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jelling

1,632 karma · joined June 13, 2016

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonelling/
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jelling··on A Dying Art: The last of the morticians
I wonder if there is any correlation between open caskets and debt collection rules / norms in each country.
jelling··on Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps
> Why people get surprised with that stuff?

Whenever you don't understand how people can think things on the internet, consider that they might be younger than you. They may not be, but it makes the world far less rage inducing. None of us are born knowing everything.

jelling··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Did Anthropic, unlike Open AI, forget to offer free equity to the government?

“Thats a pretty nice IPO you got there… it would be a shame if something happened to it.”

jelling··on Policy on the AI Exponential
This and we already did a dry run of ad-hoc distributions with COVID relief. They had to use the data from tax filings but it did work in terms of getting the money out there.
jelling··on OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
They borrowed $40B from JP Morgan. They literally did not have the money otherwise.
jelling··on The Death of the Cool
> Dimes Square consists of a series of late-night interactions in a Chinatown apartment. The apartment belongs to Stefan, a rich, connected writer who has attracted a social circle by virtue of his strategically applied charm, vague promises of professional opportunities, and abundant supply of cocaine.

I lived for years in the LES adjacent to “Dimes Square” and I was on the periphery of the art scene.

Not covered in this essay at all is how the cost of living in NYC is dramatically higher than during the “good old days” of 80s and 90s downtown scene.

It was cheap for a reason - my cousin literally had an illegal art squat he paid $0 for - but low rent also changed who was able to be on the scene.

Add-in the skyrocketing costs of private colleges, and the scene increasingly is populated by the children of the very comfortable to the obscenely rich.

And unsurprisingly, those that grow up with status to are far more risk averse and solipsistic as well.

Warhol, Herring and Basquiat did not have trust funds, and it was all for the better.

jelling··on Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola [video]
I didn’t like studying chemistry at all when I was your age. But I also didn’t like physics until I took a class thar focused on it in a practical way. So definitely listen to your interests but perhaps you’ll find a better on-ramp to chemistry if you focus on food chemistry or something else more pragmatic.

But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.

jelling··on Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
Same. We've all fooled ourselves into believing that an LLM / stochastic process was finally solved based on a good result. But the sample size is always to low to be meaningful.
jelling··on How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019)
Yes and MSFT sells it on Azure as Signal iirc
jelling··on Show HN: Dia, an open-weights TTS model for generating realistic dialogue
NPR voice is a thing.

It started with Ira Glass voice and now the default voice is someone that sounds like they're not certain they should be saying the very banal thing they are about to say, followed by a hand-shake protocol of nervous laughter.

jelling··on An update to our pricing
Clarifying the pricing would make it easier to value the revenue from current and future users. And naturally they rounded up to leave themselves literal margin for error.
jelling··on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
Etymology: like others said, the old version of cap was short for a bullet. And that term most likely comes from “cap guns” which are/were you guys for kids that had a tiny tiny amount of gunpowder/similar so they made a small noise when fired.

So a bit of speculation, but it’s possible that the word cap has inverted twice over the years, from a toy/fake bullet, to a real bullet, and now back to being a synonym for fake, which it originally was.

jelling··on BioTerrorism Will Save Your Life with the 4 Thieves Vinegar Collective [video]
Any guitarist that places outside of the house will have no problem inflicting enough damage on their guitar to make it unique.
jelling··on Scale Ruins Everything
So did I and having chosen it once, I still thought "well, I'll hear this out..."
jelling··on Bacteria involved in gum disease linked to increased risk of head, neck cancer
Try this: get the travel version of a water pick / flosser. They’re like $30 and you refill them from a tap. Now put it in your shower and make it part of your shower routine.

No mess. Easy to fill. No discomfort. Almost impossible not to use at that point.

jelling··on Do Art Scenes Lead to Gentrification? (2018)
So he did what… made a boom bap, cat-in-the-hat rap musical and put it in midtown to save them the drive?

Lin-Manuel Miranda loves letting people think he came from the streets when his Dad is a political consultant that worked for multiple mayors and presidential campaigns and his mom is a psychologist. Lin Manuel went to one of the most prestigious magnet schools in the Upper East Side and then went Wesleyan, which is one of the most prestigious private liberal arts colleges.

He shouldn’t talk about his customers like that.

jelling··on New York Establishes Stringent Protections to Safeguard Kids on Social Media
If you've ever seen someone that naturally takes to gambling - like they play, lose, and immediately think they must be due to win now! - that's probably a good analogy as any for how some brains can be more likely to get addicted to activities like this.
jelling··on The Antisocial Network: How the 90s Internet Died Like Diaryland (2014)
IRC is back and I love it
jelling··on Reddit shares plunge 25% in two days, finish the week below first day close
Reddit requested to interview me once. It was the least professional company with which I’ve spoken.
jelling··on Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues
I had the same problem while designing an AI related tool and the solution is simple: ask the user a clarifying question as to whether they want a specific ethnic background or default to random.

No matter what technical solution they come up with, even if there were one, it will be a PR disaster. But if they just make the user choose the problem is solved.

jelling··on Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum
Huh? Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

Whether it's a forum or a chat, the data structure is largely the same, especially with Slack/Discord as they have threads.

jelling··on OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
> What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something?

Yes. Yes and more yes.

That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. Because they are supposed to be improving society, not profiting from it.

jelling··on Insomnia REST client now requires an account
REST Client extension in VSCode. Just a file that makes requests and lives in your repo. No totally unnecessary SaaS business with per user licensing fees.
jelling··on It's okay to make something nobody wants
Yes. The people involved in tech changed to a non-trivial degree over the last 15 years.

I grew up in a family that made software and I’ve been a professional myself for over twenty years.

The post-2008 cheap money era brought a huge influx of people that, at best, were not technology enthusiasts or tinkerers. A similar thing happened in the dot com era but a lot of those people got pushed out by the crash. We’ll see what happens this time.

jelling··on The way out of burnout (2016)
> Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition.

Internet doctors in shambles after learning they're just occupational therapists.

jelling··on Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
Cheers. Nice to see something whiskey related that isn’t trying so hard to communicate the usual whiskey stereotypes.
jelling··on Fidelity deepens valuation cut for Reddit and Discord
The write-down might be fair. But the lesson I see with Reddit, Discord and Twitter is that letting a public company own even a tiny slice of your private company is a terrible idea.

Despite only owning a point or two of multi-billion dollar companies, they implicitly get pricing power over the entire cap table.

jelling··on A bejeweled prayer book has been identified as belonging to Thomas Cromwell
The Wolf Hall book series is a great read also, albeit much much longer.
jelling··on Jamsocket: Back Ends for Realtime Apps
Can you contrast your product with Liveblocks? I am considering it for a real-time application.
jelling··on Amazon named its “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process after Homer’s Iliad
Same. Also Apple payments are great for subscriptions, as like PayPal, they provide a control center to cancel subscriptions. For things like streaming services where I know I only need it for a month, I cancel them within seconds of signing up.
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