San Francisco, CA
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New Podcast!
Natural disasters make the Insurance Commissioner California's most important office after Governor.
But insurance is broken in California. Homeowners can't get decent coverage. Why? And how do we fix it? I interviewed Patrick Wolff for answers.
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Reading about Javier Milei — paragraphs like this should be internalized by every public policymaker in the west
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I’m always stunned by this asymmetry:
- eating 400 calories is extremely easy, a snickers two-pack. Just a little snack
- losing 400 calories requires a serious, sweaty, half hour workout (or longer)
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I would love an ELO-based restaurant ranking system
Yelp reviews aren’t very useful. Everything is 3.5 - 4.5 stars. Tells me nothing. Same for Google Maps. The 0-5 scale just doesn’t get used properly because of social norms toward high ratings.
What would work much better is…
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When I was in college at UChicago, I dated another student from Appalachia. She once told me she had gotten straight As in high school calculus -- and when she took the AP exam, she got a 1, the worst possible grade. (And she was pretty talented, she later on pretty well at UChicago's math classes, which are not easy!)
It turned out, her school just didn't have the resources -- her high school calculus teacher had just not been qualified or capable of teaching the subject. And so, for years, her class was getting basically fictitious grades, losing time to god-knows-what in the classroom.
Of course, it's not possible to identify that this is occurring without standardized testing.
And when you remove standardized testing, you remove that basic barrier of accountability. It then takes all the way until college -- when the student is out of the educational pipeline -- that someone with a different set of incentives finally takes a look and then immediately discovers that the prior system has been essentially fraudulent, a potemkin village of academic performance.
The fact is that high schools are graduating kids with As and Bs in advanced math courses who haven't mastered foundational skills. The data from the UCSD report makes that clear. 20% took calculus in high school! Their GPA in math classes is ~3.6!
This is happening all over the country. Kids are over-reliant on calculators and generous grading policies.
Because the UC system does test-blind admissions, these kids look like skilled math students. (Applicants are not allowed to even submit ACT or SAT scores at UC schools.) Their foundational math gaps are only identified when they take the freshman math placement exam (no calculator allowed) and find out they aren't qualified for pre-calc or higher math at the collegiate level.
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One way to interpret Starbucks’ corporate journey is that starting with the initial value of “coffee”, they have since run gradient descent to determine What The People Really Want, the answer to which appears to be some kind of combination of sugar and ice, large, with a straw
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Me tweeting from my phone and then from my laptop and then from my phone and then from my laptop for 14 hours
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Restaurant reviews simply based on whether one restaurant is better than another. Instead of writing a review, it should ask you which of two similar restaurants is better. That’s all you need to construct an ELO ranking scale.
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This Mississippi thing is so interesting. The TLDR is that the Bush admin was in favor of phonics, and so a bunch of left-ideologues reflexively went to not teach phonics but different/partially discredited language learning styles, some of which turned out to be bunk. Red states kept teaching phonics and did well. None of this is surprising, all of it totally predictable ahead of time. What a waste in the service of ideology and reflexive contrarianism
This may be old news among education professionals, but it still hasn't reached the general public. When I mentioned on a public radio talk show a few weeks ago that Mississippi and other Southern states were leading the way on literacy, the other panelists *literally* LOLed.
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I cancelled my Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. Here’s why:
1) Basically no movie I want to see is free on Amazon Prime Video. I always have to pay.
2) thanks to Amazon inflating the minimum cost on any item, basically no order is <$30 anymore, so I always get free shipping anwyay
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One subtlety that’s nice about this is that it allows the rating to fluctuate every day. Rather than showing a sticky average from 3,000 old reviews, on an ELO scale the rating always changes based on what’s happening recently. Great new chef? It should be reflected immediately.
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I am on the @FedEx website. I am trying to use their "print and go" service to print and mail a document.
This is one of FedEx's main offerings, surely used by tens of thousands of people a day. FedEx has a $53B market cap.
Using this feature requires me to pick a FedEx office for my print request, using their "FedEx Office Locations" picker. It's an in-browser scrollable map that shows a list of location addresses.
In the map, I try to zoom in on San Francisco to get the FedEx closest to my house. But whenever I zoom in far enough using the zoom button, the map resets back to being fully zoomed out.
It tells me to alternatively use ctrl + scroll to zoom on the map, but this only zooms while the map is in a fully-loaded state. Once you begin zooming, the map enters a loading state, during which ctrl + scroll will instead change the magnification of your browser window, and take you out of the map.
This is so dispiriting and abhorrent. How can engineers ship this? How can businesspeople tolerate such atrocious experiences, which surely bring shame on their products and companies? I am so disgusted. As a customer, I feel personally deeply disrespected by this revolting lack of care.
If you know a lot about software, then you will recognize how poorly most of it is built. But it's not poor by happenstance, it is poor by choice. And the choice of the software publisher is that they don't care about you. This is just so sad.
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This is because Indian airports are so busy that terrorist attacks on the *airports themselves* happened in the past. Hence all the security before you enter proper. It’s disjoint from regular airline security
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US politics (on the extremes) is fueled by two horrible illusions:
Left: the idea that the US is racist and oppressive, when it’s probably the most egalitarian country
Right: the idea that the US is poor and getting ripped off, when it is wildly rich and only getting richer
I genuinely believe that America is the least racist country (or at least one of them) which isn’t to say we’re not racist at all but the other countries are worse. A lot of them like to pretend they’re not but then they have nervous breakdowns when 3 Pakistanis move next door
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Chatting with my uber driver
Me: “so I think Mayor Lurie’s been doing a good job”
D: “yeah hundred percent except the speeding cameras. You hear about this shit?”
Me: “no, all I know is that during Covid, SF dropped its traffic law enforcement to zero”
D: “well now they got these speeding cameras all over town and I’m getting all these tickets or whatever”
Me: “uh-huh”
D: “yeah they added all these speed limits everywhere too it’s bullshit man. Now everything’s a 20 mile an hour zone and if I’m going 31 in a 20 I’m gonna get fined fifty fucking bucks? Fucking bullshit”
Me: “uh-huh yeah that’s crazy” [internally: YES! YES! STRAIGHT INTO MY VEINS! AHHHH!]
D: “yeah I got 7 of these damn things already”
Me: “wow no way” [internally: GOD DAMN THAT’S SOME GOOD POLICY]
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There is a severe and malicious irony in Jackie Fielder using her public platform to demonize Waymo.
It ran over a cat. To Fielder, this is enough to call for sweeping regulation.
But when homeless lifelong felon, Troy McAlister, used a stolen car to run over and kill pedestrians Hanako Abe and Elizabeth Platt, Fielder stayed quiet. A landmark vehicular homicide -- two people dead, on the sidewalk -- and neither judgment nor call for regulation from Fielder. As if it never happened -- or as if perhaps that's just fine.
What could explain this?
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Can you imagine that with $3.2M budget the city of San Francisco is able to purchase either (1) one Sea Shadow or (2) just slightly less than two publicly accessible washrooms
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I think Curtis Yarvin's work is largely not very good. It's not very rigorous and hand-waves way too many important arguments. But I get why it's popular -- it's the most visible, mainstreamed work that is truly reactionary against the present day. People sense that something is awry, so they read Yarvin. I get it.
I just think that it's a bit of an indictment on the contemporary intellectual scene: if Yarvin's the best writer to advance your views, then what does that say about your views? You'd expect much more skilled writers to show up and make these cases, but that whole scene is just paltry.
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Some might say the real trick is spitting out your chocolate to get the flavor but not the calories
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Ah yes the signature arrogance of someone genuinely interested in finding truth. Good luck
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The bar for technical interviews continues to fall lower and lower
I have taken to asking candidates what version of Python they write (so I can ask them some version-specific questions)
Then they tell me nonsensical version numbers, which is sometimes indicative that they're being aided by ChatGPT in the background
Had this today:
me: "what version of python are you writing these days?"
him: "3.5"
me: "are you sure? that came out 10 years ago"
him: "i, um, i don't think i'm prepared enough for this interview"
my jaw dropped in undergrad when i found out that this fizzbuzz test was real -- indeed, many candidates will not pass it. it turns out the bar is lower yet
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Imagine you wake up in your idyllic forest home decorated by Herman Miller from start to finish. You're in the mood for a nice neighborhood morning walk and a coffee.
You walk 37 minutes across the interchange, along an eight-lane highway to the local outdoor strip mall. :(
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My dad bought a book on Carl Jung from Amazon
He’s a few pages in, telling me how bad it is
I look. The cover looks like Dall-E. The text formatting has messy white space. The introduction’s third sentence is “Jung was not X, he was Y.”
The entire book is ChatGPT generated!
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A person working at Astronomer told me that’s the Head of HR (she reports to the Chief People Officer having the affair)
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Autocorrect on my iphone:
> i write: humilit6
> i expect a fix to: humility (one letter away on the keyboard)
> nothing happens
> i write: congrats, well done!
> corrected: we'll done!
it's like my phone is inhabited by a malicious demon determined to make me look dumb
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Sorry dude I had to unfollow you here. Not because your posts are bad. This is actually an extremely good troll. It’s so good that I can feel my heartrate spike. If I keep reading your work, it might kill me. Godspeed
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I think this is actually wrong. While many Europeans have wise/tasteful views in many of the small/aesthetic things, there are a few common, fundamentally deeply mistaken views (easy example: degrowth) that spoil all the rest
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“But why wouldn’t I just use postgres with pgvector?”
…
“I’m sorry. I know it’s a dumb question and I’m missing something — but why can’t I just use pgvector?”
…
“Listen I’m sorry to be kind of a broken record… but how does this add to my existing pgvector stack?”
…
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A lot of junior engineers are very very aggressive about DRY when in practice, a lot of code is similar enough to tempt to abstract, but too different to create a *maintainable abstraction*
Concern for future maintainability is key here
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Imagine being a Tunisian citizen having a normal day and then you see one of the most powerful men on earth wearing a “Carthage must be destroyed” t-shirt and you’re like STILL?? it’s been 2200 years!!
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There is great alpha in being “the guy for X” even when X is not popular. You spend years and years branding yourself as the guy for X. Everyone thinks of you when they think of X. And one day, when the time for X finally comes, everyone turns to you.
my palantir mental model is basically:
> be 35 y/o peter thiel
> hmm the deep-state will probably need software at some point
> they're too boomered out to figure it out themselves
> I can probably do it?
> tell 5 minions "hey you're the deep-state software guys now"
> ok boss what do we do
> nothing
> they do nothing
> 10 years pass
> deep state: anyone here do software?
> minions: yeah we're literally the deep-state software guys
> welcome aboard
> mfw idea's time has come
> nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come
> victor hugo
> company's worth half a trillion
> you're worth 20 billion
> mfw execution is a meme
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Talking with my Uber driver:
I’m paying $47
He’s getting paid $10
I don’t think this can last
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It’s the same lesson over and over again: you really can’t stop making stuff. Become a service economy — they’ll be too expensive to compete long term. Financialize — manufacturing geographies will grow their own financials. Sell the luxury meme, eventually new memes arise. Wealth is sustained by never stopping to make new things.
More evidence of European luxury facing increasing competition from home-grown Chinese brands.
Bloomberg: "Chinese consumers are losing interest in heritage European and US luxury brands, instead favoring homegrown premium labels for their distinctive Eastern aesthetic"
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Who approved this??? I'm going to lose my mind
(Also note how the zoom button is all the way on the right even though the user naturally wants their focus in the center of the screen. Just awful every step of the way.)
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I sold my last company and am starting a new one
I'm hiring for engineering roles, 200-400k cash, in person, in san francisco
looking for experienced backend (python/golang), native android & ios engineers. building a small but senior team
DM me if interested!
The bar for technical interviews continues to fall lower and lower
I have taken to asking candidates what version of Python they write (so I can ask them some version-specific questions)
Then they tell me nonsensical version numbers, which is sometimes indicative that they're being aided by ChatGPT in the background
Had this today:
me: "what version of python are you writing these days?"
him: "3.5"
me: "are you sure? that came out 10 years ago"
him: "i, um, i don't think i'm prepared enough for this interview"
my jaw dropped in undergrad when i found out that this fizzbuzz test was real -- indeed, many candidates will not pass it. it turns out the bar is lower yet
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Richard Hanania is obviously not a Nazi. Consider for a moment that calling public writers/speakers Nazis and perverts is exactly the kind of political animus that got Charlie Kirk killed.
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If you know a lot about software, then you will recognize how poorly most of it is built. But it's not poor by happenstance, it is poor by choice. And the choice of the software publisher is that they don't care about you. This is just so sad.
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This may be illegal under the FTC’s new rule prohibiting undisclosed fees. This is exactly what the new rule is meant to prevent.
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The Snakebite guy is a hero, but the story is also sort of damning of our own institutions: why did we have to wait for a single crazy dude to do this? Why didn’t we do this 50 years ago, as an organized project? People have jeopardized their lives for far less.
A man let himself be bitten hundreds of times by dozens of venomous snakes (after years of injecting escalating sublethal doses of their venom) and now produces antibodies that might be a near-universal treatment for snake bites.
This man is a hero & proof you can just do things
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What are all these administrators even doing? In my time in undergrad, the administration was largely invisible to me.
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That’s hardly any substantial water usage at all. Equivalent to a medium sized farm.
If you have a problem with this, suggest you first pick it up with the Almond Farming lobby
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Thinking about it some more, Amazon really was quite clever with Prime. It’s a great story of brand-building with a compelling narrative (free two day shipping back when that used to be basically impossible!) and then just harvesting that brand equity literally for decades.
I became a prime subscriber in 2011 — nearly 14 years ago!
It was worth it then, but hasn’t been worth it now for years. I always kept it because the narrative is so strong, like “oh, free two day shipping and movies” and probably paid them a thousand dollars for this fictitious privilege. It took a real “wtf moment” for me to wake up and realize I’m paying all this money for basically nothing.
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Browsing Design Within Reach, and okay, some of these pieces of furniture really do constitute exceptional craftsmanship, but man i don't know that i'd pay thirteen thousand dollars for this wooden bench
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I love how this entire excerpt already falls flat in the first four words. "AC is quantifiably bad..." oh? Is it? Why don't you quantify it? Oh what's that? Once quantified, under any reasonable set of priors, it either (1) doesn't matter or (2) is actually good, not bad?
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Yep! I think it would work like this: you log restaurants as you visit them. When you have recently visited two restaurants that are similar in some respect (eg both Italian, or both $30-50 range, or both high-end) then it prompts you to pick which was better.
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What I mean (and this wasn’t well expressed in my prior tweet) is that a lot of European taste/culture/wisdom is somewhat parochial and superficial, and that’s especially apparent in policy matters of any level of sophistication. It’s hard to claim wisdom when they get wrong, in a very basic way, their personal impact on climate change, for example. Memorizing the basic different types of wine or having some articulate historical views on local culture (note: you’ll find the views are always local) doesn’t impress me very much and neither should it impress TC.
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It’s kind of telling that at every event in SF I go to, there are several Very Smart People From Anthropic
Totally outclassing OpenAI and all other labs in that respect
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Explaining the second point: Amazon is not a dollar store. Orders are pretty expensive, but they look cheaper because they raise the quantity of items per order.
I go for one strainer, end up buying three. I look for an extension cord, get a pack of four. Feels cheaper on a per-unit basis, but I’m still spending way more than intended. Happens all the time.
Online shopping for ultra-cheap manufactured goods exploits your intuition for marginal cost/utility
1 big strainer: $16.49
3 strainers, including 1 of the big size: $16.49
5 strainers, including 1 of the big size: $19.99
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“Not trusting, but highly trustworthy — and one produces the other” is a very good insight
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This dude has 77,600 posts in almost exactly two years. He is tweeting over 100x a day. He is unemployed
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It was a 6-person board. Whatever happened must have taken at least (or maybe exactly) 4 vs 2.
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No, I think there are two parts to it:
1. SF traffic law enforcement really did drop to ~zero during Covid. (See chart.) And in my experience, this led to drivers becoming way more reckless. Making people obey the speed limit is a good way to turn the tide on this.
2. I think this more broadly fits into a “broken windows” framework where you have to push back on the Chesa Boudin era and start enforcing the law. And caring about the small things leads the general public to expect a higher standard of enforcement across the board.
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The Hurricane of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar is making landfall at the Crypto Dot Com Arena
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I think automated speed enforcement is a good thing. Speeding in a busy city gets people killed. Simple as that.
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just one more $600m bro. i promise bro just one more $600m and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more $600m. please just one more. one more $600m and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more $600m i promise bro. please
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Cloudflare down, Gemini down, Superbase down, AWS down, …. But @dhh’s private datacenter and my bedroom server are still UP!
Once a year, the run-your-own-metal crowd gets to bask in smug delight. This is your moment, see you in 2026!
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I look up the author — “Olivier Veyrat” — and it’s dozens and dozens of obviously AI-generated books on philosophers. Amazon is as usual totally asleep at the wheel and not protecting consumers
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I have always dismissed birdwatching as a hobby, but now I’m in my early 30s on an 8am walk in the park, and I saw a tiny creature with magnificent blue feathers on the path ahead of me, so bright and azure that I instinctively took out my camera for a photo
Maybe I get it now
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Proportional to Germany’s GDP, this is a bigger financial loss than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the US
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Look man, I love the Great Lakes more than most people do, but at that price point I’d rather hit the Antarctic
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Farming already is mostly automated. Farm employment in the United States is down 98% from its peak. Most modern American farms are far more high tech than outside observers would assume.
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Imagine telling a guy in 1900 that a hundred years in the future, you can fly across the country in five hours for the price of 4 ham sandwiches.
Is it dangerous? No, it is the safest form of transport
People must love it! No, it is so commonplace that people whine endlessly
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If you care so little about the tools you use that you don’t even bother reading the updates, or your memory is so bad that you can’t remember a few bullet points, then I’m not interested in working with you, sorry
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This is kind of false in the sense that any physical BlockBuster had a much greater selection of films than any given streaming service today.
Seriously, a given Blockbuster would have 7000-10000 titles, Netflix today has 3000-6000 at any point
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A sizable bloc of American voters are in favor of Scandinavian-level taxes in exchange for Scandinavian-level social services.
The rub: California and New York already pay Scandinavian-level taxes, without anything close to the same level of services provided.
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I can confirm that this was an explicit change in policy around 2013, from Dean Nondorf iirc
It was interesting to see as a student: when i was a 1st-year, the 4th years had applied before the common app. they had gotten in on a ~35% admit rate. When I graduated it was ~7.5%.
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You’re mistaking cause and effect: silly waste is a consequence of immense wealth, not an innate behavior. Only the richest nations can blow money on this kind of bonanza
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Peter Thiel called it fifteen years ago, and I underestimated it then
The cost of college, even for second-rate universities, just keeps expanding, exactly according to what the most credulous seventeen year olds with access to a practically unlimited credit line will buy
what are some more productive, impactful, or otherwise useful things a young kid might do with $400k rather than attend UMiami? please be creative
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We were in Jiufen, Taiwan a few months ago -- rumored to be the inspiration for Spirited Away. Fun to Ghiblify the picture!
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SSI acquired by Meta might be the move here
Meta is bleeding talent and needs a figurehead that’s got more cachet than Yann LeCun. Ilya would be the one
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Seeing as Quora has been hot garbage for 5+ years, they would be actually kinda justified in shaking things up a bit
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Restaurants always advertise “steel-cut oatmeal”… does it really matter what metal the oats were cut with?
Aren’t they all cut with steel, anyway?
Superfluous words
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One thing that nobody’s talking about:
It’s been long assumed that one of Google’s fundamental moats is their infrastructure: that it is hard to crawl, index, store, and digest the entire internet
Basically all the big labs are disproving this. Their crawlers are everywhere
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I'm on the website of my Internet Service Provider to get a bill statement. The login interface spinning + redirecting motion took ~35 seconds. It just shouldn't. There's no reason for this to -- unless the ISP is fine with wasting their customers' time. What an affront. :(
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