Apple isn’t the darling “it” product it’s been in years past.
Apps are addictive but not enriching our lives like we once thought.
Now you want to add advertising?
If a new product comes along and hits the right notes—maybe the e-ink variety, or Cat’s Android with thermal camera. I have the four previous, so I don’t imagine it as a trauma to step off the merry-go-round for my next phone.
I was thinking about this after watching YouTube short verticals for about 2 hours last night: ~2min clips from different TV series, movies, SNL skits, music insider clips (Robert Trujillo auditions for Metallica, 2003. LOL). My friends and I often relate in regurgitated human sound bites. Which is fine when I’m sitting with friends driving to a concert. Just wasting time.
I’m thinking about this time suck, and my continual return/revisiting to my favorite hard topics in philosophy over and over. It’s certainly what we humans do. If I think deeply and critically about something, it’s from the perspective of a foundation I made for myself from reading and writing, or it was initialized by a professor and coursework.
Isn’t it all regurgitated thinking all the way down?
Creative thinking requires an intent to be creative. Yes, it may be a delusion to imagine oneself as creative, one's thoughts to be original, but you have to begin with that idea if you're going to have any chance of actually advancing human knowledge. And the stronger wider higher you build your foundation-- your knowledge and familiarity with the works of humans before your time-- the better your chance of successful creativity, true originality, immortality.
Einstein thinks nothing of import without first consuming Newton and Galileo. While standing on their shoulders, he could begin to imagine another perspective, a creative reimaging of our physical universe. I'm fairly sure that for him, like for so many others, it began as a playful, creative thought stream, a What If juxtoposition between what was known and the mystery of unexplored ideas.
Your intent to create will make you creative. Entertain yourself and your thoughts, and share when you dare, and maybe we'll know if you're regurgitating or creating. But remember that you're the first judge and gatekeeper, and the first question is always, are you creative?
> “…agents getting stuck in loops, apologizing, and wasting time. We tried to manage this … So we built Zenflow…Cross-Model Verification, Parallel Execution, Dynamic Workflows”
So you got me with the hook, and you bullet three features, but where’s the resolution of the hook issue? You left me with the hook?? What am I missing?
I think the easiest is just to try (it's a free download that would work with your CC/Codex/Gemini CLI). Pick a mid-size task that you would typically throw at an agent (not something trivial, but also not something that will bring your mid-size engineer to his knees), and run it in Zenflow's "Spec and Build" mode.
For us, in this scenario:
1) the pipeline helps agent perform better
2) reviewing the spec is much more convenient than when juggling between TUI and text editor (esp. if you are running 5 of those pipelines in parallel)
3) if you configure the reviewer in the settings, cross-agent review saves us from some of the minutae of guiding/aligning the agent
Lmk if I misunderstood your question, happy to help.
> “I'd be wary of using AI to summarize like this and expecting accurate insights.”
Sure, but when do you have accurate results when using an iterative process? It can happen at the beginning or at the end when you’re bored, or have exhausted your powers of interrogation. Nevertheless, your reasoning will tell you if the AI result is good, great, acceptable, or trash.
For example, you can ask Chat—Summarize all 50 with names, dates and 2-3 sentence summaries and 2-3 pull quotes. Which can be sufficient to jog your memory, and therefore validate or invalidate the Chat conclusion.
That’s the tool, and its accuracy is still TBD. I for one am not ready to blindly trust our AI overlords, but darn if a talking dog isn’t worth my time if it can make an argument with me.
Doesn’t have to be a commercial solution to change the game. There’s a lot of room between the commercial product and ‘Our end users… current "system" is Excel.’ Especially if the market moves towards making useful APIs at the ERP and vendors endpoints.
And how would the outcome be different after a couple of years than the internally built Excel file with VBScript, Access and VB6 apps built by non developers back in the day?
I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.
While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.
Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).
The stories of online-only service failures are legion. And yet if you can get face to face support, even one person can do so much. The gap is infuriating.
I didn’t notice, do you have a Brick and Mortar Apple Store you can visit? I can’t help thinking this as I read the post.
Of course this is not a physical hardware issue. Where a store employee could just hand you, say, a new phone. This is on the level of getting a slot on Tim Cook’s day planner, though I imagine the person with the ability to fix this is an underling many levels down Cook on the org chart.
Yeah. I have a dis-a-bility. It’s now 2200 and I’ve been working since 0830. My eyes are tired and these 8’s look like 0’s, 5’s look like 6’s. What a tool.
Apps are addictive but not enriching our lives like we once thought.
Now you want to add advertising?
If a new product comes along and hits the right notes—maybe the e-ink variety, or Cat’s Android with thermal camera. I have the four previous, so I don’t imagine it as a trauma to step off the merry-go-round for my next phone.
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