bschne

In Switzerland, Teletext somehow proved popular enough you can now access the content (with the same nostalgic look and feel, modulo some advertising) online and on a mobile app.

https://www.teletext.ch/

https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/teletext/id308630240?l=en-GB

Tangentially related to this issue: I went back to university for a CS undergrad in my mid-20s after already having some experience writing code. One thing that really struck me while both TAing and informally supporting others in an intro programming class with somewhat subpar teaching was how many people went through the whole thing never grokking how the code was actually parsed by the computer. They would sort of learn how to solve problems, but many would still constantly get tripped up by things like confusing meaningful keywords and function names with arbitrary naming of variables and so on. At the beginning, the course just sort of jumped straight to showing finished code for simple problems, introducing python library functions, and so on — without ever really having students develop a low-level understanding of what was going on (by which I don't mean "what's the machine code this turns into", just "how is this code structured at the low level").

this picture is missing some ads, it's the logical next step

Most intriguing thing in that vein I've seen: https://thymer.com (haven't used it, am not affiliated, just looked promising in a demo video esp. on performance grounds)

> It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly

buried the lede a bit there

vaguely in that direction --- idk how active it still is these days, but a guy I know built a browser extension that gave you "social context" for pages in the form of surfacing HN threads, tweets, etc. about it when you visit it: https://ampie.app

I haven't crunched the numbers, but my hunch is that my kindle is easily the best price/use ratio tech device I ever bought, by far, even considering I upgraded to an oasis and gifted my still-working paperwhite to a relative at some point.

The same foundation/cultural festival previously built a red wooden tower on the Julier Pass, which I found quite beautiful ever since I first saw it driving by

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliertheater

If you wanna get some more footage of the buildings and inhabitants, I can recommend checking out Bêka & Lemoine's "Barbicania" --- https://vimeo.com/ondemand/barbicania

This site also seems to have lots of background info and details on various aspects of the buildings, though I haven't explored in depth --- https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk

correct, edited, thanks

2024 numbers -- Selling, General & Admin vs. R&D

Roche (Pharma Division): 7533 MCHF vs. 11096 MCHF

Novartis: 12566 MUSD vs. 10022 MUSD

Pfizer: 14730 MUSD vs. 10822 MUSD

Eli Lilly: 8594 MUSD vs. 10991 MUSD

AstraZeneca: 19977 MUSD vs. 13583 MUSD

Johnson & Johnson: 22869 MUSD vs. 17232 MUSD

The left side here contains more than just marketing, and already "far far outstripping" seems like a mischaracterization.

For comparison, the average R&D spend between these firms is bigger than the 2024 NSF budget (~9bn) and bigger than 1/4 of the 2024 NIH budget (~37bn).

> In high school we were having growing pangs

weren't we all...

I'm in civil protection service in Switzerland and occasionally spend a few days at a time in one of these doing basically office work or running refresher courses etc., definitely agree on the losing track of time thing --- can't count the number of times I've come up at 4--5pm and been extremely surprised by how light or dark, sunny or rainy it was

path dependency with fields having developed their own early on I guess?

I also find this annoying, but it‘s common practice to do this while a draft is still being worked on and not yet getting submitted to a journal (SSRN is ≈ SocSci Arxiv)

From Wikipedia:

> All tracks were originally sold in 256 kilobits-per-second variable bitrate MP3 format without per-customer watermarking or DRM

Don‘t remember 100% but wouldn‘t the variable bit rate explain this?

1. Renewables have currently offset less than half of year 2000 nuclear generation -- https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/energy-mix

2. Industrial energy prices seem to have risen pretty consistently since 2000: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

I'm pro renewable build-out, and a lot of new nuclear projects seem to my layman's eyes uneconomical, at least at today's cost (maybe we'd get better at doing it cheaper again if we invested, I don't know), but your claims seem false.

Aside: I was surprised to read "dental caries" in the list of things detectable through similar methods in the court filing screenshot in this post. Is that about a device that could optically detect caries from tooth surfaces through similar principles?

reminded of my favorite bit from Malcolm in The Middle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0

Anecdote: I was in charge of a complete rebuild for an e-commerce website a few years back, which included a new design. We were debating various layout options, as it was tricky to get the information hierarchy right and show everything necessary even on smaller screens. Then we had an internal review and the CEO complicated things considerably by insisting it was very important that the header be sticky --- to ensure that the company logo would always remain visible even when scrolling, reminding users of our brand.

:')

What is your hypothesis in this case? Something like "margins went down because of accounting shenanigans they only figured out a few years ago, surged so much because of price fixing that the accounting shenanigans were not good enough to cover it anymore, and then they figured out new accounting shenanigans to manipulate margins down to the previous low. And all of that in a way that overstated COGS or understated value of goods produced, because gross margins basically show the same pattern? I'm not in the potato business or an accountant, but curious to learn if you know more about this.

Gross margins don‘t include executive pay on the cost side

apologies, this gave me pause for a split second but I didn't double check — see sibling comment, I think the captions weren't properly updated by the site reporting the stats.

It seems they do pretty badly in Germany too. TÜV data showed 14.2% Model 3 cars had "significant defects" at inspections after 2-3 years. This was the highest defect rate of any car model.

https://fussmattenprofi.com/en/these-cars-fail-the-tuev-repo...

Edit: Previously stated "at 12-13 years it was a little over 40%.", but this is incompatible with how long the Model 3 has been on the market, so assume this was a caption mistake by the site posting the stats.

Their point is simply that your cost estimate is likely wrong.

> It costs pennies to produce, maybe a dollar in landed cost

Kellanova last had gross, operating, and net margins of ~35%, ~13%, and ~8%, respectively [1]. Likewise, Walmart achieved ~25%, ~4%, ~3% [2]. This isn't really compatible with "someone makes 700% of net profits on this box of cereal", unless you assume cereal is single-handedly subsidizing huge loss leaders for both its producer and retailers.

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/K/kellanova/profit...

2. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit...

This is what has repeatedly bothered me about Doctorow, he writes quite compellingly on the surface, but the arguments are often sketchy at best, and the pandering to/expression of outrage often dominates any attempts at clear analysis.

> These companies have been hiking prices for years, but really started to turn the screws during the post-covid inflationary period

The only one I found a time series for quickly is Lamb Weston: Their margins steadily went down after 2019, then surged quite substantially, and by the end of 2024 were more or less back at their 21/22 low points [1]

Additionally there's apparently a class action suit against the companies mentioned which was filed in November 2024 [2]

I don't know enough about this market to judge whether something shady happened, but it seems like both of those facts are relevant to this article.

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LW/lamb-weston/pro...

2. https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/frozen-potato-products-antitru...