Kenneth Trease

Happy March 15. Here is my favorite Ides of March meme:

Noma’s Food Is Art. Its Head Chef and Co-Owner Is a Problem Noma, the “world’s best restaurant,” has been rocked—again—by revelations of the chef René Redzepi’s abusive behavior. Will anything change?

What I kept thinking about, reading all these horror stories of working at Noma, is how the restaurant’s exceptionality, its sheer extraordinariness, was essential to its culture of abuse — the institution weaponized its status. My @newyorker.com column ⬇️

So, there are potential harms to a technology that can outweigh the potential usefulness? Isn't this what genAI critics are saying?

When has Seattle ever gone wrong by “going big”?

How about this: we drain the strait, but then refill it with oil. Tankers can just line up at the water's edge.

Oh! Then we could just build a road along the seabed.

Okay, maybe the critics have pretty exhaustively documented their concerns about harms, and maybe a key part of being a senior in software engineering is understanding and articulating tradeoffs, but I made an app super easy, and I ain't reading all that.

The latest White House thinking on the Strait of Hormuz.

Grandma jailed after AI error linked her to crime in state she never visited: lawyer The charges were later dismissed after bank records showed she was in Tennessee at the time

If only a college professor could condescendingly yell at her that AI is useful, I bet she’d feel so much better about all this

Not infrequently, something I post is subjected to hostile quote tweets (or screencaps) leading to a wave of AI boosters discussing me/my work, or rather pretending to, since it never actually reflects understanding of what I do.

A short 🧵>>

I was a Russian major, and took a slavic linguistics course kind of on a whim, and the professor teaching us how to actually pronounce Russian, despite how it was spelled, was fascinating.

Did a project where I elicited pronunciations from all the Russian majors in our department.

We are inviting them to die of shame, but that's not really a death threat come on.

Overheard on Bluey:

mom: that doesn’t seem like a very good idea.
kid: well, I don’t have any other ideas!

Something that looks a lot like this cruises on the BG trail in NE Seattle from time to time. The rider looks pretty young to me.

For that, we’ll need to build some housing, which is a whole other rant.

Not only do treatments like this not cost much, IMO they actually save money if you look at a long enough time frame.

I was unaware of the speed camera at our local middle school, but when i got a substantial ticket in the mail for doing like 26 in the 20 zone, I *definitely* became quite aware of it, and paid a lot more attention.

Anyway, tying in with other discourse today.

I hope the income tax cutoff in WA does come down over time.

My family's doing fine & also will certainly never approach the 1M limit, but more of us need to contribute more to have a better society.

Doing it all with sales taxes is wrong.

given we just went through a cycle of trying (and utterly failing) to convince people that the economy was actually doing quite well, I have my doubts that candidates are going to able to deliver this (correct) message.

At least recently (not sure about the current moment), defense spending was at a post-war low, as a percent of GDP.

It's a giant number in absolute terms, but it's really not very big, relative to the size of our economy.

Very cool birds, though!

Your accountant, your spouse, your kids, and the rest of us are all calling bullshit.

For the privilege of going into to debt to make a point (and be around a lot more mosquitoes), you're going to tell your daughter she has to say goodbye to her soccer team and boyfriend.

You're going to tell your son that he has to move to a new school but he can see his buddies online sometimes.

Let's say their house is worth 4M (a bit less than 3x their income). They will pay a 6% realtor's commission to do that. That's 240k.

Now let's say this move (packing up their stuff, etc) costs them 100k (I'm guessing here). We're up to 340k total.

7 years' worth of income tax.

Just scribbling on a napkin here. Let's imagine a family pulling in 1.5M in income (not wealth - income).

They will be subject to a new state income tax of 50k. They sell their house and move to Miami, to avoid this.

Also, there aren’t that many places people can move where they’re not paying an income tax! Because almost all states have them!

And it could be said that there are other qualities that make a place worth living in, and that some of the places without an income tax might lack some of those qualities.

looool Carlyle saying that this is only happening because Trump has ruined our brains.

Bill Radke, weirdly, bringing data to a whine-fest.