If you have a weird phoneme / meaning mapping brain like mine, I would note that he is not the doctor who is known for the "replication crisis". Even though Ioannis means John in Greek. Took me a second to tease that out.
It does make you wonder what would cause a downgrade. The debates over the debt ceiling have certainly brought the U.S. closer to default than I would ever have thought. It's true that the U.S. can never run out of dollars, so in once sense it's not possible for a bondholder not to get paid back. But the political environment, the potential unreliability of previously iron-clad data, economic disruption from tariffs, and behavior from the Federal Reserve, these all seem to make an unlikely event much more likely.
Well, they wouldn't be able to pretend that they are selling from the official store for that inventory. Which I, personally, would be OK with. I've been on eBay for a couple decades, I don't mind ordering from Jack and Jill's Computer Parts as long as they have a reputation I can check. But the current situation where you can order from what looks like the the official storefront but the fulfillment is from a seething mass of "stickerless commingled inventory", with no way to even determine which merchant introduced the counterfeit product? This has been a problem for over 10 years. It's not just the obvious fraud, it's the subtler fakes. I won't buy anything from Amazon where the failure could kill or injure someone. A sun hat? Sure. A charger or food? Not a chance.
Oh, I have a long list of vendors that I'll buy from over Amazon. I buy almost nothing from them. On the rare occasion that I simply can't find something locally or from a reputable vendor, or need it on very short time scale, well, OK. But we dropped Prime, where we were ordering 100+ times a year, and now I pay out of pocket for shipping on a half-dozen orders a year.
It's not clear what LLMs are good at, and there's great interest in finding out. This is made harder by the frenetic pace of development (GPT 2 came out in 2019). Not surprising at all that there's research into how LLMs fail and why.
Even for someone who kinda understands how the models are trained, it's surprising to me that they struggle when the symbols change. One thing computers are traditionally very good at is symbolic logic. Graph bijection. Stuff like that. So it's worrisome when they fail at it. Even in this research model which is much, much smaller than current or even older models.
It was the same thing for us with Qt Commercial licensing. We use only the LGPL version, dynamically link, don't modify the source, and give credit, so we're fully in compliance. To get support we chose to purchase commercial licenses for our small team of developers. Cue a regular series of calls about whether we were sure we were in compliance, etc. To add insult to injury they couldn't even navigate our purchasing process so it was a pain to pay them.
I'll take my chances in the open source world. It's a shame that the companies that created the software aren't getting paid, truly. But don't make it so obnoxious to reward you.
I’m also a happy Migadu customer, and I have never had to interact with their support. I use it for most of my domains, except for a few that are work-related.
Ooh, looks like they added that in late 2023. Man. In August 2023 I actually migrated all of my email to Proton and was ready to go when I realized they didn't support forwarding. Thanks for letting me know.
Inbox. They claim that the inbox is special in IMAP and it's hard to have a lot of messages there. 150K messages in the whole mailbox, I think. 25 years of email.
Apple's Airpods Max headphones appear to be the official uniform of University of California students. We've been visiting and I swear they outnumber normal headphones.
Wired headphones also just work, don't need to be charged, and are much cheaper. AirPods are a strict downgrade from normal wired headphones, and it is insane to me that people are willing to pay for them.
Since less water would increase the detergent concentration, I was wondering if the opposite was the case. My family's old washer filled up the entire tub with water, so any detergent (and any pathogen, to be fair) would be quite diluted.
Short cycle length certainly makes sense to be correlated with pathogens. The lousy LG "TurboWash" only takes 28 minutes to do a full load of laundry but certainly doesn't get very much clean in that time.
I have to admit it was surprising that textiles have been identified as the source of hospital acquired infections. You'd think that even if the laundering didn't eliminate pathogens, it would greatly reduce them and make any clusters more diffuse.
If I had to guess, it has more to do with the type of person who is willing to save diligently for decades. Government work (at least until the last few months) tended to be lower paying but steadier. The type of risk-averse person who takes a government job is also more likely to save over time, taking advantage of compounding. Just correlated, in other words.
I'm curious what, specifically, the foundation claims is contrary to the plans. It's not like Wright himself built the houses (or did the drawings, for that matter). There's always been a process of modification when the contractor gets onsite and builds something. When Wright was alive he (or his secretary) would review pictures of the the resulting home and award a glazed red tile with Wright's signature engraved. That was the official recognition that you had a Frank Lloyd Wright home. Perhaps with all the litigation (such as with the Jean-Michel Basquiat authentication committee) the foundation is scared to get involved.
I saw Riverrock over Christmas when it was 95% complete, and it does look really cool. Similar in a lot of ways, especially the living room, but quite a different floor plan. I hope the doors are a bit wider than the Louis Penfield house on the same site; even folks of normal width have to rotate sideways. Toilet in a narrow alcove, narrow cushions on the furniture, etc. Absolute commitment to design integrity, not always comfortable. Still a fascinating place to stay.
> There's always been a process of modification when the contractor gets onsite and builds something.
And famously, like in the case of Fallingwater among others I believe, he forced contractors to remove supports that the contractors deemed structurally necessary and had added, against his designs. In one case at least the contractors refused and Wright himself took a sledge hammer to them personally. At least that’s what I was told by the tour guide.
Worth pointing out that Wrogjt was usually wrong on such matters. Fallingeater is structurally comprised and has required substantial repairs over the years.
... because, according to the engineering firm that reviewed the original design blueprints in this millenium, Wright's specifications for extra steel rebar in the cement were ignored by the contractors. In their opinion/analysis, the house would not have needed such repairs were it built to his spec in the first place.
I've always found Wright's work beautiful and was a fan for some time, but after reading more about his life and work, and happening to visit Fallingwater on a very rainy day, my opinion has changed. His buildings are beautiful art pieces but they are not good homes. He was too cantankerous and self-righteous to accommodate the reality that a home needs to be maintained and changed over the years if it will continue to be functional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis