alexose

Interesting little realtime report showing readership trends during the 2026 midterm elections.

I've been daydreaming about starting a US company around the idea of being able to hire a "medical coach".

Not a doctor, and not a case worker, but someone with a deep knowledge of the American health care system and infinite patience. A trusted person to take you to and from appointments, to chat with you about how things are going, and handle paperwork.

It would be expensive, but I think it would pencil out for most working professionals who don't have the time or energy to navigate everything for themselves or for a loved one.

I suspect the loudest voices would be from the automakers and dealerships, who make their biggest margin from SUVs and oversized trucks. They have powerful lobbyists and spend a lot on PR, so it often seems like their anti-transit, anti-pedestrian positions are more popular than they are.

I'd love to see a real grassroots effort to tax (toll?) based on GVWR or vehicle length. It would be met with tremendous opposition by special interests, but I could see it succeeding in the right environment. Maybe it could be framed as a rebate for small vehicles, rather than a tax on large ones.

Ticketmaster obviously sucks, and their monopolistic business practices deserve a close look by regulators.

But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.

I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.

Oh man... this will be so awesome as a pedestrian/cyclist. When I see a Waymo coming, I can actually have some reasonable expectation that it will stop for me!

I'm a MAX apologist, but you're right. It sucks. I live on the yellow line, and I estimate that there's a visibly (or audibly, or orfactorily) unstable person on the train 50% of the time. I'll ride the train by myself sometimes, but always avoid it with friends or family because it's gotten embarrassing at this point.

I liked the shoutout to On Cinema at the Cinema. Truly one of the most hilarious and fascinating pieces of comedy in the last couple of decades.

Yeah, the dang thing can reach all the way to the net while standing three feet behind the table

Toni is very well regarded among Automattic employees. I'm personally stoked to see him work on Bluesky.

If there's one good thing that could possibly come out of this AI revolution, it would be the ability for people to automate this across all their feeds. I'd love it if I never had to waste time on toxicity, spam, or propaganda.

Although, recent history would suggest that we'd just end up with even more powerful echo chambers.

I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...

> A slight increase in average speed really only makes a significant difference over long drives.

Yes! I feel like I can't shout this loud enough. In addition to maintaining a safe driving distance, just leave a little earlier. The stuff I've seen people do in order to save 20 seconds boggles the mind.

Unfortunately, I think commuters fall into a gamification mindset. They're trying to set a new lap record each day, and you can see the results just by driving (or walking) during rush hour...

It's refreshing to see one of the top minds in AI converge on the same set of thoughts and frustrations as me.

For as fast as this is all moving, it's good to remember that most of us are actually a lot closer to the tip of the spear than we think.

The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices. It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super cool hearing about it from native speakers.

We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.

In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.

Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.

I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.

The original stated goal was to 10x the speed of existing tunnel boring machines by bringing up the cutting head RPMs, automating liner installation, and speeding up spoil removal with electric sleds. Which would seem like a good bet, except that there are a million other bottlenecks to the process. On top of that, it doesn't seem like they even solved their core problems.

It would be cool if they'd post a postmortem or something, but I get the impression that reporting bad news is a good way to get fired in an Elon-run organization.

Well now I'm crying too

Just spitballing, but maybe it would be possible with relatively modest advances in ion thrusters, and one (admittedly less-than-modest) breakthrough with fusion.

It's maybe too speculative to even matter, but I don't think it's _crazy_ to imagine a handful of AI-fueled advances in materials discovery during the next decade or two. Possibly enough to unlock laser fusion, or something that could be crammed onto a spacecraft.

Absolutely. I'd love to see the same effect happen in the software industry. Keep the volume of output the same, but increase the quality.

Generative CAD has incredible potential. I've had some decent results with OpenSCAD, but it's clear that current models don't have much "common sense" when it comes to how shapes connect.

If code-based CAD tools were more common, and we had a bigger corpus to pull from, these tools would probably be pretty usable. Without this, however, it seems like we'll need to train against simulations of the physical world.

Yep. It has massive ripple effects for manufacturing, especially as more industry transitions away from fossils for heat generation. Energy accounts for around 40% of the opex for steel manufacturing, for instance. Zero chance we build more steel mills if the cost of electricity continues to skyrocket.

The Chinese have the right approach: Bringing the cost-per-watt down using massive deployments of renewables and ultra high voltage transmission. We were already in the backseat, and now we're not even in the same car.

Okay, how much pollution was caused creating it? How does that compare to the expected lifecycle of other power plants?

It's absolutely insane. At some point you have to wonder if this is deliberate sabotage.

It's a little hard to describe. Flavor-wise, I thought it was great. Very clean, savory taste with no fishiness. The texture wasn't right, though. Too smooth and consistent, I guess due to the lack of connective tissue. Still incredibly impressive and exciting technology.

Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.

Hey, I just went to Kann to try it. It was very… smooth

Portland, too. The neighborhoods are doing OK, but downtown still feels empty.

It’s interesting to me that it hasn’t depressed commercial real estate prices all that much. Rents are still crazy expensive, with many vacant storefronts and even entire buildings along the light rail lines. The market forces around commercial real estate seem disconnected from reality in a surprising and unintuitive way.

Still, downtowns can be cyclical. NYC in the 70s is a prime example. The days of Taxi Driver are long gone. I guess the question is what stimulus needs to be applied to kickstart the turnaround process.

They said to keep Portland weird, but I don't think this is what they meant :)

I do think an S-Bahn style service would be interesting to pursue. Or even just regular commuter rail. The MAX is too slow for long distance commuting (it's usually faster just to sit in traffic), and it crucially doesn't go into Vancouver yet.

> you seem to not understand how America functions > you can rage against the system all you want [with] wishful thinking and obsessions > people like you are still not satisfied > you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement > want them to also be miserable with you

I was just ideating on Portland traffic, dawg

The rules that govern American railroads are impressively weird and arcane. They seem almost impossible to unravel at this point. Which is a shame, because so many American cities sacrifice the central corridors of their city to huge railyards and slow-moving freight trains.

I think of Portland, Oregon, where the tracks run north/south along the river. You can see them sitting there empty while you're stuck in traffic on I-5, which runs parallel. Running a commuter rail or light rail on those things would make life a lot less miserable trying to get around the city.

There's a ton of research happening (99% of it in China, as far as I can tell) around turning CO2 molecules into useful multi-carbon molecules.

This one describes an interesting thermal pathway that uses barium. It stands alongside calcium looping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_looping), although this is slightly better in that the temperatures involved are lower and the materials are easier to regenerate.

I'm personally interested in electrochemical pathways to generate fuels, although it seems like these are even further away from commercialization.