Great article.

I put a Teams meeting on my second monitor. I put Teams on my first monitor. I minimize Teams to look at something in a browser on the first monitor. The Teams meeting on the second monitor minimizes, too.

Mac window management UX is dogshit in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of problems that I either have to just deal with, or try to find some third party app to solve in lieu of Apple actually caring about UX again.

>Apple actually caring about UX again

I doubt Apple ever really cared about UX. It took Apple 24 years after Microsoft's Windows 2.0 introduced resizing a window from any edge, for Apple to finally implement it in MacOS Lion in 2011. Apple UX is ridiculous.

If they cared about UX, they'd throw out their "HIG", hire some competent people, and start over.

Why is the first item on the first menu of every software program "About this software"? Is it because the most frequently used thing by every user is to know what version of the software they are running? Apple specified this in their "HIG" long ago and it never changed, and it's been stuck there ever since. And it's completely stupid. MS Windows applications typically have "About this software" as the last menu item on the last menu, which is objectively a far better place for it than the first thing on the first menu, since it is rarely needed when using an application.

I'd say they have plenty of competent people, the problem is management and process.

I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.

Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.

You're not wrong.

I don't know why I didn't think about this before, but you are right. This is just wrong.

Bought a license, not a trial. Freudian slip.

I think you can see this when you look at the downvotes on that GitHub issue on any comment which suggests gating AI access behind a paywall.

This has also been my experience.

Sounds like a job for Claude Code to me.

Good. Apple has been making many, many bad UX decisions. It's not just Liquid Glass, either. I've been noticing the downward trend for years.

The other day I had to fire up my decade old 27” iMac to get some files off it and swear to God it felt faster than my two-year-old Mac Studio running Tahoe. I can’t imagine all the stupid bullshit going on behind the scenes to pull off these stupid liquid glass effects.

AI is in the Radium phase of its world-changing discovery life cycle. It's fun and novel, so every corporate grifter in the world is cramming it into every product that they can, regardless of it making sense. The companies being the most reckless will soon develop a cough, if they haven't already.

Does anyone use Claude for something other than coding?

It's quickly becoming a replacement for Google for me. When I want to know more about a topic I don't usually go to Google or Wikpedia as often, instead I'll start a dialog with Claude about the topic.

I also use it for writing, exploring complex topics or as a sounding board for interpersonal issues.

I'm fully managing multiple NixOS installs via CC. I set out to do it just as an experiment, but it's been working great and I've expanded usage. When I switched my desktop from Windows back to NixOS last night, the first thing I did was enable SSH and setup keys so my NAS can access my desktop and Claude Code has made every single configuration.nix change for me. I also use Claude Code to orchestrate my local LLM setup. It makes recommendation on local models and facilitates downloads when provided a huggingface API token.

My next experiments will entail using Claude Code to bootstrap some local LLM agents exposed as CC commands so not all of my system work will need to round trip to claude.ai to be completed.

For translations. All SOTA LLMs are good at mainstream languages these days, but when you need more niche stuff, some models can be better at some specific thing than others. Claude Opus in particular seems to be the best at Lojban, for example.

Yes! I'd say probably more than 1/2 my tokens are unrelated to code.

My favorite is I had (and still do have) a whole conversion about the water in my pool. I send it pictures of my water and test strips and it suggests how much of which chemical to add.

I asked about a recipe.

I used it to translate handwritten German from my grandmother.

I brainstorm business process ideas with it.

I ask it for medical advice (like, what should I google to find out what this bump is)

I brainstorm product ideas with it, like a PM.

And that's all just in the last three weeks.

Yes, of course. It’s good enough as sparring partner in thinking, e.g. when outlining product strategy or preparing copy. Of course if you know what to ask for or how to spot hallucinations.

Yep.

I use it for feedback on things I've written.

It's not as good as a good editor who understands what you're writing about.

But it is so fast and it really does help.

I know people that do (typically mathematics) since they pay for Claude Code anyway. I often tell them that they shouldn't.

0.1% of the time i ask questions, usually not about politics. since i dont expect much from it there

mostly sys admin things but yeah

That's besides the point, isn't it? There is a high likelihood that these models, these companies, and the people building them are going to be central in shaping future conversations and thought. Why does it matter what they're used for right now?

Same. I think that pharmaceutical industry is lot more bleak now than it was when Fen-Phen became popular. GLP-1 usage is largely off-label as far as I know, but I wouldn't trust them even if it wasn't. There is a mountain of precedent for these companies to choose profit over health, and for our government(s) to aid them in covering up evidence of negative effects on the latter for the sake of the former.

The popularity of these drugs is specifically from the FDA-approved "weight loss" indication. You're at least a few years behind. I would also think the many many years when it was only prescribed for diabetes would have yielded some data about negative effects, (other than the ocular issue) if there were any. Glp-1s were so unprofitable, Novo Nordisk let their Canadian patent lapse almost a decade ago, rather than pay the upkeep fee lol. So I dont think anyone is protecting them from bad press.

I don't buy insta-botnets and I never will.