Poplicola

reading about the Erdos problem and so what, so AI can solve incredibly hard math problems with dots on grids big deal, we all know toy problems shared by mathematicians barely ever have any practical applications so there's absolutely nothing to worry about

@jeremiahscholl @PAstynome "honey we have sk hynix at home"

@PAstynome I think it’s because they wanna buy AI stocks

The South Korean won breached the 1500 barrier a few weeks back which it last breached during the financial crisis. It’s a bit shocking because the country is running record current account surpluses but it seems like the capital keeps fleeing to the USD. Sort of like Japan.

this is a tough venn diagram been trying to recreate lower middle americana cuisine to revisit my upbringing and it's a lot of stuff out of a box or can like hamburger helper or tuna casserole. maybe meatloaf with ketchup i still try to copy my grandfather's pie recipes but they weren't quite struggle level, just pretty normal

does anyone else have a povertyslop dish that your grandparents invented, was your favorite meal as a kid, and you still make on occasion?

@RandomSprint video games taught me that if you face any problem in life look through the trash in your pockets and bang things from your inventory against the problem until one of them solves the problem

After marriage but before kids, my wife and I were hanging out at a neighboring couple's house. The guy proudly showed off his N64. When we learned that our wives had never played Zelda: Ocarina of Time, we insisted they play. "You'll love it! We'll watch y'all take turns, and we won't give any hints. It'll be just like when we were young!" With less enthusiasm (but not zero), they worked through the game's intro and into the first dungeon, a giant, sentient tree. Inside one of the rooms, metal bars closed over the door and locked Link inside a puzzle room. They looked around for about ten minutes while my buddy and I slowly lost our minds. "What happens if you take out that big stick you found? Oh, cool. It lights up. What happens if you stand by the lit torch? Huh. What did your fairy say about the unlit torch over there? Yeah. That's right. Huh. I wonder..." After what felt like an hour, we eventually told them that you reopened the door by lighting the unlit torch. They wheeled on us in anger. "Oh, really? Lighting the torch makes the door open? Why does that make sense? Why in the world are we starting a fire inside a tree?!?!?" If I'm being honest, we didn't have great answers to these reasonable questions.

@ArmandDoma definitely want to go back, if anybody has pro tips for getting the most out of those areas i would give it another go, just felt like i was missing something everybody else has figured out

post any recommendations we liked the teamLab exhibitions, and Small Worlds Miniatures Museum was an unexpected standout hit, but akihabara wasn't all we had hoped, just felt like i was drowning in a billion gashapon machines that wanted me to obsessively collect a miniature version of every type of cuisine or something

i regret to inform you that visiting Japan is every bit as awesome as all your annoying friends posting about visiting Japan have made it out to be

@scottlincicome everybody is closing the ports to the oversupply but if we wanted to paper a few sq mi in the southwest with panels now would be the time

"China’s world-beating solar industry is in turmoil" economist.com/china/2026/05/…

I've had a very nice back-and-forth email exchange with Shaolei Ren, who provided the original "AI uses a bottle of water per prompt" estimate with the Washington Post. I wanna be clear that he's more concerned than I am about AI's broader water use, so I don't want this to be read as him agreeing with me on my larger points, but he specifically agrees that his estimate for the water bottle per prompt is now outdated. Specifically: "The 2024 estimate was time-specific, assumption-based, and should not be used to describe general AI/ChatGPT or today’s optimized systems." His specific estimate for an average chatbot's water cost now is ~15 mL if you include the offsite costs. 33x lower than the bottle of water. So I do want to plant a flag and say "The person who provided the original sole estimate that chatbots use a bottle of water per prompt agrees that now that we have better information and more optimized systems, this is no longer the case, and models use ~15 mL each if you include the offsite costs, roughly 5 mL in the data center itself." It's silly that in 2026 educated people still believe that AI uses a bottle of water per normal prompt. No one investigating this believes it anymore.

It's generally a bad idea to bet against straight lines on AI graphs, but man... Option A: the trend in GPU rack power density will break down before 2040. Option B: GPU racks will eventually have greater power density than a nuclear reactor core.

watching some history docs with the kids and it's stunning how quickly midcentury america would cut off european allies over colonialism, like in greece and the suez and indonesia. after the war handed back the keys to manila pretty telling that with vietnam it backed the colonial power and loses the mandate of heaven

America never believed the world belonged to us. We believed that the world, if allowed to determine its own destiny, would choose to look more like us. We weren't totally wrong about that either.

@MostlyMonkey apparently a thing, partly due to new construction, partly due to cheap land leading to bonus greenspace and parkways but partly because these places actually pay for high quality infrastructure instead of say, dangling streetlights on wires blowing in the wind

@MostlyMonkey fairfax feels so much poorer and scruffier than a lot of upper mid midwestern suburbs east coast rich in general feels worn out

Americans: have you ever lived in one of the zip codes in the US w > 250k median income (list in post below?

@peterwildeford eat one on your deathbed until your luck runs out

THE GENIE: I have ten jellybeans. Three contain poison that kills you instantly. The other seven each give you 100 years of good life and good fortune. What do you do? THE NORMAL PERSON: Ah, no thank you. THE ACCELERATIONIST: We have to move quickly! *immediately eats all ten jellybeans* *dies* ME: What if we do science to figure out which jellybeans are poisonous and then not eat those, but do eat the others?

you have stem leaf disk and petals and A is 0, .75, .75 .75, B is 1, .25, .25, .25 and i'm honestly not sure whether you want to max your top category (B) or max your minimal category (B) or max your average (A) or max your modal category (A) or maximize your differences to make the group stronger (arguably either) and have no idea what my culture suggests to me about which of these is preferable it's a maddeningly unspecified question so i'm surprised there are clear trends

동양인 VS 서양인 사고방식 차이래 Q. 맨 밑에 있는 꽃이 A와 B 그룹중 어디에 속해야 한다고 생각하나요? 해석 ⬇️

I had Claude run a simple botec on the life years lost for US guns vs European heat, as opposed to the deaths. The graph going around was somewhat goofy.

@AndyMasley also note that the excess mortality studies of cold deaths are 10x european heat deaths taken alone this might lead to odd policy recommendations

@AndyMasley i'm still uncertain how much weight to give excess mortality studies i became really alarmed with the pm 2.5 research but trying to recalibrate based on the realization that these all explain far more than 100% of annual deaths, so most of these deaths are overdetermined

@ScottJenningsKY have we really considered the alternatives here like sunrise is 0 o'clock, solar noon is 50 o'clock, sunset is 100 o'clock, so it's a percentage bar filling up as the day goes on all times post sunset are just "the witching hour" and time is completely unspecified then

Bringing this up on the radio today - the debate over Daylight Savings Time (DST) vs Standard Time vs do nothing. What do you think? Vote and comment!

@scottlincicome costco is great, and a good resource internationally too, only recently left costco for sam's because it offers pickup which saves us easily 30m per trip and there's a time cost of money component too

Consumer Reports' recent review of the "Most and Least Expensive Supermarkets" confirms what we already knew: There's Costco*, and then there's everywhere else. consumerreports.org/money/prices-p… *Fine, there's BJ's too, but it's less common/awesome.