Notes

Started reading, preview, AI Snake Oil. Reading retelling of what a developer Thomas Ptacek received from ChatGPT about how a biblical verse would explain removing a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR. The below makes me think of the Russel Peters standup routine where he demonstrates how a particular man would stereotype explain how to bake a cake. “Fear not, my child, for I shall guide thy hand and show thee the way. Take thy butter knife, and carefully insert it between the sandwich and the VCR, and gently pry them apart. And with patience and perseverance, the sandwich shall be removed, and thy VCR shall be saved.” ...

It doesn’t feel great when you get a feeling those closest to you are not giving you credit for your ideas but maybe that is usually not the whole picture. There is Fundamental Attribution Error1, where one attributes behavior to character traits that are perhaps more easily explained by circumstances. This is similar to Hanlon’s Razor2 as far as attribution errors go. But what if there is a different kind of attribution error, a mis-attribution error? ...

Sometimes the experience of overwhelm looks like bouncing between, actively being in the weeds doing a thing, but suddenly, thinking, “hmm is this the right thing to be doing? Maybe I should do more big picture thinking”, and then doing some big picture thinking, but getting kind of caught up in some details of a priority that comes up, and thinking, “oh wow this looks important, I should probably stop planning and thinking and just do this thing now because all this strategic thinking just feels like a waste of time” . 😂 ...

Wow, today I was learning about the timeline of Microsoft adding Linux support on Windows, reading this article1, on my phone, but I got distracted. I was trying to long-press one of the links in the article, but this news website, bless their hearts, is click harvesting, so was preventing my long-click trying to take a peak at a link prior to clicking it–since don’t click on shift is just 101 against phishing. Anyway, got a tip from ChatGPT to try “Reader Mode”, in my Safari app. Somehow that option was gone for this website. I also tried “Request Desktop Website”, but that didn’t change the long-click-hijacking. But I stumbled upon another interesting Safari capability. ...

Whaaatt??? 🤯 I discovered today, thanks to a conversation with ChatGPT , Apple MacOS’s Continuity Camera , for batch scanning of documents. Had wasted so much time trying to use the Dropbox app for scanning, because I had always been trying to rename and scan at the same time. And finding the right folder and typing in the iphone keyboard, all those things are painfully slow. Dropbox has still not added the simplest of conveniences into their UI of , being able to search for some folder or file, go to it, and then from there be able to go to the parent folder. ...

surprise billing p39, (and chapter 6 too), reading a note about a 2015 study that found, 30% of plans on federal marketplqce, wow, without any emergency physician coverage?! so all those would be out of network. cost sharing p40, cost sharing like HDHP, intended to reduce cost by getting people to shop around more. RAND, findings, less money spent but not by shopping around but by getting less care . managed care p41, referrals and prior authorizations, to pay less for services as a respknse to more services and higher costs in 1970s and 1980s?? HMOs. And Medicare Advantage. ...

The chaos of hiring is perpetually on most peoples minds these days, at least in my sampling of the conversations I engage in. One topic that comes up a lot is job post ghosting. No need to mention AI. Oops just did 😅. 👻 job post ghosting: an applicant does not hear back from an entity behind an application they submitted, for an extended period of time. The entity where an application is submitted may as well be a coin in a fountain or a letter in an ocean bottle or some other kind of void. ...

When do you do the work. Examples, Andrew Wiles Fermat’s Last Theorem Chris Lattner, LLVM, SWift and Mojo And in Slow Productivity, Cal also describes McPhee, as a freelance writer , who on the surface may look like someone who spent 2 years writing some article here and there but really Cal notes in a footnote on p 216 that McPhee still needed to keep a day job teaching at Princeton and needed royalties from books that were successful, because the articles he quote unquote took his time on werent really profitable. ...

Notes Collecting some notes, reading Slow Productivity1 as I’m iterating on this2 post which is related. Disconnection From the Familiar The p160 - 163, daily rituals, going to some other other place , as a escape place to focus. I have stumbled upon this phenomenon too. Traveling has been a favorite way to collect my thoughts not otherwise accessible. Bonus relaxed low stakes environment. trail of broken urls Reading, p181, about this Jarvis, this quote resonates, ...