This smells like a way to funnel money to someone. There's no way a small number of "Smart Glasses" will be cheap, and the warlord(s) in charge can spec it in ways to increase costs, funnelling even more money to that someone. Classic US grifting from the government, in my judgement. We should find out who made this decision, and it will be interesting to see who gets the contract(s) for it. As we've seen with DoD acquisition, even a failed program can keep the money spigot open for years, too.
[Vaava](https://www.vaava.app/) is a baby tracking/logging app I originally built for myself, now available on both app stores. All the user generated data is stored only on device and is transferred in local network to users who you have paired the app with. There is 0 behavioural analytics, even the crashlytics are 100% optional.
There is a couple of semi-unique features; you can use your voice to dictate and generate events (feeding, sleep etc), you can also scan documents for growth measurements.
You don't need user account to use it, there is no subscription, the paid features are available behind a single purchase for lifetime. Still like 90% of the features are available for free.
Also https://www.athilio.com/ , which originally was also purely for my own use. Most sports and fitness wearable manufacturers own software and 3rd party software make it incredibly hard to do "how does my this months metric x compare to same month last year", athilio attempts to make those queries easier. Many of the ideas are basically copied from software observability concepts. Also I have used the app to implement and learn agentic workflows.
I wish they'd bring those back so simple and easy to set up. Could use some more functionality like VPN's and such but otherwise a great product line-up. Now it seems every AP looks like an alien spacecraft.
I'm working on the Alpha with a tester group of a learning product for my tech cooperative. A personal research extended to curriculum building and team training SaaS. I'd like to open source it and work on federation but those don't pay the bills yet.
https://chunkker.com
Coop I'm trying to bootstrap. Interested in building tooling and experimenting to make Sociocracy viable. No VC, No external investment, other than mulling Coop bonds for capital raising capability. https://kinkoda.com
Feel free to contact me via the web forms if you have experience launching apps or platforms like this or you're just interested in discussing the product.
The things you list as ostensibly different from consumerism are for the most part consequences and manifestations of consumerism. They are downstream from the consumerist ethos. So these are superficial distinctions.
Inquire into the causes. For example, why do people say they can't afford more children? Materially, we're the wealthiest we've ever been in human history. We are in the best possible position in human history to afford more children. The problem is that we have different priorities. Consumerism shifts our valuations.
Consider also the parabolic distribution of fertility. Who is having the most children and the least in developed consumerist countries? The poor and the rich are having the most. The rich, because within the consumerist calculus, the cost of raising children are minuscule as a fraction of their total wealth, even given their high material standards. The poor, because they can't compete in the consumerist game anyway (social programs that enable the poor to have more children, and perhaps a greater average religiosity, are also contributing factors; the latter shifts valuation).
The people having the fewest number of children are the middle class, because the middle class has just enough money to gain access to the fruits consumerism offers, but not enough to accommodate both the consumerist indulgence of them and large families.
This is where "keeping up with the Joneses" is most prevalent. This is where you find the most careerism; the poor don't have careers, and the rich don't need them. The middle class - perhaps especially the upper middle class - is in the fierce competition for marginal and petty gains of status over their middle class peers, and in a consumerist society, that is tied to spending on things other than what enables a family to have more children (costs whose growth, by the way, is logarithmic, not linear). The upper middle class is also perhaps best equipped to craft elaborate rationalizations for their lack of fecundity.
So you have to look at things systematically and in a systemic way.
I came here to comment the same. I'm still using my iphone SE 2nd gen and it's still receiving software updates. Calling it dead is a bit misleading imo.
Apple could easily support eGPUs if they wanted to, but they choose to have vertical integration over fragmentation or usefulness. It's the same as them not supporting OpenGL or Vulkan: they could if they wanted to be a better gaming/porting target, but compatibility of any sort is not a priority.
> Most app features don’t need a model that can write Shakespeare, explain quantum mechanics, and pass the bar exam. They need a model that can do one of these reliably: summarize, classify, extract, rewrite, or normalize.
> And for those tasks, local models can be truly excellent.
100% true and I use them for this. But the open-source models seem to be drying up unfortunately. There never was much incentive for the big players to train a model and give it away for free, it was mostly virtue signalling and advertising for their knowhow. The AI "race" seems to have entered a new phase that's more on clamping down costs and making money and this doesn't fit in well.
I hope good local models will still appear but the days that there was a new groundbreaking model for download every couple of weeks is over :'(
There's no category difference between being an expert in carpentry vs masonry and being an expert in drills vs hammers. They are both just areas of expertise.
Going down the path of trying to define what is expert functions and what is "merely" a tool using anything but descriptive technique is nonsense.
Expert functions are just those areas where using a tool is sufficiently difficult to require expertise.
In my state they can get a judge to issue a blood draw warrant. I learned this because I was on the jury of a DUI case and the arresting officer said he didn't want to bother a judge so opted not to get a warrant after the driver refused the tests and breathalyzer. The prosecutor only presented "this cop is good!, he has 100s of DUI stops, trust him!". We acquitted due to lack of evidence.
But it's extremely useful and effective compared to everything else out there that I've tried, if you're looking for an AI code review. Let me know if you try it - or find anything else that might work too without the bazillion prompts :)
Unless I'm missing something, there's an obvious logic issue here.
If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work.
Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" analogy, it's getting old to reargue the same idea time after time.
I don't know your definition of "rolled in", but the actual successor to the SE is the e line (iPhone 16e, 17e, etc).
I agree that the SE was a great iPhone and a great form factor. I didn't have one, but my kid did. Whenever I had to do something on their SE, I found it so much more usable than my own whatever Pro phone of that time. It wasn't enough to get me to go to an SE, however.
That's the whole point. The OP was lamenting that consumers are getting less for selling their behind-the-meter solar, but if everyone has behind-the-meter solar then that solar is cheap to worthless when the sun is shining. And that's a good thing! The sun is free, all of us utilizing it during the day for free means electricity is cheap during the day. It's when the sun sets and all that solar goes offline and demand rises that electricity gets expensive again.
I think being responsible for the code is a better framing. I run a saas and I don’t always review all the code, but this thing supports my family, so I am acutely aware that I’m responsible for what it does. My customers aren’t going to let me blame the agent for fucking up their workflows.
But that still doesn’t mean I review all the code. I tend to review defensively, based on the potential for harm if this piece of code is broken. And I rely a lot on tests, static analysis, canaries, analytics, health checks, etc. to reduce risk for when I’m wrong. So far it’s working.
Why do people think there will be fixing AI slop software? The cost of codegen is next to nothing. It makes no sense to spend large sums of money having an engineer fix something that could be generated over and over until gods of stochasticity come in your favour.
We've entered a period of single-use-plastic software, piling up and polluting everything, because it's cheaper than the alternative
That's awesome to hear and I'd love to see it when you're ready.
I actually think having something like adamsreview orchestrated by deterministic code - instead of simply having AI agents use deterministic code occasionally as this app does - could be even better!
The problem I ran into is that if you build a deterministic app that happens to use LLMs instead of the other way around, I don't think there's any way to get it to use your Claude Code subscription credits. It has to use API. And something like adamsreview would end up being so expensive if not subsidized by Anthropic along with the rest of our CC usage.
