@AlexanderRodd
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Engineer in the forest products industry. Former healthcare worker. Accidentally TPOT-adjacent. LVT enthusiast. YIMBY. GSTK. 🌐⚖️🥀🏘️🚇🚲
Alberta (Treaty 8 land)
Joined February 2009
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Pinned Tweet
Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill.
- Blue pill tastes like raspberry
- Red pill tastes like strawberry
- Nobody suffers any ill effects as a result of your choice
Which do you choose?
57%Blue
43%Red
23 votes • Final resultsWhy is the Google AI overview always saying you must be mistaken about the wording of your search term when you search for anything even slightly obscure
Alex Rodd retweeted
Let's just stop and ponder how impressive this really is for Europe: they have created a product that is demonstrably worse than Teams.
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams.
But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”
vist.ly/5kje9
Alex Rodd retweeted
Everyone loves “nose-to-tail” eating and minimizing food waste right until you start doing it on the only scale that matters.
Slim Jim is made with mechanically separated chicken. The ingredients are beef, pork, mechanically separated chicken, water and textured soy flour, then corn syrup and salt.
Mechanically separated chicken is what's left on the bones after the meat has been cut off. The bones are pushed through a sieve under high pressure, and the meat still stuck to them comes out as a smooth paste. USDA allows it, but it has to be listed by that name. The textured soy flour stretches the meat and holds water.
Alex Rodd retweeted
Made me laugh:
A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German were each commissioned to conduct a study of the camel.
The Frenchman went to the Jardin des Plantes, spent half an hour there, questioned the keeper, threw some bread to the camel, teased it with the tip of his umbrella, and then went home and wrote, for his newspaper, a lively column full of witty and incisive observations.
The Englishman, taking along his tea basket and a comfortable set of camping equipment, went off to pitch his tent in the lands of the East. After spending two or three years there, he returned with a hefty volume crammed with facts, without much order or any conclusion, but of genuine documentary value.
As for the German, full of contempt for the Frenchman’s frivolity and the Englishman’s lack of general ideas, he shut himself up in his room to write a work in several volumes entitled: The Idea of the Camel Derived from the Conception of the Self.
Alex Rodd retweeted
I will never let go of Canadian English
Because I can make 2 nations wince with a single word.
Colourize
Alex Rodd retweeted
This is also basically how everyone used the internet 20 years ago
You’d end up on some guy’s website about Civil War cannons, click his links page, discover a county historical society, then spend 40 minutes reading a forum for antique tractor owners
“What sort of website is this?” was half the experience
We called it surfing for a reason, now you open the same 4 apps every day
Alex Rodd retweeted
a legit problem in tech is how many of its leaders are trying to reinvent systems without bothering to understand how or why the current system works in the first place
Instinct CEO Noah Shinn says agents will let restaurants give tables to birthdays and anniversaries over whoever clicks first
"And traditionally, because of the way that the internet has worked, at least for reservations, it's been first come first serve. So anyone that comes in, no matter how important or how not important it might be, whoever gets in first gets the reservation."
"But what if you had the ability for the agent to be able to communicate on both sides, communicate, hey, this is important. This is actually the person's spouse's birthday, the 30th birthday, a very special event is coming up."
"And the restaurant too can say, let's actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people, I don't know, whatever it might be, right?"
"So now with the ability, with all of the logistical burden of having to describe exactly what your case is and what's happening and why it's important. Now we have the ability to perfectly match what does the restaurant want? What does the user want?"
"And that will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant."
Alex Rodd retweeted
in the higher arts (poetry, music, painting) it is fine, even admirable, for an artist to engage only with their own tradition. in the bastard arts (film, video games, opera) the artist must be familiar with the wider world.
Alex Rodd retweeted
We need a Conscious Extinction movement to rid the world of the animals and plants that cause the worst disease and suffering.
It's good that smallpox and rinderpest are extinct. It's good that the screwworm fly and malarial mosquitos were extinct in the developed world. So let's extend the logic to other disease-carrying mosquito species, along with lots of other pests, and let's not stop at the borders of the rich world.
There is no good reason for mosquitoes to exist in wealthy countries today.
New technologies can get rid of the mosquito species that cause diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; and others can prevent them from carrying those diseases.
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
So why do mosquitoes still exist?
In a new article for Works in Progress, Maya Rosen explains how state incapacity and risk aversion led to over a decade of delays and billions of unnecessary bites in the United States.
Oxitec, for example, engineered an Aedes aegypti mosquito in such a way that its female offspring would die before adulthood. Through sustained releases, they showed they could reduce local mosquito populations by 80% or more, in field trials.
They sought approval from the USDA in 2010, which then passed it to the FDA, which passed it to the EPA. In 2020, the EPA allowed them to conduct limited field trials in the Florida Keys. Two years ago, their experimental permit expired, and they still need another review before it can be used routinely. Their proposed field trial in California was withdrawn after public opposition.
Another company, MosquitoMate, developed a technique involving Wolbachia, which also suppresses local mosquitoes. They then spent over fifteen years working through the system before finally receiving commercial registration nationwide in 2024.
It seems that, sometimes, the barrier to getting rid of diseases isn’t technology at all. It’s policy and political will.
New products shouldn’t get stuck in regulatory review for so long, especially if the delays are about basic questions like which agency has oversight over the product, rather than testing for safety.
Though some of those uncertainties were being addressed, the broader changes haven’t materialized. After Biden’s 2022 executive order, the agencies planned to update how their coordinated framework was implemented. But Trump rescinded the order last year.
Meanwhile, the EPA unit that reviews new mosquito control products is still a small office backlogged in reviewing a wide range of products.
Mosquitoes are a policy choice. We can get rid of them. Will we choose to?
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
Alex Rodd retweeted
Amazing that Europe still has one of each - a prince-bishopric, a German principality, and an Italian city state
Alex Rodd retweeted
Instagram algorithm: here's stuff you like
Twitter algorithm: here's stuff that makes you mad
Facebook algorithm: you will now be dropped headfirst into a bizarre public feud involving a small business in a town you've never been to and several socially maladapted strangers
Alex Rodd retweeted
Car dealers are sort of emblematic of a big share of the US economy: middle men who add a lot of time and cost but no value and use the power of the state to protect their position.
They’re also the backbone of MAGA FWIW. Huge donors.
Why do I have to go through a dealership to buy a car? I should be able to go online, pick the exact model, color and features I want, see the actual price, pay for it and have the car delivered to my driveway. Why do I need to spend half a day negotiating with a middleman just to buy something I already know I want?