Andrew F

Screenshot of Safeway offering Foster Farms free range chicken for $8.73 for 2.5 lb or $3.49 / lb

Wait, is this a regional jump? Because you can definitely still get a pound of thigh meat in the SF Bay Area for $3.50 (or, more accurately, 2.5lb at $8.73).

Aliens declare war because the LLM is Grok and makes a deez nuts joke.

At this rate, if there is intelligent life out there, there's half a chance first contact will be made via an embedded AI, and the aliens will be all "weird, these humans can't count how many Rs are in strawberry".

Speaking of logos, have you seen any decent models for SVG generation yet?

I mean, you can absolutely see this happening in young children.

"I like <movie>"
"I also like <movie>!", says five year old who has never seen this movie.
"What's your favorite part?"
"<makes something up>"

High failure rate means you really need a "credible exit" for all your options though. Also, there's a particular dynamic around perceived quality in, e.g., local coffee shop vs Starbucks that might be hard to replicate in small scale clouds vs your Googles and Amazons.

The alternative to both is perhaps just a small business? The ideal IMHO is if providing digital services is roughly equivalent, profit and effort wise, to running a coffee shop. Full time job, high failure rate, but there are a lot of them.

I really want someone to just run on a single-issue "too many damn text messages" platform.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

This may sound weird, but in this day of newsletters, I really just want an email client dedicated to them? E.g., to get newsletters out of my urgent / messy inbox but also something with a UI more akin to an RSS reader (publications grouped by sender rather than unified inbox, etc.)

Yeah, I find myself thinking "I support family values" and that has everything to do with, like, child care and parental leave and not electing rapists, and very little to do with, like, drag queens.

I've slid left on pretty much everything but went conservative on "actually morality is not relative -- please stop electing sex pests and yes, I think Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern should be impeachable."

Where Is James Bond? Trapped in an Ugly Stalemate With Amazon A clash between the Broccoli family, which has creative control over 007, and the e-commerce giant, which owns the franchise, has put Bond’s future on pause.

I keep thinking of the interview with Barbara Broccoli, who controlled the James Bond franchise, and when people started pitching things like "what if Elon Musk was the bad guy", she just went "I did that back in 1997"

It would have been "wait, didn't Back to the Future 2 sort of do that already?"

Been a South Park fan since I was a kid. I remember being obsessed with episodes 200/201 because they were banned. I couldn’t wrap my head around how a cartoon could be that dangerous. It's what sparked my interest in the First Amendment.

Tonight’s episode felt like 200/201. We’re so back.

Again, not monopoly but sometimes because there is no monopoly. Competition actually limits price raising so quality goes down. And a business model that is adversarial to consumers actually using your service is rough. All-you-can-slop perfectly describes the risk for AI vibe coding SaaSes today.

I propose "all you can slop" for this effect because the classic example of this enshittification is the all you can eat buffet. First good, then raise prices or cut quality.

But how many folks use the term is just "things get worse", not because of monopolies but because businesses often offer a good thing and then decide that's not sustainable or profitable.

If you want to get more at the "things get worse" aspect of a monopoly, may I suggest "digital slumlording" or "platform slumlording"

The problem is that enshittification, as Doctorow used it, means something different than how it's frequently used.

Doctorow was talking about value extraction in the context of a monopoly (and two-sided platforms more specifically), so that's just rent seeking / middleman rent seeking.

I'd also like to see more thought put into deprecation / cleaning up old stuff. It's been very common for me to see LLMs biasing towards older, deprecated stuff because of what's in the training corpus.

Ability to download all documentation for a lib in markdown so you don't waste tokens parsing HTML. And just generally good advice, but docs should not require JavaScript to be viewable.

“.. They are nurses, mechanics, sanitation workers and executives. .. They’ve opened restaurants .. paid taxes and contributed to Social Security, living and working legally in the United States since 1999.”

They have 60 days to leave.

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Attention!!

I was tricked by a phishing email and a npm token was added and leaked then some popular packages I'm maintaining were released with malicious software, I've deleted the leaked token and deprecated all bad versions and released new versions.

It might be under Preferences > Audio & video. Third item from the bottom for me.

The annoying thing is, it's super easy to pivot from this to anything else you want to talk about in a way that doesn't dismiss it.

"Well, he clearly lied about this. What else is he lying about?"

"Maybe he's protecting someone. He's certainly protecting his billionaire friends."

Oh. Oh wait, maybe he thought you wanted four orders of two tacos each, so eight?

Welp, this is almost certainly not the reason for the bartender's confusion but one time in China, I ordered dumplings, and the guy said "how many?" and I went, "uh six?" and he looked surprised but rolled with it, and then brought us 6 kilos of dumplings.

Is there a taco trio item on the menu? A lot of places keep trying to nudge me to three for some reason.

The funny thing about the Astronomer affair thing is that if they had just did a quick peck, the camera would have kept moving and nothing would have come of it, because who in their right mind ever looks up kiss cam archival footage for a Coldplay concert?