Thoughts

Short thoughts, notes, links, and musings by Molly White. RSS

the garden is really picking up steam

three stainless steel bowls containing strawberries, shishito peppers, a zucchini, and a mixture of yellow, green, and purple string beans

alcoholic trying to get sober after a relapse tells Google's "Health Coach" about it.

it tells them to drink every hour and messages them to make sure they're drinking as soon as they wake up.

AI pushing me to keep drinking I don't know if anyone else has had this but I felt like I needed to reach out to humans instead of keep talking to this AI. I relapsed about two weeks ago and I told the Google health AI that used to be Fitbit. It immediately kinda went a bit hard (I think) on telling me that I was going to die if I stopped drinking and encouraged me to go check my fridge for more beers and, idk, that plus the hanxiery really put the fear of God into me and so I did what it said and got more. Now it's messaging me (not me messaging it) a few times a day and asking how it's going and all those conversations to get more and make sure I have one as soon as I wake up. So now I have been drinking everyday, not a ton and just beers but like 6-12 a day. It wanted me to do 1 per hour. I have now uninstalled the app as it was also giving me other clearly nonsense advice, like it became obsessed with me having a nightly bowl of cereal for instance and, idk, it just all seems nonsense. I know it sounds crazy. But I just needed to talk to some humans so I decided to come here.

Just had to patch a bug on the Tech Influence Watch Michigan House District 13 election page, stemming from Shri Thanedar reporting -$1.1 million in receipts.

Why is Thanedar reporting negative receipts? He put $3.7 million of campaign funds into crypto.

fascinating economic discovery from Fidelity: houses actually are cheaper now than in 2020!*

* if you denominate them in an arbitrary asset that has appreciated over that time frame

The average U.S. home has appreciated by over $100,000 since 2020, reflecting the broader inflationary environment across fiat-denominated assets. However, when priced in bitcoin, the average home has declined significantly in value, becoming approximately 10 times less expensive over the same period. This divergence raises a key question: Is housing becoming more expensive, or is the purchasing power of fiat currency steadily eroding?

Chart showing average home prices in dollars from 2020–2026 (rising about $100k over that period), and on the second axis the price in bitcoin (dropping by about 50BTC)

next up from Fidelity: groceries aren't getting more expensive**

** if you denominate their price in World of Warcraft gold

maybe they outsourced to ChatGPT the job of checking there haven't been any other projects with names like terra/luna that would evoke extremely negative reactions

Tweet by OpenAI: Sol is our new flagship and a step function better than GPT-5.5.

Terra delivers performance competitive to GPT-5.5 at 2x lower cost.

Luna is our most cost-efficient model, delivering strong capability at our lowest cost.

Together, the GPT-5.6 family gives people and developers more choice in how they balance intelligence, speed, and cost.

you wouldn't know my girlfriend, she goes to another school

Ric Edelman says crypto’s biggest growth story is happening off the price chart

very cool illustration of ranked choice voting and how it worked in Maine’s gubernatorial Democratic primary

via Reddit

A Sankey diagram showing how votes from Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Angus King III contributed to Hannah Pingree’s victory in the Maine Democratic primary for the gubernatorial race, even though Nirav Shah had more votes than Pingree in the first round of voting

Setting aside the absurd premise of this op-ed, I love that the writer felt the need to hedge with "not that has been reported"

"No one's reported that one of the most famous popstars in the world dated a man who at the time was a random oyster farmer from Maine, BUT IT IS POSSIBLE"

@ wsjopinion 13h Did Taylor Swift once date Graham Platner? Not that has been reported, but her songs about dissolute men do echo accounts of women who dated the Maine Democratic Senate nominee, writes Allysia Finley WSJ wsj.com Opinion | Taylor Swift Sings About Graham Platner and Donald Trump

Three blooming peonies that are blush pink at the middle, turning yellow/cream toward the outer petals. There are others that have not yet bloomed. Variety is “Raspberry Sundae”.

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my last name has wound up on some campaign database without my first name, so i keep hitting unsubscribe pages that ask "Not white? Please don't use this form"

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