alex_young

  The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed

This happened with such regularity that people would take their checks to said employer’s bank on payday and stand in line to cash them before heading to the office. You’d see a couple of coworkers in line to do this.

Maintaining a list like this is probably not super useful. Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long.

  The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.

  a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"

  In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt

  a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.

We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.

If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you:

a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders?

Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.

Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?

If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?

In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.

US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?

  Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.

My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.

I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.

I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.

40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:

  Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.

I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.

People would rather shop there than go online. Why? Because they are a part of the community.

At every farmer’s market or community event they have a booth giving out free glitter tattoos to children, and they employ several teenagers part time to wrap gifts (of course this is free too), apply tattoos, and help out in the store.

This isn’t a unique concept. Going the extra mile and doing seemingly unreasonably nice things wins you customers and loyalty.

If they allow E2E encryption, they can't scan for CSAM or do other monitoring stuff effectively, so they can't provide a "safe" place for minors.

Obviously the right answer is kids shouldn't be exposed to social media at all, but more eyeballs is more important than our kids.

We could redefine "half" to mean "half of whatever you're talking about until you get to some arbitrary limit", but doing that to all of arithmetic is going to wind up in a very odd place.

Is there a limit to how many times something can be logically divided? If not, then there’s your infinity. It doesn’t require you to continue brute forcing it, just reason about it.