andrewem

The New Yorker’s eccentric diacritic is the diaeresis rather than the umlaut.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/mary-norris-diaeresi...

It’s weird that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t say what party he’s considering running as. People who know he hired political consultants would also know who they are and thus if those consultants are Republicans or Democrats.

A plan which makes small children responsible for preventing their own deaths at the hands of adults driving vehicles they personally chose seems at the very least unlikely to produce good results, assuming you are trying to keep children from dying. I suppose if your metric is “nanny state impositions prevented” rather than “children being crushed to death” then it could be considered a success.

Formatting it with the company as the top-level item would make clear at a glance that you’ve been at places for a lot longer.

A suggestion on your sample. It says “The librarian goes to the stacks, finds the book, and brings it back to you.

The next time you need that same book, the librarian doesn't have to go all the way to the stacks again – they can just grab it from the shelf behind the counter.”

This is missing the step where after you return the book to the librarian, they put it on the shelf behind the counter.

Then if you want you can talk about the shelf only fitting a limited number of books, and the librarian having to decide what to do if the shelf is full.

Very cool! I see there are biographical sketches of you, your father, and others involved with the project at https://www.domesdaybook.net/home/contact

I liked that when a major person in Italian organized crime was arrested, US newspapers called him a “capo dei capi” while Italian newspapers called him a “boss dei boss”.

For example, here’s a book using that title

https://m.libreriauniversitaria.it/amp/product/BIT/978887928...

That document says “Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” then uses CCP 7 more times. It uses CPP once, which is clearly a typo.

The half marathon record is 57:31 for 21.1km, so it’s not too far off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_marathon_world_record_p...

As the article says: “Social-media and ad-tech industry practices, however, discourage tracking potentially sensitive traits such as sexuality, according to people who work with digital information. This data can essentially create a list of vulnerable users in parts of the world where some LGBT people face harassment and violence.”

There don’t tend to be laws against liking kites or airplanes, nor violence against people who like them on the basis of that interest.

Side note on Confluent’s products. Thanks for that link - the “Disaggregation of Revenue” table where the 73% and 61% numbers came from shows that Confluent Cloud revenue increased from $94M in 2021 to $211M in 2022, which was more than Confluent Platform’s revenue growth. If those growth rates continue then Confluent Cloud will very soon be the majority of their revenue.

My gas-powered water heater failed in my northern US location. I asked a friend who’s a plumbing engineer (!) who said to get a heat pump. I called the HVAC company which had installed the gas water heater and gas furnace some years before and asked for a heat pump water hearer, and they said oh yeah we sell one of those and people love it. I get the feeling that as you say 5-15 years ago it would have been a different story but now it’s routine.

I don’t know about pricing, but One Medical’s locations seem pretty clearly chosen to be in the richest areas of each city.

https://www.onemedical.com/locations/

A fixed ratio makes sense in the context of how a particular company operates at a particular time. Given the example strategy you're quoting is about one company (real or hypothetical), and it doesn't say that the infrastructure teams are going to gain or lose a bunch of responsibilities from what they currently have, it seems pretty clear. When you add in "Particularly we will avoid hiring that grows our current headcount." the result is that they're aiming to keep about the same number of total engineers, and therefore about the same number of infrastructure engineers.

The guy who fell in the water talks about that here: “Specifically, he wants people to know there are wireless killswitches available that can attach to passengers as well as the captain.”

https://www.wwaytv3.com/i-was-going-to-die-man-goes-overboar...

If you don’t mind my asking, how has your life unfolded as a result of following that advice?

The practical way this would work is probably insurance - if you want to pay a celebrity to endorse a product, then you also buy an insurance policy which will pay their costs if they’re sued due to that endorsement. That makes it similar to other professional liability insurance.

Without commenting on the others, the Wikipedia article for Neuralink seems to say it’s taken a ton of funding but failed to make any big improvements in the science or technology, and without even reaching initial human trials. The Boring Company built “a single-lane underground roadway less than a mile long, driven by conventional Tesla automobiles, constructed at a total cost of $48 million” (see the Wikipedia article for it).

I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.

I found https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... which says “there were 70 non-COVID-19 on-duty firefighter deaths and 78 firefighter deaths resulted from COVID-19 in 2021”.

Also “In 2021, 1,353,500 fires resulted in 3,800 civilian deaths and 14,700 injuries”. By comparison, Wikipedia says there were 42,915 deaths due to motor vehicles in 2021, more than 10x. So it makes sense that even if fire department only dealt with road crashes they would spend more time on that than on fires.

A funny thing about this is there’s an obvious typo in the quote from Mark Zuckerberg. It says “Twitter is such as mess” rather than “a mess”. Searching for that quote finds a 2013 tweet from Benedict Evans containing the typo, quoting a review of the book “Hatching Twitter” which also has the typo.

That review describes a conflict between two of the founders which today I find baffling: “Dorsey saw Twitter as a way to update one’s “status,” the ability to say what you’re doing the moment you’re doing it. Williams saw Twitter as a way to describe what’s happening in the world around you.”

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/397814437014700032?...

https://allthingsd.com/20131104/in-hatching-twitter-a-billio...

There’s a saying that transportation is land use and land use is transportation. This article has a great example talking about how a bank wants to occupy a large amount of space on a busy corner mostly with parking that is mostly empty, and take away large portions of the sidewalks for curb cuts so cars can make high-speed turns across the sidewalk. It’s a feature for the bank that what a town would like to be a lively location is either empty or just storing cars, and it’s a regrettable but necessary consequence to the bank that the curb cuts are dangerous or deadly to people walking along the street, thus discouraging people from walking.

Add up many such decisions and you get the current car dependence of the United States.

“while almost every house has a driveway, there are still many people parking on the street”

Perhaps that’s because they pay no cost for privatizing a part of a public way.

Peers are people who hold titles from this set of descending order of importance - Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Baron (and feminine equivalents). These tended to be hereditary, so that a person who the king or queen gave a title like Duke of Marlborough got to pass it down to a descendant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingd...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Marlborough_(title)

Getting hit by a bike hurts. Getting hit by a car or truck kills.

This is the crucial distinction which one must disregard in order to argue such equivalences.

> a Jewish Ottoman resettled to Spain

Today I learned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Carasso

Your characterization of Uber leaves out the sexual harassment from the source you mentioned:

“On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat… He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with… When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to… Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.”

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Family names weren’t changed at Ellis Island.

See eg this from the New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...

(The mandated adoption of surnames is a pretty complex topic and of course proceeded in different ways in various times and places.)

The author of this has some videos related to swimming (0). See for example the one called "1-10-1 Final" where he jumps into cold water that is about 40 degrees F (4 degrees C) and stays in for a number of minutes, showing what to do.

[0] https://vimeo.com/mariovittone

"Application Engineer" probably means an engineer who does high-level technical support for customers, as it did when I worked for a company which sold products to technical users in the 1990s. Your customer buys some complex electronic part or system from your company and then tries to use it in some demanding application. When it doesn't work as expected, an "AE" is called to debug the setup and educate the customer on how to properly use the company's product. In such a role, you're not part of the product development organization, so you might spend all your time training or debugging (edit: adding for clarity - training customers and debugging their systems), and none of your time writing any code; and anyway what code you write might well be examples or proofs of concept for customers.

I agree we should all aim to put up with less of this, but even with an employer you trust there’s no guarantee they won’t run into money trouble and sell to a larger company which takes a harsher view.