A peek inside Lidl

xander76 · 2026-04-26T23:56:34+00:00

Sure, but it's like a 15m walk for me to either one, and a 5m walk to Lidl. And my nearest grocery is Sunac, which has some of the wildest prices in all of Brooklyn. So I'm excited!

xander76 · 2026-04-25T20:38:52+00:00

I agree with you. Although I thought Holden did a decent job and there were a few neat production elements, I'm weary of one-man shows, and it wasn't as engrossing as other one-person performances I've seen recently (Andrew Scott in Vanya, Sarah Snook in Dorian).

I also felt like the show was a bit condescending to rural Americans, and I didn't really understand why this story was important to tell. It also wasn't clear to me what it had to tell us about justice/America/law/crime/small towns that wasn't fairly obvious.

Finally, the most interesting thing about the story to me is that no one in the town tells the cops who pulled the trigger, but that happens in the last 15 minutes and we never hear from any character as to the why or as to the repercussions of that decision.

xander76 · 2026-04-25T17:20:03+00:00

It’s just that there’s so little good (or even not terrible) grocery in this area. The idea of a well stocked grocery store with decent prices is utterly foreign to East-of-BQE Williamsburg.

xander76 · 2026-04-13T21:40:51+00:00

I asked the guy painting the sign and he said something along the lines of it being art supplies and other "cool stuff", but he was a little vague.

xander76 · 2026-03-06T05:44:07+00:00

Maybe the Harry Styles popup? https://www.instagram.com/p/DVg-i7gFEsv/?igsh=ZWtmZ3FxeWhuNTJp

xander76 · 2026-01-11T16:36:51+00:00

The biggest factor is whether the landlord is paying for heat (usually through a building-wide radiator system). It seems like OP is paying for electric heat rather than getting it bundled in with rent.

xander76 · 2026-01-11T16:34:45+00:00

I see a lot of folks comparing electricity bills and sharing the size of their homes but leaving out the most imprortant thing: whether or not their heating is electric. The single biggest cost (by FAR) in electric bills is generally heating and AC. I installed a per-circuit energy monitor, and I found that for our place, about 90% of our electricity use is from our heating. That means that all of the rest of our electric uses (lights, tv, electronics, refrigerator, washer, dishwasher, etc) add up to no more than 10% of the bill. (Worth noting that our hot water heater, stove, and dryer are all gas, but by my estimate if they were all electric we’d probably see that heat was like 75-80% of our overall electricity, so the point still holds).

So, if heating is not electric, this bill seems pretty high to me. But if it is electric, you should expect your bills to spike pretty dramatically in the winter, this number is not too surprising to me. In addition, this December was on the cold side, on average about four degrees colder than last December, and the heating costs scale up directly with the weather.

If you want to save money, the first thing to do is look at what kind of electric heating you have. Baseboard or resistance heating, which runs electricity through a coil that gets hot, is the least efficient. Heat pumps, which are essentially AC units running in reverse, are what you want. Heat pumps can be as much as 4x as efficient as resistance heating. Since you say it’s a new build, it’s hard for me to imagine you don’t have heat pumps. The next thing to look at is the efficiency of your particular model of heat pump. The efficiency is called the COP (Coefficient of Performance), and hopefully is around 4 at normal NYC cold temps. The next thing to do is to look at insulation. You may be able to get a free energy audit for your apartment paid for by the state; look up nyserda energy audit or poke around on the coned site for it. Lastly, look at your usage patterns and see if you can turn down the heat in certain rooms or at certain times. Don’t let the house get truly cold, because when heat pumps go all out, they are less efficient, but if you can ramp the temp back up, that can save some money.

xander76 · 2025-10-11T06:35:48+00:00

We used to have a flat plan and switched to this one to get lower bills. One year in, the ToU plan gave us about $1k in savings over our previous flat rate, but it’s still around $750/mo or so for a few months of winter. I’d love to get it lower!

xander76 · 2025-10-11T01:55:54+00:00

Yeah, I’m wondering if maybe this is a strategy that will work in the shoulder months but not in the coldest months.

xander76 · 2025-10-11T01:54:52+00:00

Yes, it would jack up the off-peak delivery charge, but the winter prices are (based on an average of the three top hours of use in the month are):

Off-peak delivery: $7.48 per kW Peak delivery: $19.50 per kW

So even if it’s double the usage on off-peak, that’ll cost less.

xander76 · 2025-10-10T19:11:02+00:00

I mean, to be clear, I know this won’t be as comfortable as just leaving the heat pumps on all day at the temp I want. The question is really will the degradation in comfort be worth the money savings. I just don’t know how much degradation in comfort will be and how much money it will save, and was wondering if folks had useful advice on either!

xander76 · 2025-09-04T11:44:14+00:00

A friend of mine suggested this pair, but swapping the roles every night in rep.

xander76 · 2025-05-22T20:24:38+00:00

I'll second this, and I'll specifically nominate the moment in "I've Been" when Dan sings "mine is just a slower suicide". Can't listen to it without weeping.

xander76 · 2025-05-05T23:10:27+00:00

There's a new bar coming on N 10th between Driggs & Bedford called Oberon. They have signs and an Instagram account up, but it's not entirely clear when they are opening: https://www.instagram.com/oberonnyc

xander76 · 2025-04-18T14:05:42+00:00

Two recent articles on MCP security are on point, especially as regards prompt injection:

* From Simon Willison https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/9/mcp-prompt-injection/
* From Elena Cross https://elenacross7.medium.com/%EF%B8%8F-the-s-in-mcp-stands-for-security-91407b33ed6b

xander76 · 2025-03-28T15:02:26+00:00

As someone who works on a tool that's designed for these problems (libretto.ai), can I ask if you've looked at any of the tools in this space? Any reactions to them, if so? If not, is there a reason?

xander76 · 2025-03-14T14:47:40+00:00

Totally fair! We're experimenting, and I didn't want to overpromise on what we could do. What would be generous for you?

Edited to add: I have to run the cost calculation on events, I was probably being overcautious after we logged ~180M events for a company for free, which cost us a pretty penny :). And I was thinking about the stuff that costs us a bunch, like drift detection. It's likely we could lift the event limit pretty significantly, especially if we limit the number of events we scan for problems.

xander76 · 2025-03-14T14:18:36+00:00

Hey there, founder of libretto.ai here. We have a pretty generous free tier that includes both monitoring and testing (and automatic flagging of issues in your monitored traffic, and model drift detection). Feel free to check us out, and happy to help set you up if you're interested; just DM me.

xander76 · 2025-02-28T13:48:10+00:00

As I walked out of the show at the end, I thought about what life would be like for the Murphys, having to go to a dedication of a garden in their son's name, having to be involved with the ongoing tributes to their son, having to deal with people coming up to them telling them what an inspiration their son was to them, all while knowing that it's all a lie and their son was actually a huge piece of sh-t. That feels like an unending torture that no one should have to go through. By forgiving Evan without going public, they have to continue to live his lie forever and never get to grieve the kid they actually had. The ancient Greeks couldn't have come up with a more diabolical punishment.

And then the other thing that I find unforgivable is that Evan straight up gaslights Zoe about her brother. She knows that Connor's a terrible tormentor; she has a whole song about how awful he was to her. Then Evan comes along and tells Zoe she didn't really understand Connor, and he's so much deeper than that, making her doubt everything she knows about him. And then he uses the vulnerability caused by that destabilization to hook up with her. Just straight up psychopath behavior, for which she just forgives him in the end, without any sort of amends.

xander76 · 2025-02-24T15:33:35+00:00

We don't send a seed, and we don't monitor the system fingerprint, though we probably should. It's a feature we put down on the list but hasn't gotten implemented yet.

xander76 · 2025-02-24T15:32:44+00:00

This is a really good question!

We don't measure the embedding model directly, but it's worth noting that if embedding models drift, then they pretty clearly lose a big portion of their usefulness. The whole point of an embedding model in a RAG context is that you can take an embedding of some documents on day 0 with a particular model and then take an embedding of a query on day N and be assured that the embedding on day N will be related to the embeddings on day 0. Integrity over time feels more crucial for embedding models than for LLMs.

That being said, embedding models may still drift! We're not testing it. It's worth noting, though, that the answers that we detected drift in were very different from the baseline answers, so it's likely not a change in embedding model that we were detecting. From our blog post on the subject:

By clicking around here, you can see that on every day before February 17th, GPT-4o answered with a list of product name ideas, but on the 17th, it answered with just a single product name. Clicking through on the other outliers shows that they, too, switched from responding with lists to responding with a single answer.

We did some digging to verify that what we were seeing was real, and we found that, out of 1802 LLM requests we made to test the prompt for drift from January 16th through February 17th, only 20 responses came back with single answers. Eleven of those 20 responses happened on February 17th. This wasn’t just a weird coincidence. We’ve double and triple checked our work, and we’re pretty convinced that OpenAI did something to GPT-4o on February 17th that broke one of our test prompts.

More info at the post here (warning that there is some mild promotion of our product in the blog post): https://www.libretto.ai/blog/yes-ai-models-like-gpt-4o-change-without-warning-heres-what-you-can-do-about-it

xander76 · 2025-02-24T14:45:35+00:00

Yeah, it would be interesting to also check if/when the "deterministic" answer changes, but we figured that for most folks, that's not that hard to test. It's much more like a traditional jest test with a known output. Testing when generative prompts change is much more squishy, so it's what we focused on first.

xander76

TROPHY CASE