I agree with the post. As someone with... attention issues and a deeply cluttered space due to decision fatigue and "I'll just get to it later", having a blank slate is very useful for regaining focus. Otherwise, it's just a constant mental pressure to decide which of the unfinished tasks to focus on, and that never helps.
As one step, I've taken to just nuking my browser sessions at the start of the week. If it was really important to keep, I would've bookmarked it. If it's important, it'll come up again.
Sure, sometimes I lose of forget something useful or important. But the key part is that I'm making a choice between a 20%-100% constant loss of focus, and the occasional missed item I should've kept.
By regularly nuking context, I've also trained myself to better note down those things I do want to track (I've been bouncing between Reminders.app and Emacs Org-Mode) (I am not asking for task tracker advice)
The thing with notifications is that a lot of apps go so overboard with them that I generally choose to silence them completely. This has totally led to important notifications being unseen for some time, but for the peace it is a price I'm ready to pay. Being able to configure notifications with high granularity is something I still have to discover.
I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
Certainly we have lots of horrible inefficiencies in my team, but stringing along hiring was not one of them. I understand this is not universal even at our company.
Yeah, I've seen someone get strung along and then finally hired. What happened was that it was a bit of a downturn so there was a limit to the hiring. Another dept somehow convinced the division head that their role was more urgent, so our department was left without approval even though we wanted the guy. It was a poor job market so he didn't land anywhere else even though it was a few months before the approval finally arrived. Everyone felt kind of shit about it. The guy was quite jittery to start with.
That sounds like it was a terrible place, but it was a good department in a somewhat hard nosed company. He ended up staying there 10 years.
Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB.
None of this is due to "modern web development". It's just about a dev not checking reasonable asset size before deploying/compiling, that has happened in web, game-dev, desktop apps, server containers, etc. etc.
This should be an SVG (a few kb after proper compression) or if properly made as a PNG it'd probably be in 20-ish kb.
The dev not having the common sense to check file size and apparently not realising that the PNG format was being grossly misused for this purpose (by not even having a single tone of white for the J and the corners, let alone for the blue background) is modern web development.
What is that noise actually? It's clearly not JPEG artifacts. Is it dithering from converting from a higher bitdepth source? There do appear to be very subtle gradients.
I would bet it's from AI upscaling. The dark edges around high contrast borders, plus the pronounced and slightly off-colour antialised edges (especially visible on the right side of the J) remind me of upscaling models.
If it's large enough for say 2x or more "retina" usage... a very minor soften filter, then color reduction to get well under 256 colors (often can do 32-64) quantization and oxipng w/ zopfli can go a long way... just getting down to a palette over rgb for png brings down sizes a lot... palette reduction to around 32 colors does a bit too. Just depends on the material.
That said, the actual size of this image is massive compared to where it needs to be, and looking at it, should definitely be able to quantize down to 32-64 colors and reduce the size to even 4x the render size... let alone just using svg, as others have mentioned.
Oh, ding ding! Opening in a hex editor, there's the string "Added imperceptible SynthID watermark" in an iTXt chunk. SynthID is apparently a watermark Google attaches to its AI-generated content. This is almost certainly the noise.
Anecdotally, the reason my career is in embedded software is that I kept wanting to know how the (software) system works, and embedded is as deep as you can get without changing disciplines altogether.
The cost is you lose those layers of abstractions you get at the higher software levels, and there's only so much complexity I can handle.
(the funny part is that even HW registers and stuff are just an API that the hardware chooses to expose. As Alan Kay said: "Hardware is really just software crystallized early")
Apple has been slowly tightening the screws on app notarization (code signing) requirements for running apps on macOS. To do it properly you need to be a registered developer ($100/year), and they're certainly not making it easy if you don't have access to a Mac.
> On devices with macOS 10.15, all apps distributed outside the App Store must be signed by the developer using an Apple-issued Developer ID certificate (combined with a private key) and notarized by Apple to run under the default Gatekeeper settings.
Have you actually tried it? Because I did some months ago to setup an AppleTV and it just does not work. It just hangs at the last step without telling you anything. If you inspect the server response it just says "Your account cannot be created at this time.".
What ultimately helped after weeks of trying and tinkering was installing VMware Workstation, patching it to enable macOS support, create a VM with the specific hardware configuration of an older MacBook, install an old version of macOS and do the 2FA from in there.
Use the link in my comment, it takes you straight to their signup page.
Think of it this way: if you required an apple device in order to make an Apple ID, then literally every single podcaster on Apple podcasts (which is still the dominant app for podcasts) must own an Apple device.
Did you even read what I wrote? It did not work. Apple even has an FAQ page for that error (without any useful solution). The suggestion to create an account via Apple Music app is useless since all it does is create an account which must be migrated via browser first (with the same problem). You can also find large threads on Reddit about the problem. Of course the availability of such a sign-up flow suggests it should be possibly, but having it broken for months is not a good look.
No, sorry, but it is unreasonable.. Why should I need an apple device to compile my code for an apple device?
You can build Android apps on an Apple device, no problem. You can build Linux apps on an Apple device, no problem. etc... But the reverse isn't true. Its just more of Apple financially gate keeping their ecosystem so they make more money in as many channels as they possibly can.
Testing on real hardware is the ONLY time I would say that owning, or at least having access to the hardware has real tangible benefits, and I would argue that that you NEED or SHOULD do this.. But to block compiling to that ecosystem? Sorry but I fundamentally disagree.
Blocking compiling, means requiring xcode, which requires a mac, which requires you to give more money to Apple, and is no different IMHO than giving Apple $100 a year, because now you're giving them a lot more of that every X years (where x is how many years that laptop gets updates)
For decades, Microsoft only made Visual C++ for Windows, and alternatives like DJGPP weren't very good. This isn't unreasonable, it's just how programming works when you target a platform. Visual C++ relies on Windows because it's a Windows program, and Xcode is written for MacOS, not for Java or Electron.
What is stopping you from writing an open source alternative to Xcode that runs on Linux?
you can code-sign with open-source tools. That's not the hard part. Signing with a certificate trusted by macOS , that's where there's no avoiding having to go to Apple.
IIUC, there's a confusion of meaning for "World Model", between Waymo/Deepmind's which is something that can create a consistent world (for use to train Waymo's Driver), vs Yann LeCun/Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) which is something that can understand a world.
As one step, I've taken to just nuking my browser sessions at the start of the week. If it was really important to keep, I would've bookmarked it. If it's important, it'll come up again.
Sure, sometimes I lose of forget something useful or important. But the key part is that I'm making a choice between a 20%-100% constant loss of focus, and the occasional missed item I should've kept.
By regularly nuking context, I've also trained myself to better note down those things I do want to track (I've been bouncing between Reminders.app and Emacs Org-Mode) (I am not asking for task tracker advice)
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