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I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

stavros.io

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Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#51

Post by tenacious_tuna »

shermantanktop wrote: post #45
thih9 wrote: post #16

> Half an hour and fifty dollars later, I realized I had spent fifty dollars on this, and that this was not sustainable because, if anything, the code was getting more and more buggy the more Claude fixed it. Off topic, this has been my experience with AI so often that it prevents me from exploring AI uses more. I liked Cursor’s “auto” plan but that now seems gone. I’d happily switch to a provider that offers a simil…

It is possible to radically increase your chances of success. You have to speak the LLM’s language, just like you write Java or Rust. But it doesn’t come with a language spec, so you get to figure it out by trial and error. And a model change means revisiting what works. Lots of tips on how to do this out there but one thing I do is have it try, throw away everything it it did, and try again with a completely restate…

> Lots of tips on how to do this out there but one thing I do is have it try, throw away everything it it did, and try again with a completely restated question

This is the thing that worries me about AI/LLMs and how people "profess they're actually really useful when you use them right": the cliff to figuring out if they're useful is vertical.

"You’ve still come out ahead even if you take over fully."

I just finished a weeklong saga of redoing a bunch of Claude's work because instead of figuring out how to properly codegen some files it just manually updated them and ignored a bunch of failing tests.

With another human I can ask, "Hey, wtf were you thinking when you did [x]?" and peer into their mind-state. With Claude, it's time to stir the linear algebra again. How can I tell when I'm near a local or global maxima when all the prevailing advice is "I dunno man, just `git reset --hard origin/master` and start again but like, with different words I guess."

We have studies that show people feel like they're more productive using AI while they're actually getting less done [1], and "throw away everything it did and try again" based on :sparkle: vibes :sparkle: is the state of the art on how to "actually" use this stuff, I just feel more and more skeptical.

[1]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#52

Post by dxdm »

nirav72 wrote: post #50
eniac111 wrote: post #19

https://petrovs.info/post/2023-01-12-shaiba/ This is my USB rotary dial. It's always fun with the young people when I bring it to IT conferences.

I bet the reaction was similar to what my teenage kids had when I showed them some VHS tapes I found in storage.

What was their reaction like, for those of us who don't have teenagers at home to repeat the experiment on?

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#53

Post by jtwaleson »

stavros wrote: post #46
jtwaleson wrote: post #44

Very cool but I think my wireless bluetooth one is even cooler ;) https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro... It actually supports using the rotary dial to call phone numbers on your smartphone.

I think my full-blown mobile rotary phone is EVEN cooler: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/ It actually makes calls itself and has a SIM.

ok you win

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#54

Post by stavros »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #49
jtwaleson wrote: post #44

Very cool but I think my wireless bluetooth one is even cooler ;) https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro... It actually supports using the rotary dial to call phone numbers on your smartphone.

Someone should make a Bluetooth box that outputs to a standard phone connector so any standard phone would work. Has anyone done that?

I think I've seen it, I was thinking of making a USB one. I might!

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#56

Post by freedomben »

Neat! On a mostly serious note, I went looking to buy a handset that just plugs in via USB and is a normal speaker/microphone, and I was quite surprised there wasn't anything like that out there, at least not that I could find.

Am I the only one that wants something like this? Does anybody know where to get one?

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#57

Post by toast0 »

stavros wrote: post #43
a022311 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how 10 years later we saw an actual cellphone with this color...

Did we? Which one?

I had a Blu Win HD in basically that color: https://www.meetgadget.com/gadget/71500/BLU+Win+HD/photos/im...

Although, that's contemporaneous with your post.

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#59

Post by stavros »

toast0 wrote: post #57
stavros wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we? Which one?

I had a Blu Win HD in basically that color: https://www.meetgadget.com/gadget/71500/BLU+Win+HD/photos/im... Although, that's contemporaneous with your post.

Interesting, I didn't know of this!

Re: I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

#60

Post by stavros »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #41
foobarian wrote: post #35

Since you didn't modify the original phone, I wonder if the oldschool dialing way of digit-banging would work. For each digit N, you hit the hangup button N times, pause, then go to next digit. Used to do that on our family's Pupin that looks like this one [1] [1] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/rare-vintage-pupin-bakelite-rot...

>For each digit N, you hit the hangup button N times, pause, then go to next digit N+1 times for each digit N. The digit 1 was two clicks of the hookswitch, and the digit 0 was eleven.

Was it? I've dialed like that a few times and I always clicked N times.

Here's the code for the phone, BTW, as I forgot to include it in the article:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/dialogue/blob/master/src/ma...

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