Robert Greene said it right: “If you don’t feel frustrated when you’re learning something, you’re not learning. You’re deluding yourself.”

LLMs and agents are computer programs. We should use that language a little more often.

Sigh. Microsoft's solution for Intune remote unattended is, "Just use the AVD agent". But MS made no effort to integrate the AVD agent with Intune. Even the MSI downloads must be repackaged as Win32, so they can't be pushed via policy sets.

Microsoft stopped doing these due to the cost of maintenance. Equipment in data centers, GPUs in particular, need to be replaced every 3 years or so.

Underrated things about NJ - 1) NJ is deeply, deeply unpretentious. It filters out pinkies up people better than anywhere else in the country. 2) NJ is hilarious. My least funny friend in high school is top 1% funny any other place in the country. 3) Food in NJ is amazing. Especially in the suburbs. Strip mall meals in NJ mog just about any other suburban cuisine in the country.

Truth is, if a coworker is shamed for their weight, in 99% of cases, it does not give them fuel to lose weight. Instead, the shame will stress them, and make them fall back on their stress-coping habits. Which is, for obese people, eating.

Two very important caveats to the (excellent) new working paper on school phone bans from Alcott et al. (tom-dee.github.io/files/w351…). First, the treatment—Yondr pouch adoption—only led to a .3 log point drop (~26%) in phone visits by year 2 (pg. 28, screenshot 1). I neither find it surprising this didn’t yield a significant effect on test scores, nor think it’s sufficient to rule out such an effect either with more time, or a stricter intervention. Second, it’s a huge deal that a drop this small led to significant increases in subjective well-being across middle and high school, in the former’s case of a whole (school-level) SD in year 1 (pg. 33 and pg. 50, screenshots 2 and 3)! The latter is to my knowledge the largest well-being effect ever found for a phone-use intervention. Very, very hard to see how anyone could use this study to argue against phone bans, rather than for them.

A UCLA researcher found U.S. building codes lack cost-benefit analysis and accumulate rules without removing them. The result: mid-rise buildings cost 55% more per square foot than single-family homes — a gap other wealthy countries don't see. cayimby.org/blog/shining-a-l…

In case you missed it in the February KB5077241 update, Microsoft quietly added two new PowerShell cmdlets for Secure Boot verification: Get-SecureBootSVN - checks the Secure Version Number of your firmware and bootloader and reports compliance status. This tells you whether your device is protected against boot manager rollback attacks (CVE-2023-24932). Get-SecureBootUEFI -Decoded - finally displays Secure Boot keys and certificates in a human-readable format.

Working on this is part of my new job! Even more to come blogs.windows.com/windows-in…

It costs you zero dollars to be head & shoulders above the rest.

Just launched my Silent Install Library. A searchable stash of silent install + uninstall commands for 1,400+ Windows apps. Built for packagers, Intune admins, and anyone tired of digging through old docs and random forum posts. Check it out adamgell.com/tools/silent-in…

To everyone terrified that AI is going break the world: Go into a real community outside of a major tech hub and people watch. Most people in the world, like 99% of all humans, are relatively poor, not using screens 16 hours a day, and have absolutely no idea who Jack Dorsey is

No surprise: A YouTuber thinks YouTube format is optimal for learning. Meanwhile, parents are rebelling *against* tech in schools due to learning *loss*. YT videos are one of the worst ways to educate. When was the last time you even remembered the details of a YT video?

Opposition to building data centers might be irrational at the mircoscale (they're just gonna be bulilt somewhere else). But at the mesoscale, people are profoundly doubtful about whether AI will broadly benefit society and that's not so irrational at all.

From an eng responsible for AI tooling at a mid-sized company (100+ devs): "Our execs read a blog post about Claude Code and ask: 'why are we not all using it?' Me: well, none of you would approve going from $40/mo on GitHub to $65/mo on Cursor... Claude Code is $150/mo."

In my community, we get along just fine voting for whomever, and moving along in our day-to-day lives being good to each other. To me, that's what America is about. Don't let clickbait & algorithms make you hate your neighbor, while it makes someone else a fortune.

Baseball is not selling you a sport it is selling you a warm summer night outside. A ballpark is supposed to be a setting for summer You don't even have to pay attention. You can just take in the atmosphere or walk around. eat. whatever. if a team has low attendance, it means the stadium is wrong, the neighborhood it sits in is wrong It's a referendum on placemaking

AI being a bubble was immediately obvious upon finding out how expensive it is to run the servers, considering that none of these services show anywhere near enough ads to fund that level of financial burden.

No gonna lie, I'm the biggest Apple hater for very very good reasons, but their last research paper explaining why they weren't interested in pursuing LLMs seems more and more like its gonna be correct.