drewmate

The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.

Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.

I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.

I feel this in my own life. From well before my working years I had a message ingrained into me: “Do not count on social security to be around when you retire.”

It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.

Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility limited, and just about everyone else.

It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.

Women and children aren’t inherently dangerous. If you just avoid eye contact and keep to yourself, you should be fine

I'm not sure what the answer is for housing, but there are tons of factors that go in to the growth of cost there. For one, the people making the buying decision aren't comparing DR Horton to Lennar. Usually, they're thinking along two lines: monthly mortgage cost and location.

Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.

For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.

Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)

Apparently there are companies trying similar things in the US - https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/11/13/cloud-seedin...

First I'd heard of it... though Salt Lake City did just have its rainiest October on record.

I suspect it’s a byproduct of Google’s internal launch process which may require more work or longer processes for launching something in different jurisdictions. So it’s probably not an active decision that they couldn’t legally do this in the EU, but a result of being extra careful around what they can “launch” in a jurisdiction with potentially high penalties.

(I am a Googler, but not on this team, or familiar with their launch policies)

Fellow Googler here. I'm the exception that proves the rule. After 7 years of Macbook and Linux devices, I needed Windows for a special project, so I got a "gWindows" device and found it very well supported.

Aside from the specific Windows-only software I needed, I would still just ssh into a Linux workstation, but gWindows can do basically everything my Mac can. I was pleasantly surprised.

It's just easier to iterate and improve on a coding specialist AI when that is also the skill required to iterate on said AI.

Products that build on general LLM tech are already being used in other fields. For example, my lawyer friend has started using one by LexisNexis[0] and is duly impressed by how it works. It's only a matter of time before models like that get increasingly specialized for that kind of work, it's just harder for lawyers to drive that kind of change alone. Plus, there's a lot more resistance in 'legacy' professions to any kind of change, much less one that is perceived to threaten the livelihoods of established professionals.

Current LLMs are already not bad at a lot of things, but lawyer bots, accountant bots and more are likely coming.

[0] https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-plus-ai.page

550 of 700 employees

Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.

It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.

Some pretty delightful (ab)use of ZWJ[0] to come up with unique new "characters":

* nail and gear flag [1]

* united federation of planets flag (star trek) [2]

* HAL 9000 [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner

[1] https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-1F3F3-FE0F-200D-1F4CC-200...

[2] https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-1F3F3-FE0F-200D-1F7E6-200...

[3] https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-25C9-FE0F-200D-1F534-200D...

It seems pretty self evident that China would not be in favor of military action to enforce climate goals. GP's point was that still developing nations are going to continue producing CO2 regardless of what electric grids look in OECD nations.

Another major stumbling block for train signals once you get the basics down is segment length. Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)

I frequently set up tracks with segments as large as my longest train, but then end up having to add an intersection here or there, breaking up segments into smaller sizes. This is the root of most of my train woes (aside from LTN issues, which are a whole other issue!)

As referenced by GP - it's a list of inventions from the podcast '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.' [0]

The first series is my favorite podcast of all time. They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of interesting info in each episode. In particular, they explore some of the second-order effects of each invention.

The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan' like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background and influence around the invention might surprise you! I recommend checking it out. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_the_Modern... [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p04t8k2l

I think this is a dangerous dream to have. The reality will probably be that the water cooler (or some virtual equivalent) will still be integral to career development, just maybe not yours.

People are inherently social and no workplace will ever be a strict meritocracy. Eschew small talk at your own risk!

I think the walled garden is the whole point here, and you are not the target for this app. It’s no coincidence that the sample they show on their devices is for a student (high school?) newspaper. This is like the blue texts in iMessage. Get them while they’re young, and they’ll be hooked for life. Imagine the shame of being excluded from a high school group project because, “we’re all doing it in Freeform, sorry.” Better ask mom for an iPhone just to be safe.

- Drew ( sent from my iPad)

In case the named web colors aren't enough, we're making excellent progress naming every color in the RGB space.

https://colornames.org/

This is an interesting conversation to peruse while watching an NFL (American football) game being played in Munich. [0]

I’m not sure why the NFL does a few of these games (overseas, more often in London) each year. The stadium seems full, but I don’t know if it’s more Americans who traveled for the game, Europeans who are clamoring for more American Football, or just folks curious to see what the game is like.

I think there is great value for the US in the soft power that comes from other countries adopting American culture, but I’m not sure whether it’s deliberate or just a natural consequence of being such a large economy. There’s also a deeply embedded sense of ‘manifest destiny’ in American culture. We’re out of land to acquire, because we reached the pacific coast and modern politics doesn’t allow for empire building the way it once did. So maybe the next frontier in expanding (our) civilization is to spread our culture.

[0] https://www.espn.com/nfl/game/_/gameId/401435638

https://archive.ph/Yg64e

I think it's a psychological quirk related to loss aversion[0]. Essentially, we view a house as belonging to the owner the moment the ink dries on the mortgage papers and losing a house is objectively a painful thing. Most people don't see the other side: people like me who never owned a home to begin with. I've likely missed out on 100's of thousands in gains by not buying homes with low fixed rates in 2008-2020, but nobody writes sob stories about that. The prevailing narrative is that all the gains from the crazy housing market belong (in some just sense) to the people who happened to buy at the right time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

Check trimbo's reply below for the stats, but this assertion is simply not true. Wyoming's rate of violent crime per 100k population was 234 last year (8th lowest among US states) compared to rates of 538 for New York City and 715 for San Francisco. I have spent much of my life living and working in Wyoming/Bay Area and these stats seem to match my perception of each place. I know violence existed in Wyoming, but it was shocking when something like a murder happened. In big cities, the social fabric is different and individual events get lost in a sea of statistics.

It's easy (for either side) to rely on stereotypes about places we haven't spent much time, but the statistics (as well as my lived experience) tell a different story than the one you are trying to spin. Admittedly, in both places the worst of the crime is experienced by people who are lower on the socio-economic ladder, especially if they can't afford a place to live. It just turns out there is a higher concentration of those folks (for a variety of reasons: cost of living, availability of services, etc...) in cities than rural towns.

Wages may be rising nominally, but now I'm fighting against hyperinflation of housing costs in ~10 metro areas. It's not so bad if your house is going up in value so you always have a down payment ready, but it's made it very challenging to buy a first home when the cost of a down payment is rising by the better part of an annual salary every year.

I don't know that it's any better in the counties with shrinking population. The shrinking population reduces demand for all the services they might have been able to perform at a higher wage. And housing prices still seem to be rising. Again, not a big deal if you already own a home, but I think it locks out a good portion of a whole generation from home ownership.

By all means continue to use your browser of choice, but Chrome does offer the same functionality for as many search engines as you'd like [1]. By default, the keyword for search engines you've used before is just the domain name of the website where the search engine is (which the omnibar is pretty good at filling in for you) but you can customize it to be whatever you want.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426?hl=en&co=GENI...

Pretty decent support for mono and C# in Godot 3.x. It’s not perfect, but most things are well supported. There is a proposal to move everything to .NET 6, but it has been delayed until after the big Godot 4.0 release (4.1 next year at the earliest.)

https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2333

A big challenge is that the current architecture requires a custom build of the engine that builds the whole executable as a .NET app that just happens to execute all the C++ engine code rather than a regular executable that integrates other languages as a plug-in. In theory, this is fine, and maybe ideal for modern .NET, but I don’t think there is much institutional support within the project for making special exceptions for C#. I believe they also no longer have the source of external funding (maybe MS?) that funded the original mono integration.

So, from my perspective, C# development has languished and might not make the leap to Godot 4. It appears to suffer from a chicken/egg problem where a majority of current users simply prefer GDScript. I think it would be a loss to drop C#, however, as I’m sure there are developers out there (myself included) who would prefer a modern .NET integration over mono and are holding out to see what the future holds.

I'm with you! But what does a hot new startup do when a rich old legacy corp sends them a data dump that isn't a custom sqlite database? Slowly but surely, the startup begrudgingly uses csv "just this once" until they grow into the legacy corp that sends out files in csv because "we've done it this way forever."

And the cycle continues.

As one data point, Age of Empires 2 DE takes up 13.7 GB on my desktop, so you'd probably be fine with even the smallest one (though I'm sure it will still fill up quick!)

Form factor is another consideration. You'd probably still want a dock and mouse/keyboard. I'm not sure how well that game would play on a controller.

+1. The first thought I had when I saw that email was that I felt bad for the tester/dev; it's not really their fault, but they're certainly going to get at least some backlash for this. Really, it's a director/VP level issue that this kind of mistake was even possible with my email address.

Of course, but much of the food for desert dwellers can still be grown in less drought-prone regions.

In the US, we have a fertile region in the midwest where there's enough water to grow millions of acres of corn just for ethanol fuel [0] (perhaps not sustainably given the state of underground aquifers, but that's another subject entirely.)

In drought-prone regions like California, we divert millions of acre-feet of water annually to grow especially thirsty crops like almonds [1] which aren't exactly a staple crop feeding cities. Current water policy is wildly unsustainable, but no politician wants to be the first to make an unpopular change in this game of drought chicken.

[0] https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/...

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

I'm not optimistic. People (it seems especially in the US) seem to think once they have something it is morally unconscionable for anyone to take any action that might affect that (even in the light of new facts.)

You see this with water rights (residential and agricultural), low property taxes, home values (NIMBYism in a nutshell), business models (environmental regulations would harm the extant oil industry!) and on and on.

This is a phenomenon I've observed anecdotally for a while, but I'd love to hear if there's a name for it, or if it has been formally studied.

Thanks for writing (the code and the blogs!)

What are you up to these days?