presidentender

Strangely only "Kimi" has accurately heard of me. Gemini thinks I'm a German-language version of the stuff I do in English, Kimi recognizes my long-defunct blogging about technology and economics.

I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits.

I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so.

The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a good driver now." I didn't put the pieces together right away, but it turned out that the dongle had actually trained me, like a dog's shock collar.

The reason for my too-frequent hard-braking events wasn't speed, although that would be a contributing factor. It was a lack of appropriate following distance. Because I'd follow the drivers in front of me too closely I'd have to brake hard if they did... Or if they drive normally and happened to have a turn coming up.

Over the period I had the insurance spy box in my truck I learned without thinking about it to increase my following distance, which meant that riding with me as a passenger was more comfortable and it beeped less often. Of course since I'd been so naughty early during the evaluation they didn't decrease my rates, but I think the training probably did make me statistically less likely to crash.

One of my mom's best friends when I was a kid had Huntington's. She was a few years older than mom, and her sons were a few years older than my brother and I. One of them chose to get tested. The other chose not to. I remember thinking that was foolish, but I was seven years old. In retrospect, it's strange that a seven-year-old was privy to such things.

For a time in the years around 2008 I would sign my credit card receipts "Ron Paul," which eventually resulted in a sternly-worded letter from Wells Fargo that carried no legal weight but did lead to me discontinuing the silly little campaign.

One of my favorite... solutions, I suppose, was to find a break (not a leak) in a pipe by running current through it and using some sensor (I think the vocabulary is "signal generator," but I do not know). Current does not run further, there is your break; dig and find.

When the pipe is PVC, though, current does not run through it - so what do we do? Why, pump an electrolyte solution, and run your current through that!

It's simple, but it's not done, and so the plumber friend who told me of the original solution patented it, tried to sell it, and found that potential buyers were almost offended at how easy it was. As soon as he'd describe it to people they'd almost think they came up with it themselves. So it is a valuable idea, but it is also utterly worthless.

Are there similar optimizations available for basketball? Shoes can only do so much.

If the company is employee owned, how do you propose that an investor even could back it? Investment results in an ownership stake.

Luddite technologists. What a time.

It doesn't preach so much as it explores. The author strikes me as being more economically literate than Rand or LeGuin, but not as good a writer as the latter.

The real and staggering excellence of the series is the speculation - it's not such hard SF that it explains the mechanisms by which everything happens, and there are real characters who do more than stand as cardboard observers to technology, but it's crunchier than most.

One of my favorite science fiction novels deals with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain

It would surprise me to learn that Steve Yegge had deferred the opportunity to type a lot in favor of using an LLM to generate natural language.

I'm biased in his favor, but I recognize that brevity is not among his virtues.

I'm prone to plantar warts, and the only success I've had has been from surgical removal. I have not tried duct tape, though.

Once I went to a podiatrist who injected bleomycin, a chemotherapy drug. My foot hurt for several days and blood blisters formed beneath the warts, but the operation was unsuccessful.

I went to another podiatrist for the same warts and he anesthetized me and removed them with a curette.

Several years later I had a few more show up, and got some of the same anesthetic the second doctor had used, which worked marvelously. Unfortunately I didn't remember which anti-bleeding agent he had used and so I was less able to tell what was going on during my self surgery; ultimately, though, it was effective.

I also had a wart between the third and fourth knuckle of my left hand for many years. I'd pick at it sometimes but it was benign otherwise. One day I noticed that it was gone. The spot where it had been gets dry and flaky moreso than the rest of my hands.

Those of us who have the foresight to make such sacrifices should also have the foresight to structure our investments to make them resilient against redistribution.

Fractal seems to have addressed the entire market they had identified. It doesn't appear that they're still recruiting founders.

I was in their pipeline and interviewing potential business cofounders, but chose to go the traditional venture route - it didn't work out, but I don't think I'd have succeeded at the Fractal business either.

If you live close enough to the property and you've built the right relationships with your tenants the matter is trivial.

If you live far away and rely on third party managers, the matter is also trivial, but the outcome is opposite.

I started something and failed catastrophically. We returned the remaining cash to the investors. VCs are beating down my door to discuss the next thing, and they're introducing me to their portfolio companies to see if I'm interested in jobs.

Starting a company and failing makes it easier to get a job, not harder.

More Texans will buy NordVPN subscriptions and the world will keep turning. It's a waste of legislation.

You can still go die in the forest. One fellow had a book written about him for doing just that.

This is just delightful, but is no one else bothered by the honey bear mustard bottle?

I drink heavily. Sometimes it occurs to me that I need a break. These breaks are sometimes months long, but after just a few days I feel amazing. I haven't gone for eighteen months as the author describes, but it might be interesting to see whether the benefits begin to mount again. For me they seem to top out at about a month off.

It is possible that the sixty-one percent tip for a vanishing but nonzero minority of rides.

"the author needed to grow a spine" cuts to my soul.

I was the technical cofounder of a startup. We spent a similar amount of money on a similar agency, on advisors to tell our designer he was doing a good job, and on content writers who were friends of my business founder. I was gentle in my contrary feedback.

On the engineering side, I let an early hire (a friend of mine) refactor our codebase to future-proof it against our inevitable scale. When I tried to call a meeting and redirect, another senior engineer expressed that he "liked" the new domain-driven approach, and that was that. I should have said "no."

Ultimately we shut down; my cofounder left the company and I didn't do anything that fixed it. The business didn't make sense in retrospect. I still feel a lot of guilt for lighting the VC money on fire.

The author should have grown a spine. I should grow a spine.

Even if the subsidies that drive increasingly sophisticated models evaporate, we'll still have the existing models we can run on commodity hardware. Some of those models will be good enough for the risk-tolerant low-value applications. Low value doesn't mean no value.

I also think that machine vision for agriculture can be a little more risk tolerant than for cars (doesn't matter if your weed burner occasionally torches a stalk of corn the way that it does if your robotaxi occasionally runs over a pedestrian).

Compared to what the institutional investors are chasing, that will not have been worth it. But it'll be nonzero.

I just shut down my startup (we raised a huge seed and we weren't gonna find product market fit with the original thesis; pivoting madly would have been a poor way to justify our valuation).

I am doing standup comedy and blacksmithing until I get bored. I thought it was gonna take longer than it seems like it will. But for now I'm not writing any code or doing any customer interviews.

Bench press wasn't a popular lift until the late 50s, so it's unlikely the man ever performed the motion, much less in such a way that anyone wrote down a PR.

During my year and a half there I had to wash poop off my shoe once. It took me a few minutes. My rent was several hundred dollars per month cheaper than any other place I lived in the Bay area. I'll wash anything off anything for a thousand dollars a minute.

I lived on Turk between Hyde and Leavenworth. It has all the bad things. The advantages are, to my reckoning, overwhelming.

I quite liked living in the Tenderloin. It's close to transit, it's cheap, and it's got great restaurants. I wouldn't live there if I had a cohabitating partner or kids, though.

My MIP was a factor during the background check for my security clearance in my early 20s. Since then nobody has cared.

I really like 'em when I'm in a city for a work trip. I have a truck at home. I don't have a car at an offsite. Being able to get around is nice. SF's muni buses are crowded and slow and the frequent stops are nauseating. Denver might have public transit, but a Lime bike or scooter is more convenient.