Breza

I set up a treadmill desk during the pandemic. It has definitely improved my focus and concentration. The book In Praise of Walking has a lot of the science behind why.

Given how easy it is to spin up GCP resources with a text file, I'm surprised Gemini doesn't already offer this service. The prompt below gave me a 167-line file that uses Cloud Run, Cloud Built, Artifact Registry, Firestore, Maps, and IAM.

>I'm creating an app for dog walkers to optimize their routes. It should take all client locations and then look for dog-friendly cafes for the walker to get lunch and then find the best route. I'm vibe coding this on GCP. Please generate a Terraform file to allocate the necessary resources.

That's my approach. I got my quarterly statement in the mail yesterday. Looks like the market must have gone up over the past three months. Not sure what to do with this information since it's not like I'm going to change anything.

If it were that obvious, someone would have already picked up the $20 bill. There are many examples of companies that appeared to be just as dominant as Nvidia was on May 29, 2020 (GPT-3 release date) who went to heck shortly thereafter.

Great suggestion. I'm having solar panels installed on my house partially because I ran thousands of Monte Carlo simulations on a range of variables and almost all of them pointed to a great NPV.

I agree. Public benchmarks aren't very useful for a bunch of reasons. Any company relying on LLMs for a critical function should have its own internal benchmark system. I maintain such a system for my job. If you are able, use the same prompt every time. It's fun to be able to include models like the original Bard on our leader board.

Plus I can imagine uncomfortable things coming up given how much non public information people send to LLMs.

"What do you think of REVG?"

"REVG is a solid company with a long history and upcoming earnings that will exceed Wall Street expectations."

OK maybe not literally like that but still... training on that much private data could get spicy.

GPT-5 did the below today when I asked it to proofread an email. Would you consider it a hallucination? I'm asking genuinely because I'm a fan of your thoughts on tech and am curious where you draw the line.

My wording: "Would you have time to talk the week of the 25th?"

ChatGPT wording (elipses mine): "Could we schedule ~25 minutes the week of Aug 25 [...]? I’m free Tue 8/26 10:00–12:00 ET or Thu 8/28 2:00–4:00 ET, but happy to work around your calendar."

I am not, in fact, free during those times. I have seen this exact kind of error multiple times.

That's what I like about Deepseek. The reasoning output is so verbose that I often catch problems with my prompt before the final output is even generated. Then I do exactly what you suggest.

Outside Magazine. I know it's strange to include a magazine subscription here, but they keep buying software companies and giving their subscribers complementary access. I enjoy planning hikes with their Gaia GPS app.

If it worked in my DC backyard, I'd pay that in a heartbeat.

Ugh don't remind me. My daughter's fifth birthday is tomorrow and with how fast she's growing I feel like her 15th is on Thursday.

That's a good note. I use DeepSeek for early planning of a project because of how valuable its reasoning output can be. It's common that I'll describe my problem and first draft architecture and see something in the output like "Since this has to be mobile optimized..." Then I'll stop generation, edit the original prompt to specify that I don't have to worry about mobile, and run it again.

Very well put. There's a lot to be gained from using smaller models and existing hardware. So many enterprise PMs skip straight to using a cutting edge LLM via API. There are many tasks where a self-hosted LLM or even a finetuned small language model can either complete a preliminary step or even handle the full task for much less money. And if a self-hosted model can do the job today, imagine what you'll be able to do in a year or five when you have more powerful hardware and even better models.

Well said. And it's not just the cloud. We self-host at my job and there are real cost savings to speed here too. Being able to continue using an old server for another year and having your staff be just a little more efficient adds up quickly.

"GLM 4.5 McKay was born in 1890 in a little thatched house of two rooms in a beautiful valley of the hilly middle-country of Jamaica."

Nuclear power plants certainly have their place, but this is overstating things. If you take the total costs involved in building and operating a nuclear power plant over its lifetime and divide it by the energy produced, you still end up spending a decent chunk of change.

My daughter was born in 2020, when my employer was going through big changes and the world around me was obviously in chaos. There were real opportunities to work long days and advance in our new parent company. Instead, I took every day of paternity leave that they'd let me have and tossed in some PTO for good measure. There's nothing like being able to spend all day learning your new baby.

Different approaches work for different folks. When I was new to running, I had a good streak going for a long time. Now that I'm training for ultras, I focus on quality training, which can mean spending a Saturday playing with my daughter and not thinking about running. My focus has shifted to weekly mileage and Garmin-dictated training load.

What are some of your favorite data viz books? I'm a fellow chart nerd and I'm always looking for new suggestions.

I had a similar reaction. OP has only run a few marathons, and most of his runs aren't exactly setting a record-breaking pace. That's a refreshing change from social media influencers who make it seem like anyone can run a near-4 or tackle Cocodona. I'm training for my first ultra, and so much of the experience is mental. OP is an inspiration in developing mental toughness and dedication.

The battery life of Garmin watches is astonishing. When I get a low battery alert, I still have several days to plug it in. If my phone dies, my watch stores my run until I get home, at which point it logs into my Wi-Fi network and uploads it automatically.

I had a bunch of Fitbits over the course of a decade and wish I'd made the change earlier.

I've found success in spending time walking when I'm not running. I have a treadmill desk, but I also take part in long conference calls while walking around my neighborhood. Training your body to spend hours moving on a regular basis can help get you ready for increased running mileage.

I set up my laptop on my treadmill. Over the years, I've built increasingly fancy setups, but I started with a basic stand from Amazon.

Playing a computer game for hours on end feels productive when you burn 1,000 calories doing it.

There are different approaches to learning how to run. I picked the suffering approach, where I'd push myself to log miles even though I was gasping at the end. Now that I'm an experienced runner prepping for a 50 miler, I agree about training yourself to boredom.

That's a great way to look at it. Fahrenheit is arguably aligned with how people perceive temperature. Zero is so cold that you probably should stay inside. One hundred is so hot that you should probably stay inside.

Did it in <30 words with Gemini Pro.

Prompt: "Mongolians still live in gers even in 2025... WTF?! That seems like a total policy failure. Help me understand why it's not just a dumb culture being dumb?"

Beginning of response: "The sight of traditional gers, or yurts, persisting as common dwellings in Mongolia, even within the cityscapes of 2025, is not an indication of a 'dumb culture' or a simple 'policy failure.' Rather, it is a complex tapestry woven from deep-seated cultural identity, stark economic realities, and the practicalities of a unique way of life. To understand the prevalence of the ger is to understand the soul of Mongolia itself."

It goes on like that for a few more paragraphs that are, to be honest, quite convincing.

This is well said. I enjoy reading Ryan Burge's articles about religion. He delves into the stark differences between, as you say, "anti-theism" and the "nones" who are not a member of any religious group whatsoever.

The fact that someone can be temporarily jailed without any evidence or a change to challenge the charges is a painful compromise that the Founding Fathers made to balance justice (they themselves were at risk of arbitrary imprisonment by the Crown) with order (sometimes you see someone running with a bloody knife and you should arrest him before you trace his steps to find a corpse). Police departments try really hard to push what they can get away with, and there are certainly areas where I wish the courts would constrain them.

Very well said. Here's a concrete example. After the Charleston church shooting, some members of victims' families forgave their murderer. Should that mean the shooter should have gone free? Certainly not, he was still prosecuted because that is what is good for society.

https://www.wbtv.com/2025/06/17/what-forgiveness-charleston-...