matthewowen

Coffee shops do a lot of things. Do they make good espresso? Do they do good brewed coffee? Is their cold brew good? Do they have good pastries? Do they do good milk based drinks? Do they offer milk substitutes? Do the staff make you feel inconvenient or are they pleasant? Are they nice places to sit? Is the WiFi good? Are there power outlets?

You probably don't care about all of those things. Other people probably care about a totally disjoint other set of them. If you ask the proprietor of a coffee shop they might care about some of these things and not the others. But you can't tell in advance.

Once you see one thing done poorly, it's not unreasonable to think other things that are important to you might also seem peripheral to the proprietor but actually be important to you.

You could literally have a blank piece of paper with the word "coffee" printed on it in times new roman and it would look better than off ratio AI slop graphics. It's not a case where better necessarily costs more.

I also think that you are assuming here that the effort not spent on good signs is being spent on good coffee. That might not be true. It might be spent on nice chairs, or it might be being spent on pastries, or on non-coffee drinks, or one of the many other things a coffee shop can focus on. In fact even if coffee, maybe they do brewed coffee and espresso based drinks and cold brew and milk oriented drinks and milk-substitute oriented drinks. Which of these are they spending effort on?

The thing about coffee shops is actually that they tend to do a lot of things, and so unless they do almost of them well there's a good chance they don't do one of the things you care about in a coffee shop well. Consequently it makes sense to say "given that you don't do this thing well, there's a good chance there are other things you don't do well and those things might be important for me in a coffee shop".

It's very hard to operate an espresso machine.

If you want to pull good shots you need to be adjusting grind (etc) every day and throughout the day. So it's a case where you have to check and adjust output continuously.

So for me that's especially a case where like, do you pay attention to detail and take time to fix obvious mistakes is probably the number one requirement.

Ironically, you just made even more inferences than I did!

I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.

And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do.

IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.

I was about to say caldigit and then you called them out. I have had a TS3 for six years and it still going strong and I have had basically zero compatibility issues across a range of (Mac) devices and peripherals.

The majority of the US population lives at latitudes that would be affected by the “sun rises after 8am in winter” problem.

As I said before, changing the clocks is a much more efficient approach than getting every school and workplace (etc) to change their hours.

It’s not true IMO that “plenty” of northern countries do without it. Russia doesn’t (since 2014) but their time zones are a mess anyway. Iceland doesn’t. Otherwise pretty much every European country does.

The “savings” in “daylight savings” doesn’t refer to the winter part of the schedule. It refers to the summer part, where daylight that occurs during typical “sleeping” hours is “saved” by shifting the clocks so it occurs in the evening instead.

This is a bad change.

I think it’s bad for kids to have to walk to school before sunrise.

Fundamentally it is useful to have more sunlight later in the evenings in the summer. It’s also useful to have sunlight early enough in the morning for conventional “start of day” times.

Changing the clocks meets these. Yes, time is arbitrary and throughout the year we could collectively change the times we do things at to better match daylight hours but this is obviously much worse and harder to coordinate than changing the time for everyone all together’

85% of the world population lives outside of developed nations.

27% of the world's workforce is in agriculture (contrast to the US where it is 1-2%). 15% in manufacturing.

A lot of people work in "services" (especially in high income nations, where it's roughly three quarters) and some of those are knowledge workers... but a huge number of them are nail technicians or hairdressers or bartenders (etc etc).

if you got rid of the badges and showed me the exterior shot i'd say "oh, is that one of those cheap chinese EVs everyone is talking about?"

Philadelphia is absolutely an option, but it depends on the neighborhood. Eg if you live in the penn alexander, greenfield, or meredith catchments you have a great elementary/middle school and there are lot of kids of late elementary/early middle school age moving around the city independently.

I live in west philly and it is great: the park is excellent and lots of kids safely go there by themselves, the local school is very good. Transit (specifically the trolley) is good and safe.

interestingly, i think there's also a u vs non-u thing here: jam is a u word, preserve is non-u

I think that having some difficulty and having to "bloody your forehead" acts as a filter that you cared enough to put a lot of effort into it. From a consumer side, someone having spent a lot of time on something certainly isn't a guarantee that it is good, but it provides _some_ signal about the sincerity of the producer's belief in it. IMO it's not gatekeeping to only want to pay attention to things that care went into: it's just normal human behavior to avoid unreasonable asymmetries of effort.

I think this is an odd idea. For a lot of reasons, but one is simply that higher level languages _tend_ to be terser, and context window matters for LLMs. Expressing more in less is valuable.

Ironically, grand juries refusing to indict frivolous political charges has been in the news quite a lot in the past couple of months.

It's true that jury trials have a less than perfect history of applying justice (though of course I think it's fair to say that the judges presiding over those trials exhibited similar trials so the counterfactual of a bench trial may have been the same outcome). That said, my understanding is that jury trials are just generally favorable to defendants compared to bench trials.

FWIW jury trials are arguably less vulnerable to corruption, which is a benefit. Would be hard to pull off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal#Criminal... (which wrongly put thousands of children in jail for the financial benefit of judges) with juries.

I think calling it 'American exceptionalism" is a little reductive. The idea that a jury trial is a protector of civil rights in a system that upholds the law as something no-one is above literally dates back to Magna Carta. Suggesting that this throughline of civil liberty is "silly theater' is not a serious proposition.

It's sort of hard to judge this.

The article mostly focuses on ChatGPT uses, but hard to say if ChatGPT is going to be the main revenue driver. It could be! Also unclear if the underlying report is underconsidering the other products.

It also estimates that LLM companies will capture 2% of the digital advertising market, which seems kind of low to me. There will be challenges in capturing it and challenges with user trust, but it seems super promising because it will likely be harder to block and has a lot of intent context that should make it like search advertising++. And for context, search advertising is 40% of digital ad revenue.

Seems like the error bars have to be pretty big on these estimates.

but cycling races are won by being able to put out a critical extra 50 watts for a few minutes at a key point in the race. I don't think anyone is trying to motor the whole way up a climb, but I can imagine how you could have a useful motor if you're just trying to run for ten minutes total? at that point it's analagous to the <250g drones that are out there.

there's probably just as much doping in distance running but it's easier to evade (top athletes spend most of the year in countries that have limited interest in testing)

> Standard with ads, which is distorting because ads have a different cost and benefit (more expensive and lucrative in the US). Standard Standard is 14.99€ in France, £12.99 in the UK, $17.99 in the US.

so it's 30 cents cheaper per month on that basis. that doesn't really support the claim.

> I like how you picked France, not Poland at $27, Spain at $35, UK at $35, Ireland at $39, Belgium at $42, Italy at $44, Germany at $46, etc.

I picked France because I had specifically mentioned France previously. I'm aiming to be consistent.

> Plus anecdotes from the internet.

It all becomes clearer.

> You said they're favourable, not more favourable than e.g. in the UK. What's the average APR?

I said "better access to favorable rates", not that every person is getting good rates. For what it's worth I would say that any interest rate that's below the expected return on money in the SP500 is quite favorable.

> The only metric by which Mississipi is "richer" than France is GDP/GDP per capita.

Clearly untrue: it has higher household disposable income, almost certainly the most relevant statistic.

I really don't think you're sincerely interested in this topic, you just want to dunk on America.

> netflix and co

Standard plan is £5.99 in UK, €7.99 in france, $7.99 in the US. So the US is the cheapest of those after currency conversion

> cinema

US median price in 2022: $10.53. In the UK, £7.69 == $10.54 (uncanny tbh)

> groceries

https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/360768/what-a-basket-o... puts the US at $52.80, France at $51.08.

I'm genuinely struggling to understand where you are pulling these conclusions from because they don't fit the trivially searchable data, nor do they fit the anecdotal conclusions that I think most people would make from spending time in these places.

> Are interest rates favourable? There are multiple concerning trends (like car payments being one of the top household expenses and people struggling with that, people owing more on car loans than what the vehicle is worth, etc. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/15/american-consumers-are-incre... )

Yes, they're more favorable. The interest rates available to US consumers on auto purchases are lower than those available to UK consumers. And again, it's a case where your need to moralize is getting in the way of the topic: I'm saying that easier access to credit is a contributor to Americans spending more on cars. You are saying "oh, but Americans then struggle with auto loans". Yes! These are not conflicting statements. You seem to be attaching a value judgement that isn't there to the statement that "Americans are able to spend more on cars". It doesn't have to be a good thing, but that doesn't necessarily make it untrue.

> I'm not ranting, I'm correcting a wrong comparison using a wrong metric incorrectly. I don't know what is it with Americans reassuring themselves with GDP metrics, but it's very confusing why anyone would throw in GDP numbers when talking about disposable income and the car market.

You were the first person in this thread to bring up GDP per capita! The person you are replying to said "richer". You're the one interpreting this to be a GDP reference, but it doesn't need to be since it's also true with regards to disposable income.

I also don't understand why you think it's people "reassuring themselves". I don't need reassuring of anything on this topic, and I'm not sure why you think you know what beliefs I might hold about the relative merits of living in MS versus various European countries. I think it's a pretty basic ability to be able to decouple the question of "is the median american is willing and able to spend more money on a car than the median german?" from "which country has an overall higher standard of living?".

IME it's a big part of it for a lot of people. People don't buy a car for what they do with it every day, they buy it for what they do with it a few times a year. If you have a boat on a trailer, you buy a vehicle that can pull the trailer. If you drive to the mountains in winter a few times a year, you buy a higher clearance AWD vehicle so that you can skip chain control.

You might say that this irrational and that people might be better off renting something on the occasion that they need to tow something, or go on a long road trip, or fit more than five people in their car. But people are irrational and they really do make these choices!

> GDP per capita doesn't mean what you think it does. Everything being overpriced in the US, and everything needing to have a middleman inflates GDP figures. Take health insurance, Americans pay multiple times what Europeans pay, to stuff the pockets of multiple for profit institutions and middlemen. GDP figures look better in the US, but really, which way is more efficient? Health outcomes are better across the EU, and the amount of medical bankruptcies is also telling.

Healthcare is a particularly _atypical_ example to choose, and the particularly poor health outcomes of MS are only partly explicable by healthcare cost/access: it's also cultural and lifestyle issues. So it's rather disingenuous to say "take health insurance", as though it can be used by analogy to comprehensively explain other aspects of American finance.

You don't need recourse to GDP, you can just look at household income which really is higher. Most things do _not_ actually have inflated prices relative to European countries.

Would I rather live in Mississippi than France? Are Mississipians living better lives than French people? I mean it depends on where specifically, but almost certainly no. Of course having more money doesn't necessarily make a place better to live in.

But that doesn't invalidate "people have more money available to spend on cars and easier access to credit to finance that purchase over five years at favorable interest rates" as part of the reason why Americans choose to spend more money on cars.

You really don't have to take every point of discussion of difference between the US and European countries as an obligation to rant about how much better Europe is on tangential topics.

The problem (which Sotomayor raises in her dissent, pages 94 and 95 of the PDF) is that it may never reach the supreme court:

> There is a serious question, moreover, whether this Court will ever get the chance to rule on the constitutionality of a policy like the Citizenship Order. Contra, ante, at 6 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he losing parties in the courts of appeals will regularly come to this Court in matters involving major new federal statutes and executive actions”). In the ordinary course, parties who prevail in the lower courts generally cannot seek review from this Court, likely leaving it up to the Government’s discretion whether a petition will be filed here. These cases prove the point: Every court to consider the Citizenship Order’s merits has found that it is unconstitutional in preliminary rulings. Because respondents prevailed on the merits and received universal injunctions, they have no reason to file an appeal. The Government has no incentive to file a petition here either, because the outcome of such an appeal would be preordained. The Government recognizes as much, which is why its emergency applications challenged only the scope of the preliminary injunctions

This is why it's bad. Large incumbents can manage this and then in steady state it's the same.

But for any new entrants that need to rapidly grow their engineering teams, it's a huge disadvantage.

We don't need more things in the tax code that protect large incumbents at the expense of new entrants.

I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year "Penn Christmas". I definitely see some resentment, but having made an international move in my life I have sympathy for it. You need to buy things to live, shipping that stuff when you move away is often very expensive and time consuming, so you condense your life down to a few suitcases and do the best you can.

Partly it’s a long distance thing, especially at the lower end of the market.

Imagine you want to move your possessions to somewhere that’s three days drive away. Generally speaking, you need a team in location a to pack, a driver, and a team in location B to unpack.

In practice that’s hard for companies to offer entirely in house, so it winds up being subcontracted out, and then you have the problems you expect.

If you’re moving a couple of hours down the road, this doesn’t apply, it’s easy to find local movers who will load, drive, unload with a single crew.

Do people in Spanish cities with strong grids (eg Barcelona) not also use the local language equivalent of "blocks" as a term? I would be surprised if not. It's a fundamentally convenient term in any area that has a repeated grid.

The fact that some cities don't have repeated grids and hence don't use the term is not really a valuable corrective to the post you are replying to.

> segregation (since poorer people both tend to be minorities and tend to not have capacity/time to jump through lottery hoops)

charter schools tend to have _more_ minority students than public schools. eg in philadelphia, charter schools are 80% black/hispanic versus 71% for the public schools. nationwide they are 60% black/hispanic vs 42% for public schools (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...). they're also generally lower income than public schools.

this is not super surprising because families with money already get school selection within public systems by virtue of spending more to live in better catchments.

i don't really have an opinion on charter schools being good or bad, but at least from what i've seen their primary audience is lower income families (often minorities) who look at their local public school and decide it's not good enough.

It's in Born to Run.