iambateman

This is cool! Thanks for sharing.

What understanding about hardware did you start with, and what tools did you use to learn what you didn’t already know?

Do I want to own one of these? No. I want my mechanic to be bored when I show up and need service…I guess that makes me a market laggard.

But I do love the pressure this (and Slate) puts on Toyota to restore some sanity to truck prices. There is a market of people who want reliable transportation without spending $40k++.

I really liked this article. FWIW, I didn’t know he is the CTO of Facebook until just now.

But I can relate to the challenge of making decisions with a lot of competing interests, especially in comparison to the clarity that comes from feeling like you have a mission to accomplish.

I checked Facebook every single day for over 10 years, until I left the platform. Today, the only thing I use Facebook for is Marketplace, which still has the focus he’s talking about.

Hopefully we can all learn from their mistakes as we build products people want to use.

Yes but every good police officer had watched Arrested Development and so knows that there’s always money in the banana stand.

I asked a question for my son about how mosquitos carry malaria and Fable was like “ok now hold it right there”

I would never have had SpeedTest on my board of unicorns…that’s an unbelievable sale price. To all the agents who negotiated that deal, my hat is off to you.

If you’re going to go through the effort to write 5,000 words—-spend a bit more thought on what to do.

I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.

But what do we do?

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

Ha! You can check my comment history, my Costco T-shirt love is genuine. :)

The second time, I was in the store and could tell these were legitimately great.

About a year ago, I researched the most comfortable T-shirt. There were quite a few people who mentioned this specific brand I’d never heard of so I bought about 10 shirts and was sorely disappointed—-I got had by a smart marketer I think.

But a few other people mentioned the Peruvian Pima cotton shirts that are sometimes available at Costco. Generally they show up once per year, in February.

So when they finally showed up, I bought 11. I didn’t realize, until I had these shirts, that I’d never really owned comfortable T-shirts. I’ve worn these every day since I bought them and cannot recommend them enough.

Friends don’t let friends wear crappy cotton.

If you’ll allow yourself to go one step further in the pedantry, there is no such thing as genuine money either.

The department needs to stay focused on the actually-important work they have to do.

Do you have something to say about it?

I work with these tools every day, and I’d say my productivity increase is on the order of astronomical.

This isn’t true of everyone, but depending on pre-existing skill sets and context, there’s a group of people who are actually multiples more productive than they were in 2022.

Two different friends…

First spent most of 2025 looking.

Second started last week

I had a friend with plenty of experience in HR get laid off.

He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.

Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.

These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.

I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.

Giving an LLM write access is insane but I gave LLM’s read-only access to our database and it’s been a huge productivity win.

Executives who wouldn’t take the time to build a report are happy to ask an AI agent to do so.

At some point, the market for markets will demand better regulation than this. But I find it a little absurd that anyone is still putting their money into these markets with story after story of obvious fraud.

But it does work in conspiracy theories which is what we have here.

Occam would disagree.

I also live about half an hour from Congaree. I wish it was a state park…it’d be on everyone’s list of “coolest state parks.”

It doesn’t have the same wow factor as other national parks, but it’s a special place for sure.

See you at the fireflies!

Microsoft teams: not as bad as people say, except for this situation.

I have accidentally sent so many messages trying to get to a new line.

They buried the lede…

Participation in sports betting appears to make people about 2x more likely to be delinquent on their loans.

Whether you think that’s “bad enough” is another question, but the article doesn’t make it very clear what the effect size is.

I mean…keep reading.

For the affected population, it’s around 10 percentage points—or double.

So people who sports bet are twice as likely to be delinquent as those who don’t. I’ll give you that the effect is smaller than I expected.

Here’s the thing though…it’s not like that trend is slowing down. The finalization of prediction markets and continued normalization of betting as a pro-social behavior is currently headed to the moon…so we should ask if it’s causing major side effects.

Smoking makes someone 25x more likely to develop lung cancer. Right now it looks like sports betting makes you 2x more likely to be delinquent on your car loan. At what incidence does that become anti-social enough to try to curb?

I hear the slot machine thing a lot but I don’t get it.

I use Claude Code every day for coding because it makes me way more productive. But I don’t resonate with the slot machine effect. Can you expand on what mechanism you see that give it a slot machine effect? Is it for all users or just a subset?

I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete.

I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything.

Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run.

Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount of work I would’ve had to pay $10,000/mo for. Of course I’m expecting those numbers to get closer to each other.

No VC-funded gravy train lasts forever.

It has a real “where the wild things are” feel…which is the art used to decorate my local library.

A lot of people have chosen to take the Hobbit as seriously as its older brother—-including Peter Jackson—-and have missed out on the absurd, beautiful childishness of the whole thing.

The Hobbit does a wonderful job of introducing the ideas and characters of LotR in a way which is accessible for children and I think the art presented here is a valid artistic take on a children’s book about a dragon.

TBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful.

I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.

What would be better policy, in your opinion?

We are going to have to find new ways to correct for low-effort work.

I have a report that I made with AI on how customers leave our firm…The first pass looked great but was basically nonsense. After eight hours of iteration, the resulting report is better than I could’ve made on my own, by a lot. But it got there because I brought a lot of emotional energy to the AI party.

As workers, we need to develop instincts for “plausible but incomplete” and as managers we need to find filters that get rid of the low-effort crap.