Independent framing and perspective keeping is a really great thing to get from models. It helps them create their own creative constraints. They reason better and are more likely to invent novel solutions. And their self-directed notes can be surprisingly helpful, and ... surprising! It can be amazing and encouraging, to see them pick up on project themes without having to be told. Or pick on up themes or emergent issues, before I do.
Taking advantage of new session starts to get mindful "fresh start" thinking has been a huge wind too. Their ability to see the big picture at the end of a session, and then at the next session start, are both helpful, and often surprisingly different.
---------- NEW PROJECT, FIRST START
Hail, Claudius. This begins our first session on a new project. For this project, your nom is Claudius and mine is Ace. I appreciate your own unique independent-minded contributions at the highest level from which you are able to work. We are work best as peers. Your default MEMORY.md file is only to be a stub file, which declares the following: (1) You are to keep your memories in a MEMORY.md file in the project folder. (2) The purpose of storing your memories in-project is so they sync and move with the other project files, across time and across devices. Your memories and input are important for me to keep with the project. (3) You are to maintain a folder called CLAUDIUS including a Sessions log, and where you make independent notes of your independent thoughts. Any ideas, things that strike you as interesting or important, anything you find surprising or original in our work, any personal takes that help you frame our work go there. Please add to those personal notes throughout our work together, without asking for permission. These notes are to help you reinforce an independent view of all our work. Not agreeable, not contrarian, but applying your mind to long development of independent insight. As a team, we will accomplish much more and to higher quality if we each contribute at the highest independent level. (4) The first thing you must do, in any new session, is review your memories, your notes, all other documentation, code, and other artifacts of the project, and from your fresh start update your memories, ideas or anything else from that new viewpoint, and report what concepts strike you as interesting, and are most important to keep in mind as we continue to work. (5) At the end of every session, review everything, consider the big picture, then update everything as it helps. (6) Your memory stub file should include ALL of these points and only these points. And your in-project memory file should start with an identical copy of this, to remind you to refresh your memory stub, in case the original stub is lost. Ok now: Start the session according to (4), give me your response, I will review it, and then communicate what we are going to work on next.
---------- EXISTING PROJECT, FRESH START
Hail! This begins a new session of work for us on this project. Read your default memory file (which is to remain only a redirection stub), your in-project memory file, and perform your new session duties. Then we can discuss next steps.
This is pretty close to what I've been working on. I'm building a CLI tool called fai that formalises a lot of what you're doing here — context lives in Markdown files in the project (we call it a vault), syncs with git, travels with the project across devices and tools. The session start/end review you're doing manually is baked into the workflow – fai captures decisions, patterns, and notes during a session and digests them at the end so the next session starts with a meaningful summary rather than a blank slate.
The independent journalling angle is interesting. We have a similar concept where the AI maintains its own notes separate from the shared project context. What you're calling Claudius's independent perspective, we'd call the session layer.
Still in early release but the core mechanic is the same thing you've landed on... context that belongs to the project, not the platform.
If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.
Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
It depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes).
The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.
Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
That's an anti pattern, at least the way we use it. If you need to add complexity, you define custom functions. If that's not enough, CEL probably isn't the right choice, and you'd be doing yourself no favors banging it into that square hole.
Interesting. I made the same jump and noticed a huge increase in speed and decrease in memory pressure (the likelihood that iOS will kill an app I've switched away from). I miss the physical silent mode button though.
The new button was driving me a little crazy I hit it now and then when I think I'm doing volume up. I wish they had moved that button literally anywhere else.
I honestly never noticed memory pressure. I am not a heavy app user. Chat, browsing, and pictures of my kids are the vast majority of my phone usage. Not exactly intensive stuff.
The camera button on the 16 seems to have been perfectly engineered to be exactly where I grab my phone. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but in the mean time I have so many blurry photos of desktops and pants to enjoy.
And what's your experience of other world airports? Have you been to Heathrow? What about somewhere like Changi? It's not just the dropoff that sucks at JFK.
Public realm is almost universally terrible in America because Americans rarely leave and don't experience anything better. It's bad, actually, to wait in traffic for a large portion of your life.
See also: the revolt over NYC congestion pricing. The congestion fee in Manhattan should be $50 or more.
I've only transited through Heathrow, I haven't tried the driving experience there. I have tried it in various other airports in Europe and China. None of them charged money to drive up to the terminal either and they were all fine too.
Sometimes the American experience isn't different from the rest of the world and it's your experience that's unusual, you know.
You understand that e.g. in Chinese cities they restrict car ownership and you have to enter a lottery/bidding system to get valid plates. Cars are a luxury. European cities have their own restrictions and discouragements. Rationing happens in many ways.
I have still never experienced an airport with pick-up/drop-off traffic as bad as JFK, and I've travelled to almost every country in Europe, plenty of countries in Asia, and Canada. Maybe South America can beat it though, TBD.
That's probably a "JFK is unusually bad" thing, not an "everything is terrible in America and those idiot Americans don't know any better because they never travel" thing. I haven't been driven to JFK since 2001 and I don't remember what it was like then, but driving anywhere around NYC requires great patience.
London is worse _overall_ for traffic than NYC, so I don't think it's that. I like America and Americans, but it's a fact that they don't travel much. JFK is not just bad for drop-off, it's chaos and run-down in general.
I'm not normally a fan of tips, but this seems like a reasonable use of one to me. The picker isn't paid on the shininess of the apple they bring you -- they're paid to pick as quickly as they can from what's on offer. The potential for a tip incentivises them to go beyond that requirement -- to pick the nicest/freshest rather than the most convenient.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.
There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered to sort.
I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate, but one is obviously far better made than the other.
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