Arn_Thor

The parable of boots seems apt here. In the extreme, expensive pair can last for a decade while people who can only afford the cheap pair will have to keep buying a new one every year.

Yes, the fact that any family can afford a new shelving unit is great! But the fact that it’ll last them just a few years is not good; they’ll spend more in the long run

Hong Kong is such an amazing place. I lived there overlapping with your stay. I miss the food and the weather, but most of all the people.

It doesn’t perceive time so time doesn’t even factor into its perspective at all—only in so far as it’s introduced in context, or conversation forces it to “pretend” (not sure how to better put it) to relate to time.

Nice

Sure but the infrastructure required to do that is probably (my guess) more extensive than a wood press and some chemicals

Hear hear!

Not sure the point is to recycle it but rather to have a more carbon friendly alternative to steel. It would also have the benefit of making us less reliant on steel in places where wood supply is ample.

In Hong Kong the gates are closed but spring into action much more quickly than in London (though a lot of MTR stations have turnstiles still)

What a great read! Thank you for sharing

A good solution for a standalone server. But since I use Plex already there’s an audio book plugin for it that I use along with Prologue for IOS.

Audible books can be.. liberated from such encumbrances. There’s a program called Libation.

I meant the GPT Gemini 2.5 pro exp. but I see now it's available in VS code too. Guess I missed it because I was always using Claude

Good point. I suppose I'd missed that they added it. Trying it now and it's fantastic.

I thought Cursor was pointless until trying out Google's latest coding GPT, which blows everything else out of the water. I may switch from VSCode to cursor for the next few months just because of that.

It's not either/or. We can provide both jobs and a safety net.

We could, though. Absolutely. Literally feeding all the starving people in the world would cost a fraction of the world's surplus wealth, and a briefly disruptive but manageable readjustment of global logistics. The rest of it would be costly, but still totally doable at the cost of some inconvenience for the world's top 10%.

The problem isn't lack of solutions. It's lack of cooperation on every level from individuals to organizations to social groups to nations to transnational organizations.

I think of a lot of my favorite space opera book series as optimistic. They're not depicting utopias or anything, but an imperfect world in the future that's nonetheless way beyond what we've achieved so far, and I reckon that's quite optimistic. This includes books by Peter F. Hamilton, Iain Banks, Alistair Raynolds.

I was using Copilot within VSCode and it seemed very well integrated, making changes in files for me and letting me choose between AI models

I’ve been juggling different models with Copilot in VSCode already

I was coding with VSCode for a while and just this week decided to try Cursor which everyone have been raving about. Was quite disappointed to find no meaningful difference with VSCode (so far, after 30 minutes of working with it).

Grew up watching Moomin on TV and it left with life lessons, good values and deep trauma…

Yep! I’m digitally literate but can’t do anything more advanced than “hello world”. Never had the time or really interest in learning programming.

In the last year I’ve built scripts and even full fledged apps with GUIs to solve a number of problems and automate a bunch of routine tasks at work and in my hobbies. It feels like I woke up with a superpower.

And I’ve learned a ton too, about how the plumbing works, but I still can’t write code on my own. That makes me useful but dependent on the AI.

Much like you leaving this comment?

The answer is brick and concrete. You’d be amazed how well a load bearing wall in a high rise will block a signal.

sure, you'll have some unhappy customers but that's not new. They used to sell just fine. I wonder if it's the neverending hunger for bigger margins that's really doing them in. It's not enough to make SOME profits when you need to show shareholders you're making MORE profits.

Does it really require that much R&D? Slap one of the excellent AMD mobile processors with built-in GPU in there, standard cooling (they don't use much more power than they did 5 years ago. They surely have the blueprints for the last XPS machines), and a bigger NVME. It's all more or less commodity hardware in a name-your-preference shell.

Thanks for linking to that! Really enjoyed it

Night Moves is essential neo-noir

(*cathartic)

To say they're complementary doesn't mean that they depend on each other to an equal degree.

I don't believe it would be easy to find a use for all that cow skin. Think of the enormous amounts. But even if they did find a use for it that doesn't cost them, it's not likely to be nearly as profitable as selling it as an input to the leather industry. (If there was a more profitable way to use cow skin we'd probably be doing that by now)