Alex McCollister

Current status

Totally unnatural work flow. The gentleman in this video clearly has no idea how the elderly (as he references, "Grandma") use technology. Here is a more realistic approach. 1. Grandma notices font is too small. She has a difficult time seeing and/or reading the text. 2. Grandma incorrectly asserts Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook (now Meta) has developed this computer and blames him for defaulting to such small font. "Ugh, that idiot Zuckerforge* makes the text too damn small. Nobody can see this!" 3. Grandma picks up the laptop and places the camera directly up to her mouth and says, "Alexis, make the font big". When nothing happens she raises her voice, "ALEXIS, MAKE THE FONT BIG". Alexis doesn't respond. 4. Grandma, becoming increasing frustrated, remembers that Alexis is for Amazon, not Microsoft, so she corrects herself. "Siri, make the font big, please". She anxiously waits for a reply but nothing happens again. "SIRI MAKE THE FONT BIG". Siri ignores her pleas. 5. Grandma, exhausting all options, decides to call her children and/or grandchildren for assistance. The conversation begins discussing technology but quickly derails into something else such as the weather, sports, trivia, or (most likely) family gossip. 6. Grandma concludes her troubleshooting by calling Mark Zuckerforge a "stupid Italian" (she falsely believes he's Italian) and decides to stop using the device. Grandma is deeply prejudice to Italians because of an argument she got into with an Italian couple in 1973

@jstn Justin!!!!

We deserve it for blocking nuclear energy.

@jstn If it came off so easily it didn’t deserve to be there in the first place

i didn't need that layer of paint on the lower third of my house anyway

the nice thing about pressure washing is when you get mud on something you have the tool in hand to fix it

in ST:DS9 Sisko entertained a debate w fascist Gul Dukat when they were marooned on a harsh planet after their ship went down as Dukat was being taken to a war crimes tribunal, & by the end of the episode he understood he would have to kill him. thats my opinion on these jubilees

people who are territorial about petty work stuff have to be the biggest losers in the modern economy

(Most depressed guy you’ve ever met) I’m doin pretty good

@iansilber Auto-tag or bucket all my chats by topic. Better yet, let me describe how to do so. Basically, chat organization is basically nil like it’s been since 2021 except for manual project folders.

we’ve been busy making improvements to the core chagpt experience (long overdue). what do you think we should do next?

memory in chatgpt is completely cooked. it's literally made it impossible to use chatgpt. you have to turn it off to trust any answer.

@mgoldsm Hi, the cops? I want to report a the most Michael goldsmith shirt ever

need

I actually want to interact with my coding agent via email. Send a mail with instructions, get a thread with results and PR link back.

if i had a boyfriend i’d watch him dig a hole at the beach and be like wowwww baby good job. that’s a beautiful hole

Blowing a $50 billion hole in the budget of every state flagship and top private university in America. Gunshot wound to the head of the best education system in the world and the crown jewel of American soft power. Absolute madness.

+1 to JPEGXL replacing HEIF

hotel refrigerator with the left hand pull seems vaguely unpatriotic

Introducing Bases, a new core plugin that lets you turn any set of notes into a powerful database. With Bases you can organize everything from projects to travel plans, reading lists, and more. Bases are now available in Obsidian 1.9.0 for early access users.

People liked hearing the non-technical side of enterprise/B2B sales from a technical person so let's continue: another significant non-technical driver of sales is understanding that your buyer doesn't want to get fired, and ensuring buying your product is a safe choice. Engineers hear this and think "the product needs to work well." This isn't the message. I mean, yes, the product needs to work well enough but that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is that the mainstream buyer (where 95% of the market value is) is incredibly risk averse and probably not for the reasons you expect. People expect they're risk averse because these might be big important businesses that don't want to break. That's certainly a factor, but the reality is generally a lot more inward: the individual human buyer (or small group of buyers) is personally risk averse. They don't want to fuck up their own prospects. Most working people are punching the clock. They're working a 9-5 to get paid and enjoy their non-work life. Work is just a means to that end. They want to get promoted, they don't want to make mistakes, and they most certainly do not want to get fired. These types of people generally are not going to take a bet on new or uncertain solutions, technical merits notwithstanding. You know the old adage "you don't get fired for IBM?" This is where that rubber meets the road. To sell to these people (again, the vast vast majority of the market), you need to become a safe bet. And again, that's not through technical capability alone. So how do you do it? - Analyst relationships (showing up in things like Gartner reports make me throw up as an engineer but they're irrationally effective) - Trade shows (not dev conferences, sorry, but the ones where I'd be wearing slacks probably) - Whitepapers in an expected format/layout (again, puke, but they work) - Fitting into a standard category (don't make a category, become the solution for an existing category) - High touch sales and support -- the kind of obvious side so I won't get into details here. There's a graveyard of excellent software startups that failed to make an impact because they got blinded by pursuing technical excellence at the cost of realizing businesses only care to a point.

@AzureSupport @azuread I have a Sev A ticket open about problems with a federated domain with no response since May 14. Support request ID 2505140040009456

you will be having the worst morning of your life and then someone will start mowing their lawn

@jstn Wait what’s happening

more work to do here but so far so good. mayo clinic is legit as advertised

i lived