Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
>>Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
This, too, is the problem with movies and TV shows today. They worry so much about offending anyone they lose the interest of everyone. When was the last time you laughed hard and out loud?
I'm glad I'm not alone in missing native apps. I get that it's easier to code a note-taking Electron app, but every time I look at a Linux terminal app written in JavaScript it makes me want to cry.
I know I'm beating a dead HN horse here, but how the hell is it possible that megabytes of embedded JavaScript in websites, to the point that LinkedIn uses about half the RAM I had for my first computer loading 32 MB of JavaScript files. Jjira loads 50 (!) MB of javascript, enough to include the uncompressed version of War and Peace 16 times. That's the size of a full installation of the entire Windows 95 operating system. GitLab's static landing page is 13MB of JavaScript, larger than that of Twitter.
What the hell are we doing here? Why can I spin up a 100 MHz, 8MB RAM VM with a hard drive size that's 1/16th of your entry level MacBook's RAM and have apps open immediately? I understand some backsliding as things get more high level, but a website loading 50 megabytes of JavaScript, to me, is like a bright neon sign that screams "something has gone wrong terribly here". Obviously programs, websites and operating systems have become incredibly more complex but your $200 A-series Samsung phone has about 8 cores at 2.2 GHz each. A $200 processor when Windows 95 was released had one core at 0.1GHz. making the processing power about 164x faster. Keep in mind this $200 includes a fully functioning computer in the palm of your hand.
The actual CPU part for a midrange phone like the Samsung A15 5G is the Dimension 6100+, which costs all of $25 bucks.
There must be some sort of balance between ease of prototyping, creating and deploying an application without bundling it with Electron or building websites that use tens of megabytes of a scripting language for seemingly nothing. Especially when we can see that a fast, usable website (see this very website or the blogs of many of the people who post here, compared to Reddit for your average medium or substack blog).
How the hell do we fix this? The customers clearly don't want this bloat, companies clearly shouldn't want it either (see research that indicates users exposed to a 200 millisecond load delay on Google, performed 0.2-0.6% fewer searches, and effect that remained even when the artificial delay was removed. This was replicated by Microsoft, Amazon and others. It's frequently brought up that Amazon has said that every 100 milliseconds of page load time cost them 1% in sales, though it's hard to find definitive attribution to this), programmers should hopefully not want to create crappy websites just like mechanics should hopefully not want to install brake pads that squeal every time the user breaks.
This got way longer than the two sentences I expected the post to be, so my apologies.
> The customers clearly don't want this bloat, companies clearly shouldn't want it either
Both of these statements are false. If this was really the case, then competing company/dev could implement native counterpart and just siphon all the users – I've only seen this happen with CLI tools (e.g. esbuild, rollup, uv, etc.)
Most of the JS bloat comes from really aggressive analytics, error tracking, and a/b testing. Not many developers are willing or given approval to remove these features up for smaller bundle sizes.
Sublime Text? Sure, doesn't have the long tail of extensions, but surely most people don't need those. The biggest issue with ST being the fact that it costs money...
For those who are unaware, this is exactly what Grok does. The default is an auto mode, then when you ask a question it starts researching (which is visible to the user) and if it's using the expert mode but you don't really need all that jazz, it has a "Quick Answer" button right above the prom entry field, and if it's using a "Quick Answer" mode then it has "Expert" button and the same place, and you are able to toggle between them mid answer and it will adjust the model (or model parameters, I'm not sure how it works under the hood).
It's pretty good with the auto chooser, but I appreciate the manual choice available so in-your-face and especially not having it restart the query completely but rather convert the output to either Quick or Expert.
This is on the Web UI, can't speak for other harnesses. I do find that it's quite good with the citations and has a fairly generous free tier, even on Expert mode. (As for who sits at the top, I am indeed put off by Musk's clear interference in several cases involving Grok, nor do my personal values align with the majority of his, but today's Grok is definitely less MechaHitler and more reliable than it was before.)
Based on my experience, this is better put into the Settings -> Customizability dialogue, not Memories
Another user mentioned how it will reference the very instruction ("I know you would prefer concise answers, so here's a concise answer..") but that makes sense when you realize that Memories are more for things like "user lives in San Francisco and is new in town and is open to recommendations of third places to meet people" so if it's answering the question about the best coffee places in n SF, it would make sense for ChatGPT to finish with "Also, given that you are new to San Francisco, and your interest in both boardgames and meeting new people, have you considered visiting [place]? It's a local coffee shop that also rents out board games, with a Thursday evening theme where you are partnered with strangers. It might be a good way to make new people that enjoy similar things!"
If you consider adding Memories us adding something to the system prompt, it won't make very much sense a lot of the time, because you might forget what you wrote and then be surprised when your model suddenly suggests jigsaw puzzles when you mentioned that you're stressed building a compiler. Hence it tells the user the context of the memory that it's using and why, whereas if you added to Customizability I've never seen it leak out like that.
If you add to Memories "user is a software engineer and prefers Rust to C/C++" it may say something like "By the way, since you prefer Rust I would recommend [this development path]" but if you put it into Customizability as "do not suggest C/C++ for software projects unless it's the only way, use Rust or Go instead" it will likely start down the path of suggesting and researching Rust from the very beginning without explaining to you your own instructions.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the Customizability instructions (mine say "be concise, do not be afraid to correct the user or use occasional dry humor. Speak frankly and tell the user if they may be making a mistake and suggest other courses of action" whereas Memories contain simple facts about me, i e. ("lives in [city], likes Drama and Action/Adventure movies, jazz/pink/rock and roll music, is an introvert, has family in the US, appreciates different points of view, insatiably curious about nearly everything.")
Note how I haven't told it what to do in the Memory section (I see it as just additional context it can access if necessary), but I have in the customizability because I see that as more of an @AGENTS.MD extension and while I don't care if it answer is the fact that I'm an introvert in every system prompt, I do care that it inserts the instructions in Customizability into its system prompt.
Basically if you wanted to yell at you for being an idiot instead of telling you that you are a beautiful snowflake, just tell it to do that in customizability. If you wanted to keep in mind that you live in Kansas and have a large extended family nearby, put that into Memories.
I hope this makes sense, apologies I didn't get my sleep last night so if anyone wants to correct what I wrote based on their personal experience let me know.
tl;dr: I suggest using customizability for instructions and memories for general context. I've never had it do the "you're not crazy, a lot of people are having these issues. Let's work through them together.." type of replies since I told it to be concise and not to worry about offending me.
I apologize for resurrecting a fairly old thread (I originally came across it via Googling the Claude Ad announcement), and this has nothing to do with the main post anyway but my desire not to further derail things is butting up against my pigheadedness as famously exemplified in xkcd.com/386
You wrote "the majority of US citizens support ICE", later specifying it was after the controversial killings. I want to fact-check your claim, because if I came here from Google I think others may too and so far there has been no pushback on this apart from "no, they don't support ICE" which is problematic.
The Navigator Research poll is probably the most interesting in terms of actually visualizing the data [5], it used to be at the bottom but I moved this section to the top. It's an excellent visualization, my eye was especially drawn to the incredibly stark divide between the MAGA-Republicans vs. non-MAGA Republicans. I've never seen it in such contrast and I wonder how that will play out. Regardless, that's outside of the topic of this comment, wich is already too long.
The poll (n=~1,000) conducted around the five following days states that among all those polled, the Net Favorable rating, asked as:
Please indicate how favorable or unfavorable you are to: ICE, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
was:
June 30 '25 - 8
Dec 8 '25 -14
Jan 12 '26 -20
Feb 1 '26 -22
As an added curio, among Democrats it shifted -12 points, but among Republicans it shifted -17 points. Make of that what you will.
A poll released on February 5th and conducted January 27th-30th (n=1,462) by Marist University's MaristPoll organization states [1]:
62% of Americans say the actions of ICE are making Americans somewhat less safe or much less safe. 37% think the actions of ICE are making Americans much more safe or somewhat more safe
The following information is from Pages 14-16 of the PDF [2]. The specific question was:
Do you approve or disapprove of the job Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing?
33% Approve
60% Disapprove
7% Unsure
The poll is extremely along the party lines in some respects (e.g. only 2% of the people who answered 'Approve' voted for Kamala in 2024), but I feel like that's to be expected. At the same time, while people who approve of ICE definitely didn't vote for Kamala, people who voted for Trump are not extremely strong supporters, with 24% of 2024 Trump voters answering either Disapprove or Unsure (18% and 6% respectively).
Some other interesting correlations are that while recent ICE actions are generally very unpopular among Democrats and somewhat popular among Republicans, the usual rural/urban differences which are usually much better predictors for how someone will vote, far ahead of correlations with education, race or income. In this case "approve" difference between Big city (31%) and Rural (43%) was only 12 points. Interestingly, the approval rating almost follows a reverse bell curve (?) in terms of population density:
Big city 31%
Small city 31%
Suburban 28%
Small town 40%
Rural 43%
Again, apologies for the digression, I figured maybe someone can make some sense of those numbers. Another question:
How would you describe the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in enforcing immigration laws? Do you think they have:
65% Gone too far
12% Not gone far enough
22% Or are their actions about right
1% Vol: unsure
This can be summarized in a bunch of different ways, but it's not dishonest to say that 2/3rds of Americans think that ICE has "gone too far", which heavily contradicts your statement. Everything after this is kind of just because I felt three is the minimum number of sources to thoroughly dismiss your assertion.
Here are the results from June, 2025 for the exact same question, with the change in percentage from June, 2025 to January, 2026 in brackets.
54% Gone too far [+11%]
18% Not gone far enough [-06%]
26% Or are their actions about right [-04%]
1% Vol: Unsure
Ipsos released a poll [3] on January 27th, conducted between January 23rd-25th (n=1,139) with a self-reported margin of error of +/- 3.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
Immigration-related outtakes:
Only 10% of those polled picked "Immigration" as their selection to a 17-option question that asked "In your opinion, what is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?" By comparison, 15% picked the "Economy, unemployment and jobs", 12% picked "Political violence and extremism" and 16% picked "Threats to democratic values and norms" (Page 1)
Overall, do you think efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deal with unauthorized immigration in the country... (Page 10)
Go too far 58%
Do not go far enough 12%
Are about right 26%
Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling the following issues? Immigration (Page 3)
Strongly approve 26%
Somewhat approve 14%
Somewhat disapprove 10%
Strongly disapprove 43%
Generally speaking, would you say the following things are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track? Immigration policy (Page 5)
Right direction 35%
Wrong track 51%
Don’t know 11%
P.S. I don't claim this comment to be unbiased, I clearly "cherry-picked" certain facts, but they were not out of context nor did I massage the numbers, the reason I phrased it this way was because it was a direct rebuttal to the claim that most Americans support ICE [even after the shootings].
As someone who only occasionally takes photos of mature, or empty streets (I just find them more aesthetically pleasing, especially if they're empty at night, nothing to do with the topic of discussion), I have no dog in this fight whatsoever,
May I ask where you are taking out your camera to experience these results? By "where," I mean both what part of the world/culture you are in and the specific location(s) (e.g. weddings, streets, public transit, work, at a friend's whom you know well, at an acquaintance's).. you get the point.
Despite the fact that it mostly runs in powershell, it still has a better UX then the majority of Microsoft apps. (Except for the confusion about their only GUI pop-up window, you put a check mark next to the built-in apps you want removed, which was led me to reread the instructions to make sure I had it right the first time I used it).
It has both built-in sane default for people who just want to debloat Windows 10/11, along with a "custom" option which takes less than 60 seconds to get through but gives you all the customizability you need.
(No connection with the author except mad respect.)
I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads
And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.
Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.