I know this is nothing new, but it's insane that we need policies like "When talking to us you have to use human words, not copy pasted LLM output" and "You must understand the code you're committing."
When I was young, I used to think I'd be open minded to changing times and never be curmudgeonly, but I get into one "conversation" where someone responds with ChatGPT, and I am officially a curmudgeon.
Brazen usage of LLM output is a disrespect to the target audience to begin with. If I'm being expected to employ the mental capital needed to understand the context and content of your writings, I at the very least expect that you did the same when actually authoring it.
It also feels like using one of those cereal encoder wheels, to some degree. If someone sends me 10 paragraphs of output from chatGPT, and they only wrote a sentence to prompt it, then the output is really just a re-encoding of the information in the original prompt.
Quite literally - if they sent me the text of the prompt I could obtain the same output, so the output is just a more verbose way of stating the prompt.
I find it really disrespectful to talk to people through an LLM like that.
Generally speaking, a person can write a long rambling email without much effort. It takes some work to distill it down to keep the meaning without the verbosity.
If anything, AI should be used to take the long rambling email and send off the shorter distilled version.
I hope it becomes as accepted as it is to stick cameras in random people's faces: generally seen as rude, and bad actors who do it anyway are desperate and considered as such.
I am capable of copying and pasting shit into an LLM, do not give me its output and don't insult me by pretending the output is your own work.
The root of the issue is "ChatGPT people" are using artificial intelligence to replace... intelligence. Nobody, not even ChatGPT people, wants to actually read that drivel.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
> So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
Seems about right, but wouldn't you agree that the majority of those meetings either could have been an email, or could have been handled in 20% of the time, if they had been planed?
Maybe, I think most people just don't give shit about any of this and for them wasting an hour feels "productive", like they've achieved something. After all, nobody can hear your beautiful voice over email.
TBH unless the meeting has a clear agenda and not just a vague title, I only join it when someone mention me. This allows me to be able to actually work and/or take breaks.
Last I used Visidata, it didn't play nice with fields like %sort (they'd disappear if you re-saved the file) and if you had two fields with the same name in one record they'd get combined into a single field like "Name[2]:" when you re-saved. It might've also killed comments? I'm certainly not surprised it only has basic recfile support, because who use recfiles, but I'd be careful using VD with them for anything but viewing.
I haven't put the work into supporting full round-tripping, so yes, at the moment it's mostly useful for reading/viewing. If someone files an issue that would likely go a long way towards getting better support!
You probably won't get hacked and have your domain taken down for distributing malware. But you also probably won't be randomly banned by Google/Proton. Neither feels like "full, unbannable control of my email" to me. If anything, I'm more concerned about my little old domain getting hijacked than getting banned from a hosted email account.
Say what you want but the only region in the world I went that felt like looking forward is Asia, even borderline decaying countries like Japan are clearly looking forward, you can see it from what and how they build, and not just in major centers.
When I first visited Asia 13 years ago, this is the feeling I got too. It's wonderful and intoxicating and new.
It spoke to me so strongly, that I immigrated and started my first business. Not to China, but nearby (Viet Nam). It was a very tough road, I never ended up particularly wealthy, but I have no regrets.
China is superlative in every way possible and many people don't really seem to get it.
It has several of the tallest mountains in the world—dozens over 7 km, and many of the eight-thousanders, given it borders the Himalayas and contains part of the Hindu Kush and most of the Tibetan Plateau. Given such immense mountains it also makes sense that there's a huge rain shadow behind them, and therefore China also contains both the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts.
It also has historic old cities that form the core of their modern glass and steel cities, with plenty of Chinese architecture to go around.
It also has 50 000 km of newly-built high speed rail with rolling stock that rips through all of those mountains and deserts at 350 km/h.
Patriotism is funny to see. A lot of people are so proud of their country, yet they are just pawns in a game played by the state and their leaders.
If one can think rationally, it's best to be born in smaller countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, Qatar, Singapore .. Nothing to be proud of besides having the highest chance to live a very comfortable life.
In Argentina it is said, half-jokingly, that 1 week of news cycle in Argentina is 10 years of news cycle in Switzerland.
On a similar note, leave Argentina for 2 years and everything is different. Leave for 20, and everything is the same.
In summary: There are far crazier places to be born than Argentina, but oh my god I would pay to see what a billionaire would do if they had to live there with the median wage and the current cost of living...
I wasn't really focusing much on the tourism part.
I was more pointing to the fact that asiatic countries seem much more focused on the present and future in a way we are culturally not. How and what they build is just an aspect of it.
There's quite a few places that have them, but don't prioritize bridge height. The other Himalayan countries (India, Nepal, Pakistan, etc) have similar terrain, but prefer vastly cheaper slope-hugging roads, and tunnels with shorter bridges. Not to mention the danger of winter winds in Himalayan canyons.
The US or Mexico could build a bridge over the deeper bits of their national canyons and hold the undisputed crown, but won't.
As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world.
Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't be left in standby for too long or it drains to zero.
Meanwhile, it's been 10+ years since I've worried about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices, even my 3-5 year old ones. I can fall asleep with Youtube playing and it's still playing when I wake up. I'm certainly not here to dunk on Linux phones. I want one! But if someone willing to put forth above average effort to use these devices can't realistically daily drive them, who can?
>Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use?
What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.
I have a Sony Xperia 10 III with SailfishOS and it easily does 48 hours on a charge when I'm not doing a lot of screen time. Also on days when I use it for tracking / navigation on 6-8 hour bicycle rides it easily lasts for the entire day and then some. I think this is not bad for a device that has been in daily use for almost three years and still has the original battery.
I'm running a couple of messenger clients and a web browser (Fennec under Android App Support as the native one is sadly a bit behind the times currently) all the time. The only thing I've noticed to eat a ton of battery is having wifi enabled when outside the range of my own networks, it seems the scanning the phone does in the background to look for known wifi networks is not energy efficient at all.
I also have this setup and SFos on Gigaset GS5. Similar battery performance. I did a roadtrip last week with navigation (starting with about 90% battery) and after 5&1/2 hours navigation was down to 65% or therabouts. Works for me.
And, yes, I often turn off wifi. I never go over my Data limits and 4G/5G is much more efficient for some reason.
SailfishOS is quite efficient. On Sony devices, I experienced maybe 15% extra battery life compared to stock Android, which is quite good given that Sony ROMs are excellent. Sony is known for their Sony Open Devices Program.
I genuinely think if Sony offered a Linux phone and didn't lock it down too bad, they could serve as the catalyst for the whole market. I don't think I would trust any other company at this point to execute the platonic "Linux phone" we need. The uncompromising vision on building a fantastic product for the technically minded make them an obvious choice.
I get the impression they shut it down, but Sony had/have the Xperia Open Devices program. They were close to having their devices running purely on the mainline Linux kernel:
Sony tries out so many different types of products too across their entire lineup. They have made some memorable handhelds over the years, even their eink readers were special.
I've been considering this as my Android exit plan (as part of a slow rolling de-googling effort, even before the recent "sideloading" news). Are you using it as a daily driver? I'm sort of surprised it doesn't get brought up more.
Yes, I used SailfishOS as a daily driver since ~2014 until last year when I moved to the Furi FLX1. The FLX1 has been my daily driver since. SailfishOS is much more polished, but it's not fully FOSS, and it follows upstream much less closely. FLX1 is basically in-sync with Debian testing, with the exception of kernel.
> FuriOS allows for running apps inside a container running Android codenamed Andromeda. This container has complete integration with the host and makes all Android applications work like native applications
Yes, both (official) SailfishOS and FLX1 offer decent/good Android app support. Not every app will work, but when I have needed Android (rarely, for basic stuff), the applications have worked.
Interesting. I had a poke at postmarket, which wasn't ready in comparison with SFOS. Would you say the FLX1 is at better stage in development than postmarket?
You're comparing a Linux OS (postmarketOS) to a device (FLX1). I think you meant to compare postmarketOS to FuriOS : )
FuriOS (and its base Droidian) are at a better stage of development for devices made to run Android using the old Android Linux kernel, whereas postmarketOS is better for devices made specifically for Linux, like the Liberty Phone, Pinephone, etc. Droidian will not even work on them.
I'm not familiar with postmarket, but I imagine it shares a lot of the same phosh+GNOME app ecosystem, in which case, the apps aren't in a better state.
In terms of polish and app/dev ecosystem, I feel SailfishOS still rules, but it's getting harder to justify using/development, with it's increasing divergence from upstream.
The only detractions on the software side that I ever see are about it being a “hack” via Hallium, but to be frank, the device actually ships and is usable today. Linux purists probably need to stop complaining.
It does seem like there’s been a backlog with the latest orders though - maybe due to tariff hell? I keep wanting to order but their forum has a few people being thrown for a loop on the order side, so…
N hours of actual use, in isolation, is just the matter of calculating average power draw[W] by runtime[hr] and buying the battery with Wh figures comfortably bigger than that.
e.g. your device consumed 1 Watt on average, you wanted 8 hour runtime, then you need a battery with 8 Watt-hours, or 2,162.162162162162 mAh at 3.7V of capacity, before factoring in buffers of various kinds. But it's also roughly the datasheet nominal capacity of a single 18650 cell.
You don't worry about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices and you can fall asleep with YouTube playing and it's still playing when you wake up because manufacturers know consumers do that and optimize the phone to make that work. They probably reduce display brightness, cut powers to mics and P cores, ask 3M to make the pouch films 1% thinner so battery could be few more percent bigger inside, fudge battery gauges so you would be nudged correctly to have enough charge before you fall asleep, the list goes as far as your imagination could possibly go.
The fact that same behaviors don't happen on Linux devices, even with something like four of fresh 18650s, means the list ends before it begins. They probably don't do ANY power profiling AT ALL. I'm sure they don't do ANY environmental testing, either.
Would I accept that as a consumer? No. Would I if I was the manufacturer? ...
This is a big part of why Android was developed in the first place. The operating system and application architecture that makes sense on desktop just doesn't make sense on mobile. Despite the many problems Google's restrictive APIs which you are forced to use can cause for developers, they are also highly optimized for power usage.
The architecture can work if enough smart people are put to work on it. That's how Apple managed to turn macOS into a mobile operating system.
I think UBPorts and Sailfish prove that Linux for phones is practical if you're willing to rely on Linux applications that stick to mobile friendly APIs.
You need to configure and compile your Linux kernel for aggressive power saving, of course. Seeing how Linux currently struggles to effectively do power management on laptops without S3 sleep, there's plenty of work to be done if you want to use it with a phone.
It's not just about app developers either, Qualcomm's modifications to the Linux kernel are public thanks to GPL but most phone kernel modifications haven't made it into the upstream kernel so far. Projects like postmarketOS are trying to make things better but it's not easy to port practical code that works into code that's acceptable for the maintainers of the broader Linux project.
SailfishOS also came (at least back in the day of the first Jolla Phone and Tablet) with an excellent terminal app and built-in sshd that made it work great with pretty much every Linux command-line and TUI application (only exception was of course those with hardcoded minimum screen size support). Termux for Android is maybe half that good, not as well integrated, but still good enough that I use it every day, much more than I use other apps other than the browser.
But I mean, why not take the 100s of thousands of man-hours that went into making Android this very Linux-Kernel based mobile OS and build on top?
Will you be happy with xeyes and a terminal? Like, even a technically superior solution is completely useless without an ecosystem to make use of it, and desktop GTK/qt apps won't work nicely on mobile without actual porting. Let alone a technically significantly inferior one that is a misfit in this shape for mobile hardware.
With the right kernel drivers, configuration, and tweaks, with a well-configured userland on top of that, you can run the "normal" Linux stack in a mobile device.
Getting applications to conform with an API that won't let them drain the battery in the background to make sure notifications don't arrive two seconds too late is much harder. Desktop applications don't really like being suspended/resumed the way mobile applications do.
By making a soft and then a hard suspend the reality they have to abide by, or otherwise they are killed and users will think they are broken apps.
Mobile apps just had to "grow up" in this environment, plus they have proper APIs for this two-way communication between OS and the app. Android will just ask the app to save its state and then simply unload it from memory (after a while) - but this also makes perfect sense for the desktop scene, you also want to improve energy efficiency there. A spreadsheet app doesn't have to continuously run when it's in the background. You just have to add proper APIs and permissions so that apps can optionally ask for extra background work.
I would argue that the legacy OS and app architecture we have on desktop OSs doesn't make sense there, either.
It's a model that worked fine in multi-user setups where you ran a single executable, so that the security per user was meaningful, but today it just sucks.
Android is quite elegant in reusing the Linux kernel's permission system, but on a granularity that actually makes sense (apps are started as separate users, and they just elevated their concept of user a level higher).
Hi. I have a Google Pixel 3a running PostmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ and it holds up pretty well. My phone lost 20% today with light usage and will maybe lose 60% if I scroll social media a lot.
I was actually surprised it is this good. I reinstalled recently and before the reinstall I had much worse battery life (Maybe 8 hours with normal usage). I think it was because of Syncthing running in the background.
It is also possible to use s2idle suspend which will improve the battery life even more but you will not be able to receive calls during suspend (though that may also be fixed in the future)
With my, atypical maybe?, use, I get up to 2 days on a 4KmA battery (Gigaset GS5, SailfishOs). Sometimes I'm down to 1 day if I do social media scrolling.
Well, if enough of us paid Apple level prices to Linux vendors, we would have Apple level Linux laptops and phones eventually. Not fair to pay next to nothing and then compare Linux to Apple.
Among many small examples at my job, an incident report summary used to be hand written with a current status and pending actions. Then it was heavily encouraged to start with LLM output and edit by hand. Now it’s automatically generated by an LLM. No one bothers to read the summary anymore because they’re verbose, unfocused, and can be inaccurate. But we’re all hitting our AI metrics now.
AI should not be a goal in itself, unless you make and sell AI. But for anyone else, you need to stick to your original quality and productivity metrics. If AI can help you improve those, that's great. But don't make AI use itself a goal.
I've got a coworker who complains she's getting pressured by management to use AI to write the documents she writes. She already uses AI to review them, and that works great, according to her. But they want her to use AI to write the whole thing, and she refuses, because the writing process is also how she organizes her own thinking around the content she's writing. If she does that, she's not building her own mental model of the processes she's describing, and soon she'd have no idea of what's going on anymore.
People ignore the importance of such mental models a lot. I recall a story of air traffic control that was automated, leading air traffic controllers to lose track in their heads of which plane was where. So they changed the system so they still had to manually move planes from one zone to another in an otherwise automated system, just to keep their mental models intact.
> If she does that, she's not building her own mental model of the processes she's describing, and soon she'd have no idea of what's going on anymore.
Which is fine by management, because the intent is to fire her and have AI generate the reports. The top-down diktats for AI maximization is to quickly figure out how much can be automated so companies can massively scale back on payroll before their competition does.
Really well said - it has put something I've been sensing/feeling into words.
It's also how I utilties AIs - summaries or rewrite text to make it sound better but never to create code or understand code. Nothing that requires deep understanding of the problem space.
Its the mental models in my head that don't jell with AI that prevent AI adoption for me.
Stories like this don’t surprise me. Ime a lot of managers don’t have a good understanding of what their employees actually do. Which is not that terrible in itself unless they try also to micromanage how they should do their work etc.
This is true of all technology, and it's weird to me to see all this happening with AI because it just makes me wonder what other nonsense bosses were insisting people use for no reason other than cargo culting. It just seems so wild to imagine someone saying "other people are using this so we should use it too" without that recommendation actually being based in any substantive way on the tool's functionality.
I think a general, informal rule of thumb should be that you put in as much effort to write a thing as you expect from someone to read the thing. If you think I’m going to spend an hour figuring out what happened to you, you’d better have spent at least an hour actually trying to figure it out yourself.
People read the summary to see the actual action items instead of reading the whole case. Now the action plan has constant random bullet points like “John Smith will add Mohammad to the email thread. Target date: Tuesday, July 20 2025. This will ensure all critical resources are engaged on the outage and reduce business impact.” or whatever because it’s literally summarizing every email rather than understanding the core of the work that needs doing.
It's not that they weren't useful, it's that someone higher up has to justify the expensive enterprise contract that they've foisted upon everyone else with the vague promise of saving money by using it.
The consumers of the incident report aren't the ones who had any say in using LLMs so they're stuck with less certainty.
It will be funny when one of those reports says that certain steps will be taken in the future to make sure the same incident doesn't occur again, nobody reads the report so nobody notices, and then when the same incident occurs again one of the clients sues.
Unless this is used to block TikTok or ChatGPT users still won’t care and people will still laugh at us for caring, or think wanting privacy or control of your computers is suspicious or ungood.
When I was young, I used to think I'd be open minded to changing times and never be curmudgeonly, but I get into one "conversation" where someone responds with ChatGPT, and I am officially a curmudgeon.
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