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InitialLastName

7,163 karma · joined November 2, 2016

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InitialLastName··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
Plenty of places operate much more dense transit without that level of security.

Trains, even HSR have essentially zero hijacking risk relative to airplanes, and proper safety interlocks make them very difficult to use the vehicle as a weapon.

At that point, your terrorism risk is approximately on level with any other dense transportation interconnect.

InitialLastName··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
The biggest difference to hijackings post 9/11 has nothing to do with pre-boarding security: Locking the cockpit door.
InitialLastName··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
That's how both the SBS buses in NYC used to work (before tap to pay), and how the NJ Transit light rail still works.
InitialLastName··on Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees
Your last point was that some people prefer to rent. I don't think it's irrelevant to compare that to the number of people who would prefer to own.
InitialLastName··on Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees
Assuming the same homes, which group do you think is larger:

A) Households who are currently renting who would prefer to own their home

B) Households who currently own who would prefer to be renting

I'm going to guess A >>> B, but I've never seen the data.

InitialLastName··on Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain
What's wild about this is that it makes really obvious how limited our perspective on dinosaur biodiversity is. Our best view on the best-known dinosaurs comes from a few places that were really good for finding fossils from specific eras.
InitialLastName··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Presumably the browser still has to fetch the page in that case, right? From a "surveilled net traffic" perspective, how is that different than clicking the link?
InitialLastName··on Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?
What's the market share for non-system-default browsers and/or email clients?
InitialLastName··on Pixel Watch 5
My watch (Garmin VivoActive 4) lasts ~1 week. The charger is one less thing I have to:

- keep on my nightstand

- take with me if I go away for a few days

It wouldn't be the worst thing to build charging it into my daily routine, but it sure is liberating to not need to.

InitialLastName··on U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
Not just ethnic groups. Schools mostly can't say "we only want rich people" but they definitely want to prefer students who will contribute to the donation revenue stream either themselves or through their parents. Signals like "doesn't have a job to take up their time in high school" and "parents can afford (and have the free time to enable) expensive, time-consuming activities" are really good proxies for that.
InitialLastName··on The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses
> Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use.

What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".

InitialLastName··on The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses
In the US, we usually refer to "paying someone to borrow a car" as a car "rental" and "borrowing money to finance a car purchase" as a car "loan".
InitialLastName··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
Since TFA can't be bothered, here's the text of the actual bill: https://my.ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus/FullText?GAID=18&...
InitialLastName··on Taylor Farms Cyclospora outbreak triples in size
Lettuce has a shelf-life of ~4 weeks from harvest, the parasite can incubate for ~2 weeks from consumption, and it may take a week or two for the infected person to see a doctor, get positive test results, and have those results reported to the tracking bodies. That means tracking could easily lag distribution of the bad goods by 2 months.
InitialLastName··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
This [0] was a pretty big deal in the audio electronics industry.

[0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...

InitialLastName··on Someone Used AI to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me
In addition to the direct interview, there are other advantages of authorization that often allow the author a much deeper access to research the subject:

- Access to records, correspondence, and journals in the subject's possession

- explicit endorsement from the subject encourages their family, friends and colleagues to work with the author.

- Opportunities for the subject themselves to fact-check and contextualize the research.

That must be balanced against the fact that authorization also often provides the subject an opportunity to review the content, giving them a hand in crafting the narrative and/or suppressing unflattering details.

InitialLastName··on US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers
> David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.

Every Goliath may, in the long run, meet a David that beats it, but this premise ignores all the thousands of Davids that don't win.

InitialLastName··on Aluminum foil (2021)
That would be hell on everybody's box-cutters (and fingers). I already cut myself too often on shipping boxes.
InitialLastName··on GTA 6 will cost $80
I did that for a long time. It works, but it's very difficult to match the ease of using a console:

- Steam's Big Picture mode works, but there are lots of sharp edges (launcher support being the biggest).

- PC versions of games frequently have no way to switch to a couch-friendly UI (loading menus designed for PCs)

- The power management and hardware setup is not at all streamlined

- Controller management can be painful

- Streaming apps mostly need to work in a browser, which won't have controller support.

InitialLastName··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work.

Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.

InitialLastName··on Epidurals are a miracle technology
I wonder how much of that is selection bias? In my (admittedly limited) experiences around the labor and delivery process, c-sections were (apart from when requested) advised for high-risk pregnancies and as a recourse for something having gone wrong in the L/D process. One could reasonably expect that both of those situations would indicate a higher risk for mortality from surgery.

Note that per Wikipedia [0], death by abdominal surgery in general in High-HDI countries is on the order of 100-1000/100k.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perioperative_mortality

InitialLastName··on Steam Machine launches today
Note that the power estimate for the build above is only 325W. The power supply is beefier than that for headroom and economics.

It wouldn't be surprising if Valve's efforts at integrating the unit (putting the relevant chips on a single board, eliminating anything unnecessary, and improving cooling) could shave a significant amount of power.

InitialLastName··on Steam Machine launches today
I just did one [0], mostly with regards only to specs and price (rather than quality). It comes out to $150 more, roughly 4X the volume, and about 3 hours more of my time in effort, all to get something that won't be as well-supported by games. What am I missing?

[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KY3VW9

InitialLastName··on Steam Machine launches today
To be fair, GP said that FIFA is corrupt, not that FIFA is either profit-maximizing nor out to light the goose that lays the golden egg on fire.

I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing".

InitialLastName··on Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
What I don't understand is why search is so broken.

If I do a search of my inbox with a lot of results, it gets lazy-loaded. Fair enough. But why, when I scroll to the bottom and it loads the new batch of email, does the view need to jump back to the top of the list?

Why has Gmail been able to recognize and properly group/deduplicate prior conversations in top-posted email threads for 20 years, but Outlook can't bother? That also breaks search, since every email with the result somewhere in its body (even prior emails) will appear.

InitialLastName··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
That and a way to recursively commit/push (i.e. make a change within a submodule, commit in one step with the same message in the parent submodule).

Right now, if you want to push a change to a file in a submodule such that it propagates to the users of your repo, you have to:

1. Change the file

2. Commit within the submodule

3. Push the submodule

4. add the submodule change in the outer repo

5. commit in the outer repo

6. push the outer repo

InitialLastName··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
He's had more than 2 decades to reject that opportunity.
InitialLastName··on Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
I buy the argument that a functioning democracy requires the populace to believe that the government is honest, competent, and working in their interests. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Vietnam war (respectively) undermined those notions. As of ~2016, half of the US voting population had come of age after those events.
InitialLastName··on German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
No more of a horrible liability than a human writing public-facing copy.
InitialLastName··on Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
> Seveneves

Seveneves had a conclusion, and then an extra book...

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