I just saved 250 bucks 🦋
Hi everyone, it’s Monday. And you look great today.
Welcome to Afirmativo!, where I send updates about articles that I publish on my blog and share things that have been on my mind lately.
Knuckle cracking? Amen
After some time on Mastodon, I’m giving Bluesky a go. It works, and it’s cozy. You can follow me there.
Because there was no easy way to do it by myself, I used a paid tool to delete all my tweets.
— Alberto Romero (@albertoromero.com) 2024-11-27T15:37:12.256Z
With more than 20,000 posts, it took a few days for the tool to go through them. During that time, I could visit my profile and see old tweets emerge to the surface like ghosts from the past.
Among them, there were these two articles that a past me shared some years back. Boo!
The Amen Break, 6 seconds that shaped over 1,500 songs
Read (and listen) to find the link between Bowie’s “Little Wonder”, Prodigy’s “Firestarter”, Oasis’ “D'You Know What I Mean” or Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I'm No Good”. If you’re anything like me, you may be wondering: does Spotify have a playlist with songs using the Amen break? The answer is Yes.
tl;dr: It’s bubbles forming, and no, it does not cause arthritis.
First there were 160 euros
I recently started some freelancing activities. In Spain, that means officially registering as self-employed, which involves filing and submitting two forms on two different government agencies.
The language used on these two (otherwise simple) forms and the dependencies between them are so obscure that in the past I, like so many other people, have hired a bookkeeper to do them for me.
I checked the bill I got last time: it was € 160.
In Spain, over 3 million are self-employed, so there’s your easy calculation of how much having a bad UX is costing us.
Anyway: this time, before calling them, I tried doing it myself. It turns out I had learned about a custom GPT that someone had built using a Tax Agency knowledge base, so I gave it a try.
The result? It still took me one hour to find my way around the agencies websites and triple check I was not messing up, but I confidently got what I wanted. For free one hour's worth of my work.
Imagine the excitement of the tax officials when they learned about this experiment. An opportunity to put tens of millions of euros a year back on things other than paperwork. One imagines them maybe running to develop something similar, to collaborate with the owner to make it better, or to integrate it into their websites.
Instead, MarĂa Gonzalez Benito, the creator of the GPT, got a call, first, then an email from the Tax Office, urging her to take the chatbot down. You can read about it on this LinkedIn post of hers.
Then it was 90
For some audio I am recording, I needed to free up a bit of space.
Surprised to be running out of storage, I checked what was causing it, and I found the culprit: the Photos app. I made sure that I had the Optimize Mac Storage correctly set. I had.
I was ready to get an external storage unit (Wirecutter told me this was the one — €90), when I saw the light.
Photos for Mac does not optimize as well as Photos on iOS does, so the library still takes a lot of space. The solution? Make a new Volume on your hard drive, set a quota for it, move the library there. Thank you, Reddit.
That’s all for now.
Have a nice week!
Alberto