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Domenic_S

4,120 karma · joined August 8, 2011

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Domenic_S··on 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
> or even provide terrorist strikes.

I'm sorry, Lloyd's will _what_??

Domenic_S··on I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)
Yes it is!

I've been down the mmWave rabbit hole for the last 6 months, making sensors to put around the house to control automations for lights and so forth. They're pretty great.

For my use case the advantage over PIR is they do presence detection, so no more lights shutting off when you're sitting on the toilet.

Pretty amazing you can pick up basic mmWave sensors for a few bucks on amazon, and mate them to an esp32 board which is another couple bucks. It's so much fun as a hobby!

Domenic_S··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
You're full of awful takes, aren't you.

Yale's E360 Digest is not a buddy mentioning a topic in passing.

Have some standards.

Domenic_S··on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
It's a playground, some grass, a parking lot (a "parking space" is for one car), a basketball court, a baseball diamond, and what looks like a decent paved, tree-lined trail that goes all the way past the animal shelter to a neighborhood.

Seems.... fine?

Domenic_S··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
> 1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

What an awful take. The point of news shouldn't be "assume I'm right and the readership takes my word for it". It should help the reader come to a conclusion, because it's news and not opinion. If you have to go do your own research not to dig deeper but because the article failed to even cover the basic arguments, it has utterly and completely failed.

Domenic_S··on Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
But you just said "The benefit is to people watching the prices" -- but if the odds haven't properly converged what information does watching the prices get you before-the-fact?

Maybe I'm just not getting it, could you lay out a scenario?

Domenic_S··on Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
Hmm, not following. The insider trade in this case was small enough to not change the lines meaningfully, no? D4vd's chances of being #1 went from <1% to >99% nearly overnight, was a huge upset.

Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be surfaced in this scenario except after the fact (and only maybe then).

In other words, if the line changes enough to signal insider info, it's not really insider info anymore.

Domenic_S··on Nostalgic Kits Central (2024)
I think the modern version is Snap Circuits, although I think I like the one pictured in GP better....

https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/snap-circuits-pro.html

Domenic_S··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?

Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".

The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.

Domenic_S··on GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values
> a bit of experience with LLMs make it obvious that’s not what’s going on here

I feel like that overstates the point quite a bit. There's a lot that's similar: neurotransmitter release is stochastic at the vesicle level, ion channels open and close probabilistically, post-synaptic responses have noise. A given neuron receiving identical input twice doesn't produce identical output. Neither brains nor LLMs have a central decider that forms intent and then implements it. In both, decisions emerges from network dynamics, they're a description of what the system did, not a separate cause (see Libet's experiments).

Now pretty clearly there's a lot that's different, and of course we don't understand brains enough to say just how similar they are to LLMs, but that's the point: it's an interesting thought experiment and shutting it down with a virtual eyeroll is sad.

Domenic_S··on The gay jailbreak technique (2025)
> Cyber: Of, relating to, or involving computers or computer networks (such as the Internet)

You left out the part of speech for that entry, which is "adjective"; as in "the cyber marketplace", not "the cyber".

Domenic_S··on The gay jailbreak technique (2025)
> Trusted Access for Cyber program

Using "cyber" as a noun there seems language coded for government. DC has a love of "the cyber" but do technologists use the term that way when not pointing at government?

Domenic_S··on Using a USB switch as a full KVM
I use this usb/dp switch https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098TVP9ZL

no monitor switching needed, although i did hook up a hub for more usb ports.

Domenic_S··on I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months
any recommendations? claude absolutely fell on its face editing my stls (while claiming success)
Domenic_S··on Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inference
You didn't just nail it ------------ you cut to the core of the issue.
Domenic_S··on Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inference
I ran several Gemma 4 quants on my 24gb mac mini, and with proper context size tuning they're quick enough I guess, but I would really love to see them working well on an iphone with 2/3gb of ram...
Domenic_S··on this css proves me human
Yep, I've been writing it that way forever, it just tends to get autocorrected.

> In informal contexts, a hyphen-minus (-) is often used as a substitute for an en dash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses (--) for an em dash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily available on most keyboards. The autocorrection facility of word-processing software often corrects these to the typographically correct form of dash. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

Domenic_S··on FDA declines to review Moderna's mRNA flu shot
Huh? The FDA's main guidance document on this topic, issued in 2007 with no major overhaul since [0], states that comparative efficacy or effectiveness data is valuable when:

- The comparator vaccine is indicated for the same population.

- The comparator has existing clinical effectiveness data.

In other words, the trial design should use a benchmark that makes sense given what doctors and guidelines actually recommend today. For older adults, evidence over the past 15+ years has shown that enhanced flu vaccines often provide better protection than standard-dose ones. The study used standard-dose vaccines as far as we can see.

The only oddity here is that the FDA apparently approved the study previously

[0] https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

Domenic_S··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.

Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...

Domenic_S··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
We have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???)

https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-waste...

Domenic_S··on Confessions about my smart home
As soon as i saw "And honestly? They're all wrong." i knew chatgpt had done the heavy lifting
Domenic_S··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
“Should be” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I have heard reasonable arguments either way - but it misses the point: whether the personal tax rate was all-time high or an all-time low, personal tax revenue stays roughly the same historically. In other words it’s a trap - raising the rate might make you feel better, but if history is any indicator it won’t change anything for everyday citizens.
Domenic_S··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
NPR did in their February article about DOGE; their story is ostensibly that out of everything claimed, NPR could verify “only” $2B in cuts which they present as meaningless:

> NPR's analysis found that, of its verifiable work completed so far, DOGE has cut just $2 billion in spending — less than three hundredths of a percent of last fiscal year's federal spending.

> "Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way," Riedl said. "It's great that he saved $2 on gas, but I think his wife may be more concerned about the $250,000 car."

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...

Domenic_S··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
Hard disagree. Compared to the OECD average, we collect almost double in personal tax revenue as a proportion of total tax revenue. What's more, historically personal tax revenue as a % of GDP stays roughly the same - regardless of active tax rates.

Where we fall dreadfully short compared to other countries is corporate tax revenue. In 2021, corporate income tax revenue in the U.S. was 1.6% of GDP, compared to the OECD average of 3.2%

Domenic_S··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
We already have Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and have since March 2018. These new tariffs exclude steel (since we tariff it already).
Domenic_S··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
The argument is that increasing government revenue doesn't automatically mean We the People benefit; it usually means more pork and other ways of funneling money to benefit the people with the power to funnel it.
Domenic_S··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
> taxation and wealth redistribution remain an effective way to bolster a societies resilience

Tangentially:

It’s wild how inconsistent the public and political reactions are to different ways of getting revenue. Take this common pattern:

When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often: "That’s only 0.01% of the federal budget. It’s nothing!"

But when someone proposes a tax on billionaires that would over time raise a similar amount suddenly the reaction flips: "We’ll solve inequality! Fund healthcare!"

This contradiction is everywhere. How can $20 billion in government savings be "nothing," while $20 billion in new tax revenue is "transformational"? It's the same money.

Domenic_S··on Turning a Bluetooth device into an Apple AirTag without root privileges
> they are just using a "normal" BLE address and then reverse-engineering a key from that.

It's really clever - the BLE spec limits message size, so Apple uses the BLE address as part of the message (the first part of the public key).

But since the public address of a BLE chip has 24 bits of "Company ID" (similar to MAC addresses I guess?), and the registry records are public, they were able to precompute a bunch of public/private keypairs.

Domenic_S··on Alexa+
Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected.

If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.

Domenic_S··on Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts
> It could have introduced for example a limit on grant overhead on all future grants

So exactly what they introduced, except not applying to current grants?

> forced universities find saving in admin/sports etc.

Aren't sports a net money generator for universities?

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