S. Williams

Sriracha has officially been replaced in my house

@realEstateTrent Do you have positive takeaways too?

I’m coming up on five years of being on here every single day, and honestly, my biggest takeaway has very little to do with real estate. It’s how much I’ve learned about human nature. The things I was incredibly naive about before social media: 1) How deeply people misunderstand each other 2) How powerful and widespread jealousy really is 3) How much people quietly root against each other

@dylan522p Better:

Obtuse, rubber goose, green moose, guava juice Giant snake, birthday cake, large fries, chocolate shake

Whomever design this is evil. I had to use pliers to get out the bubble wand.

@zanehengsperger 💯 The latest [outliers] on Hyundai hit on this so much. Chung had a sixth grade education but was just willing to ask questions, learn from people, and never give up.

the cost of getting into manufacturing is willing to be and look really really dumb

The agent UI still hasn’t landed for especially for low-code tasks. Doubly for working with multiple agents/multiple people. Using a git style version control feels like a kludge still. It is hard to scrub and branch from unless you are already deeply familiar.

@clairevo “Make no mistakes” + “passed regression tests, merging”

pov: your 15,000 line vibecoded PR hits production

Huh?

I wonder if tablets will see an uptick in sales with the proliferation of agents; if the majority of the work is reviewing agent outputs, the tablet may be the better form factor Basically everyone moving up and to the left in this curve

@DKThomp @TheStalwart But you can’t put a podcast on your bookshelf background for zoom! I’ve found myself getting introduced to a topic via a podcast but then switching to physical and audiobooks for deep dives

in other words: history books replaced oral histories. then history podcasts replaced history books. cc @TheStalwart

"Dad books" — which this article, and some publishing insiders, use to describe "serious nonfiction" books across biography, current affairs and business and economics — are reportedly in a free fall, with sales declining every year for the last few years “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” said Jonathan Karp, the former chief executive of Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon Six imprint. “When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts,” said Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Group at HarperCollins Publishers.

@patrickc Highly recommend an architectural walking tour of downtown. Many of the buildings may be empty, but beautiful nonetheless. Plus, beers at Batch Brewing.

Detroit impressions: • The downtown is full of beautiful buildings. All of them seem to have been built specifically in the 1920s. I guess that is after the city had accumulated enough auto wealth but before the twin hits of Modernism and the Depression. (I hadn't known that the GM Renaissance Center, built as a revitalization project, was at the time the largest private development in US history, and also at the time the world's tallest hotel. It may be large, but it is not pretty.) The downtown is surprisingly depopulated -- both the streets and the sidewalks feel empty. That said, it didn't feel at all unsafe. There are lots of great homes in the suburbs. • The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation is amazing, and it's worth visiting Detroit for it alone. Among many (many) other things, it contains the oldest known surviving steam engine in the world, the actual Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a deconstructed Model T, a deconstructed Eames Chair, and many great cars, agricultural equipment, locomotives, industrial specimens, and more. (They have the Lincoln Continental that JFK was riding in when assassinated -- which, apparently, was returned to service and used by several subsequent presidents.) • The museum made me wonder why American car design peaked in the mid-60s. (This fact is very evident at the museum.) The LLMs blame the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. (Not quite wtfhappenedin1971.com, but close.) • Good food exists but it is hard to find. • The Heidelberg Project also exists and is unique. • We stayed at the Dearborn Inn, which is wonderful, and contains cottages modeled after the homes of significant American figures. Dearborn (and Hamtramck) are now predominantly Muslim, apparently for reasons that go back a century to Henry Ford's $5 wage. Dearborn felt noticeably prosperous (we stopped for coffee at a fancy Japanese cheesecake cafe); Hamtramck did not. • Michigan.gov says that the Hispanic population of Michigan is just 6%. Coming from California, the absence is very striking. • The Detroit Institute of Arts is remarkable, particularly the room with the American landscapes and the section with the Dutch masters (especially The Visitation). An obvious question is why there is nothing quite like it in the Bay Area given how much richer the latter is than Detroit ever was -- we techies are just so uncultured by comparison. The Diego Rivera murals are amazing (and quite strange; you can see why they were controversial). • Detroit is full of historic plaques -- they are truly everywhere. This is presumably due in part to the fact that Detroit has a lot of history, but it still has many more than places with comparable historical depth. Some research suggests that it might be related to generous tax credits for historic preservation. Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing. • I recommend a visit! You overall leave with some sense for how exciting America must have felt in the early 20th century.

Who needs a weighted vest when you've got a baby carrier. Even includes progressive loading.

Future memoir: grit and the art of packing steel toed boots

Cancelled my @Starlink Standby. $5/mo from customers that didn’t use the service was a genius move originally. $5 was just low enough that I just did it. But $10/mo for an unused, backup service? No thanks. the adversarial design to cancel wasn’t appreciated either.

And honestly? It’s 90s valley-girl, not LLM speak.

@lasermatts @chris_j_paxton Or both. custom harness that has too much of the 100base-T1 twisted pair exposed (30mm vs 15mm spec) causing occasional failures. sometimes it’s one sensor, sometimes it’s another but only when the buildings AC chiller is running and late in the day when the copper is warm.

@chris_j_paxton dude yeah the infinite hellscape of deployed robots comes down to...how quickly you can trace a cable failure or realize there's some insane environmental edge case...very few people really think about this

An interesting read. One of the largest things which I feel strongly about: deployment itself is not yet "scalable", and current foundation/frontier models dont solve that. What this means is that you still cant just sell "a robot" and expect it to scale-- the only company which has managed this is unitree, which is selling a developer platform.

People will work long and hard for their own @SlackHQ emoji

Feel like this is a classic google story. Technology and infrastructure is great, but the product doesn’t hit the mark. Google has succeeded where there they have done something that fundamentally no one else could, but has often failed where it is playing catch up.

Anthropic and GH Copilot are starting to raise prices. Once those take effect OpenAI will look very attractive to companies with exploding API costs. Or computer gets resold? Or google releases a good product and not just a good model? wsj.com/tech/ai/openai…

Audible’s recommendation algorithm should be so much better than it is.