links (82)
Kebabs, Lasers, Southwest, Monkees, Art
"The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab" - A "Study"
Now with all of this data, it is time to settle the question of whether or not the kebabs are less tasty the closer they are to a train/metro station...
With a mighty Pearson's correlation of 0.091, the data indicates that this could be true! If you ignore the fact that the correlation is so weak that calling it 'statistically insignificant' would be quite generous.
Jigglypuff Seen From Above (video)
It’s a Voltorb!
Some Scattered Thoughts About Hades
Hades works your dopamine receptors with brutal ruthlessness. There is, what, seven meta-progression currencies? Plus system after system for improvement. If I finish the game, there will still be all sorts of weapons and abilities I'd have to put in a bunch more time to unlock.
Apple ran this iPhone 16 ad in September 2024 showing off the new AI Siri that understands personal context.
It's now March 2025 and they just delayed the feature until sometime within the next year.
UNIX Time-Sharing System: Forward
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features."
America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1
Not even Google was able to overcome the data scarcity problem, having famously constructed an “arm farm” of 14 robots running continuously for 3,000 hours simply to achieve reliable grasping. This never left the lab. Data scarcity was a crippling challenge. Researchers were forced to build jerry-rigged robots due to the absence of hardware standardization, and then manually gather training data, a process that consumed vast amounts of time and resources.
Most of the large projects I’ve worked on have been characterized by incomplete information:
Our cluster’s networking is bad, but we don’t understand why.
We have a correctness bug but we don’t know where it is.
We need to rewrite the system but we’re not totally sure what the rewrite should look like.In fact, I’d make a stronger claim: usually getting complete information was the hard part of the project, and took up a substantial fraction of the overall critical-path timeline.
The untold story of the vegetable peeler that changed the world
It had to work for people with arthritis, but it had to work for everybody. This was a hard and fast rule. We couldn’t design something for people just with special needs, because it would have to be in a special catalog, and no one is able to have access to those products. It had to work for everybody, so it could be at decent price for everyone.
At its core, the game relies on three elements: the original text from my book; a large language model (in this case, Gemini Pro 1.5); and a 400-word prompt that I wrote giving the model instructions on how to host the game, based on the facts contained in the book itself. You could take any comparable narrative text—fiction or nonfiction—and create an equally sophisticated game in a matter of minutes, just by slightly altering the wording of the prompt.
Stingray Laser in Action (video)
<shooting lasers at salmon to remove lice>
If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.
The Compelling Allure of Free Preview Decks (ala Hubworld: Aidalon)
I was surprised by how robust the decks were–I saw around half of the cards in the deck, so we could have easily played again and seen completely different cards. It made me think about the balance between offering a taste and satisfying someone’s experience of a game.
After a spell as the Customer Relations Manager for two large UK train companies, I worked for the Office of the Rail Regulator, the Strategic Rail Authority and finally the Department for Transport in charge of the team regulating fares & ticketing on the British rail network. Since 2007 I have run seat 61 full-time, as (a) updating it has become a full-time job and (b) it's more fun than real work.
Write as much CI logic as possible in your own code. Does not really matter what you use (shell scripts, make, just, doit, mage, whatever) as long as it is proper, maintainable code.
Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions
“We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more. There's feedback, it's real, and people love this. Honestly, it's a car. It's not a phone: it's a car.”
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Why offer more than $0.00? The nonprofit board is packed with his supporters. They’ll vote yes on anything he asks. So why spend money at all?
Because it’s illegal for a nonprofit to sell assets for less than they’re worth. If it wasn’t illegal, then anyone could loot a charity to line their own pockets. If board members approved an unfairly low offer, they could be charged with breaching their fiduciary duties (in this case, their duty to carry out the charity’s mission of benefiting humanity).
Southwest Airlines Outlines Changes to Drive Revenue Growth and Reward its Most Loyal Customers
Flight credits issued for tickets purchased on or after May 28, 2025 will expire one year or earlier from the date of ticketing, depending on the fare type purchased.
Pandemic Deemed 'Over' by 59%, yet Future Health Crisis Feared
A majority of Americans, 59%, now think the pandemic is over, but 41% think it is not. These readings are unchanged from Gallup’s last update one year ago.
A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List
Looking for silver linings in the incident, I’m sure I’ll refer this blog post to organisations I disclose future breaches to. I’ll point out in advance that even though the data is “just” email addresses and the risk to individuals doesn’t present a likelihood of serious harm or risk their rights and freedoms, it’s simply the right thing to do. In short, for those who read this in future, do not just as I say, but as I do.
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For one interviewee who said he liked hiking, Rickover asked him if he had ever hiked the nearby “Goat Mountain”. When he said he had not, Rickover told him to bring him proof he had climbed it by tomorrow morning and he would be hired. It turns out that Goat Mountain was the peak of a structure for mountain goats in a zoo. He went to the zoo, asked a tourist to take his picture, jumped into the enclosure, and climbed to the top. He’s hired the next day!
NASA confirms astronauts stranded for 9 months won't receive any overtime pay
However, astronauts do receive incidental amounts for reach they're in space, but since Suni and Butch were on a long-term stay, it only equated to about $5 per day, which totals out to just $1,430 for the entire duration of the trip - 286 days.
‘It was not a boyband!’ Micky Dolenz on the madness of being in the Monkees
He chafes a little at the suggestion that the Monkees were effectively a manufactured boyband, saying: “It was not a boyband. It was the cast of a television show, like when the cast of Glee made albums.” But Dolenz admits he was the member most comfortable with whatever the Monkees were: a showbiz pro, unbothered when albums appeared without their knowledge, or when the producers showed so little confidence in their ability to play live that they booked their first gig in Hawaii, “because back then Honolulu was like another planet, so they figured if we really sucked no one would hear what happened”.
