somberi

taneq - interesting phrasing. Thank you. To extend it to my use case, if you tracked enough Cats moving a certain way, which all resulted in a mouse being caught, then you do not need to know how to catch a mouse yourself. Of all the ways we know a cat can move, these sequences result in a dead mouse, is useful too.

As an aside, I admire Mike Nichols' ability to make gorgeous _looking_ movies. Many scenes from The Graduate, the State Island Ferry opening scene in The Working Girl, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And even the 2003 movie Closer. That is almost a 40-year span.

Atypically, he worked with 13 different cinematographers across his 19 movies. Woody Allen, as a contrast, as prolific as he is as Mike Nichols was not, used similar quantity of cinematographers across ~50 movies. Woody Allen, only because, I find his movies visually beautiful, too.

In the New Yorker article linked above, for me this stood out:

"Hollywood had never been my endgame. As far as I was concerned, the studios kept beautiful people imprisoned in seven-year contracts."

Reminds me of high-IP people inside Frontier Labs :).

On a tangential note, I highly recommend this book by Simon Singh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_Last_Theorem_(book)

Thanks to Push10K now I am on my 160th day of streak and 13,135 pushups (or my own version of equivalents) so far. It is the best thing I did after feeling like Glutton after dinner last Christmas.

Your morning latte costs $4.50. The author traced every penny through 17 years of coffee industry data, from your local café to farms in Honduras. The result? Your barista captured $1.67 for 3 minutes of work. The farmer who spent 6 months growing your coffee? They profited $0.04. That's not a typo. Four cents. This isn't about individual greed—it's about infrastructure. The entire supply chain is architected to ensure 97% of value is captured before coffee reaches the farm gate.

Wanted to buy. Not on Macos 26.

I use MacWhisper and it works well enough for me to stop looking for options.(MBA M2 24GB Ram - Large V3 English)

I wouldn't feel comfortable if someone were looking over my shoulder while I'm typing at a coffee shop.

I am not your customer.

I have one and agree with the technical issues mentioned in this thread. This is my first experience with a writing tablet, although I have occasionally dabbled with an iPad with a stylus.

What draws me to use this device is that it creates a sense of "roominess," allowing me to lean back and consume, write, and engage in a non-aggressive way. This quality is something I miss in my other devices.

The monochrome display makes playing Wordle harder :).

I was a 16-year-old kid in still-developing India, 1986. One had to wait seven years to get a landline connection.

My friends and I went through the Morse Code speed test and evaluation course, for which we prepared weeks and weeks. I was issued the handle OM118.

The non-profit organization that issues the license had a single Ham Radio for which you need to apply well in advance for 30-minute slots.

Four of us huddled in a small booth of a room, fiddling with knobs, wondering why there was static instead of some exotic voice from another part of the world - Sri Lanka, at least, please God.

A voice crackled in. We immediately knew who it was, but we were too cool to admit it. The voice asked us where we were...Madras, we said. He was too...We went around talking over each other, and the other end said, "I am an actor. My name is Kamal Haasan."

1. Madras is now called Chennai.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamal_Haasan

This entry from Wikipedia was impactful:

"Lan's embezzlement of $12.5 billion equals about three percent of Vietnam's total GDP for 2022."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_M%E1%BB%B9_La....

King Lear comes to mind:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

I suggest two books by Hesse - Siddhartha / Narcissus and Goldmund.

I can tell you that the world I operate in will want something like what you are proposing (fixed rate + OnPrem) and the pricing is going to have a ceiling because building this in-house is a real and viable alternative. Our problem is not so much lack of talent but other product-roadmap priorities. What is the ceiling? I do not know, but can hazard a guess. 1/4th of the yearly cost of a good developer.

In the long term, ~$0.005 per page (as opposed to document, which I assume hatchedlake meant) say on a mortgage document (~300 pages per) it adds up. The other alternative, which is to build this in-house (say 3 months and custom build, edge cases, such goodies), is more desirable (for us).

Useful service and a large problem space. Congrats and all the best. As someone who is a target customer, my 2 cents:

a. If this is a strategic value for my pipeline (and it is), we are going to code it ourselves, only because we can host it inside our fences. Critical customer data and hence.

b. The pricing is way off and is not reflective of the cost or value (for us). Even if it was 1/10th of the prices you charge, it will still be a no-go. At the volumes we have, it makes sense to build this ourselves.

c. SOC2 / ISO27001 - You might want to obtain them asap if you are looking to sell to outsourcing companies or FSG.

Another fan of Shottr. The tool is a pleasure to use.

Experiences are expensive. Things are cheap(er).

A medium-quality dinner for two in an expensive city costs 100$. A beautiful kitchen knife costs about that much, but lasts 20 years.

A Broadway musical for a family of 4 costs about 800$. A good mattress costs about that much, but lasts for 20 years.

The given wisdom seems to be that we should value experiences more than things. Good things also cause small dose of repeated joyful experiences.

I am 50 years old, and live a reasonably opulent, upper-middle class, big city life. I am guessing here - all the items in my apartment put together, is probably worth 6 months of my work. A bargain, compared to the joy they give me.

You might be interested in Tainter's work on Collapse of Complex Societies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://bit.ly/448HJVI

Hey digitcat - Don't see your contact info. Send me an email pls?

SilverBirch - You may be correct, and I agree with your point about IWG is a genuine business. However, it also is worth pointing out that their stock has been the lowest it has been over the past 5 years (I believe 5 years is a fair window that overlaps with WeWork).

Stock price: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWG.L/

Grew up in India; now in NYC.

The strong preferences around which of the varietals is the best, is a common squabble amongst south Asians.

I try to keep the allegiance fluid, because the peak harvest of each of these varietal differs by a few weeks, and I switch camps accordingly.

Imam Pasand is expensive, and they have a 4 week peak cycle, and the demand is strong enough in the south where it is traditionally grown, that they do not make it to the Northern part of India.

Alphonso is in mid-price point, and they are now commodity-harvested, as say Chiquita Bananas. It is still a good varietal, and one cannot go wrong in buying Alphonso.

Daseri takes over when peak Alphonso tapers off around say a 6 weeks cycle.

In NYC, Mexican Mangoes - Atalufo and sub-varietals - are available aplenty.

This one person's view is that the ones grown by Chiruli farms are good, and are commonly available at Whole Foods.

Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists Ryuichi Sakamoto assembled the soundtrack for Kajitsu,(a Japanese restaurant) in Murray Hill (NYC), and what it says about the sounds we hear (or should) while we eat.

NY Times article: https://nyti.ms/3zmI4XD

Sans Paywall: https://archive.is/9knVL

The songs listed, as Spotify Playlist: https://spoti.fi/3znZ4fY

I will miss him.

This school that espouses that art is what viewer feels, not the artist conceives - this was the mainstay of Marcel Duchamp and his ilk.

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Ref: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp.

Some note-worthy points from Crain's coverage (1).

- Compared to 2019, the average New York office worker is spending $4,661 less on meals, shopping and entertainment near their workplace, the researchers found. That dropoff is the highest of any city included in the study, outpacing Los Angeles ($4,200), Washington, D.C. ($4,051), and Atlanta ($3,938), among others.

- New York workers are spending about 33% fewer days in the office now than in 2019, according to the study. That ranks fifth among the studied cities, with Washington seeing the highest in-office decline, at 37%.

- ....Only 9% of employees in their offices five days a week—unchanged from September 2022.

- That amounts to at least $12.4 billion a year in losses for the city

- estimated 2.7 million people who worked in Manhattan in 2019.

(1)https://archive.is/YNjys

I hear you. A few articles a year, such as this one, makes the 70ish dollars I cough up every year, worth it.

@jacktribe - All the best.

I looked at the website, and I understand it is WIP. Is this a mistake that needs fixing? "Americano - Espresso with hot water. $4.50 (Medium) $4.50 (Large) "

I am 50. I was telling my wife last week, the thing I miss the most about being young(er) is the ability to sit in a corner and be lost in the pages of a book - really entrenched.

Now, it is hard. I am constantly writing my comments at the end of each page, and pausing to re-read a line.

One thing that helps is to read important content right after working our or meditating, when the mind is at it's most focused. I live close to a park and a river, and leaving my phone behind and reading at either of these places, brings that boy in me back now and then. I also keep a small notepad where I mark down all the distractions that assume fake urgency, and I get back to reading.

However it is not all negative though. I am able to make sense of what I read in a _different_ way than I did when I was in my 20s. I am able question what I read, toss it around, swirl it in my mind more and reflect on what I read. Years ago, what would have appeared as a stand-alone fountain of new knowledge, now gets bunched to an vestibule of other knowledge I have accumulated over years about a field I am reading about. I learn more by contrasting with what I know, than de novo.

All the best.

Could not resist Gad Elmaleh's frustrations about learning English (he did very well to do an hour's standup in English):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXR1PRbSfoA

It just so happened my wife and I were in a CVS (a US pharmacy chain) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (think pooches inside Gucci bags), and I wanted to get a Deodorant.

We had to call the staff to unlock small pigeon hole after another just to see what was written on the labels.

As always it is not just one thing - the lady that came to help us was in a Hijab and was studying medicine and was helping her parents who immigrated from Turkey and own the operation rights of that store, on thanksgiving eve.

May be I am Old, but I did not mind the locked shelves after meeting her.