• 14 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2025

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  • I wasn’t being disingenuous and I just validated my assumptions.

    The cost of compute per million instructions has continued to decrease. The cost of storage on HDD has also continued to decrease, albeit more slowly. The cost of NAND storage has increased due to the supply crunch that Google helped create. Average pay at Google has gone up 5% over the past two years, but this is offset at least in part by mass layoffs. License fees for music have remained stagnant.

    While a lot of those things are arguable one way or another, depending on whose numbers you look at and what specific details you want to focus on, one thing is not. Google’s profits have nearly doubled in the past 3 years. There is no reason for a price increase beyond corporate greed.




  • This is a good answer. AI tools won’t make someone who has not yet developed programming skills into a good programmer. For someone who has a good grasp of implementation patterns and the toolkit for a given tech stack, they can speed things up by putting you into the role of a senior programmer reviewing code from multiple newbies.

    I’m finding that for it to work well, you have to split things up into very small pieces. You also have to really own your AI automation prompts and scripts. You can’t just copy what some YouTuber did and expect it to work well in your environment.



  • In most measurable ways, it was much worse. Crime, mortality, institutionalized racism, war, etc. It looks worse now because every action and word by the people considered newsworthy is magnified and judged by thousands of opinions, many of which originate in troll farms, and many which are intended to be deliberately divisive.

    Yes, the US government is infested with fascists. Yes, wealth inequality is worse than it ever was. These are real problems, and worse than they ever were before. (Though I wonder sometimes about how much damage was done by Reagan, and whether denying basic government protections to the poor was just more acceptable then.)



  • I don’t see it that way. To me, it seems that there is a lot more great music available, and it takes much less effort to find it. Mass-market music is lowest-common-denominator crap, but that became the case somewhere in the 90s and hasn’t changed since.

    The sweet spot is to find artists who are popular on streaming services, but not nearly as popular as the heavily-marketed acts that fill stadiums. Then branch out from there. Maybe check out community playlists that don’t contain big name acts and add anything that resonates to your own lists to get started?








  • I’m an experienced technologist (a software engineer for over 30 years), I used to regularly install CyanogenMod on my phones. While I didn’t find the graphene OS installation to be particularly difficult, I did find actually using it to be too much of a challenge to live with every day. The biggest single problem I can recall is that I could not do any group SMS MMS texts. Many searches and attempts at fixes later, I realized that it was a known bug that for reasons unknown did not seem to affect all users. There were a number of minor annoyances in addition to that bug.

    That may reflect more on how Google has locked down things on the pixel phones, or other stuff they’ve done to keep things as proprietary as possible in their software and devices. I switched back because it wasn’t worth the hassle to me.




  • Trigger warning: I use a lot of big-tech services from Google for work and non-work purposes.

    YouTube family subscription. It’s YouTube Music (equivalent to Spotify for how I use it), and ad-free YouTube (which I watch regularly for long-form science content) for 6 people at $20/month. The price hasn’t changed in several years.

    Claude Code API account. I use it to keep my Obsidian notes organized, generate summaries, occasionally code, etc. I spend $15-30 / month on it, paid by my work.

    Google1 subscription. 2TB of cloud storage for $20/month that I share with my son. Gemini Pro included (for now), which is useful for general queries and text processing, code analysis, etc. NotebookLM is better for some things, and is also included.

    Work supplies a ChatGPT subscription that is good for some niche uses, but I could live without it. Once investor subsidies dry up, I’ll probably keep the Claude and Gemini API connections, since their prices probably won’t change.