lastofthemojito

Guessing it means Linda Yaccarino doesn't get to pretend to be CEO anymore.

It's a little bit of inside baseball, but it's been interesting to watch the article's author, Fred Lambert, change his tune about Elon Musk over the years.

I'm a car guy so I've been following automotive electrification for a while, and in the earlier days, Electrek was a shameless Tesla fan blog. I occasionally followed a link and ended up there and felt like I was reading the thoughts of someone fully enveloped by Musk's reality distortion field. Lambert was an early investor in TSLA from the sound of it and just raved about Tesla cars and gushed about Musk.

Anyhow, I think it was the repeated moving of the goalposts for Full Self Driving, or maybe it was the Roadster 2.0 delays, or maybe it was the unhinged Twitter rants ... but anyhow, Lambert slowly became more critical of Musk (until the 2 had a falling out on Twitter), and Lambert now writes things like:

> Call me crazy, but I think the company would fair better with a competent full-time CEO instead of an egomaniac wannabe oligarch who consistently lies to shareholders, engages in resource tunneling with his private competing company, and is deeply lost in one of the worst cases of social media addiction that I’ve ever seen.

(from https://electrek.co/2025/02/04/theres-finally-some-tesla-tsl...)

Fun fact, there's no N in restaurateur: https://www.ciachef.edu/blog/what-happened-to-the-n-in-resta...

Agreed. And my impression is that Gruber is a thoughtful, careful writer. I don't know any details, but he must have a fair number of sources within Apple too. So when he writes this (uncharacteristic for him) piece just excoriating Apple's management, I'm pretty sure it's not just him being in a grumpy mood or being dramatic for click-bait. He must be aware that things related to Siri/Apple Intelligence are as bad or worse than they appear and that management doesn't have a good handle on it.

I don't think enforcing the law is the problem so much as the reaction. Why is she jailed rather than simply placed on one of the daily nonstops from Sea-Tac to Heathrow?

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution.

I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message to call his bank.

Due to the experiences of countless others like my father, the FBI now recommends folks run an ad blocker.

But if everyone did, then the whole thing falls apart right? If Google or Apple built a great ad blocker into their browser and shipped it with the next update, content creators would respond pretty damn quick right? Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else that's worse than the status quo right?

sigh

It's true that the best camera is the one you have with you.

I've definitely carried "real" cameras much less in the ~2 decades since I've gotten a smartphone than the 2 decades prior. I still use a "real" camera when I'm aiming for the best results, but it doesn't make up the majority of my photos anymore, mainly because it is an extra hassle to have something else to carry.

Are there any worthwhile pocketable cameras these days? Seems like those CoolPix and similar cameras that were ubiquitous 20 years ago are a rare sight these days, and if people own an actual separate camera it's going to be something beefy. Has anyone applied the advances in computational photography from smartphones to a standalone camera with a somewhat larger sensor and lens, but still smaller than the Sigma BF and competitors?

> This is obviously aimed at the Leica/Ricoh crowd

Maybe kinda? As a Leica owner myself, honestly I like my traditional controls and wouldn't trade my camera for the Sigma BF.

This feels more like the Tesla Roadster, which I guess some would say is meant to appeal to sports car fans, but I think honestly tries to create a new market. The old-school sports car guys who enjoy revving an engine and shifting gears aren't really the market for a Tesla Roader, it's a new generation of people who are enthusiastic about electric cars.

I think this is trying to do something similar - creating a new market for well-off Gen Zers whose parents didn't even expose them to traditional cameras growing up, just smartphones. People for whom those cryptic old control knobs hold no appeal. "Here's a powerful camera with a much better sensor and lens than your phone, but you don't need to be a camera nerd" is more what I imagine the pitch to be.

Good science reporting here - rather than hysterics or speculation, or adding "color" from random folks, they just talk to an expert and explain things in detail.

Yeah I stopped taking this post seriously when I read this sentence:

> I fetched the satellite image tile for the zoomed-in region of each lake center and read a single pixel at the center of the tile, which should give us an idea of the lake’s color

There's certainly a part of me that wonders if Altman incorrectly assumes last year's rules still apply, when in fact he just ensured retribution from the man who counts all three branches of the United States government as his underlings.

Eh, common usage often precedes official changes. I grew up thinking there was a US state called "Rhode Island", and finally in 2020 that became the reality. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/rhode-island-...

I saw a thought-provoking post that similarly compared LLM makers to the airlines: https://calpaterson.com/porter.html

It feels like we've been tip-toeing in the direction of multi-host Olympics.

For the Paris Olympics, the surfing was on the other side of the world in Tahiti (French Polynesia).

The LA Olympics bid decided they didn't want to build any new facilities, and most events will be at existing facilities around LA, but softball and canoeing events will be in Oklahoma due to better facilities that exist there: https://la28.org/en/games-plan/venues.html

Doesn't seem like much more of a stretch to have a USA-hosted Olympics with events around the country.

The big downside of course being less interaction between athletes from various sports, but I think at this point, where you've got over 10,000 athletes, you could still probably split that into several cities and have big, joyous celebrations in each.

I feel like American college sports are in a similar cycle of enshittification right now.

Conference-specific TV networks have become an enormous source of income, so conferences are incentivized to expand distribution of their regional TV networks by moving into new geographic markets. Schools, looking out for themselves, are trying to join the most successful conference possible, to get a cut of the mega-conference TV cash. We now have the so-called Atlantic Coast Conference with members schools in Texas and California. The Big 10 Conference, previously made up of 10 midwestern schools, is now up to 18 schools, spanning from coast to coast.

Athletes in non-revenue sports are taking long plane rides so they can go run on a track or swim in a pool thousands of miles from home, rather than at a nearby, longstanding rival's facility.

The revenue sports are generally happier, although you do get oddities there too. In football, teams generally only play 8 conference teams, so determining the best team in an 18-team conference where each team hasn't even played half of the league isn't terribly fair.

Any why are universities abandoning historic rivalries and doing so much wasteful travel? All for that almighty dollar.

The swarm takes 5 rightsizing damage.

I have a long-time friend who, after years in fintech, now sometimes speaks this way unironically in non-work situations. I mean, I still think he's a good guy overall but when he recommends the DND party splits up to maximize ROI on a spell rather than just say "let's split up", it does make me cringe.

Seems like a neat idea but I just tried 4 times and got the same response every time:

> Hi there, I couldn't find any flights for your request. Please try again.

> -BonBook

I was trying input like "Find me a flight from BWI to PWM December 27 to January 1".

Or your in-laws watch your Netflix over their holiday visit. Now I can't tell if Netflix has generally worse quality content these days or if it's just recommending garbage to me based on what people have watched on my profile.

I like to imagine police had been following these guys for weeks after noting suspicious behavior, but were unable to crack the criminals' presumed code, "they keep talking about a big cheese heist and taking lots of cheddar - but what's the target, is it a bank or a museum or a jeweler?"

Nope, they were just talking about stealing cheese.

I didn't realize streaming services did this. Which ones don't give you the rest of the month that you paid for? I cancelled Hulu recently (not through Apple at all) and they informed me of the date I had service through, and I was able to watch Hulu for the rest of that month.

I get your point. I've watched the enlightening presentation given at MIT by an airline economist where he explains that for any route, there's no single fare that would make the route profitable. To have the convenience of modern air travel, we seemingly have to put up with the pricing games that make it possible.

I've never intentionally skiplagged, but there was one time the first leg of my journey was late, I missed my connection and I was going to be in the airport for 8 or 10 hours to catch my 1 hour flight to my final destination. I decided not to, and instead minimized my misery and bought a ticket for the 3.5 hour train ride home.

If an airline looked at that behavior and blacklisted me for not using the service I paid for, then they are the greedy fucking bastards.

That's an interesting hypothesis, but at least in my experience the flights where skiplagging has been viable have always been between 2 major airports, with a flight to a third major airport as the skipped leg. Looking at some examples on skiplagged.com right now, I see flights where BWI->LAX is cheaper if you book BWI->LAX->SFO but skip the LAX->SFO leg. Same with BWI->CLT by booking BWI->CLT->NAS. But those LA to SF or Charlotte to Nassau legs aren't subsidized flights to East Podunk.

Essential Air Service flights might sometimes play a role here but from what I've seen I think the thing that creates opportunities for skiplagging is just typical airline revenue management doing it's inscrutable magic setting prices between 2 cities without any concern for the prices of the individual legs.

I had a blast playing that game when I was a kid - as I recall it struck a good balance between simple, accessible controls while also being challenging (and without being frustrating). The gold cartridge rather than the typical NES cartridge probably also lent it an air of specialness.

As I got older I realized that most kids with Nintendos had more games and I felt left out for never having played Zelda or Metroid. But man, Micro Machines, Super Mario Bros 3 and Faxanadu was all I needed.

> Car ownership is absurdly expensive

I mean, it's absurdly expensive except for all of the other types of car usage right? Companies have been pushing car subscriptions for years because they sound nice: "Don't worry about maintenance, just pick a new car every so often!". Except that it turns out to be even more expensive than just owning a car.

Leasing (unless you have some tax advantage) is typically more expensive than owning.

Ride hailing apps are great, but I don't know anyone who has run the numbers and decided it makes more sense for a daily commute than owning a car (maybe someone with no or extremely expensive parking options?).

I'm skeptical that using a self-driving car service from a profit-seeking company would end up being less expensive than owning your own self-driving car, but maybe we'll see.

We see current cars marketed based on their safety features or crash test results - in this driverless future we'll have luxury brands touting that their remote drivers are based in the USA and can respond 5 times faster than more affordable brands with drivers on the other side of the world.

It's a shame that people need to use this template to design these sorts of eBay search sites though. Seems like it'd be easy enough for eBay to create a tabular view where one could choose fields applicable to their search - the same table that works for mini PCs could work for smartphones or comic books or collectable coins or whatever.

I suspect that doing so wouldn't be great for eBay's business though - the table is sortable, but eBay wants to sell promoted listings that are at the top of pages. And less dense search result views with big photos probably entice people to buy "shiny" things rather than specs.

Agree with the general approach, whether the devs are contractors or employees. In my industry we might call this a Skunk Works project. Get a small, talented team and turn them loose on a focused problem. If they make fantastic progress, great, if not, at least it wasn't a huge expenditure.

Solr is seen (probably unfairly) as passé by many people.

I used Solr back in 2008-2009 or so and it did a great job, but people didn't like that it used XML rather than JSON. Then we had a requirement for something like Elasticsearch's percolate query functionality, which Solr didn't support. So we switched, and subsequent projects I've joined have all used ES.

As I understand, Solr now has a JSON REST API and it's improved in other ways over the years, but ES has quite a bit more mindshare these days: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=solr%2Celastic...

So now in addition to the "does it do the job?" question, teams might also ask "can we hire and retain people to work with this technology rather than the more popular alternative?".

It feels more like writing about Boeing and then writing about Boeing again after the crash, considering the Times has been writing about cyber security and American vulnerability for a while:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/technology/cyber-hackers-... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.h... https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/world/europe/nations-buyi... etc