For around $1200 USD you can put together the “dark easel” of a Make Noise Strega, 0-Coast, 0-Ctrl off Reverb. That plus a little oscilloscope/tuner like the Korg NTS-2 and you’re set.
In the movie Idiocracy they have a dispenser with fresh clothes to put on covered in advertising — assuming free. I’m surprised that doesn’t exist and perhaps made of recycled plastic?
My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
I remember reading the newspaper in the break room and at lunch. About 2013 or so. That's all their was. Well, for me, because I was a late smartphone adopter.
I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.
Do you subscribe now? I’ve toyed with the idea — I think I’d be more aware of local news / serendipitous things I normally wouldn’t seek out.
I’ve been considering subscribing to some high quality signal / low to no ad type written publications. Asterisk, IEEE spectrum, NOEMA. Make getting mail fun again.
I subscribe. There's a newspaper downstairs, I'll fetch it later. The paper news is better than the screen news, and I'm not going to try to explain what better means.
Some of my best output has happened during life’s “reading periods”.
Working on something other than what I’m “should to be doing”…because an adjacent or completely unrelated thread HAD to be pulled…and then a period of “off task” deadline be damned irrational monomania…it’s bliss and always turns out well. I’ve learned to trust this.
A thing I go back to from the book “Unf*ck Yourself” is a firm identification with things that you have set out to do early on. Rather than saying “I need to exercise.” instead “I exercise.” With that mindset adopted pretty quickly into your campaign any slacking is genuinely you no longer being yourself. A rejection of your identity is stronger activator than a spoken aspiration of a future self that does said thing. Identities are hard to shake.
I benefit tremendously from the exercise example specifically, but I still agree with 0xf8 that this isn't something you can just will yourself into. I identity as an athlete because I am. I've played sports of some sort and exercised my entire life. It isn't "exercise" to me. I'm just an animal that has a body, wants that body to excel at being a body, and so I train it, just as I read and learn and practice various intellectual skills to keep my mind sharp, because it is also core to my identity that I'm a human, the apex of intelligence in the animal kingdom, and making my brain work as well as it possibly can is important to me. Making the rest of my body work well is also important to me.
On the other hand, I buy all of the data suggesting religious people are happier than others. They have built-in community, friends, relationships, guidance on how to live a good life. I was religious as a teenager and it was terrific. I had a great time in bible study, met interesting people I loved, even met girls and had an outlet for my singing. But as I got older, I can't do it any more because I don't believe the doctrine. I can't force myself to believe something I don't believe. In spite of how much better I believe my life would be if I was religious, I can't be.
I don't know that identity is really all that malleable. You either identity as something or you don't, and the reason is rarely if ever "I read a self help book and convinced myself this is who I am."
The most productive feedback loop to cultivate deeper knowledge / intellect is to shatter any personal identity as a robust intellect, and actually internalize the limitations of one’s own knowledge and intellect to foster more growth. No one who thinks they know everything is inherently poised to learn much. On a social level it involves surrounding yourself with individual who constantly challenge you to grow intellectually which can literally feel like an attack on said identity.
identities spoken of in this way are tools and we often get very caught up in self reflection and the level of worthiness we feel we have earned certain labels. your true and actual identity is out of your control and not something you would ever think twice about. you arent someone who exercises or not. your identity is the part of you that believes exercising is good for you to begin with. thinking you need to and telling yourself you are someone who does it are both the same identity. If you believe it is good for you and you dont do it, then there is another part of your identity that is asserting you dont always need to good things for yourself.
The part you really need to challenge, which will help in all areas of your life, is to settle the question: "to what extent do I believe I should do things that are good for me?". Every day you go without any plan or committed effort towards your health and exercising is a day you answered, "very little extent". for sake of text length im going to skip a lot of detail, but if you're like me then this eventually leads to a question of "how do I restore faith in myself?"
a thought experiment that i read somewhere (and maybe tweaked) that i use is a "post body swap" mentality. If you are willing to accept accountability and responsibility for whatever is in your past, then you no longer need to identify with it, and can treat every single new day as if it is your first time in this body. A kind of "live every day like it's your first" mentality. It has helped me recover from a lot of tough spots where i had an overwhelming amount of 'backlog' to deal with.
phrased differently, you look at your life as if you have just inherited it. you died, met God, and He said "i dont normally do this, but im sending you back for another shot in a random <yours> body".
the point isnt to trick yourself, you dont need to, there is no trick. it is simply a reminder of the free will you had already possessed prior to the thought experiment. that this is always your life to live however you want moving forward.
imagine you woke up in someones body who is more out of shape than you are currently, to the point you cant do things you currently enjoy doing. would you take the obvious path to start training to at least be able to do the things you were previously used to doing and see how far you get, or would you put in work to figure out how to change the way you live to better fit the new body?
your life is the way it is right now largely due to momentum from your past, not your current identity. identity updates really are not necessary to improve your life, and you arent identified by your momentum - even if that momentum has labels people use to describe it
I find the failure mode for this to have been pretty insurmountable when you’re not genuinely on board with said identity.
A trivial example: the behavior you could make into your identity is the result of socionormative expectations and pressure. Doctors say one should exercise, all my friends are athletic and expect me to be, society values fitness, to espouse the exercise lifestyle is seen as a moral virtue, etc.—but what if someone personally doesn’t give a fvck about exercise beyond these external forces? For some people it will never naturally become their identity, even if they “want” it to be, on account of the exogenous pressure to fit this norm. For some it will feel contrived or even forced. It is possible for the inherent motivation to act in accordance with your identity, and how you choose to orient yourself in the world, to be at odds with what you “want” to accomplish, do, or identify with on the surface. For that person, they have to genuinely value being the person who exercises for the “need” to become implicit.
For me this manifested on the intellectual plane. At times in the past I wanted to intellectually be “into XYZ”, like mathematics, for example, or some other subject matter. I had the aptitude and certainly the capacity to focus, enough to develop genuine expertise over time. But then I found that, in truth, I did not genuinely enjoy the subject matter enough to delve so deeply. I liked the idea of being someone who had cultivated rigorous mathematical expertise, but not actually being that person in reality, so it could never be my identity naturally, it would remain maximum effort as long as that were true.
It’s strange to me how we can convince ourselves to want something we don’t actually value intrinsically. But I suspect that’s a longstanding feedback loop in evolutionary psychology.
On the converse side of the story, I posit you can also get pretty far in stagnation of actual personal growth / progress by simply convincing everyone around you deceptively of a specific identity, and have that be validating enough to preclude cultivating that identity in earnest. Another trivial example: the “smartest guy in the room” effect. If you are sufficiently smart, or surround yourself with individuals who won’t challenge you intellectually and default to being deferential, you can certainly feel pretty smart, and have that maladaptively/falsely validate your sense of identity as the smartest-in-the-room type of personality.
TL;DR: I think the “make it your identity, then effort towards action comes naturally” is a powerful model for self-motivation, but it has meaningful failure modes—notably, it’s hard to force if you’re not genuinely into it, and sociodynamic feedback loops impacting personal sense of identity can collapse or even pervert the entire approach.
Worth noting that Atomic Habits does _not_ say what you are suggesting here, it says to create a new identity (I am someone who exercises) then prove to yourself that that is true. It does not suggest to internalize it and hope action follows, or to internalize it and attempt to convince others.
The helpful suggestion of Atomic Habits is that instead of saying "I am someone who exercises" and setting a goal of running a marathon, you just go out for a run, or a walk, of any length until you've proven, again to yourself, that this is a habit you are going to keep.
Hmm. That wasn’t my synthesis of Atomic Habits as it pertains to this nuance. I agree with you the more refined guidance is closer to creating a new identity intentionally, so your habits are intrinsically tied to your sense of self, and feel less effortfully organically.
But I disagree with the rest of your interpretation as stated here. The cart can’t come before the horse otherwise how useful is it to sparking motivation.
I understood the insight basically in the reversed, If your goal is to run a marathon, and you can’t find the motivation to train. If you orient towards an identity that being a runner (join a run club, buy running by apparel, watch track and field, research endurance training, subscribe to floTrack, peruse old LetsRun forum posts in your free time, talk about how great a runners high is, explore new locales during vacation by going for a run, decide you need to suddenly fix your pronation with custom orthotics your other runner friends swear by it, etc. etc.) you do that deeply enough and with genuine commitment that you start to think of yourself as a runner in earnest, why not you live it in every way other than racking up mileage. Now suddenly going out for a long run or going in a run every single day, or training for a race might just feel like the normal thinks to do because you’re a running and less like the effortfully endeavor to train for a marathon. Suddenly putting on your shoes and going for a quick tempo run sounds … not dreadful. maybe, even like something you genuinely want to do by then end. and the more you do it the more that is reinforced. you actually are a runner now. no pretending. going for a run isn’t a active decision each day—it’s what runners do.
What you describe seems like the converse to me. “You want to run a marathon, instead of convincing yourself that you are into running by weaving that into your sense of self… just go out for a run, or walk, of any length until—what if I don’t want to go for a run? don’t feel motivated. not even for a walk. besides, i’m not even a runner so what good would one random run do? I’ll do something else instead Id rather be doing, anything actually. …
you’re probably never going to prove to yourself anything other than “finding motivation to run is hard” and certainly you’re not training for a marathon any time soon.
My point about failure modes was, sometimes you adopt the new identity for yourself and it goes like I outlined above. great… atomic habits. But sometimes you do it and realize in becoming that identify — you actually don’t like it, it’s not who you want to be (e.g. you hated flotrack, never showed up to run club, etc.) that becomes an impasse because you realize you don’t actually value orienting yourself in the world that way. In this case it wouldn’t work to motivate you any more than sheer willpower and effortful discipline. “I don’t want to be a runner, i just want to run a marathon.” ok, then put on your trainers and prepare for a slog.
Karen Horney (20th-century German psychoanalyst) in her book "Neurosis and Human Growth" talks quite a bit about this failure mode. The relevant bit I want to share is her talking about how a person may be in a state of neurosis due to not feeling like they are living up to their idealized self -- and that a commonly destructive response to that neurosis is trying to force everyone around them to treat and perceive them as if they were that idealized self and not the flawed real self they are (regardless of whether the people around believe or are deceived into believing that, which is where she diverges from your point a bit but I think you're touching on very similar things).
Thanks for sharing this insight. I was not previously familiar with her research; interested to learn more. And I agree what I put forth is a narrower notion, perhaps reductive, I had not really considered a context in which “forcing others to believe some subjective account of your shared reality” would manifest other than via deception to whatever extent, but I suppose it could be of a different nature.,
I don't think one's identity is really malleable, at least not after childhood.
My sense of who I am has not changed since I graduated from high school. College, jobs, buying a house, becoming a parent, nothing has really changed that.
I used over a billion tokens per day of gpt-5.6 sol xhigh starting last Wednesday through Sunday before reaching my reset limit. The $200 pro plan is still the best deal.
There's no universe in which just buying a second or a larger subscription isn't a billion times better and cheaper than any kind of comparable local workflow.
Privacy, experimenting with ML and "unorthodox" needs are currently the only acceptable reasons to do local.
Well I wouldn't say a billion times better. I've actually been having a surprising amount of success working with local models. And my investment has only been the equivalent of 4 months of a Max x20 subscription.
Experimentation and privacy are definitely advantages, but it's also quite a lot of fun.
Yeah, it sure was convenient that there was a RAM pricing crisis right when Apple was making local inference viable. All because of a promise that AI companies will buy more of it... with money they don't yet have, whereas Apple does have lots of money.
Agreed I’ve seen what they’re paying at work for the OpenAI API but I also think that includes reserved capacity and ZDR O_o. Try some add on credits next time if you can. I was curious at how far $20 would go (500 credits). Watched them go to zero over an hour and assumed it’d stop. It then ran for another 6 hours and completed the task despite the meter at 0. What a task means is very unclear but it’s definitely not pricing sol at $20/500 credits an hr in tokens.
I mean this is kind of standard in a lot of industries? Businesses get reliability/support usually for the price increase. Just look at lots of industrial tech. Or business vs consumer 3D printers, or business vs consumer laptops etc....
Pretty basic. The codex app with one conversation per project and several running simultaneously all hours. I’m going for max caching that way and it never gets lost even with compaction somehow. Each has a plan with milestones to keep up to date and a thin agents file. I check in on them in the Remote app. Use case is protocol and control reverse engineering of audio hardware. I think they must be identifying the heavy use agent sessions and cranking up their cache lives so it’s not a big deal for them.
Ultra mode spins up many sub-agents. On a particularly challenging task, I’ve had as many as 29 agents working at one time.
Also if you don’t specify, most end up being the same as the parent model which is pretty wasteful.
I engineered a skill that spins up Terra High agents for most sub-agents, resorting to Sol Medium for technical research and Luna High for code/in-project research tasks.
On a slightly different topic, Luna Max is incredibly capable and doesn’t use as much quota (Luna tokens are dirt cheap).
Most importantly, are you seeing a return on investment for time and ultimate outcome?
No one can judge the enjoyment, learning, and hobby aspects. Just wondering if there is an end goal for that much overall expenditure (time, money, energy, etc.)
I absolutely see a return. I do not pay for this (we have a corporate gateway), for the price of a junior developer I can get 3-4-5 senior developer's work done. it's insane value.
I'd like to see a benchmark on this specific topic: Reverse engineer the hardware protocol from a driver, or just migrate a driver from one OS to another.
I’ve chipped on it with each model since 5.2 but 5.6 sol is something else. When it first came out I’d get some refusals but they’ve since stopped. I wonder what an ideal candidate benchmark task would be for that?
5.6 has been a huge pivotal change in reverse engineering tasks for me too (largely extracting game assets from binary client files). Something I spent literally weeks on in January with claude models at the time was solved in about 30 minutes with 5.6 Sol at medium just yesterday. It's both extremely satisfying but at the same time also a little annoying how much time I had previously spent on it only for it to be solved so quickly now. I suspect improvements in AI will continue this happy but annoyed trend.
Some people just do crazy stuff. For example this now ex yc guy who said he has agents constantly scanning Sf govt apis and forming dashboards just because
Yeah I am, building large software with a vision - requirements - architecture - plan - code workflow. One Claude max account is enough to work on one, maybe two of those at a time (call it 15B tokens/month per project)
I’m exclusively using ultra and I run out in 3-4 days consistently. Those resets are great but I’ve noticed they like to cluster them at the start of the cycle, would be better if they spaced them out more.
A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days.
I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd and I don't know how you can live with that. It's immoral.
I can't speak for that guy, but I'm a physicist and work in clean energy... So it's not too hard! That said, I usually am closer to 10M on days I do heavy coding, so not nearly that bad.
Have you seen the average physicist code? I've crawled around in the muck of Fortran codes written in 1970 with unreadable 8 character variable names (the first of which encodes the type), with implicit typing, zero comments, computed go-tos, SAVE, the works. Tests? Never heard of it. Bugs everywhere. You would be far less sanguine about physicists coding if you looked into some of the "flagship" codes used today. And believe me, it isn't a "boomer bad" phenomenon. Every incoming student I've had in the last decade writes shit code too.
My (only somewhat facetious) opinion is that physicist access to programming languages should be controlled like doctors' access to opiates.
0. It's not about "looking pretty", it's about being nigh impossible to understand or reason about. There is a 1000 LoC subroutine that I'm convinced was ported from FORTRAN 1 unchanged that cannot be understood by anyone under the age of 50 that underpins one of the "flagship" physics codes in my field. It's a fucking nightmare every time I have to worry about that stupid thing. I remind you that this was 100% the product of a human brain (pre computer age, pre social media, and I'm told quite the genius too). Perhaps one should not place the human brain on too high a pedestal and deify it.
1. Why did you take from my OP that I tell codex "write a climate simulation code, make no mistakes" and go suntanning on a beach in the tropics for the rest of the semester?
2. Perhaps you have a different experience from me in writing HPC codes, but my experience is that > 90% of the code is boilerplate. I find GPT 5.6 can be prone to overengineering, but with a little steering and good judgement it generates very nice interfaces and high level code. I just have to think about the solver structure or metastructure.
3. Even with core numerics - pre-AI, it was a bunch of iteration going back and forth between code and optreports. Now codex will just do it. I suppose this may seem grim to you if you loved decorating every variable with !DIR$ ASSUME_ALIGNED, and manually batching array operations or whatever, but I didn't and I'm glad I no longer need to.
4. I'm now highly motivated to write tests, and AI makes it way easier to write the immense boilerplate around good tests (sorry not sorry, my {FUNDING_AGENCY} program manager doesn't give a flying fuck what my test coverage is, and my next grant won't depend on that in the slightest, so pre-AI I did the bare minimum. You can argue that the results will be worse, yadda yadda, but the incentive structure that {FUNDING_AGENCY} has in place don't promote good software standards, and my career never suffered for it)
5. I can generate docstrings with high accuracy (see the above)
As a company... but that includes things like research costs, model training etc. to determine if they're selling electricity at a loss you should look at inference costs bc that's the "thing" they're selling
I can’t sign up for that. I tried authorizing Codex a couple days ago. For some reason, their system says my phone number has been used for verification 3 times even though it definitely has not. I’ve had this phone number for over 20 years. OpenAI support is useless. They just keep repeating the policy without actually helping me.
Use TextVerified, load up like $5 of credit and OAI verification is like $1.00. Then when your account is made, ensure 2FA/passkey is setup then you don't need to worry about the phone number.
Historically those are less useful because some of the verification systems require a real phone number and that your name is associated with the account, depending on what and how they verify. It's annoying, I use a google voice number as my primary, and it often gets rejected.
There are several tiers to these services, some are selling real us phone number verifications at about 0.5usd/text while others are selling virtual phone number verifications at much cheaper. From some limited experience with the former, there is rarely if ever any problems with rejections.
Yes I filed a support ticket with them and explained that their system is broken and they just did not care. I explained how it was impossible for me to use it 3 times already as I've only made 2 chatgpt accounts EVER, and only recalling entering my phone number for one of the two chatgpt accounts. I told them that this issue locked me out of codex and chatgpt for work and they weren't willing to do anything about it. Totally useless support.
I ended up borrowing my gf's phone number just so I could get access for work. Ridiculous
The whole point of the 2025 one is that they found the self-reporting to be significantly inflated, which is why self-reported surveys like this one are hard to trust.
Yes, but their newer write-up discusses that (and shows that the self-reported numbers have gone up radically, in a way that suggests that even if there is some inflation, the numbers are almost certainly positive if you deflate).
They also have an update -- linked from the original study! -- explaining that it's out of date and no longer reliable, and explaining why they had to cancel a follow-up study because it was understating productivity gains (but also was showing wins for the people who carried over from their previous study): https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
The authors of this paper decided to ignore all of METR's follow-up data and discussion, and to report only the ancient number from early 2025 (a time when Windsurf was state of the art). And then, rather than apologizing for it, and caveating it as a number not to be taken seriously, they described it as a study done "recently."
That's either shockingly dishonest or incredibly out-of-touch.
> shows that the self-reported numbers have gone up radically, in a way that suggests that even if there is some inflation, the numbers are almost certainly positive if you deflate
Or the hype machine is even stronger, making people inflate those numbers even more.
If I wanted to be uncharitable, the question of "how much slower you'd be without AI" compares against people's AI-less productivity from 2026, which could have become much less than 2025 AI-less productivity, if hypothetically AI use makes people helpless and deskilled.
I’ve been loving Diataxis! My agents follow guidance that links from other file types to a reference file type must be one way. Stays DRY. Also to regularly cut long reference files into smaller focused ones and link from the main.
Geiskes makes a series of aftermarket bent Walkman like cassette players aimed at musicians. I remember spending a lot of time as a kid half pressing buttons to hear the song playback in reverse or chipmunked.
The TE recorder is beautiful. I hadn’t heard of that term captures it perfectly. The itch is only scratched once it’s owned though right? O_o Their OB-4 has a similar wheel transport that can be scrubbed too and it keeps a rolling buffer of the last so many seconds of sound into the speaker from whatever source is playing.
https://youtu.be/SofDTfm1QKUsi=On2kh85cCa5rgRmA
https://youtu.be/gO9qlVr6-HA?si=FltmhE1xiqPYmKNB
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