I used Little Snitch on Mac a few years ago and liked it, though I wasn't a fan of how (necessarily) deep it had to be in the OS to work. It felt like one of those things where, the moment you have any kind of network connectivity issue, it's the first thing you need to disable to troubleshoot because it's the weirdest thing you're doing.

I guess what I'd really like is a middleware box or something that I could put on my home network, but would then still give the same user experience as the normal app. I don't want to have to log into some web interface and manually add firewall rules after I find something not working. I like the pop-ups that tell you exactly when you're trying to do something that is blocked, and allow you to either add a rule or not.

I'm probably straddling some gray area between consumer-focused and enterprise-focused feature sets, but it would be neat.

I am the same, used Little Snitch for a few years back in the late 2000s, I think like 2010 until a few years back when I moved fulltime to Linux. Back then, my parents had an iMac and I was the designated "IT" person to keep it running efficiently. My siblings had a bad habit of installing games and hack software on it for their games. I ended up purchasing a license and after the first few hours/days of configuring allow/block lists, it worked pretty well. It earned the label of "Little B*ch" from them since it would stop their gaming hacking apps from connecting and wrecking havoc. Eventually I learned to keep them on a standard user account and separate admin for installing software.

Long story you didn't ask for. Like I said, I haven't used Little Snitch in a while. I'll give this a whirl this weekend. What I have done over the past few years is run AdGuard Home on a min home server. This has helped keep ads undercontrol in our hoursehold and I have an easy "turn off adguard for 10 mins" in homeassistant for the wife so she can do some shopping online since it can occasionally break some sites, but overall they tolerate adguard and think it's a good middle ground. I have a few block lists, nothing too crazy or strict to avoid breaking most sites. On the desktops/laptops, they all run FireFox w uBlock origin.

How deep it was in the OS was exactly what I liked about it. I only wished it were open source so I know what exactly is happening with that level of access.

I’ve also wanted something like this. The challenge is with an external appliance you lose awareness of which process is initiating the request.

This is solvable to some degree but requires varying degrees of new complexity depending how smooth of a user experience you’re aiming for.

And also: political organizations and churches always must pay up front.

Agreed. Another important lesson I learned when delivering code to a non-profit org, and them asking me to convert my final invoices into "donations" to the org.

I'm thinking more like Player 2 just operates a shop vac and aims the nozzle at the appropriate area.

Though I guess if that would work, they'd just use those loud suction toilets they use on airplanes.

Shop vac tube would be gross fast and need regular maintenance. Dog poop bag is entirely disposable. Throw it behind the spacecraft and use it as propulsion.

Counter-point: I often raise the same question of people with human therapists. I do not get strong responses.

An LLM is completely unable to make that determination. They can’t even see you. So much information is lost when it’s text-only.

Where are you often asking this question/getting these weak responses?

You don't ask the therapist. You ask the person seeking therapy.

I read somewhere that the reason they don't typically use IT networking cables / tech is because normal IT infrastructure is a lot less strict with things like packet loss. It's actually not a huge deal to drop packets here and there, especially if any given component is at capacity. But in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all.

That said, I'm sure there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper. And I think they did something like that with CyberTruck.

> ...in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all....there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper.

I know CAN is a thing for a while now, and in the aviation world they have ethernet-derived standards like AFDX etc. But for some reason cables abound.

Meh, even in the IT industry cables abound.

That's kind of my concern so far. We haven't seen a lot of big AI deployment success cases, but of the few mildly successful ones we HAVE heard of, they're 100% about cost saving / perceived efficiency and never about actually making a _better_ product or service.

I think it factors into why public perception is increasingly anti-AI. It'd be one thing if people were losing jobs, but on the other hand, their daily chores were done by a robot. Instead, people are losing (or fearing losing) their jobs, while increasingly having to fight with AI chatbots for customer support and similar cost-center use cases.

It's like AI is the "high fructose corn syrup" of tech. Nobody's arguing the output is better--it's just a lot cheaper and faster to get there, so that's its legacy. Making things cheaper and worse.

I'm called by a name that is not the same as my legal name. I somehow got an Apple Developer account during the first few years of it with my preferred name, but it had my parents' house as the mailing address.

I was essentially told that I could update the mailing address but going through the steps for that process would result in the name on my account being changed to the legal name. And so today, it still has my parents' mailing address. Thankfully they haven't moved.

I've still got a phantom child on my Apple account because when I tried to create a child's account many years ago for my son it somehow messed up and used the current year instead of his birth year. Support said too bad, no possible way to fix that. So I had to create another account for my real son, and while he grew up and moved out, my phantom son still lives with us for another nine years until it is old enough that I can delete it.

I hope he at least gets his own cake on his birthday.

I sure do. I hook up Claude to my browser via MCP and have it review and give feedback for my family and friends' projects. It's a win/win.

We build pacemakers, AEDs, flight control software, and other mission-critical life-and-death software. The idea that we'll just forever keep the system run by specially trained humans with known and foreseeable faults because poorly designed software could fail is head-in-sand unreasonable.

Look what happened when the power went out in SF and the Waymos just stopped in the street because they were confused and there weren’t enough humans to direct them. Now imagine that but with planes that will fall out of the sky when they run out of fuel since they can’t land. Automating this is pants on head retarded.

That sounds like a poorly thought-out implementation.

An example of a poorly thought-out implementation elsewhere does not exclude the possibility of coming up with a better one than humans coordinating with their mouths over radio.

> I would be interested to see if there are already statistics showing academic success.

It's fair to expect that data, though honestly at this point, it might also be reasonable to expect data that increased screens IMPROVE the outcomes before allowing or issuing them.