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FiggyPudding

5 karma · joined September 6, 2021

No idea what I'm talking about
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FiggyPudding··on We have to evolve synthetically To avoid our doom
Think of the real estate value living near the food forest... Like central park in NYC, why don't we cut that in half and put up more high rises on our precious expensive land.
FiggyPudding··on We have to evolve synthetically To avoid our doom
"breeding out" is the horrible version of eugenics.

Gene editing is the less family destroying, individual abusing way to go. As long as it's more focused on disease removal and less about having thousands of [insert favorite movie star/model here] walking around.

Like klyrs said, we want some weird in the gene pool

FiggyPudding··on Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming (2018)
I do love lucid dreams but I'm going to need milder non-prescription chemicals.

Just need to be content practicing the mnemonic induction I guess, I've never done it seriously enough to see if it works. Similarly with those games to try to improve your working memory.

FiggyPudding··on I started SaaS companies in 2013 and 2021 – how things have changed
Well said, I hope for a thoughtful rebuttal.
FiggyPudding··on What's the deal with tab size (8 spaces) in the GitHub UI?
I cowardly use tabs viewed as 2 spaces so if needed in the future some quick lazy code like sed can convert it to 4 spaces or something if someone demands.
FiggyPudding··on What's the deal with tab size (8 spaces) in the GitHub UI?
Fibonacci? Never! Golden ratio with fractional spaces. With fibonacci someone is always going to screwup the whitespace. :p
FiggyPudding··on What's the deal with tab size (8 spaces) in the GitHub UI?
Notepad++ has a nice feature to convert leading spaces and tabs back and forth though I never used it on a big mess of a file to convert to tabs to see if it is successful there. Every editor I've encountered beyond Notepad/Wordpad let's the user specify tabwidth. The accessiblity issue for me is poverty and eyestrain. I like big fonts on my small monitor in my small apartment.
FiggyPudding··on What's the deal with tab size (8 spaces) in the GitHub UI?
I'm one of the monsters that prefers 2 space tabs for my small monitor, 2 files side by side.

Like you said and other comments, no newline opening braces, don't mix tab and space for OCD trailing comment and argument alignment.

On the other hand, I don't code for 20 hours straight because I need to do laundry and dishes and family stuff.

FiggyPudding··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
Some of these comments seem to support that LBRY thing that was on HN again recently if using it for blog docs instead of videos
FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Throwing around 'psychopaths' remember a good number of people grow up with abuse or neglect. Probably easier for them not to care about distant strangers and meaningless numbers. We are a vast planet with 99.99% of people in need of serious therapy. (Probably everyone)

I'm curious the statistics of how many people have lost a close contact in the pandemic to COVID. Maybe a lot of deaths are neglected parents and grandparents which is why it seems like so few people care about taking COVID precautions seriously anymore. In the US it seems we are past fatigue into exhaution in the majority even as cases continue in the unvaccinated kids and adults.

FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
There are 2 kinds of people/governments during a pandemic: Those with okay parents, and those who need that inheritance/medical savings

On a serious note, were Sweden's larger deaths early on in the pandemic when the government could be given a pass thinking COVID would be more easily controlled than it was? Or was it a long slow crawl? It's not like it would be easy to move thousands of elderly out of nursing homes to control things anyway. Nursing homes are not anywhere close to isolation wards so it might have been inevitable outcome.

FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Probably not. Because that turns lives into statistics and he is making an emotional appeal about the 10000 theoretical families affected by lost loved ones. I for example, frequently look at local hospitalization rates and remind myself that a good number of them are mothers and fathers on ventilators so I can't F about in public like everyone else while the numbers are rising so I reduce risk of leaving my wife alone with kids while I'm stuck in a hospital bed for a week or 2 and the worry about keeping up on the rent that follows. -not perfectly healthy I'm vaccinated but I think that just makes me certain to not die, but not necessarily keep me out of a hospital bed. Sometimes it helps to remind numbers are people.
FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
I'm talking from the point of view that the lockdown measures managed to keep ICU capacity open which reduced our current excess mortality observed. As far as I've read ICU capacity dropped greatly in many countries over the past decades, but my thinking is that we can't easily argue the various lockdown measures were bad using figures like national excess mortality because our current measures don't share the same baseline as an unrestricted pandemic free society.

Everyone has had vastly different experiences with the virus which affects views of the lockdown and behaviors.

Within the first few months of it in the US lost 3 coworkers to it, 1 known personally all around the same time. No clear mortality rate at the time, lockdowns made sense to us, it was real, we stayed masked up and crazy isolated. By comparison to my father who knew no one affected at all for the first year or longer. So to everyone outside of NY and California or wherever it started it was a whole lot of nothing. Either anxiety of virus that wasn't nearby for the vulnerable or another media hype like Swine flu or Avian flu or MERS that never really hit.

I'm sure there are still plenty of people who haven't been directly affected by the actual virus just the restrictions, only know people who maybe had a positive test or a short fever with their kids. When people only get news loosely from posts on the internet I'm sure many ignore or miss the semi-regular pleas from doctors and nurses to take it seriously and keep the F out of the hospitals. Like one I recently saw from Florida.

I consider COVID a new killer in addition to flu, I assume flu vaccines actually work (imperfectly) to lessen symptoms and everyone's annual clichè claims that the vaccine makes them sick or does nothing is just repeating the same old shtick. To be fair I have no data to back that up that the influenza vaccine does anything but I think it just underscores the vague distrust of medicine floating about. I'm almost a scientist and optimistically drink the koolaid and get my flu shot annual and trust that government fda, cdc, whatever generally does want medicines to actually work to keep people working.

"to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy."

I don't usually go along with these things that sound like grand control conspiracies.

The anxiety about globalization and digitization is probably part of all the conspiracy thinking. Globalization is moving what used to be semi livable jobs out and replacing livable wage work with software engineering and advanced degree jobs or rent seeking almost exclusively. Everyone else is getting squeezed by big corps, franchise contracts vs minimum wage, high tech gear with no right to repair, etc. Grand control conspiracies in my mind are a weird commiserating hope that the world sucks on purpose because some elite levers of power are making it that way when really the world sucks because a bunch of simple systems chasing money or power are making a big complicated mess the crushed the unlucky under the cruel invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand hearing vaguely about Turing being part of a team successfully handling details from the cracked enigma machine to steer WWII without letting Nazis realize the code was broken seems to give credit to the idea that the knowledge collected by agencies like the NSA could be used by geniuses around the world to manipulate things. But if they exist they do a great job making governments look dumb...

Sorry this turned into word spaghetti.

FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
I guess it helps to know where/when you can stop assuming everyone else is a seething virus cauldron.

Or from more testing... Peace of mind for the testee, social liability coverage for self or employer, knowing if infections are increasing or not, vaccines blocking transmission or not, death rate lags by a few weeks for anyone hoping to see a quick change from a new/killed policy.

FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Necessary for what? To convince everyone to stop with masks and restrictions?

It's not just about mortality rates. The other problem is hospitalizations. If you get in a bad car accident, get a bad infection, or have a pregnancy go bad you want an ICU bed not occupied by someone drowning from COVID. I expect most of these mortality rates are from places that didn't have their hospital systems collapse and have to ration care. I think US is heading there in some states, then mortality will get closer to that hospitalization rate.

Excess mortality has to somehow account for reduced commuting, reduced regular medical visits, more domestic violence, etc it's a mixed bag when you are dealing with pandemic behavioral changes do they have real models for all that?

FiggyPudding··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Chin diaper
FiggyPudding··on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC
Probably why most of the richest Americans are working on spaceflight to colonize the moon instead of carbon emissions. Not going to get enough people to do these things and they don't want to foot the bill themselves.

They have those fancy carbon sequestration plants but who will be the first to build them, dump dry ice somewhere and keep up while the developing world is just trying to get enough food on everyone's tables.

We need nuclear powered carbon sequestration and/or CO2 catalysis back to ethanol or graphite (wouldn't that be nice). Then every year when you do your taxes, the government with your electric bill, vehicle registration and travel history ships tonnes of dry ice to your house/apartment and it's your job to deal with it, Look at what you've done!

FiggyPudding··on Ask HN: Is there a chip shortage, constantly updating, status visualization?
For all we know a few choke point suppliers could say let's be like De beers and manufacture more scarcity of something like Neodymium or further down the supply chain buy most of a resource up and sit on it.

Uncertainty of the future supplies could have some companies stockpiling materials so they can keep up with their contracts and not worry about more COVID disruptions to their own operations.

I'm not saying any of that is real but generally there is no public knowledge of supply chain. The secrecy of sales leads, output, and prices might be the only thing keeping them from being undercut or priced out by another company.

Also all the stock market woes for a company if the public found out their output is crippled ahead of any shareholder reports.

Maybe you can get data from something state owned or a trade group insider news?

FiggyPudding··on Facebook under fire over secret teen research
"I think Facebook spends much more resources than TV channels and newspapers trying to address such issues."

Proportional to their extremely greater profit they better be.

"All of those nasty effects of social media existed before, they just moved to the most efficient media form."

Back in the day you could kill a few people with arrows and spears, then you had automatic rifles, now we have nuclear and chemical weapons. We actually try to regulate those...

FiggyPudding··on Facebook under fire over secret teen research
Government Warning: (1) According to the Surgeon General, people should not pursue "likes" as it may lead to mental health defects. (2) Consumption of social media impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery and may cause social problems.
FiggyPudding··on Futarchy: Robin Hanson on prediction markets
Maybe they are hedging pipeline failure and clean up costs with water profit...

This exchange was nice.

What are alternatives to markets? Government direction of all economic developments? AI overlord telling everyone what to build and exchange? What if I want wheat bagels for my labor and we're locally optimized for pumpernickel?

FiggyPudding··on Futarchy: Robin Hanson on prediction markets
Wouldn't this also open up to foreign influence dumping money and misinformation to promote negative policy decisions.

Or not even foreign influence. It's just rephrasing money = speech. Instead of spending millions to influence voters, you spend millions on positions, and you get your money back if you don't win your side? So it lets the megacorps/trade groups get richer by removing the uncertainty of lobbying in place of buying policy once you hit a certain critical threshold of money to throw around.

FiggyPudding··on Steve Jobs: Let's force Amazon to use our payment system (2010)
Could argue they sell more by fashion and desire to have the newest thing than people caring at all about specs, more ram or cpu or x% better resolution etc.
FiggyPudding··on Researchers studying Facebook misinformation say they were deplatformed
With wacked US politics lately business regulations are just turned on and off as the parties trade control. Laws will probably make it harder to kick off foreign influencers and bots with plausible deniability if it's protecting regular a-holes
FiggyPudding··on Researchers studying Facebook misinformation say they were deplatformed
It's not super hard to resist using your primary Google account to tell people to kill themselves, or that you are going to kill them, or tell others in general to attack people or places.

If you own a Nest Thermostat you probably own your residence or rent relative luxury and therefore should have your life together enough to not be a dick on the internet or have an anonymous profile for your rage/hate projection.

I guess it's a problem if your ISP is truly policing you directly and you can't just vpn/proxy for whatever reason, poverty/security

FiggyPudding··on Researchers studying Facebook misinformation say they were deplatformed
This is the first time I heard of acab. If anything thanks for the laughs. It's a hilarious acronym, I was expecting something highbrow like apartheid government claims.
FiggyPudding··on Ask HN: How can we prevent flooding in houses using technology?
Might need to worry about crane or boat house exploding against the neighbors
FiggyPudding··on Materials to get lights on are getting scarce
That's probably very regional considering the different reactions to COVID everywhere
FiggyPudding··on Conspiracies All the Way Down
Still the trouble of learning history to reason what ought to be... STEM education leaves that out. In the US you need to actively research recent history to even know we did anything in the middle east, barely know anything about the relatively recent Desert Storm let alone Cold War operations.
FiggyPudding··on Ask HN: Ransomware preparedness how difficult is it?
Thanks, I'm interested in this too.

I have seen talk about the issue of your restore image containing unpatched (or even zero day) vulnerabilities. So you need to worry about your restored systems quickly becoming compromised again.

Also that your backups should be pulled to an independent backup system instead of pushed so the compromised machine can't potentially ruin your backups. (Then you would need to wait longer for your off site backup to restore your backup.)

If you can't audit that it was simply a successful phishing attempt and you just need to revoke keys and passwords. I suppose a super expensive solution would be to use multiple operating systems and software platforms so you have a chance to get yourself back up and running on a different environment with different vulnerabilities that aren't being presently being attacked?

I'm excited to hear from someone who sounds like a professional.

I suppose this is really a more general question of how do I prevent remote code execution? Traffic analysis probably has to be done on an independent gateway? I assume that's hard in a large network vs botnet... Block Tor ips from any ports except your application/web ports? Because I'd like to support the good guys on Tor...

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