During Covid, I used DoorDash to get a pizza delivered. The prices were so inflated. They wanted $70 for a large pizza from Round Table. When, much to my admitted stupidity, I went ahead and ordered, the pizza arrived cold. Then, I felt I needed to tip the driver. The whole thing felt like a ripoff. Incredibly expensive and low value. I have not used them or any food delivery service since.

In some areas it's not a horrible deal. I'm in downtown Montreal, several hundred delivery options within 5km, so there's pretty much always a decent deal on something I'm hungry for. Of course, I'm close enough to walk to plenty of these places anyway, but it's quite nice when I'm sick or extremely busy.

I'm in Montreal as well. You might be underestimating how much you're spending on third party delivery.

I compared a meal I bought takeout the other day (by calling the place and walking over to pick it up) vs the same meal on Doordash.

* Direct: 56.28

* Doordash: 101.16

Nearly double. It can be hard to find out what the actual direct price is for some restaurants, but I'd encourage you to make the same experiment.

Am I crazy or was pizza delivery free (or very cheap) when i was a child in comparison? I'd pay $5 to deliver most things but the percentage model makes no sense

It was built into the price; typically with extensive “carry out” discounts for people who picked up their orders.

How in gods name is a large pizza $70?

From Dominos you can get 10 pizzas delivered for not much more than that.

I wonder if Cunard/Carnival will ever build a replacement to her.

No. Possibly Kishore Patil, who was born yesterday in Mumbai, will build a replacement for her on a whim when he is 70, using self-assembling nanobots, or possibly next century the Creative Cold War Re-Enactment Society will cosplay 20th-century steel-mill workers and welders long enough to build a replacement for her in a period-correct fashion, but nothing really resembling Cunard will exist in a future where building a replacement for her is possible.

Not to toss cold water in the face of your maudlin science-fictional musings (kidding I’m totally doing that), QM2 is the 51st largest passenger ship afloat.

They call them “cruise ships” now, because the only reason to float around like that is fun, not business. So they have waterslides and such. Slightly less old-growth hardwood paneling, fewer places where one is allowed to smoke cigars.

But no. There are ten Greeks who could build another Queen Mary as a lark, and that’s just counting Greeks. However rich you think the world is? It’s richer than that.

Zeppelins, though. Those, I will grant you, have gotten scarce. Oh, the humanity.

Cruise ships and ocean liners are two different kinds of ship. An ocean liner has higher freeboard, higher service speed, longer bow, greater draft, and other features that make it more suitable for crossing oceans.

Forget the Greeks, have a look at Clive Palmer. Not just dreaming about building a replica Titanic, but also wanted to revive zeppelins commercially.

I always wondered if there is not a market for old-school travel using such liners, not just for recreation.

Many people hate or fear flying. Some might also just prefer the laid back, retro, travel style. Not all are in a mad rush to get somewhere.

But I guess the market might be too small for regularly scheduled trips.

Maybe you're right.

> Zeppelins, though. Those, I will grant you, have gotten scarce.

Just saw a Zeppelin cruising over Woodside today. It's Sergey Brin's personal project, Pathfinder. It's a true Zeppelin, a rigid airship, not a blimp, and the world's largest air vehicle. [1] First flew in 2025, but, unlike the Airship Ventures craft we used to see giving tours over Silicon Valley, it's not flown often. It's normally parked in Hangar One at Moffet Field.

[1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/big-helium-airship-spott...

Thank God for billionaires, but why can't he stop Google from creating dystopia instead?

Probably much, much easier to make a zeppelin

If you can afford something this ridiculous, then IMO you aren't being taxed enough.

> Update: Nick G. from Anthropic has responded on Hacker News, and sufficient attribution has been added to Anthropic’s blog post. I stand by my posts as of the time I wrote them.

This is such a weird turn of phrase. You _stand_ by your posts, implying that you currently stand by them, but then add "as of the time" that you wrote them, implying that you no longer stand by them? Either you stand by your posts or you don't; you can't have it both ways. It's just a little confusing.

It just means that Rain continues to stand by the posts each as a response to the circumstances at time of writing.

So you are claiming that if someone says “it’s raining” while there is precipitation, and then it stops, they can say it is “no longer raining” but aren’t allowed to believe it was raining before?

Santa gave me a lump of coal because of my bad behavior.

Also, why are they almost always riding from let to right?

It's been discussed many times. The reason is bikes are almost without exception depicted that way in order to show the drivetrain.

Ever seen a movie chase scene where cars are going right to left?

All the middle eastern movies do!

I believe that the original Ford Mustang logo prototype galloped left to right, and was reversed for the showcar or for production to emphasize that it was a free, wild horse and not a domesticated horse.

It was still an awful lot to ask of a reader, and IMO, not worth the "reward." I agree with the person you are responding to. His early works are really amazing, but beginning with Cryptonomicon he became increasingly verbose and I found his later books a lot less fun to read.

Yes?

As Alex noted, apple seeds contain cyanide, or to be more accurate, cyanogenic glycosides. When the tissue of most apple seeds is damaged, an enzyme cleaves the sugar-cyanide bond, releasing hydrogen cyanide gas. You can test this yourself, by crushing some apple seeds and smelling the mashed seeds. It will smell of almonds, which is the smell of hydrogen cyanide gas.

I created a lab for intro biology around testing for HCN in various plant tissues. The interesting thing is not all apple seeds actually seem to produce HCN. Granny Smith seeds seem to always produce it (and relatively speaking a lot), while some little lunch box sized Fuji apples I bought at a farmers market don't produce any at all.