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BrainInAJar

886 karma · joined August 16, 2011

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BrainInAJar··on India's surprise baby bust
human extinction is far more likely if we keep reproducing than if we slow down. See: climate change etc
BrainInAJar··on Rust Any part 3: we have upcasts
"sometimes" is doing a lot of work there.

Sometimes it is, but also sometimes it isn't, and Rust at least gives you a choice (you can use Arc all over the place, or if performance is critical you can be more careful about specifying lifetimes)

BrainInAJar··on Tell HN: Happy Birthday, Celsius - Canada marks 50 years of metric
it's both the economic relationship but also because the Conservative government defunded metrication in the 80's about halfway through it's timeline.
BrainInAJar··on Why Does the US Still Have Lead Pipes? Blame the Lead Industries Association
in terms of things that the government provides to the public, absolutely. The US is incapable of doing anything other than through the military.
BrainInAJar··on Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
probably?

even if the LLM is trained on flawless C code (which it isn't) it still has no way of reasoning about a complex system, it's just "what token is statistically most likely to come next"

BrainInAJar··on I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too
did an oil industry write this?
BrainInAJar··on 1/3 of women < 44 have no children and the trend is rising. What is causing it?
other than to ensure a cheap exploitable workforce, who cares? Why is it a bad thing?
BrainInAJar··on Fighting an anti-doping finding
that's not even a league of "who is the best athlete" it's a league of "who is the best athlete willing to destroy their body"
BrainInAJar··on Fighting an anti-doping finding
> There's very little voluntary about signing up to rules that you're required to sign up to in order to have a career in your field.

The rules are signed well before a career even becomes an option. Everyone who holds a race license, even if you buy a bike yesterday & start your first race today, signs the anti-doping agreement

BrainInAJar··on xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
It's probably better for both companies that he isn't. Better for him to torch a $6b series B and Twitter than mess up spacex & tesla more than he already has
BrainInAJar··on PostgreSQL is eating the database world
That's an argument about Windows being production ready though, not Postgres...
BrainInAJar··on Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
we must imagine Sisyphus happy...
BrainInAJar··on Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
I'm bearish only in so far as I feel LLM's are not completely useless, but they'll be as revolutionary as spellcheck was. Which is to say, it'll make a few jobs a bit easier.
BrainInAJar··on Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
GraphQL is great if you're a frontend developer. REST is great if you're a backend or infra developer (not because of complexity of developing it, because of complexity of using it)

You cannot satisfy both with one tool. Migrating to GraphQL (or choosing it in the first place) will frustrate consumers of it who primarily use your API for things other than writing frontend clients. Using REST will frustrate people who use your API to write frontend clients.

BrainInAJar··on We’re now finding out the damaging results of the mandated return to the office
The only reason companies are mandating RTO is because C suite and investors are heavily leveraged in commercial real estate.

It doesn't matter that it's worse for the company it's better for their portfolio to force people in to go get disabled by covid

BrainInAJar··on Canada Woos American H-1B Visa Holders Fed Up with U.S. Immigration System
Try using that argument with a xenophobic highschool dropout immigration official...
BrainInAJar··on Canada Woos American H-1B Visa Holders Fed Up with U.S. Immigration System
TN visas are not for software engineers, they are for software analysts, or actual engineers. And they are not dual intent (you can't convert them to a green card).
BrainInAJar··on Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
This is the real reason for the RTO push. Lotta VC's leveraged in to commercial real estate
BrainInAJar··on Ask HN: How to minimize career risk from an attempted startup
Not in California, no. It’s why the tech industry exists there and not (as much) in eg Texas.

California has a bunch of laws related to labor ( section 96, section 2870 ) that have the effect of making it easy to start a company on your off hours

BrainInAJar··on Meta bans staff from open discussion of Roe vs. Wade
A person who "disagrees" with a federally protected right can simply not exercise that right (don't get an abortion.)
BrainInAJar··on Meta bans staff from open discussion of Roe vs. Wade
Yeah, just abandon all your friends and family (and don't worry about them, they're on their own), whatever life you've got set up and just move! it's easy!
BrainInAJar··on Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers
The people who are going to be screwed the most are immigrants who now have to find another visa sponsor & fast
BrainInAJar··on List of Worker-Owned Tech Cooperatives Worldwide
Do these qualify for the French tech worker visa? Could someone who wants to move to France decide to just start a co-op ?
BrainInAJar··on Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”
No, because concerted activity is protected at work. Being a nazi on twitter isn't.
BrainInAJar··on Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
> Seems like that was by design.

It is. Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich, on the one hand, and are paternalistic on the other. The only things that get funding are things that can attract the attention of our "betters." If we had taxed them on the front end to the point they couldn't become billionaires in the first place then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable. And with the added bonus that the negative effects of they got to be billionaires don't cause more problems (Feeney worked in private equity. PE are strip & sell firms)

BrainInAJar··on The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)
Much like the USA, lots of stuff about the USSR was bad. Lots was good. Including the political decisions the respective countries made.
BrainInAJar··on After GitHub CEO backs Black Lives Matter, workers demand an end to ICE contract
There is no such thing as "staying out of politics". Everything involving people is a political act, and if you don't notice it it's because you have status quo politics.

> I just wonder how long it will take two different subgroups trying push their own conflicting agendas and how the company should react in such a case.

Probably side with the one arguing that we should not commit atrocities.

BrainInAJar··on Elon Musk reopening Tesla factory despite Alameda County order
> If I pressure some friends into committing a crime

These aren't elon's friends. They're employees. There is a huge power dynamic

BrainInAJar··on Running a full IBM System/370 Mainframe on a Raspberry Pi Zero
> keep the prices at an affordable level

They're a bank. They can afford it.

BrainInAJar··on HPE sets end date for hobbyist licenses for OpenVMS
"Open" in the late 80's / early 90's meant open specifications & open API's. "Open Software Foundation" made a closed-source UNIX OSF/1.

The term "open source" didn't come about until much later

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