pruetj

LOL, don't mess this up for me.

I have a Costco that is walking distance from my office. If I need to decompress, I walk to Costco for lunch solo, get a hot dog and a slice of pizza, sit down, and watch both the people and what's in their cart. It's so diverse and pretty fascinating.

I remember when Uber first came to Austin, one of the big draws was that a tip wasn't expected. The app didn't even allow it IIRC and Uber sort of advertised this as a feature. 15 years later, back to it, tips seem expected again?

Oddly enough, the fact that I was initially sold a product where a tip wasn't expected has made me continue to not tip Uber drivers. Not sure what that says about me.

We do push ahead with missions that might end up in casualties. It's just a matter of risk tolerance.

It's impossible to say a space flight mission has 0% chance of casualty. It might be impossible to say that for virtually any activity involving humans.

Appreciate the write up! I’ve always wanted a hive on my property. I’ve seen some carpenter bees and bumblebees at work around the garden and this is giving me second thoughts about introducing more competition for them via honeybees.

I think I’ll let nature take its course here and enjoy the natural wild life.

Why could you reach a deal when Anthropic could not? Did you sign the deal they wouldn’t? Based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract.

Weak. You reached a deal that Anthropic could not because you demanded more safeguards than Anthropic?? (Based on what you know, of course).

Makes total sense!

Ha, giving claude code a CC and pointing to mappymail would probably be very good for business. Might be something you regret though?

"Special offer: 80% off if you send a lime with a note attached instead of a letter!"

Funny seeing this. I've been working on a site to allow people to send a letter as cheaply and conveniently as possible. I actually think letters (physical) are a great way to make an impression, often times much more so than an email. Had never considered sending an actual object lol.

At current scale (which is very small), the cheapest I can get it down to without losing money is $1.55 per letter (postage, paper, print, envelope, stripe fees, misc. hosting fees, etc.). Sadly, I have no way to compete with a $0.25 lime!

If you're curious, https://mappymail.com

Is that foreshadowing of ChatGPT redirecting users to ChatGPT Health in some way? Base product no longer answers everything, now I need to pay an add-on fee to talk about health related things?

Thank you for this, I needed that.

The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs.

Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.

I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?

purchase laptops with decent hardware specs

It costs nothing

Seems like it does cost something?

Wow, I played on your servers as a 9-10 year old. I lived in Houston and joined your server simply because they said Houston and I assumed my ping could make it there. I became obsessed with the WC3 mod. Handle was probably Coomie at the time.

I still remember invisible humans, elves with evasion, orcs with massive nade damage, undead with life steal… good times. I didn’t know how to spell “ultimate” so it took me forever to actually be able to bind an ult to keyboard.

Honestly, going off of something I heard Fr. Stephen De Young mention in one of his podcasts. If I remember right, he says when you see the 12 in certain icons, Paul is often present instead of Matthias.

He did not speak of casting lots as being something never endorsed in the Bible, more just for this particular passage, it might not be the takeaway Luke is aiming for. Agree with all your points on 'chance' often being used in scripture.

Interesting point! One interpretation of this passage suggests Peter is actually rushing this appointment. In typical Peter fashion, he makes choices before fulling thinking them through (this seems to change post Pentecost). Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible; we aren't sure what becomes of him. Canonically, he is the 12th but traditionally, it is Paul who is sometimes considered the true 12th disciple (you can find this depicted in EO iconography).

So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.

I like the idea. The rental section has a lot of potential imo. It makes me wonder if there’s room for the personal property rental business in tools like there is for housing and cars.

I do a lot of DIY and tend to acquire a lot of the tools I use if I think they are generic enough or I’ll repeat a similar job in the future but there’s also jobs I do where I’ll happily borrow from a friend. For example, I just built a small privacy fence that needed 5 posts cemented in. For that, I wanted to use a post hole digger. It’s very unlikely I’ll build another fence any time soon and a post hole digger takes up enough space that I don’t want to buy one and keep one. It’s also like $50.

If I didn’t know a friend who just built a new fence and had one but had an option of renting one from a guy down the street for $10, that’s what I’d do. And I’d be so happy I didn’t just spent $50 and then have to either store a tool that’s never used again or try to sell it.

I think DIY is growing, it’s a great way to save money and it’s only becoming easier with YouTube to help you through most any job. Good luck with the site!

If you’ve ever been by a Tesla coil in person, that static-y noise near the top of the screen is almost a perfect match.

It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentally a bad idea

No, that is not what it shows at all. Everything you do on a computer is "asking a computer for something." Do you think computers are computing things that no one asked for?

Church. I was living in Long Beach, about 23 years old. I had searched for community through CrossFit, work, etc. but just didn’t quite fit in right. Finally, I went back to church after not attending for about 5 years figuring I could meet some new people there. Became a Christian and met my wife, been married almost 8 years now.

I used to work on an Ingres database using QUEL that did have FROM before SELECT, just with different key words. We would use something like:

  RANGE OF t IS table
  RETRIEVE INTO target (t.column1, t.column2) 
  WHERE t.condition

  SELECT t.column1, t.column2
  FROM table t
  WHERE t.condition

  RANGE OF t1 IS table1
  RANGE OF t2 IS table2
  RETRIEVE INTO target (t1.column, t2.column) WHERE t1.common = t2.common

Ah, got it. I know what you are referring to now. Yea, it is seen in hospitality more often.

Interesting on the “y’all”. I’m a Texan and have never addressed a singular person as y’all. If I do address a person as y’all as in “How are y’all doing?”, it’s assumed I’m speaking of the family unit that person belongs to rather than the individual.

While we Texans might find it polite or friendly, in the corporate world I’ve been told to avoid using it in emails.

Totally agree, some of my best friends today were found through Halo/dota/RuneScape/Dark Age of Camelot/etc. These are not regrets I have - just more of a point forward perspective in what I do with my time now.

I have a family of my own now so that has played no small part in shifting my perspective.

Thank you for the article. ~7 years ago, I realized I have a similar disposition - my best mental state is when I’m in a state of learning and being challenged. The struggle I’ve run into is when I look back and consider what “good” that thing I’ve been learning about has produced.

For instance, I too love video games and have found immense enjoyment in them for many, many years but if I add up all my play logs and realize I’ve spent something like 5-10% of my life playing video games, it begs the question if that time could have been better spent? Has that really helped anyone, myself included? Has it made the world a better place in any way?

Lately, I’ve uninstalled all games and am seeking hobbies that still challenge me but also can bring joy to others. To list a couple: Cooking - An art really but also quite a bit of science involved. Chiefly though, food brings people together and there is nothing quite like feeding people with your very own creation and hard work. DIY - DIY helps with my engineering itch, saves a lot of money for the family, and also can greatly benefit others who might otherwise not be able to afford something they really do need.

I have nothing against video games, I’ve played far more than most my age. I really just wonder when it comes to hobbies, is maximum satisfaction achieved when not only you satisfy your own needs but are also able to add to others’ lives? FWIW, this can be achieved in video games through friendships and community formed… I’m just not good at making that an important part of why I’d play a video game.

I played a lot of tournament bridge from childhood through college and then stopped (I’m now 32).

For me, the two big reasons I quit were (1) the rating system, and (2) finding a partner.

For the rating system, it’s just not competitive. Master points don’t necessarily mean anything. If you have a lot, it means you’ve played a lot - maybe they at least mean that. You could play for 50 years and easily become a life master but be complete garbage compared to the kid who did it in a month or two. There’s no information to understand how successful you actually are minus what you alone know about yourself and your game. It’s just not as fun, especially once I started to play games that make success extremely evident via stats / ranking.

Bridge is very unique in needing a partner to play with and one that you understand quite well. I once played with one of the best players in the world as a 16 year old (literally, one of the “best” at least master point wise). We did terrible lol. I didn’t know what he was doing and he couldn’t stoop down to my level all too well. How do you find the right partner? Not really sure. Again, I think it’s actually a cool part of the game, adds a unique social element and togetherness to it but it does make getting plugged into it harder.

Could you please expand on this? Full disclosure, I am a Christian myself and am genuinely interested in which ethical parts of Christianity you find deplorable.

To me, the ethics essentially come down to mirroring Christ in my own life in everything I do; the moral compass is Christ himself in the Christian life. I fail often but that's the goal / struggle. With that, I'd like to know what those outside of the faith find deplorable about the way Christ lived His life?

And I do understand that deplorable ethical decisions have been made by those or the body calling themselves Christians (and sadly, myself too at times). I would say this is a sin / shortcoming of the person or group and not of what Christ has asked that person or group to live like.

James 1:27: "Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their misfortune and to keep oneself unstained by the world."