bdunks

This is a common narrative that simply isn’t true.

American Airlines has the largest loyalty program.

In last week’s report to shareholders they project it will grow to $1.5B in pre tax revenue, against a total 2025 pre tax revenue of $54bn (50bn passenger revenue).

The core business of airlines is still airlines. Optimizing TRASM & CASM, with tremendous effort on upsell and cross sell of premium services (seats, bags, food), at every point in the passenger flow.

I feel like you’ve held back on an interesting story

The Market Basket used to calculate the BLS CPI changes over time, which can make long range comparisons difficult.

I’ve read of political influence on the market basket to lower the reported rate of inflation by the incumbent party, but I’m not educated enough on the topic to give an opinion on if it happens.

> Software development is one of the most capital-intensive activities a modern company undertakes

The article is definitely written from a "high tech" industry lens. A mid-sized utility might spend $80-$150 million USD on IT capital projects in a year, but $2b on power pole maintenance. Utilities are a strong example, but any large enterprise manufacturing company is spending more on factory upgrades that programming.

> [...] built a functional replica of approximately 95% of Slack’s core product in fourteen days using LLM agents.

IT and Finance leadership and asset heavy companies are currently trying to wrap their head around the current economics of their 100+ SaaS contracts, and if it still makes sense with LLM powered developers. Can they hire developers in house to build the fraction of the tool they use from many of these companies, save on total cost and Opex?

I work with these companies a lot, and won't weigh in on the right decision. Bottom line "it depends" on many factors, some of which are not immediately obvious. The article still holds weight regardless of industries, but there is some nuance (talent availability, internal change cost, etc.) that also have to be considered.

I had a car with an all wheel drive computer in a similar spot in the late 2000s.

I had a small crack in the rubber seal around my sunroof from parking outside in the elements. When it rained, water seeped in, made its way down the a-pillar, pooled under the seat, and fried the computer.

Expensive fix but I was able to drive it to the shop.

Agree. They seem to have a “price per piece” equation. Perhaps as a result, the 5+ sets are made of hundreds of small pieces.

Older sets had larger foundational and platform pieces which gave a good starting place for new creative builds.

Today, airplanes fuselages, wings, and car chassis are instead built up piece by piece.

It’s hard for my 6 year old to start creative builds that are stable when he hardly has any pieces larger than 2x6 across dozens of sets.

My wife found a huge mixed bin from the 80s and 90s at an estate sale. It really helped.

As they say, a relevant XKCD for everything. Thanks for sharing. I hadn’t seen that one before.

> “I’m not going to install yet another chat app”

This is legitimate.

I have to use:

- iMessage & SMS for most US based family, casual friends and co workers. - WhatsApp for European Family - Signal for one group of friends - Telegram for another group of friends

Every time I message someone I have to remember what app to use. It’s annoying. This in addition to random threads that pick up with the same people on instagram, discord, etc., which I try to redirect to our “standard” channel as aggressively as I can.

That makes sense. His cover letter is dated 1974, and TeX was released 1978.

I can recommend the Acquired (podcast) 3 part series on Berkshire.

There was a cool fact in there that he sees every price tag as the opportunity cost with compounding interest.

It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.

I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)

I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.

I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.

The sibling comment has a more structured reply to the whole process, but of note the article specifically mentions the FAA has exempted international flights.

I agree. I started using Foot based on a recommendation from the notcurses library author, who has deep expertise in terminal emulation and collaborates with maintainers.

A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.

The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.