Well, because it is very Elon. In Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger recounts how Elon was the only person on the planet who believed his sniper theory.
How do the owners of that site correlate this with their business model, which is to use AI to write articles like this one, so as to get clients in the news?
I used Amazon One at my workplace all the time, but I only used it at the self-checkout line since I'd rarely get more than a few items, and the lines are shorter at this crowded neighborhood WF. There, I would scan all my items and use my palm to both log in to Prime and pay. Given that I would be scanning my own items, I much preferred it to phone or watch, as I didn't have to fish them out after scanning.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the real joy of checkout at Whole Foods, which is that there is no annoying, incessant voice asking every self-checkout shopper, "Have you scanned your rewards card yet?" and "Please complete the transaction on the pin pad." It must be sheer torture working all day with those going off constantly.
My parents had their account with Deutsche Bank private bankers. They had moved overseas and sold their house in the 90s and were living off the proceeds. Everyone got lucky that they bought their house in a big city in the 1960s. Since they didn't spend too much money, the capital accumulated for a while. It could have gone the way of Detroit but went the other way. When they passed away, we inherited the money and bought a house in the suburbs. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it changed our lives, no question.
So, when my mom passed, our family had to deal with DB. I have never, ever hand such a bad experience with a bank. The bank overseas was so courteous and efficient that I asked if I could open a bank account with them but I couldn't since I don't live in the country, just a frequent visitor. The IRS and government were easy. The will was as easy as it gets. Do things by the book, you'll be fine.
The NY DB office, to which I would have to go frequently and sit in some luxurious waiting room with nice art, was insane. My lawyer and accountant could not understand how they could repeatedly ask for the same information, deny they had received it, ask for information that literally the US government does not give out to anyone and on and on and on. And no there was nothing shady or shifty about my parents' lives. My lawyer started sending meaner and meaner letters to them, the kind that talk about making my client whole and litigation.
And yet, a few years later it turned out that same bank was often in the news for, among other things catering to Jeffrey Epstein. Who knows, maybe he spent his last hours complaining about them too. I could only hope he had that experience to add to his all-too-brief punishment. Actually, I have often wondered if we got raked over the coals because they had genuinely fishy clients and thus all the clients, especially the ones overseas, were on some kind of government watch list.
That's fair. But I always think of it as an intern I am paying $20 a month for or $200 a month. I would be kind of shocked if they could do everything as well as I'd hoped for that price point. It's fascinating for me and worth the money.
I am lucky that I don't depend on this for work at a corporation. I'd be pulling my hair out if some boss said "You are going to be doing 8 times as much work using our corporate AI from now on."
Ok, so here is an interesting case where Claude was almost good enough, but not quite. But I’ve been amusing myself by taking abandoned Mac OS programs from 20 years ago that I find on GitHub and bringing them up to date to work on Apple silicon. For example, jpegview, which was a very fast and simple slideshow viewer. It took about three iterations with Claude code before I had it working. Then it was time to fix some problems, add some features like playing videos, a new layout, and so on. I may be the only person in the world left who wants this app, but well, that was fine for a day long project that cooked in a window with some prompts from me while I did other stuff. I’ll probably tackle scantailor advanced next to clean up some terrible book scans. Again, I have real things to do with my time, but each of these mini projects just requires me to have a browser window open to a Claude code instance while I work on more attention demanding tasks.
I’m a little confused by Marginalia. I looked to find out what its purpose was, but couldn’t find it. My bad, I guess, but then again I’m not a search engine. It is pretty cool for a DIY project but the results were really off, especially for searches for individuals. Like take Ezra Klein as an example. Sure there is a link to his show from castbox, a service I have never heard of, and then a bunch of anti Ezra Klein articles. Wikipedia shows up, the last link of the first page is to Abundance. But no NYT? That seems like a big problem. I thought I’d look up Daring Fireball and the only link to his site was a ways down and was to a list of links in 2008. These are just two random searches. I did others, starting with myself, and my results were similar.
Likely I am totally not understanding what this search engine is for. I see this a lot on submissions here. I find something interesting sounding but I don’t understand the context. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s confusing.
For us, even regular YouTube is substantially louder than any streamer. If we want to watch something on YT than go back to Hulu/Netflix, we always have to adjust the volume. I don’t get it, why, why?
6 an hour isn’t unusual at a dedicated center in the US.
I had early cataract surgery at a “mill” here in NJ. There are similar centers all over. In talking both with my eye doctor and my cousin who is an eye surgeon in on the other side of the country, I was told it was better to go with a doctor who specialized in this surgery at a dedicated center (common called a mill). The rate of complications is less because they have really dialed in the procedure and have seen everything. The first day I saw him, I was literally the last patient. He said he had operated on 80 eyeballs that day. I think it was a long day, with more than eight hours but he does a few of those days a week at different centers. He has a large crew of support staff and multiple rooms to achieve this throughput. He did a good job. It was not inexpensive. He was driving a nice Porsche. He didn’t have time for a pleasant bedside chat.
I still don’t know why I had to get the surgery at 50. I haven’t had any other weird health issues like that. The one odd thing is that my grandfather was the first person to do cataract surgery in Lithuania, back in the 1920s. I always wonder if there was a link.