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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Ikea really managed to pull off a magnificent marketing stunt.

    They have the same furniture quality that you can get off of Amazon, Wayfair, or Walmart but you have to go get it out of their warehouse and deal with the logistics of getting it to your house. But they hand out some meatballs and give everything funky Swedish names; so people get the impression that it’s a fancy European experience.

    China is the single largest manufacturer of Ikea products. I found that when I went directly to the source, I could get the same item cheaper or a better item at the same price. That deal is likely to die with the new tariff regime but that same regime will have similar impacts on Ikea.



  • I’m not aware of any major predictions he’s gotten wrong. As near as I can tell, he’s very focused on ex-post analysis.

    Ukraine is still in the fight but it’s clearly loosing. Ukraine is still rich in subjective resources like “spirit” and “determination”. When it comes to hard metrics the picture is pretty bleak; casualties, ground gained, artillery production, depth of reserves…

    The “we” wasn’t a quote by Colonel Reisener. I did put it in quotation marks but I thought it would be clear from the vocabulary that I was paraphrasing him. I’m sure you already know that Austria is constitutionally obligated to remain neutral. While Austria is barred from providing military assistance it has participated in sanctions and provided humanitarian assistance. That’s earned Austria a spot on Russia’s official Unfriendly Countries List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfriendly_countries_list

    I try to keep a more complete set of facts in mind when assessing the reliability of sources.






  • Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with “de-duping” as a database operation either.

    The main components would probably be:

    1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
    2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that’s where existing duplicates would get removed)
    3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn’t valid any more.
    4. Decide when you’re going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

    There’s a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on “de-duped” databases.


  • It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

    “De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

    It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

    It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

    A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.




  • We make food “from scratch” on a regular basis.

    We’ve found a few different sources for fats. I’ll focus on the pork-fat ones.

    The most common source is to just collect fat any time we make pork things. The advantage is that it’s cheap and easy; just let it cool and add it to a jar in the fridge. The disadvantage is that it will have a lot of other flavors (especially salt).

    Sometimes we just by processed lard. That’s basically the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s very pure and has no flavor besides the fat itself.

    Often we’ll wet render our own fat. Traditionally that would be the trimmings off of other cuts. Unless you’re butchering a pig (or have bought into a fractional pig through something like a CSA) those bits usually aren’t available. Typically we’ll just buy cuts that are very high in fat. For pork, that would be pork belly. We’ll just buy an uncut slab and wet-render it. Trim any meat you want to cook with (belly is the part that bacon is made of) throw the rest in a pot of water an simmer it for a few hours. The fat layer that collects on top is almost pure lard.

    We’ve also found that duck fat is a great substitute for lard. It has a similar smoke point to lard (slightly higher). It tastes different from lard but it’s also good enough that the flavor itself will improve meals. Duck breasts are about 50% fat if you buy them with skins. You can also buy duck fat on its own.





  • Is it just Gen Z?

    Most movie sex scenes are terrible. They fail as both pornography and as literary devices.

    When you put a sex scene, or any other scene in a movie it has to serve some purpose. It can move the plot along, it can show the characters emotions or it can just be there for titillation. If it’s just there because someone thinks that the main characters are supposed to smash, it’s dumb.

    I remember that when we rented “Basic Instinct” you knew how often people re-watched the interrogation scene because the old VHS tapes would get worn at that spot and you could see the screen artifacts.

    Two things made that worth watching. The whole movie was about sex so it made sense, both in the movie and for the character. The way to get porn at the time was to walk into a store and buy a magazine. And Sharon Stone was hot, OK 3 reasons.

    There absolutely are movies where the sex scenes make sense and are important. David Kronenberg’s “Crash” and Kimberly Peirce’s “Boys Don’t Cry”, would have been weird if they didn’t include the sex scenes or just left them implied.
    The sex scene in, “Team America: World Police”, worked because it was a satire of sex scenes in movies.
    Pornhub works because their scenes are very explicit.

    When you have a boring, unironic, semi-artistic sex scene in a movie that’s not otherwise about sex, it’s just a distraction.