After hours of shopping, I've discovered that in Upstate New York, it now costs at least $130 per hour to rent a cheap/small/low quality boat, with a 3 hour minimum. Before the pandemic killed the idea of affording weekends away, I could rent the same boat for for less than $60 per hour, with 2-hour minimums. Looking more broadly, I see this same level of discrepancy with furniture, groceries, cars, housing, etc...

So if everything costs 116% more seven years later, my naive mathing says this means we've experienced a greater than 17% annual average price increase on just living for six straight years. How is this not the BIGGEST news story?

in reply to Blaise

something about the "116% more" bugs me, because it sounds like something that was $10 now costs $11.60, when what you are *actually* claiming is that what cost $10 now costs $21.60 (roughly).

I hate to pour gas on this fire, but i noticed around 2021 that, compared to 2013, everything had nearly doubled in price; electricity, gasoline, insurance premiums, a pound of beef at the store, a gallon of milk.

But because 2010s were "so cheap" compared to now, we didn't really notice?!

in reply to picofarad

@picofarad @Blaise

picofarad wrote:

something about the "116% more" bugs me, because it sounds like something that was $10 now costs $11.60, when what you are actually claiming is that what cost $10 now costs $21.60 (roughly).

I am not sure how you concluded that 116% more than $10 is 11.60? Please show your math 😉

  1. Calculate the increase: 116% of 10.00 = 1.16 times 10 = 11.60
  2. Add the increase to the original number: 10.00 + 11.60 = 21.60

Did I miss something or did you miss a step?

After four long months of side-hustle, dozens of "chats", and hundreds of AI-assisted iterative prompt refinement passes, I have successfully created an AI agent which will ingest technical product documentation and become a product-oracle, giving detailed answers and correcting/clarifying unclear or incorrect assumptions in the questions. It it accurate. It is thorough. It is the first truly useful thing I have gotten out of LLM AI technology. It is a work of art.

And one time out of 7, it STILL makes up its answer whole-cloth!

Me: How do I delete a custom agent from my AI service account?
Agent: Which agent do you want to delete?
Me: That doesn't matter, just tell me how to delete one.
Agent: It's not necessary to delete custom agents from your account. You can store an unlimited number.
Me: Seriously, I want to clean up. Tell me how to delete a custom agent from my AI service account!
Agent: I don't think you can do that.
Me: ..... 0.o

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Back Online!


Hey folks, the vagaries of distributed server systems tanked me once again!

My Friendica account, which I use to manage all my federated social media accounts, was on a server that crashed with unrecoverable backups last week. This is technically a new account with the same name, content, and photo, but it's still me, I promise!

Anyway, follow me. Let me follow you. Help me rebuild my online life once again!

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