Christopher Coleman (@[email protected])

Conservative Theology, Liberal Politics, Terrible Puns. Senior Engineer with Hope Media Group. My many opinions are my own. #ActuallyAutistic

[Christopher Coleman (@[email protected]) @mellowfish]

@BuckyIsotope
Side by side, the wharfs drifted to the event horizon.
Two pier into the abyss.
Forever a pair of docks.
- Old Klingon Proverb

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

A few times I've seen people say "LLMs have bad taste... for now." But while intelligence has very obviously shot up, current LLMs are just as cringe as they were two years ago. They're just better at expressing correct inferences in their cringe prose.

[Litong Deng @_litongdeng]

Students are failing UC Berkeley CS classes at an alarming rate. More than 35% of students failed CS 10, a course described as “a gentle but thorough introduction to computer science.” In the past few semesters, less than 10% of students failed the class.

[Christopher Coleman (@[email protected]) @mellowfish]

@DKThomp Zero is the correct number. ABA is basically torture for Autistic people (literally causes PTSD). Let’s get more OTs instead.

[Truth In Numbers @Truth_in_Number]

In response to someone claiming COVID only impacted the elderly, I just whipped up these chart.

Deaths from natural causes, per-100K population, ages 25-54 & year-over-year percent change.

Speak for themselves, I think.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

By eyeball seating density has actually increased versus what it had previously, which is not how it feels unless you actually count. That is a *nice trick* in any real estate dependent business.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Friendly neighborhood Starbucks got an interior design upgrade whose brief is clearly “Make this look like a cozy third place for discerning professionals and not like a fast food restaurant. All surfaces wood; all padding at least pretends to be leather.”

It’s quite nice.

[Matthew Herper @matthewherper]

People who don't follow cancer research often ask me why we haven't cured cancer. That perception masks a wonderful reality: We make amazing, stepwise progress every year, and the result is that many people live much longer today than they would have previously.

Right now we're in the thick of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the biggest research meeting on new cancer medicines, and this morning a bunch of really important studies dropped. I'm going to review them here.

This first image is the result for daraxonrasib, a treatment for pancreatic cancer that is generating consdirable excitement. The green line is the probability of living for patients who got the new drug; the gray one is the chemo control group.

If you follow cancer drugs, a chart like this will make your breath hitch a little. I'm going to review these and some other data here.

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

Everyone seems fixated on the models, but I think there's so much low-hanging fruit in the control layer above the model. "Agent" and "harness" sell that layer short. There's so much more that we can do beyond "read input, send to model, run commands it returns."

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

I see that "types and tests do the same thing" has once again reared its head, so here's Ideology again: https://t.co/4iCRhd2Vfq

[Christopher Coleman (@[email protected]) @mellowfish]

@davidmikucki I am on GitHub pages. It’s fine but have been considering a switch for a while

[David Mikucki @davidmikucki]

I did a cliche thing that developers do. And I have some thoughts about it.

https://t.co/DxiYwIc38b

[Tricia Dearborn @TriciaDearborn]

Just take a minute to think about why the thought of drinking contaminated water is disgusting, but the thought of breathing contaminated air is not. It hardly even registers with most people.
Air in public indoor spaces should be cleaned, as public water is

[Christopher Coleman (@[email protected]) @mellowfish]

@garybernhardt In entropy we trust

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

BURGUM: When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity

HUFFMAN: I want to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of -- it's a battery

[Christopher Coleman (@[email protected]) @mellowfish]

@Cmdr_Hadfield I wonder if the vacuum of space acts like solid wall, keeping sound bouncing around inside longer.

[Sketchplanations @sketchplanator]

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
— Vladimir Nabokov

[TANSTACK @tan_stack]

"Hardening TanStack After the npm Compromise", a followup to yesterday's post-mortem.

https://t.co/KDZQCrgfOe

[𝐓𝐗𝐌𝐂 @TXMCtrades]

More people lived in Manhattan when this photo was taken than live there today. Island population peaked in the 1910s.

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

A retailer with no advertising budget. Four thousand products on the shelf. A hot dog priced the same as it was when Reagan was president.

Costco shouldn't be the most powerful brand in retail. But it is.

The rule is almost annoyingly simple: cap markups at 14%. Most stores are at 20% or higher. Every dollar of efficiency gets handed back to the customer as a lower price.

That's the flywheel. Lower prices bring more members. More members bring better supplier deals. Better deals bring lower prices. Run it for forty years and nobody can catch you.

Ninety percent of members renew. Every year. For decades. You don't get loyalty like that from coupons. You get it from making people feel, every single visit, like they got away with something.

Strip away the warehouses and the hot dogs and what's left is a simple decision: the customer eats first. Almost nobody has the discipline to actually do it.