ssharp

On the Polymarket homepage right now, one of the featured markets is whether or not Bitcoin will be up or down over the next 5 minutes. It's hard to justify that as anything more than illegal gambling.

I find prediction markets to be interesting on two fronts:

1) They like a really good way to determine the probability of something happening, which is interesting for events like elections

2) It provides an avenue for smart bettors to take advantage and sharpen their skill, whereas they get severely limited or banned from traditional sports books

However, it seems like all incentive structures for the markets and consumer behavior will steer these things to degenerate gambling.

Concrete counter top mixes usually use either much smaller, or no aggregate and use more sand. The mixes resemble mortar more than concrete and they are typically a little harder and less forgiving to work with.

Granted, my modeling skills begin and end with Tinkercad but I've actually created some really useful things for around the house and for hobbies -- a plug for my septic drain field distribution box pipes (one pipe was cut too short and there was no good way to plug it -- I tried lots of options before making one myself), jigs for drilling, pieces for a claw machine I'm refurbishing, cases for Arduino projects, etc.

The balancing act of figuring out what you can reasonably rely on from an LLM and what you need to be skeptical or dismissive of is not the type of experience an iPhone user should be expected to navigate.

> Variant B improved conversion rate (CVR) or Add-to-Cart (ATC) rate? Roll it out.

Basing rollouts on add-to-cart rate is generally not a great idea, particularly for experiments on product pages. There are a variety of reasons why shoppers add products to carts that may only be loosely based on intent to purchase. In my years of ecommerce A/B testing, I've seen plenty of tests that improve conversion rate and/or revenue per visitor but negatively impact add-to-cart rates.

I get the sentiment but was this actually some big launch announcement? When I look at the store online, you have to dig a bit just to even find the product.

Where I live, bald-faced hornets and yellowjackets are very aggressive. Yellowjackets will also build nests inside of structures, in the ground, etc. where it's sometimes very difficult to even know they are there until it's too late.

This is much different than honey bees and other types of wasps who are much less likely to attack just by being near them.

I've used the Tacbo Bel AI drive-thru and came away with the same thought. I kind of groaned at first but it was very accurate, even when making adjustments.

But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it.

Why wouldn't consumer AI be a natural home for Apple?

Apple is constantly under blast for being slow to AI but if you look at the current state of AI, it feels like something Apple would never release -- the quality just isn't there. I don't necessarily think Apple only dipping their toes into AI is that poor of a decision right now. They still have the ability to blow the roof off the market with agents and device integration whenever the tech is far enough along to be trustworthy to the average consumer.

Every tool I've tinkered with that hints at one-shotting (or one-shot and then refine) ends up with a messy app that might be 60-70% of what you're looking for but since the foundation is not solid, you're never going to get the extra 30-40% of your initial prompt, let the multiples of work needed to bolt of future functionality.

Compare that to the approach you're using (which is what I'm also doing), and you're able have have AI stay much closer to what you're looking for, be less prone to damaging hallucinations, and also guide it to a foundation that's stable. The downside is that it's a lot more work. You might multiply your productivity by some single digit.

To me, that 2nd approach is much more reasonable than trying to 100x your productivity but actually end up getting less done because you end up stuck in a rabbit hole you don't know you're in and you'll never refine your way out of it.

I've always guessed that they are able to tell when you called/what you called about, but they simply don't give that level of information to their frontline folks.

If you magnify Alice in Chains' beginnings and pretend like Andrew Wood hadn't died and Pearl Jam never existed and Mother Love Bone became popular, the hair metal influence becomes much more obvious.

I'm not sure about Census but Fivetran's free plan has met my needs to sync data from different ad platforms to BigQuery pretty well.

One of their pitfalls is charging by the row. If you're cost-conscious, you really need to watch what data you're syncing and you need to pare it down quite a bit during the 2-week period they give you when setting up a new connector. If you do all that though, you can get a lot of mileage out of the free plan for some use cases.

“the Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes.”

This is a huge fail for Gemini. Google, of all companies, should know the incentives to distort information aggregators for monetary gain (just look at how bad search results are these days). It's 100% expected that people will try to game LLMs the same way. It's entirely dependent on the LLMs to counteract this.

The "Playing different pitches" section plays "The Final Countdown", arguably the greatest synth riff of all time. If you know it, just click the rhythm on that section.

I understand the thinking behind some of this but I don't think it's right. My first language was GW-Basic so I grew up and enjoyed this era. However, if I want to start working on Javascript today, all I need to do is open a browser and start playing around in the console or set up a directory to point my browser to.

You don't need NPM, Github, Vite, React, etc. to do any of that. I'd also say the vast amount of documentation, sites like Codecademy, seemingly infinite amount of Youtube videos, etc. accelerates learning light years beyond what we had with GW-Basic, assuming you even had this reference guide!

I've had to do this a few times for various reasons and got cancellation confirmations from the companies after the chargeback happened.

Obviously, this would be much different putting a $1,000+ business SaaS subscription on a credit card vs. a $10/month consumer product.

Most banks will report it to your credit bureau - you won't see it in form of points being withheld BUT it might be adverse for you when you try to get a loan, etc

I never knew this! I have heard about companies banning you if you request a CB, which would be really bad for things like Google, Uber, etc.

I usually end up having to dispute a charge only once a year or so. It has surprised me over the past few years how lacking AMEX seems to be in its "investigation". It at least used to take a few days and they'd sometimes ask for documentation. The last one I did got turned around in maybe an hour.

My workaround to this has been to email the company telling them I want to cancel. Once I either don't get a reply, or get a reply saying "just call us and we'll cancel!", I dispute the next charge with American Express and have the email record of trying to cancel. I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature that cuts off future charges.

Another strange part of getting old:

The gap between Dookie and American Idiot seems significantly longer to me than the gap between American Idiot and today, yet it's half as long :/

Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.

That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.

Travel from DC through New England is about the only convenient use of Amtrak. Travel times in the midwest are an absolute joke. 12 hours from Pittsburgh to New York City vs. a 1-hour flight to Newark and <30 minute ride to Penn Station.

This seems like such a grim value prop. Even if you have a private bedroom, a table service dining option, and bar, you're still on a train, not a hotel. A hotel is not, unless it's a resort, what you're going to the destination for. So rather than spend as little time as possible getting to the destination, trading some amount of comfort, you instead spend about as much time as possible getting to the destination and get very little back from the experience, other than "views".

I'm in the midwest, so rail is not remotely convenient but Amtrak recently announced a three-day ride from Ohio to Florida that I was amazed at because it somehow seemed less appealing than just grinding out the 15-hour family road trip, let alone a 2 hour flight.

If you want more people riding trains, make them faster.

Sure, the average gambler is not sophisticated but people who do find edges are generally pretty smart.

There were tons of red flags that were completely set aside.

The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.

There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.

I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.

The online (and IRL) sports books will severely limit the amount you can bet if you’re a plus-EV bettor.

For comparison, Apple's stock about 20x'd during Ballmer's tenure and that was after atrocious AAPL performance from 2000-2003.

Balmer's biggest failures were mirrored by Apple's enormous success. The two areas this article calls out as Balmer's missteps were the exact areas Apple flourished in -- hardware innovation and operating system.

I don't see how you can "underrate" Ballmer as CEO given his mistakes allowed a nearly-dead rival to grow to be larger than Microsoft. The opportunity for Microsoft to capture a significant chunk of that was completed squandered.

I keep hearing about people using these for coding. Seems like it would be extremely easy to miss something and then spend more time debugging than it would be to do yourself.

I tried recently to have ChatGPT an .htaccess RewriteCond/Rule for me and it was extremely confident you couldn't do something I needed to do. When I told it that it just needed to add a flag to the end of the rule (I was curious and was purposely non-specific about what flag it needed), it suddenly knew exactly what to do. Thankfully I knew what it needed but otherwise I might have walked away thinking it couldn't be accomplished.

I can't imagine an office full of people driving their gas vehicles 50+ miles per day creates less pollution than those people being at home. Lighting costs are extremely marginal these days, so really heating/AC would be the big driver.

I know prices may not be a perfect corollary to pollution but people driving that much to work are pretty likely to spend more money fueling their vehicles than they are on electric + gas for their homes.

It's a great site when you need to buy this sort of thing. However, given how lauded it is for functional usability, I noticed I need to rage click the back button in order to get to the site I came from after clicking one of their links.