setgree

You know the old adage about if you meet one jerk in a day, it's them, but if everyone you meet is a jerk...anyway I'm glad you like CrossFit, if climbing weren't my thing, I'd probably do something in that category instead :)

Good for you, OP! Climbing gyms are especially good for making friends because you are working on problems with people. My gym has a weekly meet up for people looking for belay partners as well as classes where folks talk. Crossfit might also do the trick, as might a running club. Good luck!

Pardon, you’re right

It’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)

"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."

Every so often the Trump administration seems like they might actually care about getting my vote. A recent executive order making it easier to do research on psychedelic therapy is another example [0]. A policy shift to reform IRB review for social and behavioral science [1] would be really targeted at me.

I know politics is hard to talk about, but I generally think that we underappreciate the importance of being agentic in politics. Obviously I prefer that our government follow the law and uphold the constitution. But the many ways in which the current administration got things done by being quick, by "flooding the zone" [2], and by using tactics that apparently no one noticed before [3-4] are worthy of study and emulation.

I know the obvious response to this is to note that a lot of what they're doing is illegal, and again, I think that's bad. But they really make the current Democratic leadership seem out of touch and old [5] by comparison. Combined with policy positions that are far from the median voter's [6], it doesn't make for a winning look/platform.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/acce...

[1] https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institut...

[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/tr...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/the-unmaking-o...

[5] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-democrat...

[6] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-someth...

Did you do a coding bootcamp or such?

St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.

Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.

Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).

> Something that surprised us early on: only a tiny fraction of farmed fish species have been through genetic improvement programs. Chickens grow 4x faster than they did in 1950 because of decades of selective breeding.

I agree that there is an opportunity here for getting more calories per fish (and especially per input of feed, which is really what decades of chicken optimization are about). But the consequences of these changes for chicken welfare have been disastrous [0] and we're seeing a concerted effort to move to higher-welfare breeds (though still more efficient than ancestral breeds). Likewise, intensive salmon farming has led to widespread '“environmental dewilding,” or the process of modifying natural water bodies with artificial infrastructure — in this case, fish farm pens and cages — and polluting them' [1]. It sounds like there are lots of ways in which using more robots can make monitoring less-invasive, and therefore less stressful for fish. I certainly hope to see those attributes, rather than the potentially disastrous ones, emphasized as you move forward.

[0] https://www.ciwf.org/programmes/better-chicken/

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/468348/atlantic-salmon-fa...

I'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs:

> The parts that were extra hard

> Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong.

The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.

Per "Choose Boring Technology" [0]:

> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.

From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already.

Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1].

[0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-te...

I once worked at a crypto company that outsourced some of its marketing work to a content marketing firm. A piece that firm submitted to us contained a link to an "academic" article about global poverty with a totally garbled abstract and absolutely no content whatsoever. I don't know how they found it, because when I search google scholar for a subject, usually the things that come back aren't so blatantly FUBAR. I was hoping Claude could help me find something like that for a point I was making in a blogpost about BS in scientific literature (https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/how-i-read-studie...).

The articles it provided where the AI prompts were left in the text were definitely in the right ballpark, although I do wonder if chatbots mean, going forward, we'll see fewer errors in the "WTF are you even talking about" category which, I must say, were typically funnier and more interesting than just the generic blather of "what a great point. It's not X -- it's Y."

claude said "I want to be straight with you: after extensive searching, I don't think the exact thing you're describing — a single paper that is obviously garbled/badly translated nonsense with no actual content, yet has accumulated hundreds or thousands of citations — exists as a famous, easily linkable example."

alas, 4.5 often hallucinates academic papers or creates false quotes. I think it's better at knowing that coding answers have deterministic output and being firm there.

this is via the chat, but it did provide this

> The user wants a real, sincere academic paper that looks legitimate — proper journal, real authors with real affiliations, many citations — but is obviously nonsense or garbled. Not a hoax or deliberate prank, but something that was genuinely submitted and published, yet is clearly meaningless if you actually read it. Let me think about what I know and search for examples. There are some famous cases:

> Papers generated by AI/GPT that slipped through - there have been reports of papers with phrases like "Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic" or "As an AI language model..." > There have been papers with obvious tortured phrases - "sham" papers that use synonym substitution to avoid plagiarism detection, producing phrases like "sheep pursuing" instead of "shepherd" or "big data" becoming "large information" I'm also thinking of papers that made it through peer review despite being complete gibberish, like the famous SCIgen computer-generated papers that fooled conferences, or papers where the abstract and content don't match at all.

> Now I'm trying to recall specific real examples that fit this criteria — published papers that are genuinely incoherent or nonsensical but appeared in legitimate venues.

This is maybe not the _exhaustive_ search strategy I would have liked, but it's probably something you would do if you were limited to just a certain amount of effort on a task.

I asked

> Can you find an academic article that _looks_ legitimate -- looks like a real journal, by researchers with what look like real academic affiliations, has been cited hundreds or thousands of times -- but is obviously nonsense, e.g. has glaring typos in the abstract, is clearly garbled or nonsensical?

It pointed me to a bunch of hoaxes. I clarified:

> no, I'm not looking for a hoax, or a deliberate comment on the situation. I'm looking for something that drives home the point that a lot of academic papers that look legit are actually meaningless but, as far as we can tell, are sincere

It provided https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246802302....

Close, but that's been retracted. So I asked for "something that looks like it's been translated from another language to english very badly and has no actual content? And don't forget the cited many times criteria. " And finally it told me that the thing I'm looking for probably doesn't exist.

For my tastes telling me "no" instead of hallucinating an answer is a real breakthrough.

I’m glad to hear that. Another frame is that your depression turned out to be “math hard” rather than bodybuilding hard [0]. Your disciplined, methodical approaches were steady applications of effort, whereas what you actually needed was easy to implement but hard to envision.

[0] https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/2017/05/26/hard-is-not-def...

We are indeed living in more comfortable homes. Americans are migrating to the sunbelt because of ample AC in the summer and the winters are pleasant. that’s a big part of why we have many fewer heat deaths per capita than Europe: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2025/08/02/opinion-us-heat-...

well if the expected value of developing AGI is 100 quadrillion dollars -- 1000X bigger than the entire global economy -- and you think this person has a .01% chance of getting there in any given year, you should pay him 10 trillion dollars a year :)

I'm as ready to hate on Meta as anyone but this article is a bit of a nothingburger.

So there are disagreements about resource allocation among staff. That's normal and healthy. The CEO's job is to resolve those disagreements and it sounds like Zuck is doing it. The suggestion to train Meta's products on Instagram and Facebook data was perfectly reasonable from the POV of the needs of Cox's teams. You'd want your skip-level to advocate for you the same way. It was also fine for AW to push back.

>. On Thursday, Mr. Wang plans to host his annual A.I. holiday party in San Francisco with Elad Gil, a start-up investor...It’s unclear if any top Meta executives were invited.

Egads, they _might_ not get invited to a 28-year-old's holiday party? However will they recover??

I'll just stick to Baldur's Gate II, thanks -- my favorite inventory management simulation

The other possible future is you rent the car for exactly when you need it and don’t pay a monthly bill— or your monthly bill pays for a certain number of rides/minutes/miles per month. In which case the subscription costs are managed by the provider, who might be the manufacturer and might not.

At least in cities, a fully-functioning, on-demand autonomous fleet would probably be superior to car ownership in just about every way except as a status symbol.

He has many other cool visualizations!

Space Elevator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640226

Deep Sea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850527

Neal Stephenson's _Seveneves_ covers these dynamics in detail :)

"That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years" is a strong argument against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you loose in a minute.

I wonder if Bumble/Hinge/etc. set profiles to be non-searchable as a kind of minimum barrier to doxxing. I have many objections to modern dating apps [0], but there's an actual tradeoff/problem here that they're trying to deal with. I don't think that uploading a screenshot to ChatGPT/Claude to figure out the translation is an unreasonable ask.

[0] https://setharielgreen.com/blog/date-me-docs-obviously/

> While it is still an emerging technology being used only on a modest scale as yet, it does have an advantage over some other renewable energies in that it is available around the clock.

I notice the 'some' here, and the absence of the word 'nuclear' from the article, which of course is also available around the clock. Most readers will know something about Japan's troubled relationship with nuclear power and can fill in that context themselves, but to my eyes, it's a startling omission.

Great! and if enforcement were consistent, rule-breaking behavior would probably decline:

> Quick, clear and consistent also works in controlling crime. It’s not a coincidence that the same approach works for parenting and crime control because the problems are largely the same. Moreover, in both domains quick, clear and consistent punishment need not be severe.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/wh...

You've got me: I believe that people respond to financial incentives. I don't think this is a radical position.