Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.

Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.

I don't think this is true in "glamor" cities, but in Baltimore where I live every Chipotle location is known to be terrible. Hostile employees, menu items constantly out of stock, orders wrong. People who patronize and love suburban locations are shocked.

I'm not sure if the independent restaurants are siphoning off all the decent employees (especially the managers who you'd think would try and make sure there's enough product to meet demand), or if it's just that much more difficult to get delivery trucks to city locations, or if corporate just wants to close the city locations and doesn't mind setting them up to fail, or what.

But it's stark.

That's not even getting into McDonald's or KFC which are legitimately ratchet in the city and pretty wholesome out in the burbs.

She lives in terror of being grossed out or impatient, or our children complaining. Her favorite places are ones where she didn't have to wait, never wondered whether we'd been forgotten, where parking was easy, where our son ate the food, where the food didn't gross her out, where the finishes look new/spotless, and something about the atmosphere of the place set her mind at ease about no one paying attention to our children's behavior.

Chains are very good at ticking these boxes. Independent places always seem to have slow service, or a dirty bathroom, or a dingy finish, or poorly-separated seating so that she feels like our son is bothering other patrons, or no kids' menu, or no parking lot, or just manage to put her off in some way. "Feel dirty". "Feel sketchy".

I really don't know if it's the chicken or the egg. Is it because chains are familiar? Or is it because it takes a corporate arm to understand the existential necessity of "not putting off high-achieving white women" and to do the market research it takes to actually achieve that aim? IDK

To the extent that the article has a political thesis (the author was pretty careful to avoid one), I think it's "don't throw the LLM baby out with the OpenAI bathwater". But it's pretty clear to me that OpenAI being bathwater is taken as near-fact.

Its' greater sin in my view was attempting to present simple pedantry as politically relevant. The literary criticism I found enjoyable, convincing, and devoid of actionable political insight.

The typical student does not emigrate or even travel that much, so you don't prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the population of the Earth, you prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the regions where they are likely to spend their lives.

In the US you are very likely, at some point in your life, to encounter native Spanish speakers with poor English competency. Outside of higher education, you are very unlikely to encounter native Mandarin speakers with poor English competency.

I live in Baltimore, where people have very negative attitudes towards police because of everything you describe.

Nevertheless, the perception here is that it's impossible to get police to act on nuisance crime, or really anything short of murder, even with video evidence. There's also a perception that it that this is a recent shift and represents the police retaliating after being prosecuted for the murder of Freddie Gray.

I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools.

Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!?

Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.