matthewowen

Coffee shops do a lot of things. Do they make good espresso? Do they do good brewed coffee? Is their cold brew good? Do they have good pastries? Do they do good milk based drinks? Do they offer milk substitutes? Do the staff make you feel inconvenient or are they pleasant? Are they nice places to sit? Is the WiFi good? Are there power outlets?

You probably don't care about all of those things. Other people probably care about a totally disjoint other set of them. If you ask the proprietor of a coffee shop they might care about some of these things and not the others. But you can't tell in advance.

Once you see one thing done poorly, it's not unreasonable to think other things that are important to you might also seem peripheral to the proprietor but actually be important to you.

You could literally have a blank piece of paper with the word "coffee" printed on it in times new roman and it would look better than off ratio AI slop graphics. It's not a case where better necessarily costs more.

I also think that you are assuming here that the effort not spent on good signs is being spent on good coffee. That might not be true. It might be spent on nice chairs, or it might be being spent on pastries, or on non-coffee drinks, or one of the many other things a coffee shop can focus on. In fact even if coffee, maybe they do brewed coffee and espresso based drinks and cold brew and milk oriented drinks and milk-substitute oriented drinks. Which of these are they spending effort on?

The thing about coffee shops is actually that they tend to do a lot of things, and so unless they do almost of them well there's a good chance they don't do one of the things you care about in a coffee shop well. Consequently it makes sense to say "given that you don't do this thing well, there's a good chance there are other things you don't do well and those things might be important for me in a coffee shop".

It's very hard to operate an espresso machine.

If you want to pull good shots you need to be adjusting grind (etc) every day and throughout the day. So it's a case where you have to check and adjust output continuously.

So for me that's especially a case where like, do you pay attention to detail and take time to fix obvious mistakes is probably the number one requirement.

Ironically, you just made even more inferences than I did!

I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.

And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do.

IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.

I was about to say caldigit and then you called them out. I have had a TS3 for six years and it still going strong and I have had basically zero compatibility issues across a range of (Mac) devices and peripherals.

The majority of the US population lives at latitudes that would be affected by the “sun rises after 8am in winter” problem.

As I said before, changing the clocks is a much more efficient approach than getting every school and workplace (etc) to change their hours.

It’s not true IMO that “plenty” of northern countries do without it. Russia doesn’t (since 2014) but their time zones are a mess anyway. Iceland doesn’t. Otherwise pretty much every European country does.

The “savings” in “daylight savings” doesn’t refer to the winter part of the schedule. It refers to the summer part, where daylight that occurs during typical “sleeping” hours is “saved” by shifting the clocks so it occurs in the evening instead.

This is a bad change.

I think it’s bad for kids to have to walk to school before sunrise.

Fundamentally it is useful to have more sunlight later in the evenings in the summer. It’s also useful to have sunlight early enough in the morning for conventional “start of day” times.

Changing the clocks meets these. Yes, time is arbitrary and throughout the year we could collectively change the times we do things at to better match daylight hours but this is obviously much worse and harder to coordinate than changing the time for everyone all together’

85% of the world population lives outside of developed nations.

27% of the world's workforce is in agriculture (contrast to the US where it is 1-2%). 15% in manufacturing.

A lot of people work in "services" (especially in high income nations, where it's roughly three quarters) and some of those are knowledge workers... but a huge number of them are nail technicians or hairdressers or bartenders (etc etc).

if you got rid of the badges and showed me the exterior shot i'd say "oh, is that one of those cheap chinese EVs everyone is talking about?"

Philadelphia is absolutely an option, but it depends on the neighborhood. Eg if you live in the penn alexander, greenfield, or meredith catchments you have a great elementary/middle school and there are lot of kids of late elementary/early middle school age moving around the city independently.

I live in west philly and it is great: the park is excellent and lots of kids safely go there by themselves, the local school is very good. Transit (specifically the trolley) is good and safe.

interestingly, i think there's also a u vs non-u thing here: jam is a u word, preserve is non-u

I think that having some difficulty and having to "bloody your forehead" acts as a filter that you cared enough to put a lot of effort into it. From a consumer side, someone having spent a lot of time on something certainly isn't a guarantee that it is good, but it provides _some_ signal about the sincerity of the producer's belief in it. IMO it's not gatekeeping to only want to pay attention to things that care went into: it's just normal human behavior to avoid unreasonable asymmetries of effort.

I think this is an odd idea. For a lot of reasons, but one is simply that higher level languages _tend_ to be terser, and context window matters for LLMs. Expressing more in less is valuable.