Well, and not only that, but the article itself clearly says that it was the tariffs that killed the company, not Lena Khan. So the headline looks a bit like it's just clickbait nonsense, and Lena Khan had nothing to do with this. Sure, if Amazon had acquired them, maybe they would have operated at an apparent loss in order to collect all that hot hot private home use data, but that would not have been a win.

The worry that iRobot would be acquired by Amazon was reason enough for me to disable my device—I hadn't actually heard that the merger was canceled, because I moved shortly after that and we sold the Robot so we wouldn't have to move with it. :/

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

Amazing how execs are so valuable and unique that they can't be replaced by AI. I could see many millions saved for just a few of these dead weights.

At this point I'm thinking that it is just a normal human condition and shouldn't be diagnosed as a disability. It is like calling hunger a disability. This is something to be exploited by helicopter parents and students looking for an advantage.

Wait, people will exploit loopholes that are treated as sacred cows? "How dare you question disabilities!?" I'm shocked!

Just a reminder! It's "blog post," not "blog!"

To address the contents of the post: yeah, this sucks, a textbook example of enshittification.

Contrary to the scaremongering we hear, the world is not full of terrorists. They exist, don't get me wrong, but the reason we're so afraid of them is that our fear of them is incredibly useful for people who want to control us.

And also, the ones who do exist aren't engineers. So a shooting, or a stabbing, that's pretty easy to figure out how to do. Derailing a train? That's physics. Physics is much harder than pointing a gun and pulling the trigger.

Unfortunately Acela sucks. I took Acela from New York to Boston once. Once. It was terrifying—the tracks aren't really suited for running at (haha!) 100mph. The idea that this is high-speed rail and that anybody takes that name seriously just illustrates what a backwater the U.S. is nowadays.

There is already a rail corridor through western Indiana into the Chicago metropolitan area. And there are already passenger trains running on it. The problem isn't getting a train into the city center—it's that we don't have electrified high-speed rail lines between the cities. Which, given that we do have low-speed (only 75mph max) highways, which are insanely expensive to build and maintain, seems like an eminently solvable problem.

The real problem is that there are huge fortunes dependent on keeping those roads full of cars. But really that's not even the problem. You can see the problem right here in this discussion: if you haven't lived in a place where high speed rail is ubiquitous, it seems really really hard. If you haven't lived in a place where cars are not completely and utterly dominant, it seems inconceivable that things could be any different. Even people who are anti-car tend to think with car brain because of this.

Tech companies: Security is such a huge priority that we'll load our software with power and memory wasting countermeasures that annoy the hell out of you. You may hate being that using two-factor authentication requires you to grab your phone for a text message before you log into anything, but it's all in the name of security! You should learn with it, it's all for the best!

Also tech companies: It's so important to lard our work with generative AI features that a little security compromise is fine!

Math is hard.

If a substantial percentage of the population is vaccinated, the likelihood of being exposed to measles is very low, so the 3% who might contract it if exposed have a good chance of not being exposed. This also doesn't account for whether the severity of the infection will be different for those 3% if they have been vaccinated.

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

Now they will start using metal zip ties.

How is this any different from paying with a credit card? Americans have been carrying significant credit card debt for decades.

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.