morley

Can I ask how you gained preview access to Fable 5?

I didn't realize whistleblowers could recover part of fraud settlements:

The civil settlement includes the resolution of claims brought under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Sholto David. Under those provisions, a private party can file an action on behalf of the United States and receive a portion of any recovery. David will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/dana-farber-cancer-institute-...

Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)

If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.

I'm finding it a little hard to believe that GPT 5.5 is in 11th place for webdev, outranked by models like Kimi, Qwen, and Z.ai. I'm not saying it's not true (I have noticed GPT being less smart in recent weeks), but this is very different from my expectation.

$2bn is their entire marketing spend, so it includes media buying, creative, in-store displays, PR, research, and anything else involved in the marketing mix.

FTA:

The confectionery giant, home to brands like Reese’s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate marketing mix modeling — a statistical technique that measures how media spending and other variables drive sales — making it faster and more frequent.

So this system doesn't cost $2bn, it goes into the decision-making of where to spend the $2bn.

I agree that when you have a $2bn budget, it's hard to fathom tolerating a 6-mo analytics lead time, but I'm sure it's not alone, and I'm sure that's why this vendor lobbied Ad Age to cover this project.

For a more informed deep dive into data center water usage (albeit many months old): https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

"Leave them alone" is easy to type into a comment textbox but is much more difficult when it's a neighbor, or a family member, or someone else you have to interact with at a regular interval.

I highly recommend the book Hidden Valley Road for anyone curious about how difficult schizophrenia is for families and the researchers trying to find treatments.

Out of curiosity, what colors (or text treatments) do you personally prefer to confer "gain" and "loss"?

In some cultures, you signal respecting someone's time by not bothering them.

In other cultures, you signal respecting someone's time by making small-talk with them.

Advice about making small talk vs. not making small talk is not really useful unless it acknowledges this cultural divide and the percentage chance a stranger falls into one culture or another.

I personally don't want to trawl through Twitter to find the current state-of-the-art, so I read Zvi Mowshowitz's newsletter:

https://thezvi.substack.com/

His newsletter put me onto using Opus 4.5 exclusively on Dec 1, a little over a week after it was released. That's pretty good for a few minutes of reading a week.

I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.

There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.

You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.

A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."

I really miss gallo pinto. I went to Costa Rica in 2009, and since then, nothing has been the same (in NYC).

It's mind-boggling that such a simple recipe can be so good in CR but so bad over here! I hear there are some Costa Rican restaurants in Paterson, NJ, but I haven't had the chance to check yet.

Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

EDIT: And HN at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697

One number is not going to work for everyone. The only way to be sure is to get a blood test for Vitamin D levels. I get tested with my yearly physical, but if someone really cares they can get more frequent blood tests.

Privy just got purchased by Stripe: https://privy.io/blog/announcing-our-acquisition-by-stripe

By the way, if you liked this post, this taking-silly-things-way-to-seriously is the comedic wheelhouse of Nathan Fielder.

But the point still stands: if it's so straightforward, why give this person this treatment, instead of millions of other people?

I wonder how hard it is to change a game engine to render images like this, and if the effect would be preserved while panning.

I don't know why you've been downvoted so much. I'd expect a company to issue replacements, not refunds, when they're not the end retailer.

I was under the impression that Community Notes were designed to be resistant to sybil attacks, but I could be wrong. Community Notes have been used at Twitter for a long time. Are there examples of state-influenced notes getting through the process?

Some comedy works have endured, like Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (though it is helped by its huge influence on To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis).

It's moving to schedule III, though the new company it's in really highlights how it should be descheduled instead:

It moves pot to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids

Hopefully the first step but not the last.

I don't read "it exists because it has to exist" in the parent's statement. They're saying that there's an advantage one way and a disadvantage another, and evolution favors advantages. I wouldn't characterize a statement like that as a tautology, and I don't think the author deserves your dig for it.

I've played Textorcist! It's a solid game, and it's fun insofar as it's challenging and makes you want to play it more.

(It's been a couple years since I've played it, hence the vagueness.)

IIRC there's a bit of a difficulty spike when you have to transition from typing English to typing Latin...

My first job out of college was at an ad agency. The level 1 playbook of all agencies is to find the "hot new things" in the zeitgeist and figure out how to turn it into advertising.

NYC is also interesting in that landowners are responsible for maintaining the sidewalks in front of their property instead of the city.

Depending on your point of view, that's actually a solution to the problem you pose: the costs of maintaining damage from this plan are spread across private owners.

It does mean that owners will grumble in fall months when they have to clear leaves from their sidewalks, and will complain in the rare occasions when their sidewalks crack, meanwhile their home value ticks upward silently.

There's a bit of storytelling embellishment. I believe it's covered in the FAQ:

https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

This is such a great blog post. I wish I had read this ten years ago.

The "how" took some reading to find. Here it is:

They filled one field with water, as is common in Bali, but they drained the other, wetting the soil only when hairline cracks were spotted in the earth

I've read before -- though right now I can't think of the source -- that if a group of interviewers are weakly against a candidate but one is strongly for them, you should trust the instincts of the person who's "strongly for." When hiring, I'd probably have that than a room of people who are weakly for a candidate on the basis that you'd rather have a person who's great at one thing than someone who's okay at everything.