Leon Markham
6.1K posts
Leon Markham
@humanleon
father husband he/him - into technology bicycles wine technology market dynamics strategy nerdery.
Ealing, London Katılım Ekim 2009
3.6K Takip Edilen5.6K Takipçiler
@jbarro One time I cooked dinner for a girl for a date. She accused me of buying the food from a restaurant and pretending to cook it because, in her words, "no one I know knows how to cook."
It wasn't even an impressive meal either lol.
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People used to be embarrassed to admit that they found everyday tasks too overwhelming to handle, now it's an identity
Deva Hazarika@devahaz
Some reasons why cooking is overwhelming for many: -To cook each cuisine requires different base set of spices, staples, etc -Popular recipes often include obscure, expensive ingredients -Purchasing exact item amts often not possible -Utilizing rest of perishable food challenging
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@paulg Yes and the difficulty is that it's hard to design a system in which you can prevent cheating.
Charlie Munger used to talk about how designing systems that are easy to cheat is bad for culture. That is a huge problem that needs to get solved right now.
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The right way to use AI in schools is to have sharply different policies about how much you allow it. Using AI should be encouraged in some situations and absolutely banned in others.
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@WalkerMarcus Rich Argentina is a lot less lindy than Rich Britain.
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“Argentina was once as rich as Germany and richer than France. It isn’t anymore.”
In a generally excellent essay this is the most important line. Everybody expects Britain to muddle through no matter how poor our leaders are. There is no - zero - reason to believe this is true.
Chris Bayliss@baylissbaghdad
This is a highly original, brilliantly written and disturbingly persuasive piece by @PMarlowe1939 about bond markets, and how nations 'in hock' to them have to navigate fiscal policy differently. Highly recommended reading. thecritic.co.uk/im-worried-abo…
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@villi Counterpoint. That was the fastest way to get to value with that level of technology. FDE is the same today.
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The FDE conversation reminds me of software before SaaS. Sign an deal with SAP, buy a DB, servers and storage array boxes, hire an SI and a few consultants, and spend 18-24 months to get a solution that may not work. This is not the future. This is a sign of bad products. The future is good software that does not require FDEs to get to value.
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Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don't properly understand?
Off the top of my head:
• Lightning (how does it happen?)
• Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?)
• Glass (thermodynamics of formation)
• Turbulence (when does it start?)
• Morphogenesis (how does a creature know what should go where?)
• Rain (it seems to start faster than models would predict)
• Ice (dynamics of slipperiness)
• Static electricity (which material will donate electrons?)
• General anaesthetic. (And the mechanism of a lot of drugs, e.g. paracetamol.)
Patrick Collison@patrickc
Some progress in lightning: quantamagazine.org/what-causes-li….
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@gabriel_horwitz @patrickc Consciousness has a different quality in that we don’t all agree on what it *is*. Glass is glass and lightning is lighting.
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@emollick Semi related - HHGTTG was also basically a travelog written by a highly educated 1980s British man suffering culture shock in California. He saw the future because it was already there.
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The single most accurate science fiction author writing about AI turned out to be… Douglas Adams
He wrote about AIs that work best when emotionally manipulated & that guilt you in turn. And he understood there was no upper bound on test time compute for hard problem. Also 🐬s.
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@SinaiLawFirm The good news is they’ll stay fresh for half as long too.
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I usually get flowers from the local Whole Foods. They wrap it in nice paper with some fancy straw thing.
Today I decided to support a small local business and buy the same flowers, same wrapping and they charged me 6x the price.
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@hekwoys Pudding == dessert. Yorkshire pudding and black pudding are different from pudding in the same way that West Virginia is different from Virginia.
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I just do not understand what “pudding” means to the English. “Dessert”—ok fine. Yorkshire “pudding”—a popover. Huh? “Black pudding”—a kind of sausage. What does “pudding” even signify? These things have literally nothing in common in their preparation, ingredients, or function
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@bolkonsky35 @james1071 @peter_sarris No just Oxbridge is bigger (Ivy League + MIT) - America perfected higher education around 1910 and leapfrogged Europe
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@james1071 @peter_sarris The way this provokes argument proves my point…much more level playing field in US
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1/2 Over thirty years teaching in academia in Oxbridge I have observed massive degree grade inflation. I have observed three main reasons:
1) Students do genuinely work harder than they used to. The world beyond graduation is genuinely much tougher.
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@chrisgolds The Elizabeth line has loads more luggage space than I can fill. Unless you enjoy the ceremony of lifting your luggage off a high rack, it’s perfect.
GIF
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My favourite thing about the Elizabeth Line is that they didn’t consider for a moment that people might take luggage on a railway line that transports you directly to the world’s busiest airport.
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@sasuke___420 @sdamico The thing about surface spreading was that it was just incorrect. At some point we didn’t know. I don’t think an abundance of caution destroyed trust - it was speaking dishonestly when things changed that did it.
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@sdamico it's funny because we also had extreme deployment of alcohol for nonexistent surface transmission, bullying businesses to reduce hours, and a domestic tourism campaign (!)
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Japan had some basic rules that directly countered aerosolized transmission (avoid close contact, crowds, poor ventilation) that were grounded.
Burning man, beach parties, schools that opened windows / added fans -> really low risk vs. "every cramped commercial kitchen is open for doordash"
Apparently western public health couldn't deploy these because they would bring us back to the discredited "miasma" theory that was false in the case of waterborne diseases like cholera...
Patrick Collison@patrickc
Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.
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The flip side to this is - who increased trust? @patio11 and @zeynep deserve to have their names engraved somewhere for sure
Patrick Collison@patrickc
Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.
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I’m sorry to say this, but I just do not get wine and food. I like wine, and I like food, but I don’t see how they go together. A cold glass of water is always a more refreshing accompaniment to a meal for me.
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@s8mb I say this with respect and love, but you don't really like wine. The purpose is not to refresh, it is to delight.
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@robkhenderson A friend works at a posh London club. One of the members caused a scandal when a guest of his asked someone what their job was. The vulgarity!
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Got invited to a dinner in NY. Organizer sent out participant guidelines, one is "Avoid status signaling. Everyone at [redacted] is highly accomplished. Only share those aspects of your bio that are most relevant to the conversation or to people getting to know you." Does this mean I'm allowed to mention my blue check on X dot com or no
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@HarryStebbings Jura all day long. There are cheaper ones but not better ones.
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I LOVE coffee and espresso and need an upgrade on the at home nespresso.
I don’t want faff and all the cleaning. Buttons only please.
What is the best? Help me X.
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@JacobAShell I mean that sounds a lot more like “Italian e-commerce sucks” than “trains suck”. And next time - ask your German friends how to buy train tickets - they know what’s up.
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The European passenger rail system is very cool, but I remember having this horrible experience in '22 where I bought an Italian rail ticket to go from Munich to Rome, and purchased it online. Was told after I completed the purchase that "it was only valid if printed, and it could only be printed at an Italian printer" (I was in Germany). The Italians wouldn't let me return the ticket.
Germans I knew rolled their eyes and said I should have just gone to a German train station and bought the ticket there, in person, and that buying anything online, esp from Trenitalia, is bad. 100 euros down the drain.
The point of the story is that yes the EU rail system looks cool on a map. And if you go Point A to B inside of one country (e.g. Munich to Hamburg), things usually go very well. But when doing multiple countries, you can wind up back in a situation from early 20th century where you're dealing with various border-bureaucrat "Kafka traps."
You'd think the whole point of the EU would be to streamline this, but no, apparently the only point of it is to deprive nations of sovereign control over labor flows.
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@zackangelo @paulg @Seanfrank 100%. I was at an event where an American guest asked “why do British people love Ridge so much?” - I was like, taste it???
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Ridge wallet fans everywhere you look
Paul Graham@paulg
Brands I love: Lego, Leuchtturm, Oxford University Press, Pentel, Schöffel, Aqualung, Paradores, Staedtler, Birkenstock, Braun, Knoll, Patagonia, Herman Miller, Iittala, L.A. Burdick, Artemide, Aman, Thames & Hudson, Yeti, Rimowa, L.L.Bean, Timbuk2, Eschenbach, Ridge, Maui Jim.
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