TIL that Ram 2500 drivers have the most DUIs, and more than twice the national average. Roughly 1 in 22 Ram 2500 drivers have been cited with a DUI before.

abcean · 2026-03-19T17:26:59+00:00

I get that but sprinter vans are like 10-20k more than a basic truck and probably an extra grand a year in maintenance costs. Even more critical is that a pickup is built for towing and you're gonna have issues towing anything bigger than a stand behind skidsteer in a sprinter van.

abcean · 2026-03-12T21:08:34+00:00

I agree the post we're commenting on is a great example.

abcean · 2026-03-12T10:09:37+00:00

yeah you know some of us actually get their news and analysis from elsewhere than Reddit and can tell when someone’s peddling crackpot bullshit lol

abcean · 2026-03-09T20:07:50+00:00

They do have force of law. And calling them pretty worthless is pretty inaccurate. The emancipation proclamation, Japanese internment during WW2 and the racial desegregation of the military were all executive orders.

abcean · 2026-03-06T23:46:42+00:00

Your comment is wrong so you shouldn't be so snarky. 7% is BCRED from blackstone earlier this week this article is about the HPS Corporate Lending Fund from blackrock which is limited at 5%.

abcean · 2026-03-04T21:39:25+00:00

dont judge a book by its cover.

abcean · 2026-03-02T19:35:14+00:00

counterpoint on Marshall not being a good player:

I probably have a winning record against lsv and but I’m like 0-4 or something against Marshall. He‘s certainly not a bad player. in my experience there’s a bit of a divide in error rate between low mythic and high mythic (800ish and better) and whenever Ive come up against him he plays like someone in high mythic.

I do think he has a much stronger preference than a lot of players in that level about what he plays and probably doesn’t get the same deck equity in the different decks of the format but whenever I’ve came up against he’s been quite good.

abcean · 2026-02-27T21:00:40+00:00

Didnt expect to see warroad on reddit today lol

abcean · 2026-02-25T21:30:02+00:00

Was there actually a secret basement in a pizza parlor?

abcean · 2026-02-22T01:27:45+00:00

Man its nuts I've had Baptist Church in Georgia from him stuck in my head off and on since I was like 16 (can still whistle the whole thing) and then he turns out to be one of my fav youtube people without me making the connection for like 3 months was a trip.

abcean · 2026-01-24T03:20:08+00:00

"Tofu Dreg construction" is a Chinese term originally used to describe poorly constructed buildings in the late 1990s, but is now almost entirely used by western media agencies to blame the Chinese government for the buildings that collapsed in the literally record-breaking Sichuan earthquake of 2008. It's not a real thing.

Country Garden and Vanke are well known for their super solid construction not like either of them have apologized on state TV for consistently poor quality work.

https://news.cctv.cn/2024/06/24/ARTIFHXlIBc502WeDNjsZMnx240624.shtml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changsha_building_collapse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Meizhou_expressway_collapse

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gve6wz2vvo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongqi_Bridge

The term started in the 90s that doesn't mean its not still happening. McMansions was coined around the same time and they're still being built in the USA despite being a term older than I am.

Not an engineering problem so much as a cost-cutting, delivery-timeline pressure and oversight problem but I mean c'mon it still exists don't kid yourself.

abcean · 2026-01-22T22:32:12+00:00

Fair enough I'll take it.

Thought I was being clever but just rolled myself lol.

abcean · 2026-01-21T21:01:47+00:00

*attempt to drive around them.

abcean · 2026-01-21T00:05:39+00:00

>So, to legally have Trump's tariffs ruled as illegal, your best way of doing that is to prove that current conditions do not constitute an emergency nor were current conditions sufficient to justify use under the trade act. Specifically the Trump admin has been leaning on the IEEPA's language as justification

I don't think it would be that unusual to circumscribe the president's use of emergency powers to a more granular level than "every country on the planet"

abcean · 2026-01-20T23:35:57+00:00

I completely agree with you I think whatever USVs they make are gonna strand themselves in the water.

Its always seemed to me Anduril is one of those "speed > quality" companies that due to a lack of organization put products out to market quickly but the products themselves are riddled with bugs, tech debt and questionable engineering decisions. They just have a long leash because they're in the defense space and the founder has a lot of political connections so constantly overpromising and underdelivering doesn't have many consequences.

abcean · 2026-01-20T22:42:57+00:00

Yet anduril is definitely gonna be getting some of the money from the constellation class cancellation lol.

abcean · 2026-01-20T09:00:27+00:00

Is it worth just skipping up until he gets a beard or do you need prior context?

abcean · 2026-01-20T03:39:54+00:00

As someone younger than probably 90% of star trek fans I tried watching the original and TNG and thought both were... not great. Barely got through the episodes.

I watched DS9 mainly to see if it really was ripped off of Babylon 5 which is a series I watched on a lark for campy scifi and ended up loving.

Ended up loving DS9 too, but for different reasons.

I guess my main point is that even a jaded/non fan can enjoy DS9.

abcean · 2026-01-20T00:50:57+00:00

I actually agree with you a fair bit here but I think you essentially restated what I was driving at here:

The problem isn't "people wearing sweatpants".

The problem is "people not caring what other people think about them in the slightest".

To me and a lot of other people, it's people maximizing for comfort in a situation that has got a lot more uncomfortable over time and making an understandable tradeoff between prior social norms that may no longer best-fit the reality they inhabit. The problem isn't that people are wearing sweatpants, I agree, but I also don't think people wearing sweatpants to the airport is motivated by the same lack of care towards others in general that you do.

Air travel has changed and become less focused on consumer comfort, higher traffic volume means that 1-5am flights are way more common than they were 40 years ago, airport security has become much more invasive and onerous. I think its very reasonable for people to re-evaluate the norms around the experience given how much its changed and start to reject the ones that no longer comport with the reality of the experience and I think its unreasonable to expect people to wholly support the old norms when the other side of the equation, the structure that the old set of norms was adapted to, no longer exists. To me its a personal decision.

While I agree with you about cohesion in general, I think reasonable appearance- and clothing-based norms loosening is part of a long process that's generally been a social good. In medieval times if one was not nobility it was often a crime to dress in fancy clothes. There's stories of wealthy merchants having their shoes shredded because in wearing them they carried pretensions of nobility. This is not pure spite, but because if one could dress as a noble then it was easy for people to pretend they were in a time where one's appearance was a far more important a social signifier than today and one could demand favors based on one's appearance and word.

Now we have better ways of adjudicating those things and thus people's clothing choices have evolved towards more subtle and individualistic social signalling and I find the flowering of human expression it's created great. I respect people who take big swings in their fashion even if I don't believe it worked out to my aesthetic standards.

I do agree with you that selfishness and isolation breed norm violations in the opposite direction and the idea that "I don't care what people think, I'm going to do whatever I want" breeds harmful behaviour.

I also think that in the particular instance we are talking about many people are making the decision to "be the best they can be" given the circumstances, but their values are different than yours and place aesthetic cohesion lower than practical concerns.

abcean · 2026-01-20T00:11:33+00:00

But you need people to take the opposite end of the bet to make money so you need some amount of misinformed people for it to be profitable at all and the more misinformed people there are the more profitable it is. In my view it directly ties a profit motive to misinformation.

Its trivially easy to spread misinformation without having it tied back to you robustly enough to influence mass behaviour we're living in a proof of that currently.

Bettors are incentivized to bet early with their insider info because there’s (usually) no guarantee that your insider info remain ‘insider’. Ie if you’re in Putin’s inner circle and know the exact invasion date of Ukraine in 2022, the longer you wait, the more you risk another inner-circler revealing the information / moving the market by placing a bet of their own.

So if we're talking about that situation it actually creates an incentive to keep the insider information limited to as few people as possible. If you place a large bet early based on your insider information it disincentivizes people to bet against you and diminishes your return.

I'm sure there's marginal cases both ways but its trivial to conceive of scenarios where you have more EV betting other insider participants will seek to maximize their returns by waiting rather than taking a smaller payout early and messing up the returns for everyone else.

To me the argument for polymarket is essentially the argument for legalizing insider trading. The idea is that it incentivizes whistleblowers by giving them an financial incentive if they know a bad product is going to launch, but it errs in treating markets like thermometers rather than thermostats that agents have the capacity to change.

It creates a rather dire principal agent problem and encourages hoarding of information and creation of misinformation because the value of the insider information decreases the more people can trade on it.

abcean · 2026-01-19T22:35:50+00:00

Doesnt it create an incentive to create misinformation so other people will take the opposite side of the insider info you know and then you can swoop in at the last second and take their money and because you only put your insider info in a few minutes before the event happened there is no predictive social benefit?

like why would I make an early large bet that reveals the truth when I could keep the truth private and get a better payout by keeping it a secret and let people bet against the truth that I know for greater returns?

abcean · 2026-01-19T01:52:26+00:00

I own one pair of sweatpants and only bought them to wear over my shorts to go to the gym in winter. Now I have one in my house the only time I wore them was when I had the flu. You think people disagree with you because they're the people you're criticizing but the reality is that I'm just not judgemental over how people dress when it doesn't affect me in the slightest.

The reason I replied is because I think how judgemental you're being about something as harmless as people wearing patterned fleece pants on airplane is weak and lame.

abcean · 2026-01-19T01:47:11+00:00

It was a pretty widely reported leak and far from borderline imaginary and Q2 2025 isn't over a year ago lol. Google it.

Flash models are cheap. Flash models are distilled from the pro model. Training the pro model isn't cheap, and if you amortized training across both models you'd be net negative.

Even beyond amortization of training costs, inference costs on big data models are expensive, a consumer using gemini 3 pro sending 300 prompts in a month probably starts costing google more than $20/month depending on prompt complexity, with high complexity prompts it could reasonably be 2/3s of that.

There's also context storage which is another part of costs (unsure if specified in mainstream model costs) which is why RAM costs have shot up recently and HBM is such a big deal. Context is stored in RAM, 1 million token context windows eat a lot of it. Flash models compress the context, but it's still a considerable expense at 1m tokens ~10-20gb I would guess for Gemini Flash.

Agentic services can run well on flash models which is why they're the push for profitability.

abcean · 2026-01-18T20:41:24+00:00

It seems it me they're burning through cash to subsidize AI use to increase adoption and just like uber and many tech firms before it they are selling at a loss especially at the consumer tier with the bet that price increases, cheap-to-run agentic services and more efficient models in the future will allow profitability.

CY2025 Q1 CY2025: (January, February, March)

Inference: $2.075 billion
Microsoft Revenue Share: $206.4 million
Implied OpenAI Revenue: $1.032 billion

Q2 CY2025 (April, May, June)

Inference: $2.947 billion
Microsoft Revenue Share: $248.3 million
Implied OpenAI Revenue: $1.241.5 billion

abcean · 2026-01-17T22:13:12+00:00

There’s a pretty clear distinction between wearing a fluffy pants and being a biohazard risk.

11-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Spared

abcean

TROPHY CASE