willturman

> I don't understand how websites can be this broken.

Wait. What? There are dozens of threads posted here daily about the new AI model, laying off huge swaths of junior engineering roles, and vibe coding as engineering, dev-ops, and quality control.

Amtrak is a perfect example too. An American monopoly, an established near-ancient technology, and tech bolted on that make something simple worse and complicated. Trains have been figured out for 150 years, welcome to the age of AI.

Along which axis?

James Somers’ You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014) changed my life for the better.

https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is a phenomenal resource as well.

The stock market is not the economy.

Huh, I was thinking US Congresspeople.

A few as in tens of thousands.

23andMe used a custom Illumina Infinium microarray designed around segments of particular interest.

https://www.illumina.com/products/by-brand/infinium.html

The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you.

This is awesome.

Was there a particular application that inspired you to make this?

The GitHub and X logos are chefs kiss

Won’t someone please think of those poor helpless law enforcement agencies!

AI code is flawless and impenetrable!

I can't believe people spend their lives finding lazier ways to classify a bunch of objects that will end up heaped in dormitory dumpsters across the US next spring.

Mark Twain himself wrote a story about a sure thing, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County:

https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_c...

Vision Pro: when you're done sitting in the dark on your couch looking at photos of the family who left you, you can use AR to remodel your apartment. It even has textures.

You seem to have independently discovered the market failure commonly know as the Free-rider problem, for which there are many solutions, and which is not a dispositive preemptive argument against the establishment or management of common good(s).

For example, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work illuminating design principles illustrated by long enduring common pool resource institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_princi...

It is interesting that the output of code is associated with sight and taste, while the quality of the code itself is associated with smell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell

*edit: that wikipedia page ^ itself is a pretty answer to your request for a list of things to avoid when writing maintainable code.

Also, thank you for including the passage about Elinor Ostrom's work. The conditions outlined as necessary for an enduring public commons go a long way toward explaining why the existing decision governing Mono Lake's public interest resources hasn't delivered the intended outcome.

A similar appropriative-use vs. public-trust evaluation is playing out this year as the California State Water Resources Control Board reevaluates Los Angeles’ right to divert water from the Mono Basin in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.

The foundational case for Mono Lake as a public trust resource is National Audubon Society v. Superior Court (1983) [1]. The California Supreme Court evaluated appropriative water rights against the public trust doctrine, took both arguments to their logical extremes, and decided that neither was acceptable in itself.

In a pretty jaw-dropping passage, the Court summarized the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s position in relation to appropriative use of water diverted from a unique ecosystem hundreds of thousands of years old:

> Defendant DWP, on the other hand, argues that the public trust doctrine as to stream waters has been "subsumed" into the appropriative water rights system and, absorbed by that body of law, quietly disappeared; according to DWP, the recipient of a board license enjoys a vested right in perpetuity to take water without concern for the consequences to the trust.

The decision in Audubon rejected LADWP’s argument, but it remains a stark example of the beneficiary of a public resource recasting a conditional public license as a permanent private entitlement, apparently free from consequence of accountability for harm inflicted on the public trust.

I think this appropriative-use vs. public-trust/public-benefit discussion is going to define the coming decades. The landscape remains unsettled as it applies to water (especially in a changing climate), much less to data in a period of rapidly evolving technology.

With respect to data, progress could be made by formally establishing a public corpus as an accessible commons, with clear expectations and rights around individual contributions made to third-party platforms. Publicly funded research is still often locked behind paywalls. The contents of the Library of Congress, special collections, municipal libraries, university archives, and museums are publicly owned or publicly supported, yet remain largely inaccessible to the general public.

I expect the “leader” in LLM performance to keep changing, but the accumulated genius of public knowledge to remain far more durable, with periodic and incremental additions. Fighting over small reparations for every scraped post seems less transformative than building a public knowledge commons that anyone can use, converse with, search, train on, and learn from.

reCAPTCHA began as a tool that simultaneously authenticated users while helping verify OCR for the backlog of The New York Times and Project Gutenberg. Maybe it is time for a similar public project to digitize and make accessible the body of public knowledge without surreptitious and ethically dubious appropriation of copyrighted works. Authors, writers, and shitposters could opt in as desired.

I would take a public resource like that well ahead of a few bucks of compensation for my decades of shitposting, just as I'd take a thriving Mono Lake well ahead of compensation for it being relegated into lifeless alkali flat via appropriative water rights.

This post brought to mind a post by Bret Victor titled Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction [1] where he frames working on and understanding problems at different layers of focus as providing insight that isn’t otherwise so apparent. It’s one of those posts that immediately resonated and that I’ve tried to internalize and adopt when approaching problems, especially those in new domains.

[1] https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

> Enterprise sales isn’t about ovens.

The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.

A pretty incredible answer to your question comes from a perhaps wholly unexpected source: Hunter S. Thompson, in a letter responding to a friend's request for life advice:

https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...

I read "widespread flourishing" as referring to a scope of influence and "at a level that is difficult to imagine" as referring to an amount of accumulated wealth.

But surely the people who aren't committing to not use technology for autonomous death deserve a more charitable reading.

I recently discovered Practical Typography [1] and Typography for Lawyers [2] by Matthew Butterick which have changed the way I've approached presenting information. I would highly recommend each for anyone who uses text to communicate. Butterick is a Tufte for text.

[1] https://practicaltypography.com

[2] https://typographyforlawyers.com.

It was exactly a game theory question, and a perfect exercise in real world betting markets. You’ll never have the most information and you’ll never be the biggest fish.

I learned the lesson that day, and I’d argue that even Obama with 365 electoral votes and control of the legislature learned it soon afterwards. Being a naïve hopeful Obama supporter, I bet 50 points on up and lost my ass.

Nate Silver came into the national spotlight after his analysis that year. There were other polling prediction models out of Princeton, but I heavily relied on Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight. I remember predicting every state correctly except North Carolina.

Interestingly in the context of this post, the University of Iowa has been hosting a market for real monetary binary options on US political outcomes for 30 years now. [1] It’s probably some small stakes fun for Midwest market makers looking for some action during off season corn futures.

Other things we learned: - The players club at Harrah’s marked the beginning of the rewards points programs available at nearly every single seller of goods today. - Casinos, in cracking down on card sharp teams playing blackjack with a mathematical edge and who had been 86’d but often returned in disguise, developed software to identify people from security camera footage by their stride. This was in 2008. - Bet the pass line, and stack the odds behind your number. It’s the best odds in the casino and nobody likes the guy betting Don’t.

[1] https://iem.uiowa.edu/iem/

Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.

Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.

Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.

I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?

It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.

Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Eadington

Or another kind of take:

Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91707.The_Land_of_Little...

> the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose

Or, rewritten for the Los Angeles Aqueduct:

the desert shall wither / and blossom in a plume of dust [1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-06-19/owens-v...

Why would credit card companies release data showing that consumption indicates a recession? Surely they’re in the business of sustaining exuberance.

Yeah, and make sure you cut out letters from magazines and paste them onto the note so you can't be identified by your handwriting.