> in 2023, Amex cardholders (U.S. consumers only) spent, on average, $13,945 per year, or almost 4 times more than Discover cardholders
Honestly, not surprised. AXP/AMEX marketing team and superior customer service in the early days of the programs made it the top card to own amongst wealthy individuals.
The once coveted "black card" or Centurion product was invite only to existing card holders with the platinum card and met a certain annual spend criteria (some 6 figure amount). Card holders of this product paid some couple thousand dollar "initiation fee" and of course the annual fee. AXP got paid and then double dipped on the merchant side with even higher fees (the "no limit" cards charge a higher transaction fee).
Its exclusivity and hype has died down, especially when it started to issue centurion for businesses. Very easy to hit the required spend limit and use it as a weird flex at your next dinner party or restaurant outing with friends/family.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the centurion product. AXP would just be another credit card company and credit card network out in the wild (maybe it would have just been like "Diner's Club")
If you want or need to stay totally within the JavaScript ecosystem, Marijn Haverbeke (author of CodeMirror, ProseMirror, and more) created Lezer which is tree-sitter like and is grammar driven with optional external tokenizers also:
"The programmer scoffed at Master Foo and rose to depart. But Master Foo nodded to his student Nubi, who wrote a line of shell script on a nearby whiteboard, and said: “Master programmer, consider this pipeline. Implemented in pure C, would it not span ten thousand lines?”"
Hot on the heels of recent research[1] showing forcing RTO doesn't do anything to improve firms' valuations, but does reduce morale. Remote workers provide a convenient scapegoat for low performing CEOs:
> Our empirical analyses find that the probability of RTO mandates is higher for firms with poor prior stock market performance. However, institutional ownership significantly decreases the probability of RTO, and CEO stock ownership does not have a significant effect on RTO mandates. Further, the probability of RTO mandates is significantly higher for firms with male and powerful CEOs, who are more likely to grab power back from employees through RTO (Cragun et al., 2020; Business Insider, 2023a). 5 Overall, our results do not support the argument that managers impose these mandates to increase firm values. Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.
i really feel like Geometric Algebra, specifically the concepts of wedge product and bivectors, could save everyone a lot of time if it was put into the curriculum. because people keep "rediscovering" it all the time and calling it different names. (here "determinant")
If you're into machining, the American Precision Museum[0] in Windsor, VT is highly worth a visit.
I had the good fortune to tour the Starrett factory some years back. They were still running pre-NC screw machines to make parts. It really is true that old machines, well cared for, will last just about forever. Apparently it's something of an axiom in the machining industry that tools that are no longer economically viable for large scale production end up in job shops where the capability is needed but there isn't a need to pump out volume.
The Springfield Armory[1] is also a neat visit. For hopefully obvious reasons, their machining exhibits are focused on the production of weapons. The American Precision Museum is actually housed in a historic privately-owned gun factory. It turns out a lot of the progress in machining is driving by the need to make weapons.
- literally 100s of publications showing how disruptive and destructive to focus it is to be working in an open office work and how much distractions it brings:
- A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend. Backed, of course, by C-level dudes who simply can't bring themselves to believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.
The first thing mentioned in this article can be summed up: minimize pauses. He calls it "eliminate dependencies" but it's really about finding out where work stops and needs to wait for something.
This is so important. It's one of the key tenets of agile (not only software agile, but real world agile too) as embodies in the TPC (Toyota Production System).
> Uh, the Bill of Rights does not apply to corporations. It applies to humans. I recognize no other entities with rights.
So, you're saying that this new set of rules can be evaded by people wanting to form social media firms if they get someone to operate it as a sole proprietorship and then build a set of contractual financing, revenue-sharing, and decision-control arrangements around it that approximate (without, for the proprietor, the liability shield) a corporation, since it will then legally be a single human endowed with the rights of a human?
My understanding is that they are only removing products that ONLY contain Phenylephrine, which means they will still sell it when it is part of multiple-ingredient formulations, which are in themselves kind of a scam.
For example, many OTC "severe cold/flu" formulations contain:
- Acetaminophen. Potentially helpful for the body aches that come with the flu, but a lot of the time when I'm sick, I don't exactly need or benefit from a pain reliever. If you have a fever it can reduce it, but for a minor fever I'm not sure that is necessary.
- A cough suppressant (Dextromethorphan) and an expectorant (Guaifenesin). Most recommendations I've read advise taking one or the other depending on the type of the cough, but not both. For a productive cough, a cough suppressant can be counterproductive.
- For PM formulations, an antihistamine as a sleep aid.
- And of course Phenylephrine as a decongestant, which doesn't work.
People feel sick and they go in and just say "I'll take whatever is strongest" and they get overcharged for these weird formulations that are sort of kitchen-sink type things. I guess they are mostly harmless but you wind of spending $20 for pennies worth of out-of-patent ingredients that might actually make you feel a bit worse.
And yeah, if you are actually congested, go to the pharmacy counter and get Pseudoephedrine. It costs next to nothing and in my experience works.
Checkout App Tamer[1] to control the priority of processes as well as core assignment on the M series chips:
> App Tamer can take special advantage of Apple Silicon powered Macs, which have two different types of processor cores. Use it to automatically run busy background apps on the M1 or M2's efficiency cores to save power, leaving the performance cores for the apps you want to run fastest.
- I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for her
- She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes?? What did you do?"
- I break out in a cold sweat
- I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app
- I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the Notes
- We call Apple
- The support person ended up figuring out that we could essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they wouldn't be wiped out.
It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more warning/pop ups of the full impact of this.
PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in action.
So far this is probably the best "intro to CRDTs for a developer" I've read. I built a product around CRDTs, essentially, and my god was it painful trying to engage with. Showing actual code, explaining that `merge` is the fundamental operation, etc, is really all a developer needs to know IMO.
Also, the fact that we always use text editing as the de-facto solution is so weird to me since that problem is both niche and extremely complex. IMO a better example would be something like "Can this person drink alcohol?". Age moves in one direction so it has a simple merge function:
A property of this is that if I query your age and if you're 21 I can cache that age forever. You'll only ever be >= 21, after all. If I add new queries that care about you being 25 (for a hotel) I can satisfy the "drinking age" queries from a stale cache and then retrieve the true value (<25) when I need to check if you can book a hotel.
This means you can have distributed caches without invalidation logic. A pretty amazing property since cache invalidation is a hugely complex problem and has seriously negative performance/ storage implications.
It also means you can drop writes. If my system gets information that a person was 18, but that information is out of date, I can drop that write, and I can do so by examining the cache and viewing stale information, only checking the real value if the cache value is < 18.
This whole thing lets you push computation to the edge, drop expensive writes, ignore any cache invalidation logic, cache values forever, potentially answer queries from stale cache values, etc.
Anyway, kudos for the writeup. I skimmed the second half but the first half was great and the second half looked legit.
I'm going to use that title on the next conversations I have about estimates, in particular in the context of 'we need to know that this piece of work will be started in 4 months and finished in 8'. Those conversations definitely ſuck for me.
Cool to see Russ Tedrakes recent work! His online course Underactuated Robotics is a very good course to get a grasp on the complexities faced in robotics.
It's exciting to see someone with a bit more deeper knowledge than "Flex tape slap LLM on robotics" featured here, which is majority of Robot Learning work upvoted on HN.
There's more to it than just language learning to be solved before we can have proper embodied agents in the chaotic real world.
I read this article looking forward to the complex bespoke code to be ripped out and deleted - but the author clearly grew as an engineer in a way I didn’t expect:
> Sometimes that’s just how it is. The devops saying “Cattle, not pets” is apt here: code (and by proxy, the products built with that code) is cattle. It does a job for you, and when that job is no longer useful, the code is ready to be retired. If you treat the code like a pet for sentimental reasons, you’re working in direct opposition to the interests of the business.
A lot of code is fun to write. A lot of problems are fun to solve. But a business, especially a startup, needs to stay razor focused. My entire career is effectively to sit in meetings and tell young, passionate engineers not to build things. It’s a bit depressing, but it’s also vital.
A good engineer can solve any problem with clever code. A great engineer knows what problems aren’t really problems and probably an XLS download link updated daily would have been fine.
> I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.
Fernando Pessoa is my inspiration. As a teenager, his heteronyms shaped my life. Not because of being heteronyms, but because of the philosophies of life that they taught, and how they differed. Pessoa taught me that there there can be a fusion of philosophy and poetry.
Fernando Pessoa is one of the few "famous" people who I would really love to meet and have a chat with -- the other being George Orwell. I am currently reading the Book of Disquiet and I sometimes have to stop myself from being too marveled at what I'm reading. The depth of emotion and of insight!...
This is indeed an easy way to fix text rendering in your inputs and textareas. However, you'll also need to do the same for elements that render the submitted text. And once you encounter bidirectional text (e.g. an English product name within an Arabic paragraph), that opens up another whole can of worms...
Note also that there's currently a regression in Chrome that affects how RTL text is rendered in inputs with dir='auto'. They just shipped a fix though so it should be included in the next release.
> In the case of a woman who has a fully developed muscular system and has had ample physical exertion all through the pregnancy, as is common with all more primitive peoples, nature provides all the necessary equipment and power to have a normal and quick delivery. This is not the case, however, with more civilized Women who often do not have the opportunity to develop the muscles needed in confinement.
Ignoring the depressingly-predictable classist/colonialist tone, it's interesting to note that modern medicine recommends things like pelvic floor exercises to help with childbirth, primarily to prevent unwanted urination during childbirth and incontinence afterwards it seems.
But this observation - if correct - might lead us to conclude that certain types of exercise help the actual act of childbirth more than others.
Do we know if this has been corroborated / debunked? I'm wondering if there are any agencies out there with specific recommendations for those who are trying for a baby, for exercises that are actually proven to make childbirth quicker or less painful?
My kids hate it that when my phone buzzes I don't look at it right away. I do sometimes miss important things, but not being a slave to my device is wonderful.
> forget the phony ethics, and focus on the best version of this technology
I’ve experimented a lot between the censored and uncensored versions of Llama 2.
Based on this, I’ve concluded that fine-tuning for political correctness and ethics negatively affects all answers. They become repetitive and washed out.
I've practiced mindfulness and meditation for many years until I found "The Tao of Pooh", which, if you're not familiar, outlines the basic tenets of taoism. It has completely changed me and made me feel whole for the first time in my life, and I don't have to practice anything to achieve it.
Early on in my life I was drawn in by proverbs and other pieces of wisdom, in an attempt to fill in the gaps of what I thought was missing, to fix myself and make me feel whole. Then mindfulness presented itself to me and it gave me a feeling that everything just worked - it was simple and applied to everything; but I couldn't hold onto it. I wanted to just be, and be ok. Non-dual mindfulness felt like the answer to that problem, but while it sounded right in theory, I still felt that it was something I had to achieve or maintain.
When I read The Tao of Pooh, everything clicked for me. I could be myself without trying. My whole life has become open-ended. It also helped me to understand something that always nagged at me - how could some people appear to be mindful from birth, without having read anything about mindfulness? - People who seemed to always grow and learn in a way that upends their nature continually (nature vs. nurture?), while I felt that there was always something I was missing.
The answer(for me) was 2 things
-an ability to see myself as whole, despite the capacity for personal growth; -and complete/lazy faith in my intuition.
(Intuition being this kind of thing that everyone is born with - and so in my view, the only thing that could transcend the differences between every living being. The differences in access to teachings, wisdom, philosophies, religion, culture, etc.)
I'm curious if anyone here has felt similar with meditation/mindfulness, or has had experience with both that and taoism and what that journey was like for you.
It's not wrong - it's incomplete. There is almost nothing a non-industrialized country can make more efficiently than an industrialized one. Except food and raw materials. Without protectionism, their industries don't stand a chance against advanced foreign incumbents, so they'll remain stuck doing farming and exporting their natural resources. A victim of economic colonization.
If you erect steel tariffs, initially steel will be more expensive and of lower quality, but it will allow your smelting industry to develop until it is eventually on par with foreign offerings. Otherwise you'll be stuck exporting ore and importing steel. This is even more true of industries where the added value is higher, such as automotive and semiconductors.
That is what the simple analysis misses - a country's efficiency at some economic endeavor is not static. Protectionism is what allows fledgling industries to develop to a point where opening trade won't see them immediately crushed by foreign competitors.
More convincing is perhaps the simple empirical observation that none of the most successful trading countries reached their status through liberal trade rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37229422
> people who haven't studied economics enough to conceive of second- and third-order policy effects.
The problem is the effects don't stop at 3rd order, where economic models stop, yielding the consensus that trade liberalization is always good. The reality is different:
her work showed that trade liberalization had slowed the rate of poverty reduction in rural India. - the linked article
" ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
It turns out that our evolved instincts can be better guides than simplified mathematical models.
Honestly, not surprised. AXP/AMEX marketing team and superior customer service in the early days of the programs made it the top card to own amongst wealthy individuals.
The once coveted "black card" or Centurion product was invite only to existing card holders with the platinum card and met a certain annual spend criteria (some 6 figure amount). Card holders of this product paid some couple thousand dollar "initiation fee" and of course the annual fee. AXP got paid and then double dipped on the merchant side with even higher fees (the "no limit" cards charge a higher transaction fee).
Its exclusivity and hype has died down, especially when it started to issue centurion for businesses. Very easy to hit the required spend limit and use it as a weird flex at your next dinner party or restaurant outing with friends/family.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the centurion product. AXP would just be another credit card company and credit card network out in the wild (maybe it would have just been like "Diner's Club")