What about Siemens? The previous owners graced our kitchen with all-Siemens appliances, including the induction plate. Doesn't light up at all and I have maybe one? gripe with it.

You did get me to wonder what my Siemens oven has that I don't know about... it has a pizza mode, and it has a superspeed heat mode, which leads me to wonder if it secretly also has convection in it or sumthin' because it draws a clean 5-6 kW when I put it in said mode.

It's nice, but my god I can't wait for the eighties nostalgia wave to wane and for the nineties/zeroes to begin any day now.

Armenia and Estonia keep popping up in my head days after the Eurovision finals

If I had to pick a winner, it'd be "France, if it wasn't off-key at times"

with of course Ireland as an honorable mention

Maybe I read over it, or it’s hidden incorrectly in the ‘low self-esteem’ or ‘task aversion’ category, but what I see with myself and my peers is that the biggest reason for procrastination is the perceived ability to do the task. “I need to write an essay, but I don’t know where to start” or any other task where the steps from now to finished thing is fuzzy, unclear, tricky, scary, or all of the above. I see so many people struggling with procrastination actually struggling with generating the activation energy necessary to start and subsequently not losing steam. None of that seems present in this meta-analysis in a way that I find matching my experiences.

Ohhhhh I’ve had that indecipherable infrequent egg burn for so long! I’ll try that from now on. I just compensated with more butter but that just results in very greasy eggs.

Maybe 4) would be to let the pan and oil/butter warm up entirely and thoroughly before adding anything else. I’m always so impatient to start and it often hurts in the long run.

Same! Quickly becoming my most listened new album this year.

I've been playing D&D on 'n off for the past...six years? I'm very glad I found it, but I've also just finished prepping my first one-shot using an alpha version of what I hope grows into the D&D killer. At the very least it is a much more fun game already, finally stripping out the weird war game legacy shit that never really made sense in D&D but would anger the grognards too much if it were removed from D&D. Personally, I just love the combination of narratively tense tactical battles and collaborative storytelling that keep me coming back to TTRPGs. It's just such a different medium to tell stories in than games, tv or film.

Matt Colville (of the aforementioned D&D killer) pointed out that there have been a bunch of cycles of interest, hype, excitement over new versions of D&D, only for it to grow stale again (or get superseded by WoW). The last years were definitely a new upswing for D&D that I rode along with, but I am also quite certain the inflection point is in the past and we're on a downward trajectory again. In no small part because Hasbro wants their properties to go bajillion-or-bust and D&D has never, will never be a cash cow the way Magic is, even if they manage to Netflix it up by making 6th Edition some kind of online tethered game. Kinda remarkable how varied and interesting the TTRPG space seems to be these days while simultaneously having D&D as the undeniable centerpiece.

Good ol' trifecta of incompetency, power grabs and grift. That makes...more sense. Fuckn' stellar journalism, Vice.

Over time I've come to appreciate slash realize that on a fundamental level, the general public simply does not care for public transportation. It's why the US gets so many trams that should have been metros. Even here - the railways cut service in half to a rural-ish city, and people grumbled and some politicians sputtered, but transit is only 13% of all trips so they'll grumble and sputter and the train just won't come more than once an hour and the people will adapt and the people will forget it wasn't always that way and they will wonder why the roads are so busy these days and they will never link the bad choices in the past to the bad outcomes in the present.

Dan desperately wants to be an auteur. He's not.

What I like about the metaphor is that it reminded me a lot of how I feel like managing interns at my job. You're gonna need to instruct (prompt) them in a particular way, they're gonna run in whatever direction that seems good to them regardless of if it actually makes sense/is true, and it's up to you to coordinate various people and make sure the right task befalls the right person (model). It's a metaphor on how to use the increasing array of different tools and models and interfaces and whatnot. I feel there's a difference between how I use a normal tool versus how I use AI tools, precisely because they're both unreliable and a way to boost creativity or to outsource easily-controllable tasks. (Lke interns.)

I fully agree that managing people and, you know, their feelings & morale & motivation is what a manager's actual job is, but I find the argument that Dan makes where "we are all gonna be a bit more managerial due to AI tools cropping up in our job in weird ways" at least somewhat compelling.

…why? What’s the significance of it beyond the minor step towards governmental legitimacy and retail acceptance of crypto?

It's a fundamental, speechless recognition of a vast difference that has no supporting evidence for its existence beyond cultural choices. It's a horrified, irreversible recognition of a great wrong that you have no way to right.

That's a good way of looking at it. I might've talked about this before, but when I was working with Americans for a project I did in 2020 it was an...interesting look into the hypercapitalist abyss. Someone on the team having a breakdown over their health because of its ties to job security was quite the a Bass Pro Shop moment, so to speak.

I distinctly remember the Americans being annoyed at me and my colleague being fuck'n gone AGAIN every 8 weeks or so because we have reasonable PTO (in my case a slightly above average of 30 days/yr) that we reasonably use, during which we reasonably disappear off the face of the earth. Their annoyance was frequent but also brief in a - I now realize - "I don't want to think about this for too long, let's go discuss something else" kinda way. It might've just hurt too much in exactly the way you descibe.

This is not because Europe is a bunch of laggards, it's because Europe had less room for improvement.

Did you know we invented a term for that?. I'm glad you're catching up on worker's rights and you're right, I probably underestimate the leaps and bounds that have been made since I last visited the other side of the pond. I think we, as far as labour go, only got two things out of the pandemic: immense pressure on blue collar work (with very strong calls for a minimum wage raise) and a seemingly irreversible increase in the number of WFH days to two or three for most white collar work. Nothing earth-shattering - for me it seems energy insecurity and inflation has had a bigger impact on society than labour reforms.

I do now wonder what impact Brexit had on all of this, and thus also on the Economist's lukewarm take. It seems to me they basically slid further back the past years. They're not just geographically in between the EU and US, economically too, with classism thrown in for extra spice.

Such a heartwarming song:

I've been fascinated/mesmerized/amazed by Caroline Polachek's voice this week

"No idea how we'd do that" is a good way to condense it. But it just seems like every promising foray into improvisation done by computers ultimately turns out to be a fata morgana or a false positive. What hopes I had before this week have been put to bed now.

Put differently, how long must we search (and how many billions do we/Google/rich people spend) before we ask ourselves the hard question whether this is doable at all. That may very well turn out to be a failure of imagination on my part, but personally I feel like the position of "this is, for the forseeable future, iron law" is preferential to "it might work some day (we just don't know how, and have no practically attainable idea of how)".

As if an intervention is gonna last only seconds, lol.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one gobsmacked and outraged by that fact. Never thought that the definition of succes for a company like Cruise isn't "is this safe enough for rollout", but instead "are the downsides linearly scalable" like every other fucking startup.

Personally I do think there is an argument to be made that self-driving cars might be in the realm of "this can't work because physics", if we define "physics" in a particular way: this can't work because the physics of compute tech and AI cannot reach the levels of safety that we might demand from an actual, fully self-driving vehicle.

Because, let's be honest, it depends on a) Moore's law continuing, b) an unattainable amount of data or some unforeseen leap in ML that allows it to reason outside of its training data. I came across this which argues that GPT-2 can't reason beyond its training data. Much like GPT, the dominant idea of AVs is that they would be either able to preload everything they could ever possibly encounter, or that they could reason outside of that dataset through some kind of magi- I mean AGI. We know through Waymo/Google that the former is pretty much impossible in the near future, and we know through Tesla and GPT that the latter is also impossible in the near future, especially if what that paper argues is a fundamental part of all ML models and AGI turns out to be just a rabbit pulled out of the hat.

Lol, I tried CS2 on my 1060 and got a whopping 7 FPS. But that may also be because the _city_ builder is rendering detailed _teeth_ for every citizen

I mean I already knew Jacob Collier has more musical prowess in his left pinky than most mortals will ever have in their life and it was amazing seeing him live last year, but he is also better at mixing and Logic than I will ever be and I am just left in awe. Living legend.

I've heard that, with the recent patch, NMS is finally playable with PSVR2. Might be worth a try?

Hey man we had an August <no date> pubski the other day and nobody complained about that, so we can let this slide.

that autocorrect f-up should be 'strenghthening', in case anyone was puzzled by my ability to voter secret the structure

It's been on my to read list for a while now. Will do!

Can't you...just flatten it?

don't call me a nobody how dare ye

It's paywalled so I can't vouch for its quality again but I think I vaguely remember what article that was.

I don't know what to think of Google now. I wish it wasn't the way it was, but they have also built such a large tower of Babel if you include all secondary services that I cannot imagine my life unchanged without it. Hell, I'm writing this from a campsite that I found and got to through Maps, most of my screentime is given to YouTube, everything I have ever emailed that's still relevant to me is in Gmail. I did do a Google Takeout the other day and it was well over 50GB.

Now I was hoping for some serious web3 alternatives but we're not there and won't be for a while it seems. It's easy to yell TINA! and call it a day, but it feels to me like social media collapsing in on itself the past year is an omen for bigger tech collapsing in on itself and while the former are bad, but things most people can do without I don't want to know how ugly it'll get if Google musks themselves. Not saying it's a reason to stick to the current path, but I would like for there to be better alternatives sooner rather than later.

Google has gone downhill for a while now. I've moved to DuckDuckGo a few years ago and I find myself using the !g shortcut less and less. It used to be that you'd get better, more specific results with Google but the opposite is true now; I'm pretty sure they now optimize for more generic results and optimize for spoken input, and the past year the degradation has only worsened like you said.

I think it makes sense to use it less and wait for someone new to do it right again. Weird parallel, but I just saw a video on Battlebits, which is a shooter game whose entire existence is to take only the good parts of 2009-ish Battlefield and CoD (but mostly Battlefield). Those games have in the past years become such cash grabbing garbage that a game that does almost nothing but reset the clock is now one of the most played games on Steam.

I feel like we're gonna need that for search engines. (And then some.)

Thanks! Went to a few jewelers, they seem to be quite used to Yet Another Clueless Guy to Sell a Ring To. First a few visits to explore what’s possible, what’s expensive, what looks good and what doesn’t. I ended up going with the local jeweler, their limited selection of pretty nice rings was good to narrow down the choice.

Has it ever not been? I remember reading some Cracked.com thing (it may have been this?) a decade ago or so that cemented Florida in my mind as the weird alcoholic uncle of U.S. states. It has ever more isolated tourism but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a shunting yard for the elderly whose potential was never, is never that great.

p.s. I don’t know why Italian road designers have decided vehicle clearance is one of the things to let go of when building roads in rural areas, but I hate it. The amount of near-misses with buildings, trees, and other road users in my regular width car that I really don’t want to scratch has been too damn high.

I am actively resisting the urge to badge this story. fuck'n LA, man.

That birth plan you linked is also phenomenal. I have a friend who's thinking of becoming a doula, and while I don't intend to discourage her, I'm tempted to send it to her just to give a bit of a warning.

The Moinet one is DOPE. I'd wear that. Beats the Bell & Ross out of the water. In the category of technicolor entries, I also quite like the Grönefeld if you recolor the second dial and gve it a normal strap. The Krayon is also very nice, if that center art doesn't look plastic IRL.

I think Hublot wins the "most batshit watch" award, maybe Jacob in second place. ArtyA gets an A for the effort of machining a case out of moissanite. I do not know what Ressence and Louis Vuitton were thinking.

Also piling on to agree and point out that the reason I got my six conversations, were all (except one) because I reached out to specific people in the organizations that I’m interested in with three things: why I’m looking for a job, what I want from the person I’m reaching out to (to help me), and how I think I’ll be valuable (why helping me is a good idea for them). Clearly YMMV but that formula has so far worked pretty swimmingly.