If you have induction, how do you feel about the sound of the range? I still have an ancient gas burner (though I did install a good ventilation fan), but when I've cooked on an induction stove elsewhere, it both made an annoying high-pitched squeal (think old CRTs but louder) and had fan noises kicking on and off. It annoyed the crap out of me.

I don't want to get another gas burner, and technologically induction does seem like the clear winner, but the noise thing is really throwing me off. What's your experience?

Look at all the porn age verification laws that are being passed. They know they can't directly pass bans, so this is what they are doing for now. Ohio goes into effect in a two weeks. Michigan is trying to pass one. Several other states already have.

HBO's CEO thinks HBO's cancellations are way too low!!!

Put a banner or disclosure on the front page of your website with a link to the actual threat. If everyone responds that way, it will negate the effect.

If you spend time with the higher-tier (paid) reasoning models, you’ll see they already operate in ways that are effectively deductive (i.e., behaviorally indistinguishable) within the bounds of where they operate well. So not novel theorem proving. But give them scheduling constraints, warranty/return policies, travel planning, or system troubleshooting, and they’ll parse the conditions, decompose the problem, and run through intermediate steps until they land on the right conclusion. That’s not "just chained prediction". It’s structured reasoning that, in practice, outperforms what a lot of humans can do effectively.

When the domain is checkable (e.g., dates, constraints, algebraic rewrites, SAT-style logic), the outputs are effectively indistinguishable from human deduction. Outside those domains, yes it drifts into probabilistic inference or “reading between the lines.” But to dismiss it all as “not deduction at all” ignores how far beyond surface-level token prediction the good models already are. If you want to dismiss all that by saying “but it’s just prediction,” you’re basically saying deduction doesn’t count unless it’s done by a human. That’s just redefining words to try and win an Internet argument.

They do quite a bit more than that. There's a good bit of reasoning that comes into play and newer models (really beginning with o3 on the ChatGPT side) can do multi-step reasoning where it'll first determine what the user is actually seeking, then determine what it needs to provide that, then begin the process of response generation based on all of that.

This is not a surprise, just one more data point that LLMs fundamentally suck and cannot be trusted.

Huh? LLMs are not perfect and are not expert-level in every single thing ever. But that doesn't mean they suck. Nothing does everything. A great LLM can fail to produce a perfect original proof but still be excellent at helping people adjust the tone of their writing or understanding interactions with others or developing communication skills, developing coping skills, or learning new subjects quickly. I've used ChatGPT for everything from landscaping to plumbing successfully. Right now it's helping to guide my diet, tracking macros and suggesting strategies and recipes to remain on target.

LLMs are a tool with use cases where they work well and use cases where they don't. They actually have a very wide set of use cases. A hammer doesn't suck just because I can't use it to cut my grass. That's not a use case where it excels. But a hammer is a perfect tool for hammering nails into wood and it's pretty decent at putting holes in drywall. Let's not throw out LLMs just because they don't do everything everywhere perfectly at all times. They're a brand new novel tool that's suddenly been put into millions of peoples' hands. And it's been massively improved over the past few years to expand its usefulness. But it's still just a tool.

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.

Ok, I'm making a note to check in with you in 15 years to see how the extremophiles are doing.

I think that's a total misread of the situation.

Tesco has a contract with VMware. According to Tesco, VMware/Broadcom is now breaking this contract. The point of litigation is to determine which said prevails in this dispute. Of course, during litigation, Tesco will make many claims to show how important they are, and how insidious VMware/Broadom's actions are, all in support of their position. It doesn't mean that they Tesco could go offline at any second (though that is of course possible).

You later said "Tesco sell groceries, like potatoes. Do you think they only have a single potato supplier?"

That's a good point, but the more direct analogy would be it Tesco signed a purchasing agreement with a particular potato vendor where they paid £1m for a certain amount of potatoes over three years. Now let's say that after the first year this particular vendor fails to supply the agreed upon potatoes and won't refund any money. Tesco would undoubtedly sue that one vendor (even though they have multiple potato vendors). I have no doubt that Tesco would likewise claim that "This vendor's refusal to supply us with potatoes is endangering the food supply for Britain and Ireland!"

You wouldn't say that Tesco was "negligent" for trying to enforce a paid contract with that potato vendor, would you?

It's wild to imagine Echostar/Dish being worth anything close to that amount of money. From my own experience working inside the company everything always seemed like it was held together with bailing wire and bubble-gum.

I assume there was a highly competitive bidding process for this because there's no way Dish's board of directors would have had the stones to set the price at "three times the company's market cap" on their own.

I walked into a gym, told them I wanted to cancel and they did it on the spot.  I was paying via a credit card so no checking fees involved.

I've been w/ them for about 20 years and I still had a very old monthly payment which was $30.. No idea if thats still active or not but I did with no backlash. I just told them that I'm moving to another state which doesn't have LA Fitness.

I'm largely in agreement with you. I don't think its terribly effective to tell people what they can and can't do. If we don't want people to gamble, making gambling illegal isn't going to move the needle meaningfully and it's probably going to increase overall harm. See, for example, the war on drugs.

But we can move the needle by regulating the supply side of the equation and the more infrastructure intensive the supply side is the more effective regulation is. Banning the sale of leaded gas, for example, resulted in a pretty painless transition away from lead in gasoline. We didn't need to arrest people using leaded gas; the inconvenience of getting leaded gas was more than enough to get people to convert.

That's the approach that makes the most sense for online gambling too. We don't need to be kicking down doors to card games or frog-marching seniors out of bingo night, but we probably would be substantially better off if it weren't legal to develop platforms and services which are specifically engineered to engaged young people and nurture in them a crippling gambling addiction.

And we can say "oh, but why can't you just convince companies not to build those products without the threat of government force" but building those gambling products, or putting heroin in the Big Mac special sauce, or handing out cigarettes and alcohol at middle school football games is a fantastic way to make giant buckets of money at the expense of people's lives and nothing short of the threat of consequences exceeding those potential profits is going to convince a profit-seeking corporation to pass on all that money.

Banning tobacco didn't stop smoking, but banning cigarette vending machines meaningfully reduced it, especially in under-age smokers and lighter smokers.

Yes, banning gambling doesn't stop gaming addiction but taking the casino out of your pocket and taking away the casino's ability to run A/B tests on what it takes to get you, personally, to place your next bet will reduce the harm of gambling addiction across the population.

I'm not anti-AI but FFS I wish people would stop trying to shove it down my throat. Invite me to try it, ask me if I want it. But stop turning on for me and not telling me about it. The code completion guesses for my AI aren't even wrong --most of the time--, but they are wrong often enough - probably 20-30% - that it just slows me down and I'm turning it off. If you have a friend that randomly lies to you even 10% of the time, would you consider that friend a trustworthy person? Would you count on them for important information? How much time do you want to spend fact checking your tools? My answer is ZERO.