When I watch medical professionals at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through notes, talking to others or waiting for results from some lab down the hall. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.

I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a public health system.

When I watch software developers at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through stackoverflow, zoom chat to others or waiting for results from a github CI run. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.

I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in technology tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a publicly traded company.

This was also a public health system (Spain), but I guess it might depend on the country.

Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.

> no LLM in the world can make them go faster

You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them.

But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times).

You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.

If I remember correctly, the procedure was to prepare a food sample, put it in a temperature-controlled environment for 24 hours, and next day see if something grew there or not. If it did, the food was contaminated.

You could try shortening the time to 6 or 12 hours, but then

1) if something grew then the food was contaminated, but if it didn't, how can you be sure it is good or you just didn't wait enough? You would get a lot of false negatives.

2) the lab followed a normal 8 hours a day schedule, so nobody would be there to analize the results. You would not gain anything.

> microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster

Rate limited by biology. Love that.

We did a deal with IBM back in the day to adapt our tech as the code generation for enterprise java beans.

The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.

How to not learn from your mistakes and actually make them worse. I wonder how many valuable alliances they lost just because of that fear. Whoever was willing to sign was already probably not going to be a threat.

To be fair, source code escrow was for a long time a standard feature of contracts between small/medium software companies and large enterprises.

It's actually one of the reasons that open source took off in the early 2000s - if the source was already available all you needed to do was come up with a legal agreement that says something to the effect of "EnterpriseCo has a limited license to use SmallCo's software which reverts to full rights in the event that SmallCo is unable to carry out its obligations", with no need to bother arranging (and paying for) escrow.

That made it easier and cheaper to deal with open source companies, and made escrow seem weird and expensive by comparison. But in the 90s it was almost universal in those sort of contracts.

The Trash 80 was the first computer I could afford. A great little machine and Z80 assembly has a certain simple elegance.

I worked all summer and was able to buy a TRS 80. I could not afford the cassette storage so I'd just type my programs in line by line to run them each time. They were pretty simple.

A snake like line drawer that crashed when it hit the screen edge, stuff like that. I was 12 or 13 and didn't have any mentors but I did know some BASIC from a school program. Really loved that machine.

I never tried ASM on it. Interestingly, the TRS-80 CoCo did not have a Z80, it had a 6809E @ 0.895 / 1.79 MHz. Mine had been upgraded to 64KB of RAM.

Make it permissive enough that 80% of potential users don't need to pay for subscription. 20% of a heck of a lot of people is still a lot.

do not do this please. if you have a good product, people will pay for it. if you don’t, you don’t. don’t optimize for free-loaders

If you have an enormous addressable market then it can pay to build awareness as quickly as possible. Having lots of enthusiastic users will do that. Having a useful free tier is a pretty uncontroversial way to get those users.

Plenty of apps do this - looking at the first browser tab I have open I see gmail which does exactly this.

For a pure client app like an iphone app, you don't have any real "per user" costs, so there are no concerns about going under from the costs of attempting this. It would be very different if you had to pay for server capacity.

correct. never optimize your product, just wait to see if it's a success or not.

Thank you - this has been my plan

I feel like the GP was being sarcastic.

That job was often called a "business analyst" in "the old days".

When I started at IBM back in the 80s in NZ, there were plenty of 1403 printers still in operation, though no 1401 CPUs.

Since they were old even then, and NZ was something of a computing backwater (on a training course I met a guy who's territory of 3 or 4 floors of the world trade center had more machines than my territory of half of the North Island) there were no formal training courses on them, and I was on my own with the manuals and the insights of the gray beards in the company lunch room.

It wasn't until I found Ken Shirrif's magnificent animated explainer https://ibm-1401.info/KenShirriff-1403Animation.html many decades later that I really understood how the machines I had been fixing worked.

In the example of Ukrainians, to protect their families and loved ones.

There's a video of a Finnish clay target champion taking on drones with a shotgun.

The first one gets him because he's unfamiliar with their flight paths.

After that he does better but it clearly shows that you'd have to be an expert to take down a drone with a shotgun.

Also there's a lot of air inside a shotgun spread, so even an on target shot may fail to disable a drone.

I'm reasonably good with clay targets. I would expect that if I was actually asked to take on drones I would need to do some practice on drones before I'd be good at them too. Drones are more expensive than clay targets but they're not particularly expensive and considering the situation I'd be willing to pay the price of a few drones to learn how to shoot them down down in a controlled setting where it's safe.

Shotguns have very short range: if I'm expected to be taking down a drone with a shotgun things are really bad at that point my life is alread in danger. if I hit I may save my life.

We live in a remote area with no surrounding lights, perfect for star watching.

It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.

They are not, especially after twilight, or before dawn.

Indeed. Compare https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03651 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale

> Needing more electricity in a capitalist country literally causes the energy mix to become more green over time.

Perhaps true, but meaningless except as a vanity metric if fossil fuel usage rises as well.

EU and US have had declining total carbon emissions for over 2 decades now. The global rise in total carbon emissions comes from outside the west.