BWStearns

It reminds me of that shields down article[0] but for your customers. Maybe it’s just me but if there are enough little interactions with a vendor that go poorly because of the counterparty clearly not giving a shit they end up in a kind of dead-to-me zone. I’ll still be polite and all but the second an alternative is there I’m gone.

Alternatively there are companies that are always pleasant to interact with. Avemco is an insurance company I use and any time I have a question for them they either have the answer or go find it immediately. When it’s time to renew they proactively check if I’m eligible for better rates. even if someone came in with a quote at a 30% premium discount I’d probably not hear them out because I just don’t expect such service elsewhere.

It’s sad that these nice experiences get optimized away, I honestly think people would be nicer to each other if it didn’t constantly feel like everyone was constantly racing to the bottom.

0: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/

Me and my wife are working on https://nativi.sh

It's a tool to help you improve your writing in your second language. We're still tweaking the input pre/postprocessing and prompts at the moment and would love some feedback!

Motivation for the project: my wife is French, I'm still not fully fluent and I sounded like a goof on text in her family's group chat so this helps sanity check my texts without bugging her for review.

It's basically grammarly for any™ language. It's geared towards helping middle and advanced speakers get past that point where you can express yourself but you still come off awkward and clearly non-native.

Backend is Rust (Loco/Axum) with some NLP libraries and a bunch of LLM calls. Frontend is Vue and there's a chrome extension that we're just cleaning up before releasing.

Me and my wife made the app in part because I get nervous about communicating in French in her family's group chat then realized it might actually be a good tool in general.

GRU is nominally military intelligence and SVR inherited the KGB illegals program. These programs are really hard and have a ton of overhead supporting a relatively small number of actual officers. Having duplicate capabilities for it is a waste. Especially in this case where they're used for active crimes/violence. The GRU has never been shy about just going and murdering people on a tourist visa[0], why bother with all the extra overhead?

Not all (or even most) intelligence agencies run illegals programs since they're crazy difficult, fragile, expensive, and arguably a waste of effort/resources.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/05/planes-train...

I didn't know the GRU had an illegals program. I thought it was all SVR. Anyone know if that's a recent development?

Oops you are correct! Broader point still there that federal regulators can regulate contracts though.

Options are also contracts and the FTC seems to have succeeded in regulating those.

One thing that stands out to me is that most (all?) of the near-incidents people are worried about are aircraft are Part 135 ATP ops. GA will always be mildly dangerous, and increasingly they'll just not let you near a Class B in your clapped out 150, and that's fine. It's too expensive to retrofit the trainer fleet.

But the big guys _all_ have working ADSB/other safety equipment and have operators that would be able to add new mandatory equipment in a reasonable time period. I wonder if they could pick up the pace in terms of safety tech adoption for 135s to relieve the bottlenecking.

I'm happy to see testing come back, might give school another look in a couple years when more follow suit.

I was looking at applying to grad schools last year. I've been out of school for, uh, a bit, and my undergrad was neither stellar nor relevant. I do great on standardized tests but basically none of the programs I wanted to apply to even accepted them and there's not a lot of room to communicate non-academic learning, so I just didn't bother.

It's closer to 2x the cost but that's a fairly fat margin since the Sawstop models ate the whole upper end. With a competitor they could probably get down to 1.5x.

A free tier/trial that opens with an end to end "hello world" of your product that's easy to modify with my own data/system to test out the happy path.

Many products with a lot of config options open up with a totally blank slate. Just to see what it might feel like you have to go away from their system to go google for examples which may or may not be current best practice.

Doesn't methane get reacted away in a relatively short (≈years) period of time?

ohhh haha. I just realized that. I clicked on madina first so when I clicked elsewhere I assumed it was the same element and I didn't notice the style difference. User error!

Wicked cool! I like this format of practice. Just found a small bug though. The click-to-translate for a given word seems to miss the target of click somewhere. It's translating عُمَر and سَارة as listen (and in the latter case the click gets `وسَارة` instead of just سَارة.)

The problem is that legal advice is hard and requires nuance. It's not even entirely wrong. Simply not paying rent is not sufficient cause for eviction. Not paying rent is permissible if maintenance is neglected.

Despite IBM's colorful moral history in the early days of computing, IBM had it right: "A computer can never be held accountable, so has increasingly been used to make management decisions". I'd extend that to "human" or "important" decisions.

Adam Neumann _should_ have an atrocious reputation given how he treats other people's money but VCs seem happy to fund his new adventures (presumably assuming they can still make money on the way up before the bust).

There would no doubt be people happy to give SBF the funds to go fleece a whole new herd of victims on the off chance he got away with it enough to make the number go up.

Since they were still moving forward while gunning it in reverse the rudder would still operate normally. They generally have bow thrusters too. I have no idea whether they could have been operational with the broader power/engine failures but if they were available I'm sure they were being used as well.

It's interesting how the marathon discrepancies mostly disappear at left and right of the curve (looking at 2:30 and 6:30). Presumably top runners are putting out 100% of sustainable effort the whole time so there's no reserve energy and the slowest are similarly doing all they can just to get the race done. The folks in the middle are the ones who are putting in something less than 100%.

European lack of AC is mostly that they historically haven't needed it. It's not like they can't afford ACs. Also, 27C (80° in freedom units) as your normal peak temp is pretty firmly in "why bother with AC" territory.

> Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off?

This has to be facetious. They're perfectly free to go live in the country or move to Italy. I've never seen a desirable apartment I couldn't afford and then thought to myself how much I'm being respected by not being able to live there.

And with regard to the last point, no one is suggesting this as a means to have some peasant zoo in the city, a city needs a labor force. If you price out everyone who isn't a dev or a financier then you're not going to have a lot of the things that make a city nice. To some degree this is a subsidy for employers, because otherwise they'd need to pay more for their employees to afford living nearby.

NYC is wildly unaffordable compared to Paris even accounting for the earnings differences. That is the outcome and the failure, not the presence or absence of some specific policy.

I am not saying Paris' approach is transplantable directly to NYC, but rather that first principle analyses (such as gp's commentary) that say that the Paris approach doesn't work are flawed. I know these analyses are flawed because one can look at Paris and see that they have achieved their policy objective of Paris being affordable for a wide swath of incomes.

Policies should be pursued, adopted, changed etc based on their outcomes above their adherence to abstract models. Models are great but once you have data that a policy has failed you should change that policy and try something else.

I get these arguments against it and I'm sympathetic to the reasoning, but the point of public policy is results and the Parisian policy certainly seems to just work better than most US housing policy. SF, Boston, NYC also spend a ridiculous amount of money ostensibly trying to achieve similar outcomes but their approaches just don't work.

I had a similar thing and it was literally causing my eyesight to go. Just bail. Grab something new. Even if the reason for your unhappiness is unreasonable it doesn’t matter, it’s not worth staying at a place that makes you physically unhappy.

I'm actually working on a chrome extension for reviewing emails/other written language for fluency and giving suggestions and feedback if you'd like to give it a try when I deploy it. (It's of course an LLM backed thing lol). I've been using it for my written French while working on it and I've found it helpful.

> once they are programming a robot, I feel they become roboticists

Yes! I am not a roboticist (or at least a good one in any sense) but I was having a similar discussion regarding enabling non-technical users do data analysis. Once they start doing anything more complicated than `SELECT COUNT(*) FROM blah WHERE foo=otherblah` it's going to get real real quick. You can't just give them some cheap point and click stuff because their questions will immediately overrun the extent of what's practicable. Asking interesting questions of data is roughly as difficult as phrasing the questions in SQL (or any other formal query language) and anyone who can do the first can do the latter easily enough.

(or the point and click stuff _is_ really powerful but it's some proprietary non-googleable voodoo that requires a month long training course that costs $5K/week to get a certificate and become middlingly powerful)

Yeah, I just started typing out a scenario where instruments blipping might do it and it started getting implausible several clauses in.

Not a control issue but there was a Hawaiian flight that had 36 injuries from turbulence. Edit to add: it would be unsurprising if turbulence was the cause here and the passenger quoted had their facts wrong.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/us/hawaiian-airlines-injuries...

Yeah, I don't find I end up with copilot code that survives very long as it came.

The whole reason I got interested in Rust in the first place was because of the type system. I viewed it as "Haskell types but with broad(er) adoption". The fact that it also has this neat non-GC but memory safe aspect was cool and all but not the main sell for me.

Peter Norvig’s udacity class was probably the thing that made me employable when I was just getting started. Udacity in general was an amazing resource around 2012-14(+?) because it was very high quality and free. They had courses that would get you through an interview but also a decent amount that went deeper. I will always have good memories of them.