bdunks

This is a common narrative that simply isn’t true.

American Airlines has the largest loyalty program.

In last week’s report to shareholders they project it will grow to $1.5B in pre tax revenue, against a total 2025 pre tax revenue of $54bn (50bn passenger revenue).

The core business of airlines is still airlines. Optimizing TRASM & CASM, with tremendous effort on upsell and cross sell of premium services (seats, bags, food), at every point in the passenger flow.

I feel like you’ve held back on an interesting story

The Market Basket used to calculate the BLS CPI changes over time, which can make long range comparisons difficult.

I’ve read of political influence on the market basket to lower the reported rate of inflation by the incumbent party, but I’m not educated enough on the topic to give an opinion on if it happens.

Software development is one of the most capital-intensive activities a modern company undertakes

The article is definitely written from a "high tech" industry lens. A mid-sized utility might spend $80-$150 million USD on IT capital projects in a year, but $2b on power pole maintenance. Utilities are a strong example, but any large enterprise manufacturing company is spending more on factory upgrades that programming.

[...] built a functional replica of approximately 95% of Slack’s core product in fourteen days using LLM agents.

IT and Finance leadership and asset heavy companies are currently trying to wrap their head around the current economics of their 100+ SaaS contracts, and if it still makes sense with LLM powered developers. Can they hire developers in house to build the fraction of the tool they use from many of these companies, save on total cost and Opex?

I work with these companies a lot, and won't weigh in on the right decision. Bottom line "it depends" on many factors, some of which are not immediately obvious. The article still holds weight regardless of industries, but there is some nuance (talent availability, internal change cost, etc.) that also have to be considered.

I had a car with an all wheel drive computer in a similar spot in the late 2000s.

I had a small crack in the rubber seal around my sunroof from parking outside in the elements. When it rained, water seeped in, made its way down the a-pillar, pooled under the seat, and fried the computer.

Expensive fix but I was able to drive it to the shop.

There is a book called Art & Fear which explores this in depth. A quick read and worth it for people that don’t consider themselves artists.

It has a great story (allegory) about a pottery class, which was shared here in the past. Six sentences. Worth a read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663

Agree. They seem to have a “price per piece” equation. Perhaps as a result, the 5+ sets are made of hundreds of small pieces.

Older sets had larger foundational and platform pieces which gave a good starting place for new creative builds.

Today, airplanes fuselages, wings, and car chassis are instead built up piece by piece.

It’s hard for my 6 year old to start creative builds that are stable when he hardly has any pieces larger than 2x6 across dozens of sets.

My wife found a huge mixed bin from the 80s and 90s at an estate sale. It really helped.

As they say, a relevant XKCD for everything. Thanks for sharing. I hadn’t seen that one before.

“I’m not going to install yet another chat app”

This is legitimate.

I have to use:

- iMessage & SMS for most US based family, casual friends and co workers. - WhatsApp for European Family - Signal for one group of friends - Telegram for another group of friends

Every time I message someone I have to remember what app to use. It’s annoying. This in addition to random threads that pick up with the same people on instagram, discord, etc., which I try to redirect to our “standard” channel as aggressively as I can.

I will add that FreeCAD has come a long way in constraint based and parametric part design, and I'm able to use it exclusively running an Arch-based distro.

Deltahedra has extremely impressive tutorials on YouTube. No fluff -- no long intros or filler -- 30-60 minutes of dense content, clearly explained: https://www.youtube.com/@deltahedra3D

That makes sense. His cover letter is dated 1974, and TeX was released 1978.

I can recommend the Acquired (podcast) 3 part series on Berkshire.

There was a cool fact in there that he sees every price tag as the opportunity cost with compounding interest.

It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.

I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)

I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.

I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.

The sibling comment has a more structured reply to the whole process, but of note the article specifically mentions the FAA has exempted international flights.

I agree. I started using Foot based on a recommendation from the notcurses library author, who has deep expertise in terminal emulation and collaborates with maintainers.

A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.

The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.

Agreed. I have 4 Omada APs in my house — 3 wired PoE and 1 mesh.

I haven’t thought about it since I set it up, three years ago. 100% reliability, seamless handoff between APs.

I'm a Kagi customer and I definitely don't want anything they do with the news.

Can you expand on why?

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...

Tell that to Tex Johnson:

https://youtu.be/Ra_khhzuFlE?si=MxkaSRaIYFvbGqil

I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written).

In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publication over 8 years, and later compiled into the books.

I was astonished.

Perhaps everyone else already knew this. But such a clear narrative through line to be written in discrete short stories. Very impressive.

It sounds like this may have been common prior to this era as well.

I've just read through the entire documentation end-to-end. It's very clear and well written, thank you for the time and love.

One thing that's unclear to me in how I might manage this "side-by-side coexistence": how you manage potential route conflicts, e.g., You have a Hologram "page" that defines `route "/hello-world"`, and the Phoenix application router.ex also defines a route, `live "/hello-world', MyApp.HellowWorld, :index`.

I could imagine the lack of a central router may be offset through conventions of how you organize pages (perhaps a directory-based-routing convention). I saw in the Installation section that it's common to organize under `app/`, and `app/pages`. Maybe an expansion on best practices for larger project organization, and how you keep Hologram routes straight, would be interesting to other people as well.

Regardless, I've just started dipping my toes in the elixir and phoenix ecosystem about 3 months ago, and it's been a real joy. I'm throwing every hobby project I can think of at it to learn more. I'll give hologram a spin -- thanks again for such clear documentation.

It’s available as a VSCode extension and documented here:

https://elixir-lsp.github.io/elixir-ls/

Thank you for sharing! After reading the article, I played your game and really enjoyed it. My first text based game in ~30 years.

I was inspired and went on to play one of the games listed on IFDB tagged “short” and “recommended for beginners”. (Suveh Nux).

Also super fun and satisfying to beat!

Absolutely. And I’m finding the same with “agent” coding tools. With the ever increasing hype around Cursor I tried to give it a go this week. The first 5 minutes were impressive, when I sent a small trial ballon for a simple change.

But when asking for a full feature, I lost a full day trying to get it to stop chasing its tail. I’m still in the “pro” free trial period so it was using a frontier model.

This was for a Phoenix / Elixir project; which I realize is not as robustly in the training data as other languages and frameworks, but it was supposedly consuming the documentation, other reference code I’d linked in, and I’d connected the Tidewave MCP.

Regardless, in the morning with fresh eyes and a fresh cup of coffee, I reverted all the cursor changes and implemented the code myself in a couple hours.

Have you paid for the AI Planner, and if so, can you recommend it?

I can’t put my finger on why.

To me it feels inauthentic.

Based on early comments, which say it makes sense, I’m an outlier.

However, this shifts from something that had semantic value (not saying Apple used Semver, but there were linear major and minor versions) to marketing driven version numbers.

That’s a very nice Kaizen of this Kanban. Very scalable. The office may not have thought of it yet.

Thank you for the correction and clarification. I didn’t dig into country specific pricing before posting.

While still higher, I believe these are all very reasonable prices — perhaps just not as mind blowing. I’m optimistic for the future.

I was in Mexico City two weeks ago and a few uber drivers were driving BYD Dolphins. I was impressed. At a $14k price point, I can’t imagine better value for money. I got sucked into research and there are no near term plans for expanding to the US market. It’s too bad. They’re expecting to sell 500,000 units in Mexico this year. With the current (lower) emissions standards, I’m optimistic such affordable EVs will make a big difference to air quality in the coming years.

According to the FAA’s website, it is not in use today.

https://www.faa.gov/faq/faa-getting-rid-air-traffic-skills-b...