This isn't an accident. Yes, there has been a oil-and-gas boom (fracking, mostly), but it is a great place to do business, so many other non-petro industries have been furiously expanding there in the last 25 years.
Well, they're also terrible at spending state resources despite high taxes (outside of income tax). One of, if not the worst, public education systems in the country. Pretty bad urban planning, too. Decent food and music tho
This. I think people in California (like me) have trouble seeing the things Texas does well because of partisanship. It's bad for California not to see when another state does a thing better.
California's biggest problems are mostly along the lines of "too many people want to live here."
I have plenty of complaints about California governance, many of them conservative coded. But if California is a failed state, it's a failed state that much of the world aspires to be.
I have family in California so I've visited often. It's got beautiful geography, and very pleasant weather most of the time (at least in the areas people have chosen to live: few people voluntarily choose to live in the desert areas). I don't have much personal experience with California's government other than second-hand reports, usually from people leaving the state so you can imagine those reports tend negative. But I suspect that if California's government were better, there would be even more overcrowding problems, i.e. that bad government is actually helping the state (in a small, entirely backwards, way) by keeping many more people from wanting to move there.
I stick with OpenCode Zen (only US providers) and Together.ai (hosting themselves). As interesting as new Chinese models are when they're first released, I wait til they are open source and on US providers.
Briar is dead because it doesn't work on iPhones. It doesn't work on iPhones because iOS will only allow waking the app from background when there's a push notification. Push notifications have to go through Apple's servers, which defeats the purpose of a decentralized app where your messages (and metadata) can't be traced.
What about a "fake push" that does not leak message contents, sender etc.? Fuzz the time the push notification is sent by a random amount of time and you have something plausibly private given the constraints?
Briar is designed to work over 1) tor, 2) ad-hoc wifi, 3) bluetooth. None of those are going to be conducive to sending push notifications through Apple's servers.
You're still dependent on Apple continuing to allow such a use.
If the goal is messaging that avoids government spying or censorship its a lost cause - the government would simply compel Apple to pull the app in their jurisdiction.
That still exposes some metadata. Depending on your threat model, leaking the timing may or may not be a problem.
Also, how do you avoid leaking the sender? You can avoid giving Apple that information by routing the notification through a server, but then that server would know the sender and recipient.
Could come from Apple publicly saying a while back that killing apps doesn't save battery life because apps can't wake in the background. Might be sound advice not to kill apps, but part of that was factually untrue.
Yes, and not only that but you can't even access it via API, you can only use it in Devin (formerly Windsurf).
I'm an OpenCode user, but I'll fall back to Claude Code if I want to use Opus end to end for something, given my company has a subscription. But I'm not using yet another tool and subscription for a model that isn't even winning.
Because Plex provides a way for me to share my server with my friends. They're mostly not very technical, but they can handle "sign up for this free account and install an app and you can stream from my basement like it's Netflix".
Jellyfin has no such solution that I can tell. Stuff like give them access over Tailscale is not the same user friendly option that Plex has. When there's an actual alternative for easily sharing with friends, I'll consider it. Til then I've had a lifetime Plex Pass for around a decade.
> They're mostly not very technical, but they can handle "sign up for this free account and install an app and you can stream from my basement like it's Netflix".
Ironically, every person I've tried to get to sign up so they can view my content failed, because they all would put in a different email address than the one they were invited to use (presumably one they use for signing up stuff). I then have to either re-invite them or tell them to sign up with the original email address.
All but one just gave up. These are somewhat technical users, so perhaps they're too smart for it?
I have a remote Jellyfin setup as a server that streams. It's entirely in the cloud. It's far easier to share with friends as none of them are required to buy a Plex account.
None of mine are required to buy a plex account either. They just need to make a free account. Me running it with Plex Pass means they don't have to pay to stream it.
The people who go through phases are also born to be something for life: adaptable, and used to change. Being good at doing exactly one thing your entire life a certain way has the potentially fatal flaw of having significant issue doing anything else.
I feel like I've lived 3-4 completely different lives so far, but the constant is the ability to adapt to the next one, and still find joy in it while you're there. "Survival is the ability to swim in strange water."
Personally, the AI tools have been transformative for work, but haven't affected how I work much. I have always coded as a team. I'd often do the largest and most complicated parts myself, but work (both at work work and my hobby work) has always been about passing things between colleagues based on what our strengths were and how much time we had.
The AI tools are another colleague. They work incredibly fast, and I do less coding myself now, but my goal was always to solve the problem, not the code itself. The AI tools do a great job most of the time, but they sometimes screw up and need more guidance or me to step in to fix the thing (usually a very small error compared to the whole). If they screw it all up, we might need to start from scratch, or I might need to just do it myself. But that's not most of the time. And then I figure out the thing missing in my process to move them in the right direction, and improve it.
I feel like any software developer used to collaborating with, training, and mentoring other developers knows exactly how to work with AI tools, and the only main difference is how much effort I put into being really nice about it the whole time.
One main thing has changed. Before I would handle the most complicated problems people were having trouble with myself. Now I allow AI to work on them, even if I know I'll have to fix it. The difference is that I care about the time, the strain, and the morale of my coworkers. AI is just getting paid for iterating tokens, so I don't have to feel bad about what I ask it to figure out for me.
Is their interview process Dungeon Crawler Carl? Do you just apply to work at Canonical, and at the 3rd interview you get to pick what position you're applying for?
