The design looks cool, but it surfaces the app launchers as the protagonists of my workflow. I feel that it would be better if it was more about open windows or something in this direction.

Who wants to be a co-founder with me on a company that's focused on just making dumb appliances? We can start with TVs - just remove all the smart stuff, make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device, and that's it. Start building trust with consumers and find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed. It's just a boring company forever.

Economy of scale would be against us, but maybe there is a way to surpass it. Fun thought exercise :)

> find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed

I have no idea how to solve this. The pressure to cash out just gets stronger as the business succeeds more. Even starting the "business" as a non-profit is no guarantee, as we've seen with OpenAI!

You could certainly create a pro-user EULA that specifically locks in your company's ideals and forbids reneging on them in the future. This is essentially what the GPL is - it's an end user license agreement that is exceptionally user friendly.

Pro-user EULAs just aren't popular because they limit future monetization paths for the company, but it sounds like that is exactly what you want.

Agreed. This is the hardest problem and I don't know how to solve it either.

Would it be possible to structure the company so that it can never be sold in this fashion?

Maybe something related with prediction markets, like punishing the company heavily if it ever betrays these core values. Just thinking out loud.

Is this idea viable? Who are these smart consumers and do they really exist in everyday life?

Smart consumers of this flavor are a minority but they exist. People who care can already bypass the "smart" features of mainstream TVs, thereby enjoying low prices and negating the privacy risks. Or they can pair a large computer monitor and separate audio system that never had smart features to begin with. To make the business work you need smart consumers who are privacy-conscious and are willing to pay more for it instead of doing a little more work on their own.

I think if you went in a Framework direction (opensource, high quality hardware, techie oriented, etc.) you would be able to make it work for a small high end market, particularly if you aimed it having a great "pc-connected" experience.

It is a bet on two things:

1. the enshitification of smart devices would continue progressing and, at some point, our product would just be better and enough reason to migrate 2. a single, catastrophic privacy event would change the public perception on the importance of privacy and trusting your own devices, which would change the value perception of dumb appliances

Any one of those two would suffice to make the business viable, in my opinion.

Why not keep your Smart TV disconnected from the internet instead?

For how long will this work? Eventually, these companies are just going to insert LTE capabilities and use their own connection for data acquisition.

> make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device

What do you mean by that? Isn't that the "smart stuff" you want to remove?

Smart stuff should be opt in, not opt out. Some people just don't care and just want to watch YouTube.

You could surpass that by just charging more. I would pay more for a high quality dumb set.

Sounds kind of dumb.

The Dumb Company is a great name, to be fair :)

Until you have to quote a string that has ampersands in it :)

You mean like this...

' "Here is an ampersand... &" '

To clarify, in PowerShell there is a difference between text between single quotes (e.g. '$test') and double quotes (e.g. "$test"). Single quote strings are literal strings, so whatever text is contained within them is reproduced as written. Double quote strings are expandable strings, which means that certain text inside the string is evaluated before it is returned. If you have double quotes in a literal string, you'll see double quotes within that string, and the same should be true for ampersands.

That works in some cases, not others. I'm not saying that PowerShell is bad, but it certainly isn't a masterpiece of design.

What do you mean it works in some cases, not others? A literal string is a literal string in all cases.

As for it being a "masterpiece of design", it has it's quirks but compared to common Unix shells (aside from Nushell) it's far better. It doesn't need to have a perfect design in order to be a step above the competition.

I hope to continue to see the growth of Nushell, I can see that becoming the best shell one day.

& has no special behaviour in strings, backticks and $ on the other hand do. For example "&Some String&" and '&Some String&' are all the literal value `&Some String&`. Backticks and $ are special in double quoted strings as they are the escape character and variable reference chars respectively.

I have a different concern: the SOTA products are expensive and get dumbed down on busy times. My personal strategy has been to be a late follower, where I adopt new AI tools when the competition has caught up with the previous SOTA, and now there are many tools that are cost effective and equally good.

Can't wait for when the competition catches up with Claude Code, especially the open source/weights Chinese alternatives :)

If you haven't tried it yet, OpenCode is quite good.

The author probably meant "coding without AI", not "learning without AI".

Never heard of it. Sounds cool. Is it useful for virtual office setups? With virtual screen sharing, etc.

No, it's like a nightclub, except full of anime characters and furries and other wacky avatars. Look it up on youtube.

Or minigolf, board games, etc with your friends across the world in about the closest approximation we have of physical in-same-room interaction over the internet.

I've used Conan briefly in the past for C++ and I quite liked it.

Me too! It's pretty good. Unfortunately, it depend on Python. Not that Python's that bad. It's just that it's completely bonkers to me that building C, the most fundamental language that's commonly written today, the language that every other language has an FFI for and three quarters of them either are written in or were bootstrapped with a version written in -- that this language depends on PYTHON to build!

It's crazy, and I understand why it's the case, but I know how to fix it and I'd like to have a crack at it.

I think Grandia was the biggest case in my life of a game that starts slow and finishes in a very high note. Crazy experience. Some unique story traits. It probably didn't age well, but I have fond memories :)

If you can create this filtering model, you have created Skynet and solved AGI :D

The way that worked for me to properly learn shell is to do a non-shell project with it.

Like, do a complex background worker for a web server that listens to a socket, does complicated stuff, exports functions (if in Bash), etc.

You don't have to use it afterwards. The value is in the journey. It's fun :)