I wanted to read this but I couldn’t because of all the allusions in the article that distracted me from the points the author was trying to make.

On mobile all the text is about 3 times bigger than it needs to be as well making for an obnoxious amount of scrolling. Unreadable code examples.

Thanks for the feedback. That's due to a viewport configuration meta tag which I added recently in an attempt to make it more responsive in portrait mode. I just reverted it. Should work just like on desktop now.

Yeah it totally grossed me out too, it's quite twisted. Author has serious issues.

If the prose is too much for you, any number of AI services will pre-chew it and give it to you devoid of voice, character, or offense.

Maybe that’s no coincidence as the German word braun means the same as the English word brown.

Bloomberg Engineering

Most mechanical watches unwind smoothly, ticks are typically due to a powered quartz crystal.

They did so well, they lived to tell the tale. Or squawked.

Yeah their descendants/relatives taste delicious. It worked out for the best.

There is no such thing as “pure X” when it comes to organisms.

Yes we can play the semantic game all the way to absurdity, but its also quite true that genetic ancestry is heritable and traceable. We know that many unique native american ancestries have been diluted down to very small percentages over the centuries so its not an unreasonable question.

The child tax credit starts tapering off if your adjusted gross income is more than $200k single ($400k joint). If Bezos is reporting less than that due to other deductions then that’s truly impressive.

It’s really simple. Loans don’t count as income so you use your stock to get guaranteed loans. And you don’t take most of your income on a W2 you take it in stock.

I know. I would still be impressed if Bezos’s w-2 income was below $400k.

Edit: also you need to pay the loan back, and the income to pay it back is taxable. You can die with an outstanding loan, but i’m sure bezos lenders will structure the loan to make sure they get most of their money back.

Or you just get another loan from another party to pay the initial loan back.

Bezos probably has an army of banks, private lenders, and private capital connections to effectively have a lifetime of loans against his Amazon shares.

It's a pyramid scheme, except the guy at the top actually has the money and collateral.

These lenders will want some interest. The collateral is only useful if he defaults. If the collateral generates realized gains then those are taxed.

The answer was almost certainly generated by an LLM.

I tried asking ChatGPT if Japanese high speed rail has level crossings and it correctly identified the line I used as my counterexample (Yamagata Shinkansen). I think GP is just plainly misinformed in a more boring way.

If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment. Also, "Finally, ..." and "it's not A, it's B" is a good tell.

Damn, I tried doing what you did and got a similar response too, down to exact wordings like "short answer, long answer" and "conservative maintenance". I will admit i was too quick to dismiss the accusation in my previous reply.

> If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment.

But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?

A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.

A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!

Excalidraw

Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.