nmcfarl

The horrible thing is there can be lots of differentiation here. I grow my own meat birds for my own consumption, and they taste radically better than anything I’ve ever had in America. (Barring when I eat my friends’ birds.) Artisanal chicken could definitely be a thing, although it would definitely cost more.

I feel that regulatory capture is part of the problem - processing your own birds is safely is definitely possible, but what is required to process them for sale makes it so the local USDA butcher would have to charge as much for a chicken as for a sheep, and that’s just not viable.

My stepmother (in her 60s) inherited or rather lot of furniture from her parents, enough to furnish most of a house. It’s spectacular and at this point it has to be well over 100 years old. She both wanted it and has lived with it daily for coming on 40 years.

And my wife inherited three pieces from her parents and they make up much of our dining room, and her uncle gave her two pieces that he made by hand, and that did not fit into his new house. I was dubious about the stuff from her parents, but it’s beautiful if dated and we’ve gone with a very “eclectic” decorating style, no room has to look like any other room. And now I’m very grateful for all of it.

I lost a Mac laptop in the pre-MagSafe days, to a bullpen environment –a sysadmin was rushing to a meeting, snagged his foot, and took the cable and the laptop off the desk at high speeds.

After that, I was a big fan of MagSafe, but today’s USB-C and better batteries situation solves a lot of problems that MagSafe did in a different way. It allows for you to have multiple reasonably priced chargers, so the one on your desk can be safely placed, with a short unsnaggable cable. And you can still go to meetings and take your laptop home – because you have another cable in your bag and another at home.

So these days, I barely use the MagSafe cable on my MacBook Pro.

I don’t know what Amazon did - but I use Aider+Openrouter with Gemini 2.5 pro and it cost 1/6 of what sonnet 3.7 does. The aider leaderboard https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ - includes relative pricing theses days.

I grew up in Alaska which has a billboard ban. And then I went to Florida for university, and while there was a lot of culture shock I really think that the in your face billboards everywhere where the biggest bit.

Huge aggressive grabs for attention when you really should be paying attention to the road really should not be allowed.

I do.

My eyesight is so bad that, without my glasses, I cannot see the numbers on my iPhone, even when using the big number display in standby mode. About a decade ago I got a cheap no name thing off of Amazon with a 4” high LED display. That I can see!

She does journalism, but this is a fantastic article about what it’s like to go independent, in any way. Bootstrapping a business of any kind is not dissimilar. The hats may be different, but there are still a lot of them. Well worth a read.

(Plus, it’s just a very well written and entertaining post.)

Since everyone’s discussing the inverse, I shall mention that long ago I worked for a 100 person, 5 year old, startup who's policy was: your vacation is your year-end bonus. No one could take vacation ever, it just got paid out in December. They did give you Christmas and New Year’s off.

Getting sick was jokingly referred to as a firing offense, though people did take sick leave. Burnout was a real thing – and I barely lasted a year, though that may well have been unrelated.

I don’t know – I look at history and I see series of AI bubbles directly after a breakthrough that led to a great advancement in the science and nothing else. And then AI crashes and winters.

I think it’s completely possible to look around and think that this is as good as ChatGPT is going to get, or maybe it’ll get to 5.5 in a few years and peter out there (instead of here). And then we’ll spend the next decade shrinking and cramming and maybe we’ll even get 5.5 intelligence on our watches, but it’s never getting smarter than that.

Then in 2040 we’ll have another breakthrough, another hype cycle, and things will get smarter again, for another few years.

Looking at history, that’s a future I can believe in.

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PS. Generally I think these large transformer models are amazing, show great utility, and I use them every day.

Ours really depends on your definition of simplicity.

We have independent checking accounts (normally at the same bank), and credit cards. And then we have 10 or so joint savings or roboadvisor investment accounts – each one for a single purpose, buying a new car, family vacations, new furniture, major house repairs: the roofs need repainting. It is trivial for each of us to see what our progress is on any particular upcoming expense and adjust our donations to that account.

Day-to-day small expenses were divided amongst us fairly, based on income out to the start. But our incomes have changed a fair bit and they’ve been re-jigged a few times. Additionally, it became obvious that my wife was not great at paying bills that required checks in the mail (I know it’s 2024) so now all of those get paid by me and she sends me monthly top up payments when she gets to it.

——

This structure allows for us to have very different spending patterns on personal stuff and have aligned goals for big stuff. Different amounts can go to different goals, based both on income and interest in the goals, and progress is clear.

It has also allowed for us to deal with income changes - We each have three jobs currently and one of mine only pays out one in five years, and none of mine pay a salary. Lumpy income can be hard to plan for, and the private accounts allow us to smooth some of this out.

Also for a while, she was a student and had negligible income, then we had similar incomes and now she makes more than I do, the joint accounts and small expense division help level this out over time.

Also, we can have either savings accounts or these days just ad hoc payments that allow for one person to do the chore (shopping, car repairs, writing checks) and another to pay for it.

I think this is cultural or location based – I know at least a dozen people who can weld and no one who has a 3-D printer, but I live /way/ out and rural America. The Internet would suggest that urban America is the reverse.

If you need heat resistance and can give up reforming and strength sugru is a moldable silicone that I’ve used for a quite a number of repairs. A knife handle I repaired in 2014 is still going strong.

(InstaMorph is new to me - but will certainly get used in the future)

I don't know about that - my Subaru head unit crashes a lot more when I'm clicking around in the Subaru programs, and it very rarely crashes when I'm clicking in CarPlay. My feeling is there are bugs in the Subaru provided programs, and very few bugs in the program that launches CarPlay and gives it control of the screen (probably because that is a very simple program).

So it seems that the more features I use via carplay the less it crashes. It's not perfect, but it certainly helps.

No where.

Rather I was pointing out that this clause in Anthropic’s TOS is so broad that if Claude ever adds code interpreter you can never use it as a code generator again.

However anyone that uses Claude to generating code is 'supplanting' OpenAI's Code Interpreter mode (at the very least if it's python). So, once Code Interpreter gets into Claude, that whole use case violates the TOS.

You can turn off the barriers in settings.

This particular one I live with constantly being in tech and living on a ranch in the US west.

I'd never call a tech friend at 8am, I might well wake them up. And I'd never call a rancher after 8 - they will be working without cell. 6-7am is ideal they will still be working, but hopefully inside cell range with a cup of coffee.

No - but they can imply that you should, and if you don’t make cashing the check more onerous opening an account.

I had this happen to me 25 years ago with Wells Fargo. I was on vacation and had a check drawn on the branch I was standing in front of - and foolishly thought it easier to cash it right the and there than wait to get home and deposit it. Boy was I wrong.

I’d also done this once or twice as an actual child in the early 90s and then it was not a problem.

However on the flip side a user can be someone who downloads your app, pokes at for 10 minutes and deletes it. Not something I would call a user, but for apples purposes it works.

I am the owner of the great Great Pyrenees (several in fact: we use them to guard our sheep from cougars - but one that sounds much like Agnes in temperament), and he would never consider going near people. People need to come to him. In this, like most activities, great Pyrenees self-supervise quite well.

They should have just paid for yellow routers.

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I know that this is not the author's point, and that it even undercuts his point, but it feels to me like the original color scheme was flexible to handle this development, it's just that people were not dedicated enough to it to put the work/money in to keeping it up. Which seems like a shame for a place like Centre Pompidou.

This sounds a lot like a ‘title company’ to me.

I use emacs like that. When first getting into it, 20 years ago, I was very much as described above - slowly pulling everything in my life into emacs. And then the iPhone arrived, and I started pulling out things that I wanted to do mobile: email, to do lists, and eventually notes, and recipes. Most recently, I’ve started doing JavaScript in VS code, as the LLM assistants are better than what I’ve got in emacs, but I suspect this is temporary.

I find the emacs works best when it does everything, but there’s stuff it just doesn’t do, so I do that stuff elsewhere. I look outside of emacs if I think the task is going to be done mobile, and even then, I generally choose a solution that produces plain text so I can do it inside emacs if required - but sometimes that just doesn’t work out.

In addition to curries I make a New Mexican style posole stew with my necks - it is also delicious.

This was exactly my experience.

I then got a short contracting gig when I needed some cash. It was good money - and I never wanted to do that kind of work again. The language has any number of deficiencies, that have been fixed by later languages. And as another commenter mentioned - the departments that use it have any number deficiencies, many of them political, that got them into this position.

It is not something I would recommend for fun.

The feature is pretty awesome - I just learned about it myself last week.

And the link totally works! (I have no clue on Nuxt though.)

Scroll to text fragments are your friend (though they are not in Firefox yet):

https://astro.build/#:~:text=Learn%20more%20in%20our%20docs

Docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments

I have done both (I have also purchased with a realtor), all in rural Oregon.

I did a FSBO in a tiny town and the property was purchased directly by a buyer that was also without a realtor, but both sides had a mortgage from a national bank, and inspections happened, there was a boilerplate contract (the same one the previous realtor used for us buying the house, the lawyer’s name was on the contract) and a title company. The transaction was on rails. Could not have been smoother or cheaper.

For that place we knew the local market was small and the rumor mill active and figured we could FSBO for a bit before we contacted a real estate agent if we needed access to the MLS and non local buyers.

As for the time we purchased without an agent, we purchased a few 100 acre ranch from our family and did so with a real estate contract, seller financing and no mortgage. It would have been difficult to get financing at a reasonable rate for a property of this kind. This involved a fair bit of time dealing with lawyers and neither party is happy with the lawyers but the deal got done.

Anyhow - both experiences were good.

These are all fairly obvious sadly. And as such are lacking in style, and grace is much harder with angry people who know what is up.

These days when I say I need to check my calendar people are instantly disappointed, everyone knows it’s beyond full.

And I can memorably remember being screamed at extensively (by a higher up outside of my chain) in a meeting 20 years ago, for asking what needed to be deprioritized.

I mean I use these all, but if people are going to be emotional about a no, they will see right through these, and you will have the same problems.

The GBP USD rate went from 1.6245 on Jan 1 2013 to 1.25 today - which is a drop. Perhaps this is what is being focused on.

But your comment is dead on - this doesn’t feel like a collapse it feels like currency fluctuations, at least from the outside.