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IncandescentGas

480 karma · joined February 15, 2019

A gigantic nuclear furnace Where hydrogen is made into helium At a temperature of hundreds of degrees
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IncandescentGas··on DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers
This framing is nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.

We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.

We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.

We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.

We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.

We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.

IncandescentGas··on Have an LLC
> "An LLC will help you force a separation of personal and work finances"

An LLC will require you, under civil or criminal penalty for non-compliance, to separate personal and work finances.

IncandescentGas··on Have an LLC
> Cost-wise it’s maybe $500 a year

This is not my experience. My costs are higher, but the costs offset and then some by tax advantages.

Sharing here, to give a picture of what a real single person LLC looks like, compared to a vanity hobby LLC as described by OP.

I'm a contractor with a registered LLC S-Corp in the US. Almost all of my income is 1099 from one source. I was converted from W-2 to contract when my employer was acquired, my job role did not change. You might call me a misclassified full time employee. I could report this of course, and then I would burn my professional contacts and lose my job. So I don't.

I hire myself, pay myself a fair market rate as a salary, and run a payroll just for me. And I provide myself a few benefits from the LLC, like health insurance.

I'm required to keep up with a pile of quarterly and yearly fillings between the state, county, city and IRS. This is a non trivial amount of time and effort. I have to maintain separate business books and bank accounts in coordination with my accountant. I don't actually get to access the money I earned until it exits the business entity through a controlled process. I have to file business taxes separate from personal taxes. I still have to pay quarterly estimates on my personal taxes too.

My family health insurance is roughly $12k this year. If I purchase that insurance directly, I use post-tax income to do so. I'd pay ~$4k in taxes to take home the ~$12k income used to buy health insurance. But when the LLC buys the health insurance and provides it as a employee benefit, the ~$12k is not taxed.

The salary I pay myself is taxed at ~37%. The same as if I just filed as self employed. But the business income I earn over that salary is taxed at ~20%. This is the biggest advantage. The gap between a "fair market value" for my role, and my actual contract rate. In that gap, the LLC structure saves me 20% on taxes by labeling that portion of income as "shareholder profit disbursement".

Rough yearly costs:

$150 registered agent service $150 state registration filing $2500 tax prep and account services throughout year $1500 payroll services, including payroll tax filings

Rough yearly tax advantage:

$15,000

IncandescentGas··on Google Maps Showing 'Lake America' in U.S.
Renaming Lake Ontario is Not Just Stupid and Petty. It is also Illegal.

https://verdict.justia.com/2026/08/31/renaming-lake-ontario-...

IncandescentGas··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.
IncandescentGas··on What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?
Thanks, your comment got this song stuck in my head. (I like my gym membership, thank you very much. I even visited the gym once several months ago.)

We wasted every second dime On diets, lawyers, shrinks, and apps, and flags And plastic surgery

- So long & thanks for all the fish, a perfect circle

IncandescentGas··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
> You are perfectly free to keep selling what we've been eating. No one is forcing people to plant the new stuff.

This common sense statement should be true, but is wholly ignorant of the lawsuits farmers deal with from seed suppliers

IncandescentGas··on Court Records Should Be Free
No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.
IncandescentGas··on The AirPods Effect
Few who paid their debt to society and moved on are excited about random strangers wanting to do their own petty little performative mock show trials to sit in smug judgement over them. Please stop.
IncandescentGas··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
I think the point is intent. Sure, no chance of success to build a reactor. But he created a radiation hazard situation all the same.

If a nuclear engineer enabled and instructed him, would there not be liability for the hazard? If ml is going to be an expert instructor for nuclear, hacking, bio hacking, virus research, do the peddlers of the ai product escape ethical or legal responsibility just because "its an app?"

IncandescentGas··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
> succeeded in making a real reactor

The concern here is not if an amateur attempt to make a reactor, hack a bank, bioengineer a medicine/poison is successful or not. Interactive and instructive access to some forms of knowledge used to come with discretion along side instruction.

Yes, perhaps your swearing at me in this context is a little hysterical

IncandescentGas··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
Of course. "tried to" being key words in the comment. If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been?

A real nuclear engineer with the knowledge he needed would also have said "no, don't do that and I won't help you." We are programming the knowledge into the ai agent. Giving ai a little discretion makes sense too.

IncandescentGas··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
A high school kid tried to build a nuclear reactor as a science project a while back, getting his mom's house designated as a superfund cleanup site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

IncandescentGas··on The Future of Email
Fastmail reads or analyzes users email to sell ads? Fastmail trains ai models on their user's email messages?

Metadata is more valuable than message content for analysis. GPG solves that how?

IncandescentGas··on SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
Off topic rage bait harassment has top comment? Why?
IncandescentGas··on Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
Is this specific to carplay, or can other bluetooth devices also silently and nefariously hijack your cellular data connection?
IncandescentGas··on US Supreme Court reviews police use of cell location data
> Justice asks why no one of the 500M people who were searched have complained?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

IncandescentGas··on Work with the garage door up (2024)
> If you actually have serious workshop like restoring cars or building something, rent a warehouse. HOAs have strict rules about chemicals, noise and vans parked on drive way!

I'd never buy a home in a HOA, because I don't need this guy telling me how I can use my garage. City ordinances are already good enough, when it comes to sane noise and parking rules.

IncandescentGas··on We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees
This is not always the case.

Last week, my monitoring system sent me 20k emails in a few hours in response to a server attack.

When those hit my gmail inbox, gmail marked them all as spam. Myself, the user, did not mark them as spam. Gmail did that for me. But their reputation system is behaving as if 20k people marked 20k emails from us as spam.

In response to those 20k emails marked as spam, now our domain sender reputation with gmail is LOW, and our low volume of legitimate email with customers goes to their spam folders.

The gmail client gives me no way to unmark these messages as spam, except to click on each message, one at a time, and dig into a submenu to find the "Not spam" button.

IncandescentGas··on I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse
> This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze.

Why is it a danger for the value of money to be correlated with major things happening in the real physical world.

If my house burns down, the value of my house changed.

If a bank gambles it's deposits on snake oil like Tesla or Ai Companies, and the market wakes up to the true value of those companies, the worth of that bank rightfully collapses.

Is the author arguing the value of money should be divorced from the physical world?

IncandescentGas··on Another DOGE staffer explaining how he flagged grants at NEH for "DEI"
How does someone as young as Cavanaugh become so homophobic. I wanted to believe our society was past this.
IncandescentGas··on Good software knows when to stop
The counter-example, in classic MMO terms, is Ultima Online adding non-PVP game instances in response to player feedback. Without the dramatic threat of PVP conflict at most times, UO was less emotionally engaging. The non-PVP players were bored without the emotional excitement (stress, danger, whatever) of ad hoc PVP. The PVP-focused players were bored when all the reputational mechanics became more or less meaningless in a world only occupied by PKers.

The release of Arc Raiders captured that original UO social dynamic perfectly. Players flooded forums with requests to make PVP optional. In that case, the devs knew better than to listen.

IncandescentGas··on Verizon outages reported across U.S.
Telco infra runs on autopilot?
IncandescentGas··on Chase to become new issuer of Apple Card
Has none of the usual expected perks like rental car insurance or damage/theft protection on purchases. Guess purchase protection would be a threat to applecare revenue.
IncandescentGas··on Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
> if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).

Most kids did't read the manual? I would rtfm for every game I got my hands on during the car ride home from toysrus or blockbuster. If Mom had several errands to run, I may rtfm a dozen times before I finally got home with the game.

IncandescentGas··on I am just sooo sick of AI prediction content, let's kill it already
Identifying the 1% of ai use cases that are useful and refusing to have your attention stolen by the 99% that is mild melting garbage will be the key ai skill for the ai future
IncandescentGas··on When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts
I just got an invoice from ups to pay a $16 brokerage fee to jpmorgan for collecting a $0.60 tariff on a sticker included in a box with a custom keyboard shipped from Taiwan. Seems like wall street is making out better than the US on this arrangement
IncandescentGas··on Obsidian Note Codes
Would you consider renaming the note to contain a reference to the generated code? Such as "Thoughts on Hedgehogs.md" becomes "Thoughts on Hedgehogs [AB-99].md"

This preserves your goal of having the system rightfully not need another source of truth outside the markdown files, but also lets the markdown file carry the identifier across renames without adding a YAML block.

And it lets you find the note in the "open note" dialog box by typing the code, so no other kind of search interface is needed. Or even to find the note with any other filesystem utility if you have your reference code.

Were you inspired by the Zettelkasten Method for your plugin?

IncandescentGas··on Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content
The payment processors have been held criminally and civilly liable in court for processing payments for pornhub. I don't see how we can expect Visa/MC to not censor their customers, if we also intend to hold them criminally liable for the actions of their customers in such cases.

If Visa spends years in criminal court because a book store accepted a credit card payment for an illegal book, then yes, expect Visa to start placing limits on card processing for bookstores.

IncandescentGas··on Matt Trout has died
RIP mst and thanks for all the fish. DBIx::Class and Catalyst are still a core part of how I pay the bills.
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