nikhil.io

forty-three things tagged “technology”

Note 0009

Read these two articles on the OpenAI and Jony Ive collab. Smelled some familiar bullshit first and felt some déjà vu next.

Altman told employees that they had “the chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here,” he said after announcing OpenAI’s plans to purchase Ive’s startup, named io, and give him an expansive creative and design role.

Berber Jin, “What Sam Altman Told OpenAI About the Secret Device He’s Making With Jony Ive”, Wall Street Journal

Thought the biggest thing you set out to do was Artificial General Super Intelligence (for the benefit of all humankind, of course).

Anyway. Ive’s company has a “staff of roughly 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists and product development specialists” (source) who appear to be experimenting furiously with what to make, for this is what we’re told the thing will do:

The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users off of screens. Altman said the device also isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.

Sounds like a sleeker version of this flaming piece of shit daring foray into the future of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction:

Rabbit R1

Marques Brownlee thought it was “Barely Reviewable”. I do like how it looks though.

Can’t wait for the Ive video introducing it. And he wouldn’t be the first ex-Apple person with too much money who had an idea on how to transform our relationship with our computers. Altman invested in that disaster too.

But I’m a know-nothing curmedgeon and it’s certainly possible that this will be an unalloyed success in the hands of these wizened titans of industry (even if Uber-Curmudgeon Ed Zitron doesn’t think so.) I wish the happy couple the very best of luck 💝

Moving from Chrome to Firefox

I finally switched over from Chrome to Firefox, after switching away from the latter over 12 years ago. I’d basically given up on any shred of privacy I might have left on the internet, but the final straw for me was Chrome totally bypassing the DNS blocklists on my PiHole1 (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Unsurprisi…

“I Fucking Hate Jira” is a collection of people sharing their feelings about one of the worst pieces of software I continue to use every day.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially d…

Users hate change

by @sleepyfox on Github

This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly: Humans naturally resist change Your change is for the better Customers should just get use…

A List of Hacker News ‘Classics’

When you’re following a bunch of feeds, it’s easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn’t just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks. These are stories that get reposted a lot. Many…

On Security Through Obscurity

Security by Obscurity is when you hide how a security measure works, not when you keep some part of it a secret. Daniel Miessler, “No, Moving Your SSH Port Isn’t Security by Obscurity” (Cached) As a former sysadmin (but no expert on security): This should be read and re-read. After which one…

Robot Party

I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw…

Tampography

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I2fMf0xtCQ You can use the same technique on a…

Computers Are Fast

A nice little quiz meant to illustrate how much your typical Python and Bash code can accomplish in one second. If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :) and A newer computer won’t make your code run 1000x…

Hugo Migration

Gave Hugo a try and was quite impressed by the ease and speed. The official documentation kinda sucks at introducing key ideas (like taxonomies) in a gradual way that’s helpful to newcomers, but is great for variable and function references. Found these two posts very helpful. Here’s another that e…