2023-07-15
One of my proudest accomplishments from the past year is coding this website with the help of GPT.
When I first built the site, I wasn't sure I was going to finish it and GPT didn't have sharing features, so then I was done and I couldn't share with others what it was like, but it was really impactful for me. This skill that had always been outside of my grasp was now something I could do... and what did that mean for other skills?
Since finishing the site's MVP, I've periodically made changes, but haven't put all the effort into sharing them. I'm going to try and do more of that though, in part because ChatGPT's sharing features make it so easy to do.
So with that prologue, here's my first change log post: images are now responsive on the site. This was annoying me for a while and I'm glad I took the 15 minutes to fix it.
Here's how things looked before:
And here's how things look after:
You can see how I did it here
2023-07-12
Just to give you a sense, the mortality rate for something like cardiac arrest or a heart attack goes up by about 15 to 20% on the day of a marathon. Now, most people are not having cardiac arrest or a heart attack, so the aggregate impact on a city might be limited. But I think if I were to talk to people about the Boston Marathon bombings, most people would say that was a horrific event. But more people die because of marathon-associated road closures every year in a given city with a large marathon than died in the Boston Marathon bombings. But the bombings, what they did are so salient to us. Deaths in these other channels, we don’t even think about that.
That is from David Epstein's newsletter Range Widely. The cause is that the closure of roads along the marathon route makes it difficult to get to hospitals quickly.
An idle thought: I wonder if the same holds true for cardiac arrests during rush hour traffic?
2023-07-11
One of my favorite stories of the year. From Vice:
Comparatively, according to a representative from the Royal Thai Embassy in DC, there are just 300,000 Thai-Americans—less than 1 percent the size of the the Mexican-American population. Yet there are an estimated 5,342 Thai restaurants in the United States, compared to around 54,000 Mexican restaurants; that’s ten times the population-to-restaurant ratio. So, why are there so many Thai restaurants in the US?
The Thai government has created a company, the Global Thai Restaurant Company, to make it easier to start and run Thai restaurants. If I understand correctly, they aren't quite franchised (as in sharing a brand name), but effectively provide a pre-planned out restaurant. More from the article:
The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion, most likely run by bureaucrats rather than restaurateurs, drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.”
Why go to the trouble? To increase exports and travel to Thailand through gastrodiplomacy.
2023-07-05
Truly incredible statistic from the Nation on Meta's Metaverse, Horizon Worlds:
Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars.
I don't consider this to be a definitive statement on the concept of the metaverse, but wow are those numbers small. Found via The Browser.