Emilia

my mom taught me there's two kinds of businesses: hot dog stands and art galleries

- hot dog stands protect territory and keep competition off their turf
- art galleries benefit from more adjacent art galleries, cluster together to amplify reach/support

youre an art gallery, not a hot dog stand

Yes! Freezing puts microbes into stasis, but doesn’t kill them. Back when I made my own yogurt, I’d store my cultures (read: spoonfuls of yogurt in an ice cube tray) in the freezer

It must be the dextrose, I know glucose is supposed to help with absorption but that’s interesting that it would do so in a smoothing manner. Ironic that so many brands reach for sugar-free sweeteners.

Today in “do I feel like crap because of my new med (complimentary) or because of my new med (derogatory)”

I’m not sure, if I had to put money on it I’d guess it was fake, but at this point it feels more like a meme than an actual news story

*bravely* trans women having prostates gives them an advantage over cis women when cheating at chess

the manosphere stuff isn’t new. they were glorifying redpill pickup artist types when I was a teen. the problem is that podcasts and streamers more perfectly replicate the experience of hanging out with social peers than any mass medium in history and the human brain can’t cope

I found her gofundme! She's already raised 41.5k of her 45k goal for gas, vehicle maintenance, phone/internet costs (for posting the videos), food and supply drives for the community, and emergency funds in case she gets into legal trouble:

me: I'll take it! an llm pretending to be me will be there first thing monday morning, provided my first paycheck clears first

hell yeah, a basket! I've been looking for something to put all my eggs in

I agree, but I also think if there’s a single genre where it’s acceptable to say “so go get a better dedicated controller”, it’s fighting games

man, I am *really* enjoying this weird little research project / prototype I'm jamming on — tough questions crossing game design, statistical analysis, and pedagogical theory — and I also wish I could work on it more than like 30min every 3-4 days as crippling fatigue and brain fog allow.

clippy saying “oops! it looks like you’re confusing the personal with the systemic. would you like help?”

saying the phrase "minors DNI" every time I meet someone in real life, just so they know

"my color is colorless" statements of the utterly deranged!!

thatnordicguy on tumblr: "Just add Epstein as a playable character in War Thunder and this whole thing will get solved in a matter of hours."

It feels like a societal exploit that we still operate in a late-20th-Century mindset of “believe authoritative journalists and intellectuals to be accurate” despite complete erosion of that trust.

Blindly trusting LLM hallucinations is a particularly ruinous version of this, but that’s a symptom.

kind of wild to remember there was a world without hard borders and passports just a century ago

Hell yeah, once every 4-5 months I get an email from someone who’s confused my free unofficial CitiBike app is the official app, but today’s email was in French so I got some language practice when responding

(It’s possible but unlikely this mistake has caused irreversible damage. It will still take several months at a minimum to unwind, and makes my treatment plan *much* more complex.)

There are also *checks notes* at least four specialists in my care team who ordered adjacent labwork in the last year who plausibly should have also ordered the tests that would have caught this.

This is why people as sick as me don’t trust the medical system.

So I found out last week that it’s plausible the last year has been *so* bad for me medically because of an extremely basic error my PCP should have caught (and I should have pushed back harder against, but I trusted her as an expert in this specific specialty), and I am disheartened beyond words.

I also do not yet understand why people tend to describe Claude Code as the strictly superior product. Its context management is good, which avoids a major pain point, but I did not find its code to be substantively better than e.g. Copilot or Zed using Sonnet 4. I suspect people really like CLIs.

This is also where the definition of 'prototype' matters a lot. What I have now is insufficient to answer my broad question of "is this tool I built for myself a good idea?", but if I'd been trying to answer more discrete and specific product questions I think it'd be productive.

Me yesterday: "wow, I'm impressed at the scale of prototype I was able to bang together in 2 days"

Me today: "holy shit this thing is like 90% of the way to where I want it to be, but the remaining 10% is rendered so difficult by tech debt I'm better off throwing everything away"

My latest experiment with LLM-assisted coding, things have shifted from "I immediately regret the code it generates" to "I regret the code it generates 2-3 days later", which is... an impressive technical improvement, and also far more net-negative on both my productivity and mental health.

“We’d rather hire one A-player and pay an above-market amount”

Does not list salary ranges in job listings, in violation of NY state labor law 🫠

Cursed timeline where MS sells off their games business to Elon to become X, the Everything Box

Feeling some bad detox symptoms from a new supplement, which is theoretically a sign it's working. It sure is complex to balance "I feel like crap, I don't know if this is a good thing or not". I do fear I should have lowered my dose today and it'll lead to a crash.

If I’m being truly honest,
then yes, I am tired
of wearing a mask
of taking precautions
of reading health studies
yes, I am tired,
but what exhausts me
what truly exhausts me
is being asked
if I’m tired of those things
by people who wonder
why they keep getting sick.