitely does seem like connectivity is the huge battery killer, like even if you wake up only periodically to take a reading or update an epaper display, the cost in battery just to negotiate a wifi connection and do tcpip and http things is awful.

And then you're stuck with a device that can only be communicated with when it chooses to wake up, whereas with BLE it seems you can listen for a remote OTA wake much more cheaply.

Thanks for speaking to the battery question; I'm very interested in how to run this kind of thing (the display portion at least) cordlessly too, especially when lipo pouches in that range are so dirt cheap.

Dave's old portfolio/blog is gone though: http://www.mezzoblue.com

The Bright Creative site is also AWOL.

Too bad neither is set up to redirect to the current https://daveshea.com/

Hope he's doing well. Guys like him, Doug Bowman, Jeffrey Zeldman... all a huge influence on teenaged-me hacking away on my little blog and thinking of going to SXSW someday.

EDIT: He's just left after being at Shopify for six years: https://lnkd.in/p/dcYBvQfq

ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge.

With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.

Will file that away as well, seems like it could be useful in various professional contexts.

The Square One commentary on the AlphaZero v Stockfish game from 2017 is pretty entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnVDUQksIDk

In other videos he's called out the influence that this and similar games have had on human players in recent years, particularly around square denial and thorn pawn strategies.

True, though I wonder if 2026's "Claude make me a minecraft plugin" is 2006's "View Source" button.

Web development took a long time to gain respect in part due to the accessibility of it. When everyone had a nephew who "makes websites" and anyone could get started with a $5/mo Dreamhost account, it was harder to see why a consultant was worth $200/hr to do the job properly.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, particularly accounting for bots continuing to get smarter and smarter. Is the "craft" of software engineering dying before our eyes? Or will this be like webdev, where there's an explosion of access and ideas for a time and then it settles back down into being a thing that normal people mostly leave to the nerds.

I remember fifteen years ago I would tell people leaving my house "oh yeah, ignore your GPS that tells you to go that way, just down the road here and left turn; that'll get you on the highway much faster."

Nowadays obviously Google Maps gets it right, but it was interesting that period where you had to actively preempt everyone's instinct to just rely on the little table hanging off their dashboard.

I can see how the situation is annoying there; I've had a similar frustration when doing manual code review for someone's obviously AI-slop PR only to have their bot auto-respond to my comments. There's an asymmetry of effort that feels unfair. Like, don't ask for manual review of something that contains lots of things that your own manual review should have caught first, and if I provide human feedback, I expect human responses.

That said, I wouldn't necessarily take it at face value that the person you were working with trusted the bot more than you— at the end of the day, the bot was doing all the implementation anyway, so all the interactions between her and the bot were probably framed in language like "what if we" or "I think it would be better if", so her saying "my programmer colleague thinks X" would naturally generate that "yeah your colleague is right, let's go that direction, makes sense" that she passed back to you, probably thinking it was a complement.

Maybe the real frustration is her not understanding the value-add that still exists there when someone with real expertise and more context can step in and provide that nudge in the right direction.

Transporting and handling cash is absolutely not free, and unlike joe sixpack taking out $20k in a stack of benjamins that one time to buy a motorcycle with cash, it's much worse when

a. a lot of it is coins, so it's heavy and bulky, and

b. it becomes a regular thing that everyone on the street observes you doing over and over

The Square One Chess channel on youtube turns this kind of exploration/commentary into quite digestible content, though the thumbnails are, like everything else these days, a little clickbaity.

It's been fun viewing for me and my chess-interested 9-year-old.

Agree. The comparison to a passport is ludicrous since a passport can be curled around your leg when it's in a pocket where this obviously cannot.

I switched off my 13 Mini this year to go to a Pixel 10 for the better Pebble support. I still miss it, it really was the last perfectly-sized phone.

I mean, cash is also expensive in its own way. It has to be handled and insured, coins may need to be rolled before being taken to the bank, a register is a mechanical device to power and maintain, petty theft by employees is a concern.

It's not really that hard to see why a business charging $5-20 per transaction from people who all have phones and credit cards anyway might choose not to accept cash.

> For most users who only use a single platform

Also depends if your "platform" extends beyond just the OS. If platform includes IDE/editor/terminal, then a lot of users are juggling multiple keyboard schemes from different eras (ctrl-C has entered the chat).

For a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.

Seems like an extremely practical way to handle that requirement without hauling around a ton of extra battery capacity that will rarely get used.

It's definitely a case where I see the value of the Asia-style super apps, where you just attach transactions like this to LINE or Grab or whatever, and everyone knows what to do with it.

The only thing remotely comparable in Toronto might be if Presto (payment app for multiple transit agencies in GTHA) took on parking payment, but the Presto network now supports just tapping a credit card so I don't know how many people would be getting cards or using the app for that either.

Using tab to cycle between interactive elements in a window or page. As soon as you tab and it goes somewhere unexpected, you're cooked.

That seems reasonable. The kiosk is still there to pay with cards or cash directly, but the app/website lets you skip that, avoid printing a slip, maybe buy a pass or something.

The risk is mainly that down the road someone looks at the usage numbers and goes hmm, well the kiosk is only getting used 5% of the time, let's just discontinue supporting it.

Valid, though I expect this being down the block from the festival theatre, it probably was being actively patrolled. I was a bit shaken by a prominent sign threatening a $400 fine for illegal parking, though having just checked the website for the City of Stratford, it looks like the standard municipal parking ticket is $40 if paid promptly, so the $400 fine was probably specific to parking in the theatre's dropoff zone or fire access or something.

All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.

Yes, just a plain tap-to-pay on the meter itself (or a nearby kiosk) is the obvious solution. I think doing it on the meter is awkward because then they all need to be online, so you're either dealing with individual M2M cards or some kind of local mesh network, not to mention powering them all. The kiosk is another thing to have to install and maintain and power. And doing a plain tap would have no way of inputting how long you wanted to pay for.

All that to say, I can fully understand how we ended up with "here's a sticker with a number on it, pay on your phone"; it's just, the pay on your phone option should be a one step apple/google pay webpage where you at most have to enter your license plate, and it certainly should not be collecting credit card details within the app.

I guess, but no one carries coins, and the machine doesn't accept them. Me not having coins changed nothing about this situation.

Ehh maybe. I mean, it was a three hour show and I don't carry coins any more. So that would have been ATM -> go to a store and break a twenty -> put in a few bucks -> remember to go out at intermission and put in more money.

Paying by phone is a step up from that old world; I just want it to be one tap, not a whole sequence that tries to upsell me on a monthly pass or establishing an in-app "parking wallet" or whatever.