John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
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Bitcoin has won. And the big fight with the regulators, that so many anticipated, never happened. Some things turned out very differently from what early Bitcoiners expected. Some reflections on the last thirteen years and the Strategic Reserve:
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I would love an ELO-based restaurant ranking system. Yelp reviews aren’t very useful. Everything is 3.5 - 4.5 stars. Tells me nothing. Same for Google Maps. The 0-5 scale just doesn’t get used properly because of social norms toward high ratings. What would work much better is….
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One way to interpret Starbucks’ corporate journey is that starting with the initial value of “coffee”, they have since run gradient descent to determine What The People Really Want, the answer to which appears to be some kind of combination of sugar and ice, large, with a straw
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Restaurant reviews simply based on whether one restaurant is better than another. Instead of writing a review, it should ask you which of two similar restaurants is better. That’s all you need to construct an ELO ranking scale.
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I cancelled my Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. Here’s why:. 1) Basically no movie I want to see is free on Amazon Prime Video. I always have to pay. 2) thanks to Amazon inflating the minimum cost on any item, basically no order is <$30 anymore, so I always get free shipping anwyay.
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One subtlety that’s nice about this is that it allows the rating to fluctuate every day. Rather than showing a sticky average from 3,000 old reviews, on an ELO scale the rating always changes based on what’s happening recently. Great new chef? It should be reflected immediately.
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US politics (on the extremes) is fueled by two horrible illusions:. Left: the idea that the US is racist and oppressive, when it’s probably the most egalitarian country. Right: the idea that the US is poor and getting ripped off, when it is wildly rich and only getting richer.
I genuinely believe that America is the least racist country (or at least one of them) which isn’t to say we’re not racist at all but the other countries are worse. A lot of them like to pretend they’re not but then they have nervous breakdowns when 3 Pakistanis move next door.
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@kane Can you imagine that with $3.2M budget the city of San Francisco is able to purchase either (1) one Sea Shadow or (2) just slightly less than two publicly accessible washrooms.
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@zillowgonewild Imagine you wake up in your idyllic forest home decorated by Herman Miller from start to finish. You're in the mood for a nice neighborhood morning walk and a coffee. You walk 37 minutes across the interchange, along an eight-lane highway to the local outdoor strip mall. :(
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@ID_AA_Carmack A lot of junior engineers are very very aggressive about DRY when in practice, a lot of code is similar enough to tempt to abstract, but too different to create a *maintainable abstraction* . Concern for future maintainability is key here.
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Imagine being a Tunisian citizen having a normal day and then you see one of the most powerful men on earth wearing a “Carthage must be destroyed” t-shirt and you’re like STILL?? it’s been 2200 years!!.
Wow who woulda thought 2024 Zuck would be wearing Cuban links while referencing war on Carthage
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The Snakebite guy is a hero, but the story is also sort of damning of our own institutions: why did we have to wait for a single crazy dude to do this? Why didn’t we do this 50 years ago, as an organized project? People have jeopardized their lives for far less.
A man let himself be bitten hundreds of times by dozens of venomous snakes (after years of injecting escalating sublethal doses of their venom) and now produces antibodies that might be a near-universal treatment for snake bites. This man is a hero & proof you can just do things
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@JohnArnoldFndtn @washingtonpost What are all these administrators even doing? In my time in undergrad, the administration was largely invisible to me.
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Thinking about it some more, Amazon really was quite clever with Prime. It’s a great story of brand-building with a compelling narrative (free two day shipping back when that used to be basically impossible!) and then just harvesting that brand equity literally for decades. I.
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@StefanFSchubert Yep! I think it would work like this: you log restaurants as you visit them. When you have recently visited two restaurants that are similar in some respect (eg both Italian, or both $30-50 range, or both high-end) then it prompts you to pick which was better.
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Explaining the second point: Amazon is not a dollar store. Orders are pretty expensive, but they look cheaper because they raise the quantity of items per order. I go for one strainer, end up buying three. I look for an extension cord, get a pack of four. Feels cheaper on a.
Online shopping for ultra-cheap manufactured goods exploits your intuition for marginal cost/utility. 1 big strainer: $16.49.3 strainers, including 1 of the big size: $16.49.5 strainers, including 1 of the big size: $19.99
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@Noahpinion “Not trusting, but highly trustworthy — and one produces the other” is a very good insight.
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@zachtratar It was a 6-person board. Whatever happened must have taken at least (or maybe exactly) 4 vs 2.
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It’s kind of telling that at every event in SF I go to, there are several Very Smart People From Anthropic . Totally outclassing OpenAI and all other labs in that respect.
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just one more $600m bro. i promise bro just one more $600m and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more $600m. please just one more. one more $600m and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more $600m i promise bro. please
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I have always dismissed birdwatching as a hobby, but now I’m in my early 30s on an 8am walk in the park, and I saw a tiny creature with magnificent blue feathers on the path ahead of me, so bright and azure that I instinctively took out my camera for a photo. Maybe I get it now.
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@MichaelAArouet Proportional to Germany’s GDP, this is a bigger financial loss than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the US.
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@d_feldman Look man, I love the Great Lakes more than most people do, but at that price point I’d rather hit the Antarctic.
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@MichaelAArouet Americans with 401(K)s own more of their own economy than Soviet workers ever did.
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Imagine telling a guy in 1900 that a hundred years in the future, you can fly across the country in five hours for the price of 4 ham sandwiches. Is it dangerous? No, it is the safest form of transport . People must love it! No, it is so commonplace that people whine endlessly.
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@constans I can confirm that this was an explicit change in policy around 2013, from Dean Nondorf iirc. It was interesting to see as a student: when i was a 1st-year, the 4th years had applied before the common app. they had gotten in on a ~35% admit rate. When I graduated it was ~7.5%.
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@GrantSlatton We were in Jiufen, Taiwan a few months ago -- rumored to be the inspiration for Spirited Away. Fun to Ghiblify the picture!
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@_ali_taylor Seeing as Quora has been hot garbage for 5+ years, they would be actually kinda justified in shaking things up a bit.
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One thing that nobody’s talking about:. It’s been long assumed that one of Google’s fundamental moats is their infrastructure: that it is hard to crawl, index, store, and digest the entire internet . Basically all the big labs are disproving this. Their crawlers are everywhere.
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@GrantSlatton Yep! There's a whole article on it: IIRC it's called a "Dropped Copula". I believe there's a whole anthropological trace to it: it's a common grammatical quirk in Scottish, and it has persisted most in Appalachia, where Scottish influence was strongest.
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@wagieeacc the reason people thought it was plausible was: . 1) FTX was pretending to be raking in huge fees (profitable!). 2) Alameda was rumored to be profiting $1B/y. 3) FTX had held and driven huge price spikes in Solana, Serum and others . 4) FTX began selling FTT. Ofc 1 & 2 were false.
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It seems that Western perceptions of Chinese manufacturing capabilities are stuck in ~2015, except for people who’ve been close to the industry. I think this coincides with the general exit of Westerners from China between 2016 and 2020. Same info comes back, but less awareness.
Almost every major Chinese contract manufacturer has a team that makes 3 axis assembly robots, line following material delivery robots, and a couple common automated assembly robots in-house, and many have had this capability for almost 10 years.
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@wileycwj @hyumankind At the same time, many of these modern patterns are less legible and harder to engage with. Icons are everywhere, and casual users have no idea what they mean. Universal design idioms have largely been lost, and keyboard shortcuts are super heterogeneous from app to app.
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@yishan Hold on… are you telling me that if I drink 4L of cold water a day, that’s ~500 cals burned? Roughly the same as an hour of moderate exercise?. New diet incoming.
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@ryxcommar @quantian1 "Nationally Representative" SAT percentiles are:.1390 => 97th percentile.1420 => 98th percentile.
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@ryancbriggs “Let there be a finite-dimensional vector Space V. Consider the basis…”. Commentariat: plagiarism!.
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@kepano @ycombinator creates adverse incentives imo, encourages free-rider-ism and doesn't encourage folks to try their best because they can lean back on the bucket.
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There is one good Döner Kebab shop in New York. It’s called Berlin Kebab. I am in Berlin eating what is reviewed as the best kebab in Berlin. (Pic related) . I am absolutely gobsmacked to find that Berlin Kebab in New York has tactically carbon-copied this very top-rated kebab
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@skominers [clears throat] Considering that there's an uncountably infinite number of people who don't exist, and there's a countably finite number of people who do exist, the probability that i exist is 0.
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@nabeelqu My guess would be that the Waymo supply is too limited, and they don’t want to create an experience where any time you request a Waymo it takes 20+ minutes.
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@AlecStapp @Sam__Enright 1. Anything by David Graeber.2. Thinking Fast and Slow (doesn’t replicate) .3. Anything by Michael Lewis.
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@Jonathan_Blow @KevinNaughtonJr month 3 of working on fizzbuzz. i now have even/odd cases for all integers up to 24,576. i wish there were an easier way to do this.
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Politicians have a unique problem: how do you tell someone who is convinced that everything is broken that it’s actually working fine?. People have these vicious political resentments that are basically built on fiction — how do you undo this brainwashing?.
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@Jerold_Chinn Homie, the reason I avoid market street as a pedestrian is the leagues of crackheads. You want “Kids Safe SF”, consider not having sixth and market littered with drug needles. As a cyclist I feel very safe around Waymos btw — at least they follow the rules of the road!.
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@StefanFSchubert Tyler Cowen seems to have missed the fact that Keynes basically lived in a polycule for years (“Bloomsbury group”).
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Dean Preston is out, Aaron Peskin is out, Connie Chan is out. Bullish elections for SF!.
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@ID_AA_Carmack Yep! I have not-so-fond memories of exactly that. I would write a function to abstract over others, then find myself adding extra args to the function, conditioning on them inside the function, and suddenly there’s a whole hairball of complexity that has to be broken back out.
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Seeing posts about cluely is like gazing into the nietzschean abyss. Vibes are off, moral aesthetics are rotten, whatever you want to call it — from the company mission to their intern class posting about getting lapdances, I think it’s gross. Send it to zero
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@PradyuPrasad I don’t think so. The shift to the three-meal pattern is mostly a 19th century western cultural standard. The Romans took one large meal a day in the early afternoon. Many other cultures (pre 19th c US, medieval Europe, ancient China) practiced two meals a day.
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@AviSchiffmann Enormous amount of respect for Zuck:.(1) always doing his best to run things responsibly (clear in retrospect).(2) dealing with an endless, multi year torrent of stress and hostility . Weaker men would’ve aged a thousand years.
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It's very irritating that Claude 3.5 Sonnet always insights that I'm right. It's so obsequious. I suggest an idea, it says brilliant! And implements. But I am often wrong. If I'm writing software, I need a thoughtful, capable *critic* not a yes-man who implements every buggy idea.
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@zck If I’m on a layover between several hour-long flights, I would easily pay $100 for a good workout + shower + sauna . Business travelers would be all over it. Adds a negligible cost to $1000+ flight tickets. Baffling this doesn’t exist yet.
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Lots of people talking about polymarket odds. Nobody talking about. how thin is this order book? 🤯🤯🤯. kinda makes it hard to take this market seriously when all it takes to take the odds from 33.9 to 50.0% is $1.5M
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@jorilallo Ben Affleck is a very smart guy. There’s an interview with him in 2009 where he articulates the coming success of streaming because of dropping bandwidth costs.
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Lots of people are sleeping on this: Chinese electric vehicles are getting *cheap*. I'm noticing that a lot of Ubers are now Polestars. I ask the drivers how much they paid -- $24K, $25K, $28K. And much of that price is in tariffs. Those things are getting produced for < $10K.
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@xiu_shoegaze @Logo_Daedalus Request: On GP but sampling “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree” at 0:21
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Ordering sandwiches for 3 people on doordash: $83.47. Ordering an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core, 12-Thread CPU on Amazon: $83.47. My intuition continues to be dumbfounded by how cheap “pinnacle of civilization” style goods are, and how expensive unskilled labor is.
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@JosephPolitano It’s a meme about 2020! Mid lockdowns! July 2020 **sucked**! This was well known at the time!.
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@burrhhh I don’t think the neuroplasticity stuff is true/causal at all. I think that people just get too busy to actually pick up new skills. Spare time to invest drops to zero really easily if you’re not careful.
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Incredibly, the @amazon cart now shows a California Proposition 65 warning for every single item you purchase
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An important lesson from global travel for Americans is that the US gets right a ton of things that other countries don’t. America is, in many respects, exceptional. I’ve been to enough places to see this first-hand.
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Napoleon Crossing the Alps
Boris Yeltsin visits grocery store in Clear Lake, TX, leading to the dissolution of the USSR
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Why, you ask? Because labels on this package contain BPS. Yes, they're putting these checkout warnings on every single item that's getting packaged with a shipping label. On every single item. Unbelievable.
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@shakoistsLog $5.50 an hour? That’s a pretty high number. Illegal immigrants make about $2/hour picking crops, so that appears to be closer to the true clearing price of unskilled labor. Or maybe we’ll have another couple hundred percent of inflation. That would also do it.
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@ChrisExpTheNews Age 15: “George Carlin is provocative and funny” . Age 30: “George Carlin’s jokes are as stupid as they are cynical. Not funny, just disappointing”. His work in the 70s/80s was probably his best. So much more intelligent than the old-spiteful-curmudgeon act from the 90s onwards.
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@Jon83989650 I suspect the markup on Amazon/Whole Foods might be larger than the savings. But as a rule I also don’t make any decisions based on credit card cashback points. (Papers show they always raise spending.) I don’t have the time to do point optimization, and also avoid altering my.
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