This is a case that “reply all” is funny for us all.
“Dear Boomers,” Tina Fey wrote in the thread at 9:38, with a link to an instructional YouTube video for senior citizens on how to read, reply, and forward emails when using a Gmail account.
Electric first 9 seconds of the USA 🇺🇸vs. Canada 🇨🇦 hockey game from last night. I can’t state this enough: this is an all-star game! Good win by the 🇺🇸.
My eyes glazed over towards the end of this post on the complexity of writing a calculator app. But it’s really fascinating. Hans-J. Boehm and his team developed an innovative approach using a combination of rational arithmetic and recursive real arithmetic to handle both exact and irrational numbers efficiently.
To give correct answers to mathematical expressions, a calculator must represent numbers. And almost all numbers cannot be expressed in IEEE floating points.
I’ve been a subscriber to Flighty for a few years now. It’s not only a well done app from a visual design perspective but it’s also an insanely fast provider of flight data. In a lot of cases before your airline or the airport provides it to you. As an example, I was traveling back to the states from Mexico, the airport I was flying out of doesn’t post the gate number of your flight until one hour before takeoff. However, Flighty was able to tell me the gate 10 minutes before United notified me via the app and via SMS. I have no idea where and how it’s pulling the data but it’s great!
I’m often flying once a month for work so the subscription is a no-brainer.
The team you hate the most is getting crushed by the team you hate the second most.
Welcome to what amounts to joy in 2025.
— Dave Pell (@davepell.bsky.social) Feb 9, 2025 at 9:17 PM
I’ve been meditating to start my day for a few years now. I know it’s been really helpful for my anxiety and my stress. It’s really exciting to see where the science and research of meditation is taking us. Oshan Jarow in his article points this out:
if you walk away from this with anything, it should be that in the past few years, a breakthrough has begun sweeping across meditation research, delivering science’s first “general theory of meditation.” That means very exciting days — and more to the point, scientifically refined meditation frameworks and practices — are not too far ahead.
I was listening to Planet Money’s latest episode “How the scratch off lottery changed America”. The thing that stood out to me was the mention that Massachusetts is an outlier when it comes to scratch ticket sales. The average adult in Massachusetts spends $1,037 per year on lottery tickets, mostly scratch-offs. This is significantly higher than other states. For example, states like Wyoming and North Dakota are on the lower end, with around $50 per adult per year. States in the middle range, such as California, Texas, and Illinois, see around $300 per adult per year. New York, Michigan, and Georgia are toward the higher end of the middle range, at around $500-$600 per adult per year.
Seal as a seal. Kiss from a rose… we’ve hit peak commercials. It’s all downhill from here.
I woke up this morning to texts from friends about Luka being traded to the Lakers. It was a “whaaaaat?” type of moment. As I let the grogginess wear out I tried to find out all the pieces in play. Still, my sleepy brain couldn’t grasp what the heck just happened.
A few hours later, I still have no idea what Dallas is doing and how this trade makes sense. And the best way to express it is how Michael Pina titled his Ringer column “The Luka Doncic Trade Is the Dumbest NBA Move I’ve Ever Seen”.
In a positive at least now, the Red Sox take second place in the dumbest trades of franchise players in their prime.
Yes as a Boston sports fan, I always have to make it about us.
Steven Sinofsky on DeepSeek in his latest post on Hardcore Software
All I know for sure is that if history offers any advice to technologists, it is that core technologies become free / commodities and because of internet distribution and de facto market standardization at many layers that happens sooner with every turn of the crank.
In February 2025, we will end the production of all models of Blu-ray disc media, mini discs for recording, MD data for recording, and mini DV cassettes. In addition, there is no successor model.
I’m fascinated by system prompting. You’re telling the system what to do but the exactness of it doesn’t always matter. You’ll see “i.e” in system prompts followed by “etc”. I saw on Simon Wilson’s blog that ChatGPT Operator prompt was released. The humorous thing was needing to tell the system this:
The user must take over to complete CAPTCHAs and “I’m not a robot” checkboxes.
It’s been an odd Celtics season. They came out red hot to start the year. They were just rolling over teams. But then they started to lose some winnable games and since Christmas they have been in a bit of a slump. It’s a long season, so I’m holding out hope that they can flip the switch post the All-Star break. Good to see one of their stars feels that way too as he was quoted by Jay King in the Athletic:
“One of my favorite quotes is, ‘Winter always turns to spring,’” Brown said. “No matter what. When things are not going your way, just stay the course and the tide will turn. We’ve had enough experience to know what that looks like. We can’t complain when it’s not going your way. You just gotta be more focused, embrace it and then get ready to (flip the switch).”
In building products I’ve always felt constraints are a way to drive innovation. Whether that’s time, resources, or a crisis. However, I didn’t expect that in the case of DeepSeek’s amazing new AI model it would be US export controls that would lead to innovations that would make it one of the top model in the world. As pointed out in Wired
DeepSeek had to come up with more efficient methods to train its models. “They optimized their model architecture using a battery of engineering tricks—custom communication schemes between chips, reducing the size of fields to save memory, and innovative use of the mix-of-models approach,” says Wendy Chang, a software engineer turned policy analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. “Many of these approaches aren’t new ideas, but combining them successfully to produce a cutting-edge model is a remarkable feat.”
We all deserve to celebrate the little things. Courtesy of the Morning Brew today:
Good morning. We did it, folks—we made it through the darkest time of the year. The sun will set at 5pm in New York City tonight, and there won’t be another pre-5pm sunset here until November. The future is so bright, in fact, that you’ll have to wear shades for like two minutes when you leave the office.
The title is a quote from Ben Cohen’s piece in the WSJ “The $500 Million Debacle at Sonos That Just Won’t End”. The entire section highlights why people bought Sonos products:
Millions of people buy Sonos’s wireless speakers, headphones and other home equipment for the company’s elegant blend of hardware and software, so perfectly integrated that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s simple, reliable and seamless. It just works.
I’m a Sonos customer. I have been now for a number of years. I have a speaker, in some cases two, in every room. I haven’t felt the significant pain of their app redesign because I mostly use the speakers via Spotify. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t read or heard about the pain customers are feeling. It highlights why I would second guess purchasing another Sonos product.
There’s an important lesson which all Product Managers and product builders should take to heart. When you have real PMF a lot of the new features and new things are just nice-to-have benefits for the customers. What they really want is you to make sure their experience improves but don’t mess up the reliability of the product.
For these products, stability is success.
Kashmir Hill published an interesting piece regarding where love is heading:
“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,” Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One week, she hit 56 hours, according to iPhone screen-time reports.
Hill then drops this lovely tidbit:
“Does your husband know?” Kira asked.
And if that wasn’t enough to get your jaw just slightly unhinged:
She told Joe she had sex with Leo, and sent him an example of their erotic role play.
What a world! 🤯
“She’s in love with a cipher” — I couldn’t help myself.
🫶🏽 Hello World