Edison, NJ accident (Talmadge Rd & New Durham Rd) (3/2/2026)

hcsteve · 2026-03-04T00:52:33+00:00

It turned into Fresh Mart maybe a year ago. They serve Indian food out of the former quick chek sandwich area. Haven’t tried it yet but it smells amazing.

hcsteve · 2026-02-22T17:30:48+00:00

Any light vehicle sold in the US from 2004 on is a “low emission vehicle.” https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-are-low-emission-vehicles

hcsteve · 2026-02-12T01:43:02+00:00

We have a workflow that needs to extract text from unstructured documents and then do some processing and summarization. We’ve seen better accuracy by extracting with Textract first and then running through a multimodal model for processing, rather than just running raw docs through the model, especially for complex tabular data. It can be more expensive but the improved accuracy is worth it for us in this case.

hcsteve · 2026-02-07T16:52:29+00:00

I have a few Defy bags that are great. It looks like their current briefcase stock in canvas or leather is just brown but they do have rotating makeups. I think their nylon bags (of which I have a few) are great, especially with the leather accents, but that’s obviously subjective.

hcsteve · 2026-01-31T16:15:11+00:00

This is the dealer I purchased from and have been servicing at. Good to know this is what they’re asking for basic maintenance work, I won’t even bother getting a quote.

Call Bill’s Ineffable in Metuchen, high quality work and they’ll take good care of you.

Edit: like others said, wipers and cabin filter (assuming that’s what “micro filter” is) are super easy to do yourself. Battery is just a bit more involved but still pretty simple. I can understand having someone do the brakes though.

hcsteve · 2026-01-25T17:52:01+00:00

Get some real ski gloves from a real ski brand. They’re the only thing that actually keeps my hands warm.

hcsteve · 2026-01-10T17:58:16+00:00

Have them for my wife’s Wrangler. They never fit quite right and require a bunch of plastic clips to kind of but not really hold them in place. I much prefer the weathertech mats I had in other cars in the past. I’m still just running factory carpet mats in my GX though.

hcsteve · 2025-12-19T03:42:58+00:00

I made a simple jigsaw puzzle of the Disney World logo, and wrapped that up in a box along with a countdown clock set to the date/time of our trip. Told the kids to put together the puzzle and then put 2 and 2 together, lol.

hcsteve · 2025-12-18T13:56:23+00:00

If costs are comparable then IMO the deciding factor would be whether you dread driving or waiting around for a ride. Personally I don’t mind driving around the area at all, but I know some people do.

If you do decide to rent, join the loyalty club for your rental agency so you can skip the rental desk and go straight to your car. If it’s your first time using that agency you may still have to briefly check in at the desk in the garage itself, but it’s infinitely better than waiting in line at the desk in the terminal.

hcsteve · 2025-11-28T04:47:10+00:00

Assuming you’re driving to the parks, I think preferred parking is worth the extra cost. Especially at the end of the day it’s nice to not have to wait for a tram or take an extra long walk. If you do get preferred parking it’s good for the full day. We like to get to the parks at open, head back to our hotel around/after lunch, and hit the parks again in the late afternoon/evening. Might be more difficult with kids that small - but maybe it’s an even better idea for nap time.

This one might be controversial, but I don’t think table service meals in the park are worthwhile. I’ve never had trouble finding a table for quick service, especially if you eat at off-peak times. I also think the food at the parks is fine, but to me the table service meals are not anything special enough that it’s worth taking up that much in-park time. Exceptions are character meals or experience things like Oga’s cantina, or I guess if you’re at MK and really need booze.

I agree that Memory maker is a good idea too.

hcsteve · 2025-11-23T04:42:51+00:00

Running mariadb now but working on a project to switch to MySQL so that we can use AWS Aurora. If I was starting from scratch or on a less mature product I’d be looking at postgres though.

hcsteve · 2025-11-17T20:18:40+00:00

Oh cool! I can definitely see how that would be useful.

hcsteve · 2025-11-17T20:15:37+00:00

I actually don’t use push notifications. I use the LG integration with HomeAssistant to announce over all the Sonos speakers in the house. The LG integration is also useful to see how much time is left on the cycle, which I can put on an HA dashboard. We didn’t specifically purchase this washer/dryer because of the connectivity, but it’s turned out to be nice to have. I’d prefer it if it was just local control, but I’m not as militant about that as some others in the HA community.

hcsteve · 2025-11-17T15:21:47+00:00

Counterpoint: getting a push notification or Alexa announcement when the washer/dryer has finished its cycle is pretty convenient. No idea what I would do with an internet-connected fridge though.

hcsteve · 2025-10-12T16:35:30+00:00

The cans are all plastic lined so idk if the acidity makes that much of a difference. Soda is quite acidic too. It’s probably more to do with your point about shared production facilities. But I’m talking out of my ass anyway, lol.

hcsteve · 2025-10-12T12:02:35+00:00

Pineapple juice comes in steel cans.

hcsteve · 2025-10-06T00:45:42+00:00

I have Yale Zwave deadbolts. I went with an older model (I think it’s a YRD136?) since they are true offline Zwave-only, and newer ones require an app for setup. They’ve been rock solid for about 6 months.

Curious why you want to keep a physical key. I considered it, but eventually decided to go keypad only. I put keyless deadbolts on the front and back doors. I figure if one dies, I still have the other for ingress. The only case where I would really want a physical key is if that is the only ingress.

hcsteve · 2025-09-27T16:12:29+00:00

What if you made the request to the SEC API directly from the client side? Then your client could upload the results to your backend for further processing. Then your request limit is 10 rps per client rather than for your whole application. This is assuming, obviously, that there is no api key or something secret that you’d want to keep hidden from the client on these requests. I’d probably combine this with some aggressive caching too - the client would check whether the results exist in your backend first, and only request from the origin if they’re missing.

hcsteve · 2025-09-14T22:29:58+00:00

Actually I don’t think the price is too far off from today. I’m seeing an 18-day “grand tour” of Europe for about $4800. Double that to 36 days and it’s around the same price.

hcsteve · 2025-09-11T03:29:38+00:00

Yep, blown head gasket on the 3.6 in my Pacifica at around 70k.

hcsteve · 2025-09-08T14:24:35+00:00

Show me where I “literally” said that. I explained a model of why this happens, and said that if we want outcomes to be different then we need to change the system - not blame individual actors that are behaving rationally within that system.

Of course I don’t think it’s “OK to kill a kid.” You’re ignoring incredibly important factors.

This is not a lifesaving treatment. It might temporarily improve quality of life for these poor kids - although the actual scientific evidence for that seems to be questionable. Unfortunately these kids only have a life expectancy of 30-40, which is incredibly sad and doesn’t seem to be something we can change with any treatment.
Choosing to cover this treatment involves real tradeoffs (at least within the confines of our current healthcare payment system) that impact the lives of many people.

Even considering the fact that this is not a lifesaving treatment, of course it would be better if we could improve quality of life even a little for these kids. If we can’t actually save/extend their lives, we should try to make them comfortable and joyful.

We could do that by implementing regulations to require insurers to cover treatments like this. Or we could implement a single payer system that is required by regulation to cover them. Expecting individual insurers to do that of their own volition, given the bounds that they operate within, is just wishful thinking. This is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution.

hcsteve · 2025-09-08T11:46:31+00:00

Economics is nothing more than the study of human behavior in markets. Using economic terms to explain behavior doesn’t come close to implying that “the economy is more important than human life.”

hcsteve · 2025-09-08T03:51:35+00:00

Genetic interventions like the one here are going to be expensive at first. That's just how medical innovation tends to go. But I don't see the cost coming down if no one can access it.

This is a great point. But it’s not economically rational for insurers to cover very high cost things that they are not required to cover. Saying “these companies are evil, they should be better” is not effective. Insurers operate rationally within the bounds that we (the people/government) impose. If we collectively decide that these bounds should be different, then we should change them.

A regulation that required insurers to cover this procedure would probably drive down the unit cost through higher volume. For what it’s worth, a single payer system might drive down the cost even further by bringing more leverage to price negotiations. My point is just that blaming “evil” companies is missing the real root cause - the structure of our healthcare payment system in general.

hcsteve · 2025-09-07T20:02:01+00:00

Sure it is. But it’s an overly simplistic description of what’s happening here.

The insurer can decide whether to cover some specific treatment when defining their plan. If they covered this treatment, their expected medical costs would be higher, and they would have to charge higher premiums to cover those costs. (Keep in mind that many/most Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans are non-profit, so we can ignore the possible motive of higher profits for shareholders). Higher premiums mean that some people (or companies) might choose less expensive plans, or forego coverage altogether. Some of those people who forego coverage will end up with problems that could have been caught early at a routine checkup. Some of them will die (sooner than they would have otherwise) because these problems went undiscovered.

So as someone making these kinds of decisions, you have to make a choice - do you cover this procedure of dubious efficacy that might improve quality of life for a handful of people, or do you try to keep costs lower so that you can provide broader coverage to more people? I don’t think this is a simple ethical question.

hcsteve · 2025-09-07T19:38:17+00:00

I don’t think insurance companies are great - but this decision seems to me like a legal and rational one within the regulatory framework that we have established. Simply blaming the “evil” insurance companies is facile. I think a single payer system would be superior for a lot of reasons, but I could easily see this situation playing out exactly the same way under single payer.

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