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.

Or with water, frankly. Is the only option for the switch inside the bathroom literally in the sink basin? There shouldn’t be that much splashing in a work bathroom.

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.

This news is about lobsters, specifically.

But how would it slow their metabolism down? Unless they’re just eating non-stop at room temperature, that colder weather is what they’re adapted to.

I’m totally unfamiliar with how to cook a lobster, but “chilling them” doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. They live in the North Atlantic, where water temperatures tend to hover in the “refrigerator” range most of the year, and with salinity lowering the freezing point, probably goes even lower over the winter. Seems like chilling a lobster would just make it feel at home.

I’ve only ever had it work for me once or twice, and it was always near the very beginning of a project when I was only losing a few days or a week of working code at most. When I discover that I fundamentally misunderstood or misjudged a core assumption and everything needs to be reoriented. Never when I already had code in production.

That’s fair, but even with that, it’s got to be easier to shove it into existing code. Especially if you’re trying to do it in a way that people don’t notice!

And actually, the Windows 10 start menu infamously had ads, too. So it can’t be that.

But this was four years ago! Actually it was released four years ago. This decision was almost certainly made before there were widespread code assistance AIs.

Tali Roth, the then product manager working on the core Windows user experience, including the Start menu, taskbar, and notifications, took up the question and talked about how building the taskbar from scratch meant that they had to cherry-pick things to put into the feature list first, and the ability to move the taskbar didn’t make the cut, for several reasons that Microsoft values.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!

If you have working code, why would you rewrite it from scratch? Refactor, sure. Overhaul, maybe. But why rewrite the whole thing?! You’re gaining nothing but unnecessary bugs.

I know all the joke answers. To justify a product manager’s salary, because Microsoft gonna Microsoft, whatever. I want to know the real reason. Why would you ever rewrite working code from scratch if you don’t have to?

Four years ago, Recall wasn’t a thing. Microsoft was caught as off-guard by the AI hype machine as the rest of us. So I doubt this was originally the reason.

Might be now, though.

Electron (and Tauri, and Neutralino) also offers some deeper OS integration stuff that browsers don’t do or actively block; direct file management, USB peripheral control, that sort of thing.

But for something like Discord, you’re totally right. You just need the browser.

It’s been a fun journey. And he’s on the Fediverse! https://mas.to/@TechConnectify

(not tagging him directly because I feel like he probably gets that enough)

Alec has been on a multi-year quest to get an incandescent color profile from LED Christmas lights. I haven’t watched this episode, but he usually does a pretty good job of recapping at the start of every episode.

It’s always super entertaining, in my opinion.

EDIT: I watched it. It is indeed super entertaining! This time, the recap comes after his special Christmas light repacking tip, so it’s a couple of minutes in.

Walking into a meeting at Kohler and keeping a straight face after saying the words “toilet camera”–and then maintaining that straight face throughout the product’s discussion, greenlighting, development, manufacture, and sale–deserves an Oscar.

I’m a bigger fan of kisses and Higgs, myself.

That’ll be a massive breakthrough.

Looks like it’s MIT-licensed, so it’s probably time to make a non-Anthropic fork.