tylervigen

Here is the actual executive order: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2024-Encam...

Wube hired the creator of that mod to develop this expansion, and he says that they are nothing alike (except for the “going to space” part).[0]

[0] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

Interesting take. I was a paying personal customer who switched away from ProtonMail. I appreciate it for what it is, but ultimately for me it was just way too slow. The website is incredibly sluggish, and the mobile app is worse. I spent a good 5-10 seconds waiting on a loading screen everything I wanted to check my email.

I did too. Actually I was introduced to the Acquired podcast by the WSJ last month[1] and Hermes was the first episode I listened to. I wonder if this was just another WSJ reporter falling down that same rabbit hole.

[1] Via https://www.wsj.com/business/media/acquired-podcast-tech-bus...

All these wonderful stories... mine is much sillier.

I didn't have any friends on ICQ - they were all on AIM or MSN. But I was very active on ProBoards (a non-phpBB forum service) and ICQ was the only social icon that I was missing from my mini-profile, so I signed up so I would have something to put there.

Given how vain and overly-focused I was on appearances in that context, I cannot imagine how bad my mental health would have been if social media was available for me.

I have used WinDirStat for years. It's not perfect, but it solves my use case very well.

My use case is just: my disk is full, I don't know why. This happens on one of my computers like once a year, so the fact that it's slow is fine. It usually helps me spot some folder set that is taking up a lot of space that I don't need on that PC, or something large that is duplicated.

My personal favorite example is wedding photos and videos. Turns out: those are huge, I am not going to delete them, but they don't need to be backed up on every computer I own.

I am glad the Wookieepedia exists, but every time I open it I feel like I am reading about some foreign sci-fi universe. I have watched every mainline Star Wars movie and the new popular shows (The Mandalorian, Andor), but feel like I only recognize maybe 20% of the characters and plotline referenced in the wiki.

Either this is my own ignorance, or the universe is super deep outside of the most popular content. Probably both.

> We have found that the USPS is under attack from text scams

The core challenge of phishing attacks is that USPS is not, in fact, the primary victim of these attacks.

The victims are distributed citizens who fall for the scam. USPS doesn't have very many levers available to them to address the attacks (besides a warning on their site, which they have), but also doesn't 'feel' the impact so would have a hard time justifying substantial investment in addressing it.

Ultimately the solution needs to come from regulatory regimes that target fraud, particularly SMS message spam.

One data point: I'd happily pay 20x your current pro price point if you are able to expand the suppliers covered and the n for each.

I've worked on the claims management process flow for payer like Anthem before. It's probably obvious, but this story hints at some serious deficiencies in the backend processes.

One way to look at it is that this Byzantine process helps Anthem by trapping valid claims in a black hole of bureaucracy. That way they don't need to pay, right?

It's not quite that simple. It's true that incentives are not usually aligned, but in reality the payment P&L impact is often far away from the claims processing administrative decisions. At many payers (like Anthem), the ultimate 'payer' for most of the cost may not actually be Anthem. They may be the third-party administrator charging back to an employer, or the Federal government. Even if it is Anthem, the owner of the cost center for this broken administrative process is almost certainly removed from whomever runs the actuarial accounting to decide what kinds of services to cover and how much to charge customers (except, as the author found, once they unite at the level of the CEO).

Ultimately for Anthem, this claim cost them a lot more to handle than if they had just paid out in the first place - even if they were the ultimate payer. Consider how much time the author spent on the phone with customer service representatives. Many of those were almost certainly contracted out and charged to Anthem by the minute. Then consider the claims processing backend, also likely contracted through third-party claims processing and management systems. It would have been simpler to manage the first one straight through.

Usually what it comes down to is that it is hard to estimate the ROI for investing in fixing a problem like this, because the benefits are spread out over many small cases. One way to prove it out is to highlight some of those small cases so that payers feel the pain and recognize the need for change. Thus, I am glad the author published this complete story.

I think this is a funny joke about how HTTP is technically an API. However, with more and more website fighting back against scraping (in part due to LLMs), I suspect explicit APIs are going to become increasingly important and useful.

This made me very curious about the error correction. Apparently you can design the codes to be variably durable from 7% to 30% recoverable.[0] Neat!

[0] https://docs.beaconstac.com/en/articles/6018654-what-is-erro...

It does mention AI, at least for me the slash page says "Wanderer is an AI-powered tool."

But hard agree on the lack of privacy policy, especially since it asks for a LinkedIn.

Ethics and restrictive terms aside, it doesn't seem like GPT 4 was necessary for what the poster did. How much worse or more difficult would it have been to use Mixtral or 3.5 to generate the first 100 good prompt-response pairs and then manually tweak them as the poster did?

I have personally gotten very aggressive at removing as many ads from my life as I can. I pay for the "premium" version of everything I can to remove ads (Spotify, YouTube, podcast subscriptions) and use adblocker aggressively. It's so much nicer than the alternative.

There are two places where ads remain: 1) Social media where the ads are integrated and not blocked (Facebook, YouTube in-video promos) 2) Billboards in cities and airports

#1 has gotten more aggressive lately. I'm not a fan, but I understand why it has happened. However, at least I can choose to avoid these sites if I wish.

#2, which is what the article is about, is unavoidable for me. I find billboards ugly, distracting, and annoying clutter. It's just visual "noise." What's worse is that the products targeted in #1 above are frequently relevant to me, and I have purchased them. But I cannot think of a single time I have ever made any purchase based on any billboard. I would love if more municipalities clamped down on these.

I find the actions of Google here are as troubling as every other commenter. However, I cannot fathom managing 200TB on Google Drive. It's just such a terrible cloud platform experience for managing that much data. It is clearly design for "typical" consumers who have a few gigabytes at most; moving, modifying, downloading, and uploading files is all bottlenecked.

Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.

This was a very good decision. It was a poor use experience to pay $10/month and regularly get notified that I had gone over my search count; it discouraged me from consistently using Kagi. Glad the $10/month level is now unlimited.

It’s a well written story but I’m not convinced the metric system would have been adopted by the US even in the absence of pirates.

By the story’s own account, they were going to Jefferson who had already unsuccessfully lobbied for the metric system, and when the instruments finally did make their way to the Secretary of State they were unconvincing.

That said, I am still glad to have read the story and formed the opinion.

The biggest “aha!” thing for me has not been any complicated data lake, but rather one simple text file.

In this file I write the date and a short note anytime something important happens. Visit the doctor and get test results? Write a note. Change the oil in my car? Write a note. Get a quote for a mortgage? Write a note. Open a new bank account? Write a note. Shop for new running shoes and learn what size fits best? Write a note. Have a contractor come work on the house? Write a note.

If there are important files that relate to those I list filenames and say where they are, but frankly I haven’t found that to be very useful. Rarely do I need any original documents. And if I died prematurely, my family can just scroll through this document to check off accounts (Google will automatically send it to them if I don’t access it for a period of time).

I’ve been using it for a few years and found it to be a total lifesaver. I frequently just need to quickly see how I did something, who I used, or his much something cost.

I store the live version on Google Drive so I can edit it anywhere, but you could host it locally.

Some clarification here: when JoeAltmaier made his comment, the article contained a sentence that said, "They [Grainger] wanted the bridge torn down!"

After reading that comment and other comments like it online, I decided that it was casting the Grainger team in a worse light than I intended to, so I removed that sentence. The people at Grainger don't like the bridge, but it's not like they are out petitioning for its destruction. Even if they were, I would understand where they were coming from. My article romanticizes the bridge a bit, but it's not a particularly nice bridge to walk over today.

Thanks! Means a lot!

I did actually check for that! I didn't see schools nearby enough to make sense for the ones I labeled "park."

Fixed! Sorry about that. It's an artifact of my stubborn refusal to use any web editing tools other than Notepad++.

Glad someone appreciated it, because it was a lot of additional work to do it that way!

Actually skipping those two was intentional! They were built in the 1990s, but I was specifically looking for pedestrian bridges built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The reasons for building bridges seemed to shift over the decades, so I wanted to focus in on the ones built in the same era as the interstates were being built out.

Thanks dang! I appreciate your deep dig and kind words. I spend a lot of time on each project (as you saw...) so I can't promise anything soon, but happy to be unbanned.

I think I might have banned my site too if the same simple 10-year-old page was linked to 85 times, so I get it!

I mean, fair. But traffic on my site tends to be extremely spikey like this (whenever the Spurious Correlations page gets posted somewhere), so I am not sure I would ever get an accurate baseline. I don't mind paying a little extra for something that works.

Also the reason I don't track pageviews is psychological: because the metric cannot impact me in any way, I avoid it so that I don't just sit around watching numbers go up.

I am glad you liked the inline notes! I explored a lot of ways to do that before I settled on them. s/o to Matt Stevans for the CSS: https://www.stevans.org/inline-footnotes/

I don't think the bridge needs another plaque. But the good news is that now if someone else is curious and searches the project number, they will find the answer!

Glad you enjoyed it, and good luck with your project!

Wild! Thank you for fixing it. I wonder why it was originally banned. If it’s something I can fix to avoid in the future, I’d like to address it.

Ha, then you might enjoy this anecdote: In that Tiffany video, there is a chart that appears on screen for a fraction of a second at 7:39 (the correlation "People drowning in swimming pool <> Films with Nicholas Cage"). That chart is from Spurious Correlations, and was made by the author of the bridge article.

Source: Am that author. :)