swalling

This is a healthy skepticism but the difference was that using Messenger chatbots was a disjointed, clunky experience that felt slower than just a few taps in the OpenTable app. Not to mention that their natural language understanding was only marginally better than Siri at best.

In this scenario, it seems dramatically faster to type or speak "Find me a dinner reservation for 4 tomorrow at a Thai or Vietnamese restaurant near me." than to browse Google Maps or OpenTable. It then comes down to the quality and personalization of the results, and ChatGPT has a leg up on Google here just due to the fact that their results are not filled with ads and garbage SEO bait.

Yes. And the endowment is also moving off Tides now that it has its own approved 501(c)(3) status.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/10/26/governance-updates-for...

If there are issues with a specific viewport width you can always file a bug at https://bugs.wikimedia.org/

Executing a major redesign or feature launch in an open source, consensus-driven project like Wikipedia is an exceptionally difficult and often frustrating experience for any design/engineering/product person.

The team that worked on this did an outstanding job of being patient, empathetic with users, and methodical (over years!) to make this happen. Every RFC and discussion they showed up to listen and act on feedback, incrementally improving it bit by bit. Even as a regular editor, I find it much faster to navigate Wikipedia thanks to the redesign.

This is approaching the status of truism to anyone who has worked in journalism.

It’s not just the macabre dopamine rush of car crashes and natural disasters. Critiques involving total and complete destruction of the restaurant/play/movie/album — like this classic takedown of Guy Fieri’s monstrosity of a Times Square restaurant https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant... —always draw the most eyeballs.

I can assure you that your number was recycled.

In the last few years I got a new number from Verizon after moving from one state to another, in the hope that it would combat robocalls. Not only did I experience what you did, but received a number previously used by a plumber who apparently had trouble paying his car loan. I was getting frantic calls at all hours from people with plumbing problems, and from Honda threatening to repossess a car. Verizon and other carriers even admit to recycling numbers as soon as 6 months after they were last used. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Windows-Phone/How-Do-I-Chec....

Except if you look at mortgages as an example, the government already has a huge impact on who gets loans (via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, plus programs like USDA home loans). That influence is largely to expand access to people who would otherwise get cut out of the system.

From https://www.muji.com/us/feature/whatismuji/: MUJI’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.”

I think half the time I go to a Muji store it's really because the entire space gives me a sense of calm. Making a brand that's inexpensive but still projects a quiet feeling of quality and attention to detail is rare, at least in America.

Botany is fun in part because it has its own arcane descriptive vocabulary. One of my favorite botanical words is "arborescent", meaning resembling a tree.

There are whole genera where some of the related plants are trees and others aren't. There's Aloe vera, which you can keep in a pot on your windowsill, and then there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloidendron_barberae which can be 60 ft tall. A bunch of the tree aloes got split off somewhat recently, but there are a lot of genera where some have tree forms and others are tiny. Dracaena is another one, where you have the "snake plant" that's probably the most common office plant in the world, and it got lumped together with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_draco in one genus. Taxonomy is wild.

The location of the home (Fairhope, Alabama) is in a humid subtropical climate where the average humidity is above 70% year round. I couldn't find any data but seems possible that the net average interior humidity is not actually that low?

Philip Tibehnam reports on Dundee pensioner Annie Sweeney, who took up karate to keep fit in her late 60s, and who now — pushing 75 — is probably the oldest person in Europe to hold a black belt in the sport.

Originally broadcast 12 June, 1975

Declaring that strident criticism of an opinion or perspective is the same as a personal attack on the person who holds it is your assumption, not mine. Good, kind, intelligent people have objectively wrong opinions all the time. This kind of fragility is why The Coddling of the American Mind ended up getting written.

Describing a set of societies that featured large scale human sacrifice as in any way communal or egalitarian is bordering on deranged. Even examining them purely economically, they were often heavily based on extracting and centralizing resources from weaker communities subjugated through violence.

Hämäläinen's book is widely thought of as trying to stretch a pretty weak and biased historical narrative, and presents a far from universally accepted view of history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-continent...

Suggesting the Americas were some communal relic of Ice Age cultures before European arrival is laughably wrong. As far north as modern St Louis, the Mississippian city of Cahokia was larger than contemporaneous London 1,000 years before contact. You then have the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec Empires that were highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare, state religion, slavery, and pyramid building.

This misperception exists largely because most of the population was wiped out by introduced disease long before European colonization happened in earnest in most areas. (Read 1491 by Charles Mann.)

The sentiment is understandably scary and totalitarian in nature, but the consequences of the extreme American predilection toward individual choice has indisputable negative consequences at the population level. Video games are a leading explanation for why American men are increasingly satisfied to not work (https://w.wiki/6Qck).

Video games and TikTok aren't even the worst of it. The progressive American agenda in drugs is towards decriminalization. States like Oregon are at the vanguard of this (https://w.wiki/6Qcq), and the impact years later is widely seen as contributing to an epidemic of crime, homelessness, and bad health outcomes. China is the leading source of the worst synthetic drugs like fentanyl and meth (https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...).

Of course, the correct response is to not go the totalitarian control route, but to retain the flexibility and creativity that American independence fosters, invest in positive countermeasures (CHIPs act investment in manufacturing employment, drug treatment and diversion), and heavily regulate industries prone to create negative externalities.

Apparently young children have more REM sleep (the stage when dreams and nightmares happen) than adults. Babies actually spend half their time in REM sleep (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/baby-sleep/baby-sleep-cycle) before they develop adult sleep cycles, which makes me wonder what a newborn baby dreams about.

I would pay money to see a video of Pinker forced to make his “everything is better than you think” argument to a room full of teenagers. No one growing up today cares if they're better off on average than 100 years ago when they're anxious and depressed.

Don't assume that these particular owners are the norm. They are highlighted in the article because of the unusual situation with the takeover by a developer.

The more typical condo buyer looks more like a senior on a fixed income looking to downsize or a first time buyer in a expensive city who can't possibly afford a single family home.

Fascinating, thanks for sharing.

They honestly need to try tweaking the recipe too if they want to move upmarket again. To me the amount of sugar in Campari seems high compared to other aperitivo and amaro.

Artificially limiting production on a secret recipe liqueur is a great tactic for turning what could be a commodity into more like a Veblen good. The opposite has happened to Campari, where you can now buy a ton of different red-hued craft aperitivo with similar flavor profiles.

The article missed out on mentioning the best Chartreuse-based cocktail though: The Last Word. It’s absolutely sublime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_word_(cocktail)

This is egregiously bad advice.

There is zero evidence that keto or low carb/high fat diets improve running performance. There's actually consistently reproduced evidence that it impairs performance at high intensities. Studies: https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP278928, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16357078/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26553488/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32497061/

Summary if you don't want to read all the studies: https://trainright.com/should-endurance-athletes-go-keto-ket...

Condos are yet another example of how being poor in America is expensive.

While condos are attractive for people who can't afford regular homes, mortgages are harder to get for them. Even if you have a perfect credit score and 20% down, there is a whole category of condo called "nonwarrantable", which makes them ineligible with any lender who sells direct to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One of the laundry list of stipulations is that no single person or entity owns more than 10% of all condo units in the building or development.

Condo buyers are living with risks like the article describes, and they're paying more for it to the bank for the privilege. It's a cruel joke that the people who can't afford single family home mortgages are given fewer protections and subject to a litany of HOA payments, special assessments, fees, and fines that can result in the condo being foreclosed on even if you own it free and clear.

There is a great novel "Condominium" by John D. MacDonald that lays bare the skeezy nature of condo developments. It's from 1977, and here we are 40-50 years later, still letting people get conned and maybe even die (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse) thanks to the numerous messed up incentives in condo development.

This TED talk warned us about local warming years ago. https://youtu.be/waO8KKtVgaQ

This is very similar to the scaling problem with Etsy. What started out as a way for creative people to make money from their quirky local crafts is now a marketplace filled with duplicative factory-made junk you can often also find on eBay or Amazon.

Lately Airbnb has tried to combat this obvious degradation in quality by highlighting high-end stays at unique properties that can cost absurd amounts of money (screengrab: https://imgur.com/nDu8tpL), so it looks cool but they know actual demand is low.

I have also encountered this in Spain, and my counter was to refuse the cash extortion after I had arrived and had the keys in hand. They will grumble or threaten you, but they know they can't force you to pay since it violates Airbnb policies. Even local occupancy taxes must be collected via the platform.

If they're extremely sneaky, their next trick is to fake property damage or extra cleaning fees collected post stay, but that's not a highly repeatable trick without them getting banned, so less likely to happen and you can dispute it with Airbnb, though ymmv.

This is why they're called an antihero.

The absurd, frustrating, and sometimes hilarious experience of the characters in Mad Men reminds me _a lot_ of the chaos of working in tech startups the last 10 years during the boom economy. A lot of people have had bosses reminiscent of a Don Draper, Roger Sterling, or Cooper, even if it wasn't full bore day drinking, fuck-your-secretary 1960s levels of bad behavior. Pretty close though. I'll never forget hearing a story a date once told me about her eng manager doing nitrous oxide at his desk. Or how Dropbox, Google, etc. literally had places to nap in the office. Or the many many women who went to coding bootcamps, only to have their mentors try and date them.

Even if you think Draper is an unappealing asshole, there are other characters (like Peggy!) that are there to personally identify with and root for. Mad Men provides a lot of catharsis seeing a set of deeply flawed people, subject to the trials and tribulations of history, make it through life and work. We all want to believe that despite our various fuckups, we're good people and deserve to be happy.

No, quite the opposite. Cycling is a very low impact activity, especially compared to running. Many runners get on a bike to develop or maintain aerobic fitness when they are healing from overuse injuries like stress fractures.

Addictively fun. I'd love to see a leaderboard for this or at least what the score distribution is.

Actually there is a huge amount of local support for these camps politically. Both in issue polling [1] and in terms of which candidates won election to city council, etc.

Part of this has to do with the fact that there have been persistent homeless camps directly in some of the richest neighborhoods, and the city is proposing that the sanctioned camps won't be in residential neighborhoods.[2] If they happen, it will more likely be in a parking lot on the edges of the city or in industrial/commercial zones. Combine the site selection criteria and the obvious advantages of having a centralized set of camps with waste collection, fire code enforcement, and 24/7 onsite security, and it's no-brainer to most people. The real barrier is the question of where the money comes from and who will be in charge, because Portland has an extremely dysfunctional, fractured local government where funding for homeless services is run by an office jointly administered by the city and the county.

1. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/11/housed-portlande... 2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-may...

The funniest part of this quote is that Steve Martin is just not very good. Never has been. Even his early comedy is uncomfortably dumb.

This is one of Martin's breakout performances on the Tonight Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN0G0hP7n-s

Compare that to the eloquent and socially poignant hilarity that is Richard Pryor's comedy album from the same year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjv7oEqv92U