arrowsmith

> Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.

Yes, that means we can use the energy we would have used on light for other things.

"The only network that compares to X, size-wise, is Threads"

I'm astonished by this if it's true. People actually use Threads?

The modern folklore (comes down the chimney, rides reindeer etc) is an American invention that came to Britain in the 19th Century. “Father Christmas” was an older British folk figure who got merged into the American tradition.

Interesting — so Belisha beacons were like the 1930s equivalent of Boris bikes.

“Bobby” and (in Northern Ireland) “peeler” as slang terms for a policeman are two more examples of things named after a politician.

I've noticed that "Santa" is really starting to displace "Father Christmas" in British English. When I was a kid if you said "Santa" you'd have been scolded for using the American name, but listening to kids now I hear them say "Santa" all the time. I blame TV.

"Crosswalk" sounds extremely American to me and I've never heard anyone say it in Britain, but maybe I'm just getting old.

I'm British and I never knew that those yellow-ball-on-black-and-white-pole-by-pedestrian-crossing things had a name. TIL

All of those things are trivially possible without an explicit 'plan mode' built into the harness.

Claude Code also doesn't read AGENTS.md by default if there's a CLAUDE.md it can read instead. This isn't limited to your repo, e.g. if you have a ~/CLAUDE.md then no AGENTS.md will be read.

To always read both, you have to switch the 'Project instructions' setting to the non-default `claude-md-and-agents-md`.

Just in case anyone is wondering why their AGENTS.md still isn't being read.

3Blue1Brown has a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM

Thank God there aren't any other media companies like that

What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?

If all manufacturers except one were altruistic good guys, the one malevolent bad guy would undercut the altruists and drive them out of business.

Regulation is the solution to this prisoner’s dilemma.

I'm still on an iPhone 11 that I bought second-hand a few years ago when the iPhone 15 was the newest. The battery life isn't great which is the only thing tempting me to upgrade, but I'll still put that off as long as possible.

Other than the battery I have no complaints. It's a phone. I can make calls, send texts, browse the web, check maps, take photos. What more do I need? Why waste money?

I can't even tell the difference between newer iPhone models. Why do people upgrade every year? What's the point?

"We lost, let's change the rules"

I watched that movie so many times as a child I could probably still recite every line.

RIP Long John Silver!

So it was never about principles, it was only about who was in charge.

Colour me shocked.

I hadn't, but don't pretend there's not huge overlap between the people who were saying that then and the people who are saying this now.

Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?

They just announced the new "Omacom foundation" last Friday, with $8 million of funding from prominent tech people. That's why it's getting current flurry of attention

"all software is political" is a textbook deepity: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity

Knowledge for its own sake is great, but it's worth noting that many "useless" fields of mathematics turned out to be very practical in the long run.

Number theory was long thought to have no practical application, but now it's the backbone of cryptography. Boolean algebra was developed in the 19th century (George Boole died in 1864), decades before it was used to build computers.

Those "useless" theorems being proved today may turn out to unlock a world-changing technology centuries from now. When the breakthrough comes we'll be grateful for the people who laid the foundations.

Yes but it's always advertised as "$12/MONTH" in big letters with billed annually written somewhere small and non-obvous.

Regulation is a good thing for big, established incumbents who can afford expensive lawyers. It keeps them safe from competition.

Yes but that didn't happen in the Americas. They didn't settle or leave any lasting impact.

They briefly visited, they didn't "conquer"

The president of the European Commission is “elected” through a thin pretence of democracy that the people of Europe have effectively no control over, and mostly pay no attention to. If you think she’s there because the greater public decided she’s the best person for the job then you don’t know how the EU works.

Also most of the EU population don’t know her for anything at all. I’d be surprised if more than 50% of Europeans could name her.

Maybe an ESL thing? "Potatoes" are literally called "earth apples" in some languages (e.g. pommes de terre in French; Erdäpfel in some German dialects.)

Max Planck published the same paper in multiple journals in the 1940s, which was common practice at the time. He also published a second unrelated paper that happened to have the same title as the paper it was a response to. In 2011 both papers were retracted from their journals' archives, most likely because a bot incorrectly flagged them for plagiarism.

Saved you a click.

Then it's perhaps not the best name, given what happened in the end to the empire's eastern border.