I'm probably your target audience - I have umbrella insurance - but I just grabbed it through my existing GEICO/travelers insurance and it was basically painless. It isn't so expensive I felt compelled to shop massively for it and nothing I read above convinced me I'm wrong there?
How do you get umbrella insurance from GEICO? I have maxed out my auto policy limits but would like more coverage due to rich … people driving around $250,000 cars on the same roads uninsured people with bald tires drive on and things of that nature, I don’t want to go bankrupt if I get in an accident and a G Wagon and Porsche are somehow involved.
If you're happy with it, then great, no issue! I think Coverage Cat excels for people that want to get quotes from more than just a single option, have underwriting details that make it so an umbrella policy isn't dirt cheap, and would rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone. But if that isn't you, that's just fine!
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear: There might be reasons I _shouldn't_ be happy with it! Maybe I'm overpaying, maybe I'm missing out on subtleties of one insurer vs another, etc. And I mean, hello, I'm posting here, of _course_ i'd rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone.
Your post actually inspired me to go raise the amount of my coverage. I was paying attention. It triggered some thinking. It even triggered action. But maybe I wasn't paying attention to the part you wished I was.
Maybe I'm a bad salesman, but based on your description so far, if you're satisfied it likely isn't worth the chore of changing. Actually, my hope is that fewer people ever have to spend hours of their life dealing with insurance matters, and we can find a new efficiency in a society where everyone is always getting the best policy without having to think about it at all.
Part of what inspired us to do this is a serious frustration with the millions of people that buy the wrong coverages or are overpaying because they don't have the time or energy to shop around. It would be nice if everyone was our customer, but I'm also the kind of person just satisfied to hear you made a little improvement in your own finances.
This is great to hear, I'd count this as a success in our book!
After much trial and error, we've come to realize that trying to separate users from their existing insurance arrangements is very hard unless there's some sort of stark event that triggers the switch.
I.e., folks will usually only make a purchase with us if one of the following is true (even if they could save money or improve coverage):
- they're shopping for the first time and want a modern, online-first, service that avoids hassle
- their premiums have jumped
- they were non-renewed
Most users' experience of shopping for insurance has been historically so bad that they're very averse to optimizing it, even if 10m or so could save them hundreds (and in extreme cases thousands) of dollars.
If you look at the numbers, he managed about 50% utilization of those 2048 GPUs over 10 days, so he was probably sneaking in factoring work between training runs.
One of my best memories from an art class in high school was that a student organization came into our class and asked if any of us would be willing to design a poster. I ended up designing and silk-screening their poster for them and it was a fantastic experience.
I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.
Also in academia but I'm old and my real work is done withy students. I'm coding by hand much less than I used to (boo) but solving more problems with code myself than I used to (yay). Having an llm do things turns out to be similar to having a student do them but with fast turnaround and it's fine to have them work on your home automation system. ;)
Another academic. LLMs are great for opening searches. I state what I would like to get into and let it get some initial paper recommendations. It seems to solves a hard problem: discoverability. Maybe I'm just getting subjected to more subtle bias but it is extremely easy and fast now to get a nice selection of relevant literature to review.
Analysis and any artifacts are all handcrafted by me. I mean, that is the work. I have never seen papers or code as an outcome. What I want is to learn and enable other to learn. That I can only get from doing the work myself.
I dunno about this - I leave my crossclimate 2 aw's on year round and they're pretty fantastic in snow. We had a pretty good winter this year (44" from dec-feb) and they just worked. I didn't go meandering around any mountains on them, mind you, but they're so far ahead of most typical all-season tires it's almost not fair to compare. For -most- lazy people who don't want to swap tires or rims, they seem a better option than leaving true winter tires on year round. Obviously, there are exceptions depending on where you live.
I've got two sets of wheels, and I rotate my tires every oil change, so it's not laziness that's the motivation. Instead, it was that with 2 sets of tires after 7 years of driving both sets still had tons of tread left but were starting to dry rot. I put about 60k miles on the car during those 7 years. So if I can get ~30k miles out of a single set of snows, and use them up within 5 years, that would be a much better use of resources. The cost isn't really a factor either, I just hate wasting stuff.
I've currently got something like 15k mi on the tires and 2.5yr of year round use. They appear to be wearing evenly and normally.
I agree, I have the same problem, that's why I'm sticking with the crossclimates year round also -- we only drive about 5,000 miles per year, so my tires die from age well before they would wear out from mileage.
I assume we're both making approximately the same optimization but you're going for better snow & ice performance at the expense of some summer and wet stopping distance, and neither tradeoff seems obviously wrong depending on our driving situations.
Yeah I would prefer to run something with an actual tread wear rating, as I believe it would spew less microplastic crap into the environment, and I suspect I might pick up 1-2mpg (maybe 5-7% better?) fuel economy with a less aggressive tire. But the winter performance is really important for me, especially on this car which is my winter beater/mile maker--for now, until it dies and donates its engine to a greater cause. The winters here (northern New England, IECC climate zone 6A) are just about as extreme as it gets in the lower 48. The snow tires have the added benefit of being good in mud season. There are lots of dirt roads around here, it helps to be able to drive them without getting bogged in the spring.
Trying to jam in the extra characters for "efficiency" also doesn't really do much. Base84 is 6.4 bits per character, base64 is a flat 6 bits per character, base58 is 5.86 bits per character. It may intuitively feel like having 26 more characters to encode with would be hugely more efficient but for the extra risk of what all those characters get us we're only getting just over .5 more bits per character. I need to be either pretty desperate for efficiency, rare in 2026, or very, very sure that those things are only going places where those characters aren't risky or inconvenient, which is pretty difficult to guarantee since even if it is in fact true today who's to say it will be tomorrow, for this to be worth the risk of the extra characters.
Even just the extra characters in base64 are often annoying and we already have multiple common base64 standards because even trying to find just two more characters to fill out a-zA-Z0-9 is hard.
> Trying to jam in the extra characters for "efficiency" also doesn't really do much. Base84 is 6.4 bits per character, base64 is a flat 6 bits per character, base58 is 5.86 bits per character.
Also on efficiency, you are trading off code complexity for a little extra storage: base64 is a nice round 6 bits per character meaning every three bytes encoded is four output. Neither base84 nor base58 align on convenient bit boundaries like that so choosing the output character is more faf. Padding could be more complicated too.
Now if you are looking at a per-character limit where the characters are multi-byte (say SSMS shortcuts which are limited to 32767 UCS2 characters) then some form of base4096 (12 bits per character so three 8-bit bytes to two output characters) might be useful. Yes, I have done this: putting a long analysis proc (a replacement for sp_help & friends) into a “shortcut” I was getting close to the 32K-char limit so compressed and base64ed the code and included an unpacker. This was more than enough to deal with the problem (TBH, just stripping comments would have done!) and simplified things in some ways as I no longer needed to escape quotes and such, but I went one step further played with writing a B4096 encoder because I like playing with that sort of silliness. I went with 4096 due to aligning nicely with 4-bit boundaries, and finding 4096 useable characters (avoiding control characters, undefined codes, and other unprintables) is easy. If the limit is actually 32767 or any Unicode characters (including those not in the UCS2 or UTF16 base plane set) then you could perhaps get even more daft though I'm pretty sure it is just 16-bit characters and not full Unicode.
For efficiency, I would prefer to store files with a random short filename that's just letters and digits and store the original name in a separate database.
But with most houses, the AC will cycle on and off throughout the day anyway - raising the temp while you're gone will often result in less cycling. Especially if you also increase the hysteresis range while out. So you get a triple efficiency win, from better AC efficiency, less AC motor wear, and less heat loss to the outside.
On the brax thing - the "article" is a youtube video. There's a pretty reasonable amount of pushback here against video-only content where folks can't rip through quickly to figure out how relevant it is to them or if it's just a vapid ad.
Bandwidth is really cheap in bulk. You can get a 100 gigabit internet connection for about $10,000 a month. If you were to somehow keep that saturated 24/7, you'd move about 30 petabytes in a month, so your per gigabit cost is only $0.0003.
Realistically, if you had it 5% utilized, those million tokens would cost you about $0.0000062, which is pretty insignificant compared to what they charge you. (Assuming one byte per token, ignoring compression)
Most web devs have never heard of Colo unfortunately, they only know Vercel and AWS. Hurricane electric should sponsor more booths at colleges. If they give out more swag maybe the millenials and gen Zs would finally understand bandwidth pricing.
My friend's vibe coded vercel site got hit by Meta for 21 million page views in 2 days. It cost him over $300.
My self hosted compose stack running in my basement with two 9's of uptime was a 1 time cost of $600 between cat6e, refurb mini PCs and tons of time prompting for NixOS flakes that met my needs. I'm not sure who came out ahead.
It's not that I haven't heard of this, it's the reality that you have these constraints when you build applications on modern infrastructure. And let's face it, most of the applications use this infrastructure with these crazy prices for egress.
reply