mherdeg

Was this the premise of the pilot episode of 30 Rock? The trivection oven?

Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to a fast one). Wikipedia says that moving walkways had been in sf for decades by that point, but Heinlein also almost incidentally invents the Segway in the story -- just a little treat.

I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.

In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)

Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The Story of Mel" -- and then compilers started doing all the work for us.

The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".

It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.

I would play a 2023 entry in the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series where you have to learn and use phrases like "Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:" or "Take it step by step."

Boston definitely makes it hard to love.

Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.

Gosh. I just emailed myself a .png of the barcode containing my library card number and open it in, like, the Photos or Gmail app when I'm at the kiosk.

I *swear* that a year or two into this whole thing there were a wave of articles about how individual state marketplaces were having insurers exit the state marketplace. The story which I am *sure* I read more than once said that an insurer found they were losing money on a small number of patients with very expensive treatment needs which drove up their costs so much that no one else wanted to buy their product at its new price.

I went looking for articles about this recently and couldn't find them any more. Did I imagine this happening?

Reading this writeup, the procedure takes up to two minutes:

* each person in the room pulls up the stem when their individual second hand is pointing at 0, and also sets the time to the prearranged hour/minute,

* then everyone waits a bit longer until this is done;

* after another minute, everyone pushes down the stem simultaneously

Is there an alternative where you could have some way to force your second hand to the 0 position rather than waiting up to a minute for it to get there on its own then freeze it?

I do see why hacking is nice for time zone changes.

(I realize that there are a few details that you can use to tell these apart, but,) Who gets to register the copyright on the image?