Rob Donnelly

New California law means a big change for grocery shoppers in 2026 Starting January 1, California will implement a major change at grocery stores around the state as part of an environmental push.

www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

California's "plastic bag ban" was incredibly counterproductive. Banning regular plastic bags just pushed retailers to use thick heavy duty "reusable" bags that most people never reuse. Net impact is 47% more tons of plastic bags in the trash.

OpenAI is testing out a new strategy for finding enough GPUs to keep up with demand: bumper stickers

Dumb Cuneiform We'll take your short messages and make them permanent clay tablets.

Finally the solution to a problem we all face: it's too hard to commemorate a dumb tweet as a durable cuneiform tablet dumbcuneiform.com

The Jones Act makes shipping between American ports unreasonably expensive, especially for islands like Hawaii. We need to get rid of the Jones Act to make it cheaper to buy American.

Coreweave's business model is pretty wild:

If we're undoing all the bad decisions from the 2010s, can we get plastic straws back?

What's the logic for Instacart/Uber/Doordash constantly offering giftcards for 20% off? The discount is large enough to make delivery approx same cost as in store.

Why have TV shows gotten so ridiculously expensive to produce? I would have thought the cost of CGI / special effects would go down as tech improved, but it seems like they've gone up instead.

User: Can you show me how to connect Gemini to my gmail? Gemini Advanced: Unfortunately there isn't a way to directly connect Gemini (the crypto exchange) to your Gmail

That feeling when you mess up your branding so badly that your "advanced" model gets confused about its own name. #Google #Gemini

Looks like they are working on it: prefix.dev/blog/introdu...

Thanks this seems very close to what I was looking for!

Thanks this is super helpful

Are there any published examples of Double ML or other doubly robust estimators for applied to a ranking problem?

e.g. Predicting the causal effect of displaying a product/post/ad in a particular position of a content feed

Yeah that seems like it really would have benefitted from an editor to make it more clear

prefix.dev – solving software package management The software package management platform for Python, C++, R, Rust and more

prefix.dev

I've really been enjoying testing out Pixi for managing software development environments (mostly python, but it also can support non-python dependencies including R packages).It combines a lot of what I like best about brew/conda/poetry.

Causal DAG simulator Causal DAG simulator. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Here's the link to the code: gist.github.com/rodonn/63bdc...

Causal DAG simulator Causal DAG simulator. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Thanks for catching! (and "thank you" to twitter for that nice "feature")
Here's the corrected link gist.github.com/rodonn/63bdc...

In case anyone finds it useful, this is a python helper function I wrote that let's you write out the data generating process and get back a dataframe and a DAG representing the causal pathways.