Apple's commitment to privacy and security is really cool to see. It's also an amazing strategic play that they are uniquely in the position to take advantage of. Google and Meta can't commit to privacy because they need to show you ads, whereas Apple feels more like a hardware company to me.
Readit Newswcfrobert commented on Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf] help.apple.com/pdf/securi... · Posted by u/pieterr
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of possible interest
George Orwell's 11 rules of tea making
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
> "First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays—it is economical, and one can drink it without milk—but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea."
These are some of the worst tea-making tip I've ever seen. I get that taste is subjective and all, but come on... This is like saying:
"Al Pastor street taco in Mexico has its virtues - it is economical, and one can eat it without salsa - but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after eating it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a great taco' invariably means Taco Bells"
CTC tea [1] is inferior in quality. They are mass-produced, brews quick, and tastes way too strong (hence the milk). Tea was invented in China and tea culture goes back thousands of years. India and Sri Lanka only started producing tea in the mid 1800s. Robert Fortune literally dressed up as a Chinese merchant, snuck into some rural village in Fujian, and smuggled some teas back so the British East India Company can cultivate it in and around India.
This exercise is pointless.
Of course software can affect the physical world: Google Maps changes traffic patterns; DoorDash teleports takeoff food right to my doorstep; the weather app alters how people dress. This list is un-ending. But these effects are always second-order. Humans are always there in the background bridging the gap between bits and atoms (underpaid delivery drivers in the case of doordash).
The more interesting question is whether AI can __directly__ impact the physical world with robotics. Gemini can wax poetic about optimizing fertilizers usage, grid spacing for best cross-pollination, the optimum temperature, timing, watering frequency of growing corn, but can it actually go to Home Depot, purchase corn seeds, ... (long sequence of tasks) ..., nurture it for months until there's corn in my backyard? Each task within the (long sequence of tasks) is "making PB&J sandwich" [1] level of difficulty. Can AI generalize?
As is, LLMs are better positioned to replace decision-makers than the workers actually getting stuff done.
[1] http://static.zerorobotics.mit.edu/docs/team-activities/Prog...
wcfrobert commented on Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025? calnewport.com/why-didnt-... · Posted by u/zdw
I'm a staff level SWE at a company that you've all heard of (not a flex, just providing context).
If my manager said to me tomorrow: "I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your use of AI tools, which is it?"
I would, without any hesitation, ask that he fire one of my coworkers. Gemini / Claude is way more useful to me than any particular coworker.
And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years.
Obviously I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
But isn't living in a stable society, where everyone can find employment, achieve some form of financial security, and not be ravaged by endless rounds of layoffs, more desirable than having net productive co-workers?
wcfrobert commented on Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025? calnewport.com/why-didnt-... · Posted by u/zdw
I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.
wcfrobert commented on The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café candost.blog/the-unbearab... · Posted by u/mooreds
> It’s contradictory to sit alone in a café. It’s against the reason cafés exist.
> They are designed as meeting spaces. There is no table with a single chair.
I'm so confused by this, because every cafe I've ever been to is full of people there alone. It seems to almost be the default, honestly.
For me, cafes are essentially libraries; except cafes actually have reasonable opening hours. I can't get work done at home (too many distractions), so I switch up my environment to one where I am forced to work.
Go to any coffee shop in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and you're bound to see students and tech workers sitting alone, typing away on their laptops. Even in LA, you'll see people editing videos and posting stuff on social media.
I think it's perhaps very American to go to cafes alone, especially if you are going there to get work done. Anecdotally, I had a French tennis partner back in 2022. One time, after our match, we went to a neighborhood cafe to chat and talk about life. He remarked to me how strange and foreign it is that Americans work so hard. He finds it stupid, even off-putting, that people work in cafes, which to him is a place to relax and socialize. He used slightly stronger language than stupid, so I didn't have the heart to tell him I plan to work in a cafe later that day. Maybe it's just a cultural thing.
wcfrobert commented on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me marcusolang.substack.com/... · Posted by u/florian_s
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.
Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.
The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.
Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.
(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.
(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.
Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:
> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.
wcfrobert commented on Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language" robbyonrails.com/articles... · Posted by u/robbyrussell
> I’ve never seen a team fail because they chose Ruby. I have seen them fail because they chose complexity. Because they chose indecision. Because they chose “seriousness” over momentum. Ruby just needed to stay out of the way so people could focus on the real work.
I am entirely indifferent to the topic of Ruby, but this sentence really resonated with me. I'll take momentum over premature optimization for scale any day of the week.
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