smogcutter

It is, however, the setting of On the Road.

The pun being that “eu-topos” would be “good place”.

It seems to me that calling the customer to get them to agree on a quote is the most important contact?

It’s like telling a salesman to just enter data into a CRM and trust their livelihood to an AI closer. See how that goes over.

I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.

> Additive Manufacturing, industrial robotics, the Internet, and the proliferation of computers had already made large portions of manufacturing and low skill white collar jobs redundant by the mid-2010s.

I think a much more realistic explanation than robotics and 3d printing is the outsourcing of the social and environmental costs of industrialization to countries willing to bear it, like China, Vietnam and Mexico.

Containerized shipping, email, and computerized logistics have made globalization efficient, and therefore inevitable.

Lots of farm stands in NY’s North Country operate like this.

With Zelle, etc, there’s no box of cash sitting out and you don’t need to worry about making change.

Except for the Europeans that are literally fighting Russia.

But being willing to pay for something is a pretty good indicator for being willing to pay for other things too.

To add - there’s also an Austrian general named O’Reilly, and a famously subpar Macdonald for the French.

The French at the time were busy inventing nationalism. Someone suitably aristocratic could find a place as an officer basically anywhere.

> I'm pointing out that that's not something they did

Well that settles it then!

If only you could go back and tell them what a waste those walls are! I’m sure the Mongolians would value your expertise.

This is a good point as a tangent. “Cargo Cult” is a meaningful phrase for ritualizing a process without understanding it.

Debasing the phrase makes it less useful and informative.

It’s a cargo cult usage of “cargo cult”!

Even bending over that far backwards to find a useful example comes up empty.

Those kinds of emails are so uncommon they’re absolutely not worth wasting this level of effort on. And if you’re in a sorry enough situation where that’s not the case, what you really need is the outside context the model doesn’t know. The model doesn’t know your office politics.

Gotta go to Mo’s!

Irulan’s books are state propaganda! The true Paul Atreides is only revealed in Leto II’s secret diaries.

But we’re way beyond templates here.

There will be niches in research, high performance computing & graphics, security, etc. But we’re in the last generation or two that’s going to hand write their own CRUD apps. That’s the livelihood of a lot of software developers around the world.

Something I hadn’t thought about before with the V-K test: in the setting of the film animals are just about extinct. The only animal life we see are engineered like the replicants.

I had always thought of the test as about empathy for the animals, but hadn’t really clocked that in the world of the film the scenarios are all major transgressions.

The calfskin wallet isn’t just in poor taste, it’s rare & obscene.

Totally off topic, but thanks for the thought.

Your square color photos are almost certainly made from medium format film!

The most common frame size used in 120 is a 6x6cm square, especially in consumer cameras of the time. 6x6 cameras stayed popular for snapshots because they could be contact printed straight from the negative, without an enlarger. A whole roll of 120 can be contact printed onto a single sheet of paper and then cut. Much cheaper and faster than enlarging 35mm negatives.

With film there’s no such thing as a b&w specific camera. The difference you’re seeing is probably down to the glass in whatever cheap & cheerful 6x6 rangefinder they took those 1950s family snaps on, vs the photos from the AE-1 which is an all time great camera & lens system.

There’s a spectacular moment in Django Unchained where Leonardo DiCaprio (a generational plantation master) asks something like “why don’t they fight back?”

If you understand both the answer to that question and the fear underlying its asking, you understand a lot about how atrocity is sustained.

I turned screws in an Apple Store in that era, circa iPhone 3G/4.

Internally that policy was called “getting to yes” and it was a huge pain in the ass.

The idea: customer comes in with a broken screen. You surprise and delight them by getting a manager’s override on the cost. You say you can make an exception because it’s the first time, but the next screen will cost x.

The reality: customer comes in expecting free repairs. Any charge is an argument. Their cousin dropped like 5 phones in the toilet and they were all replaced for free, etc. It sucked.

I’ve switched to a thumbs down in traffic and can’t recommend it enough. Let’s then know how they should feel without escalating like a middle finger.

Obviously someone was playing a barbarian

Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized.

For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read.

But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.

For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard.

Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities.

Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.

What I find fun & interesting here is that this prompt doesn’t really establish your credentials in typography, but rather the kind of social signaling you want to do.

So the prompt is successful at getting an answer that isn’t just reprinted blogspam, but also guesses that you want to be flattered and told what refined taste and expertise you have.

And part of the joy of Eve Online is that if you want, you can be a reason travel is dangerous.

> This way of thinking is likely more productive for what they are doing.

Which is… attempting a rigorous understanding of evolutionary biology, rather than idly ruminating.

I hate to use a dork-ism like “update your priors”, but this is actually maybe a situation where it applies? If you’re serious about a subject it’s more interesting to really incorporate the likelihood that you’re wrong than it is to wave it away as semantics or point of view.

Sure, but think of a good help desk tech: if they waited for users to accurately report useful information, nothing would ever get fixed.

> Film negatives have 12-stops of useful dynamic range

No, that’s not inherently true. AA used 12 zones, that doesn’t mean every negative stock has 12 stops of latitude. Stocks are different, you need to look at the curves.

But yes most modern negatives are very forgiving. FP4 for example has barely any shoulder at all iirc.

It’s very obviously a rhetorical exaggeration.