TaylorAlexander

Also thought it was a joke. Absolutely not signing in to google for an unknown app meant as a novelty, and I can’t imagine that’s necessary for this to function so I think it’s fair to say it’s a bad design, if not outright malicious.

I'm really trying to keep this about the engineering features of a system rather than moral judgments. Open source systems are simply more flexible and adaptable than proprietary systems, which have their own benefits. In today's world, the engineering value of open source systems is becoming so important that people are looking for other ways to provide for the developers creating these systems. It can be surprising when a project creator builds something in an area that is usually all open source, but they choose a proprietary path. Just look at the problems created by NVIDIA for their use of proprietary software in CUDA and their GPUs. This software is an attempt to fix issues created by proprietary software with another piece of proprietary software, which is if nothing else an interesting decision.

Makes sense to expect this kind of thing to be open source. The whole point of providing improved compatibility is to make people’s lives easier, and open source is usually an important feature to ensure wide compatibility. It also means projects can live on after the creators move to other things, people can submit patches for important features or bug fixes, and generally makes the system much more useful.

I think this is a misunderstanding. People are already having a whole lot of promiscuous unprotected sex. The function of PrEP is to make that sex safer.

My friend used to volunteer at an LGBTQ support shelter. She knew gay men who had promiscuous unprotected sex 20 years ago. Some of these people had been so marginalized by society and abandoned by their families that the connection from their random sexual encounters was the only thing they had. She knew a guy that was willing to do it no matter the risks. One day he found he had contracted HIV, and not long after he committed suicide.

I’ve been to sex parties before I was on PrEP, and the arrangement is the same. Have a conversation about testing, and if everything sounds good have unprotected oral or use condoms for penetration.

The difference is that now with PrEP this feels much safer as one of the most significant STIs is no longer nearly as easily transmitted.

Gonorrhea and syphilis can be cured by antibiotics. HIV has no cure. One is an inconvenience and the other changes your life completely.

I also wrote a more detailed response to a related comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966287

It makes a big difference for oral sex. In queer communities "sex" means a lot of things. My agreement with my partner is that if I am going to have sex with someone else, first we have a conversation about testing status and sex partners, and if that goes well we can have oral sex without protection or have penetrative sex with condoms.

I don't really have sex with people I don't have some level of trust with, but we are all sleeping around a bit and even someone you trust can make mistakes. Most STIs are curable or not a big deal, but HIV changes your entire life. With PrEP, you allow yourself some freedom to take a calculated risk. I mostly don't have sex with someone unless they are on PrEP too, because I only have sex with responsible mature people and in our community, taking PrEP is the responsible and mature thing to do. But we are still fooling around with a lot of people. If I am on PrEP and the person I am hooking up with is on PrEP, the chances of getting a life changing STI become extremely low.

There is another factor. With my doctor's office, which sees a lot of people in the community, they won't let you be on PrEP unless you get tested every three months. So in many cases if someone is on PrEP they are also getting regular testing done. That is not a direct result of PrEP, just an administrative side effect, but what it means is that if I go to a sex party and someone wants to go down on me, as happened in January, then if we are both on PrEP and getting tested every three months, then that interaction is very safe. When I did this it was with someone my girlfriend (who was also at the party with me) knew before I did, so there was some level of community trust there.

Hope that is a helpful answer.

Thank you! I’m so happy it was enlightening. It’s a space we don’t often discuss and I think these stories need to be told. We all deserve the sense of joy that can be found in the exploration of our bodies and others.

This is wonderful to hear! I’m transgender, polyamorous, and on PrEP. Often trans people didn’t get to have the sex they really wanted for a long time, and after coming out there is this sense of liberation and joy along with a new found appreciation for sex. I’ve heard it said that “sex is an adult form of play” and that’s how I see it. It’s extremely fun to get together with another consenting adult and explore what feels nice together. PrEP has already been a game changer for our sense of safety and possibility. It’s always reassuring when you meet someone, find mutual interest, and then when discussing safety you find you’re both on PrEP and get regularly tested. I’ve never had this experience before as for a long time I dated in serial monogamy and had one new partner every three or four years. With an expansion of sexual partnership opportunities I’m learning so much about the myriad ways I enjoy relating to others, and finding so much fulfillment in this part of my life. These medications are truly wonderful. We owe so much to those who came before us and lived their truths despite the risks, blazed the trail for people like myself and our community today, and lost their lives or loved ones as a result. We should never forget the fight it took to gain this recognition, or the people who resisted our right to freedom along the way.

I want to say also that I recognize this trial was largely among presumably heterosexual people in an HIV stricken region, but my experience is in the gay and trans community in the USA and I wanted to share a personal story of the value these drugs have had for us. My story will no doubt attract some weird comments, but I hope we all recognize the value of consenting adults making their own choices. We all deserve to find our joy, and I suspect most of us recognize the value of sex and pleasure in some form or another. I hope my story provides some insight in to what drugs like this can mean to communities around the world. Love to all people. <3

Edit: By the way here’s some book recommendations on polyamory. You too can find this joy if you’re in the right community and you develop the skills to handle things with maturity and respect, while identifying others who have done the same work. It’s been a ten year journey for me, but it has been well worth it. Books: “More Than Two, 2nd edition” (2nd edition is in preprint but recommended over the first) “Polysecure”, “Polywise”. Good luck exploring! Oh and finding a supporting therapist made all the difference for me in this journey too. That one is harder but see the directory on the Psychology Today website and take advantage of their filters.

“It doesn’t come with any operating systems, though the app does link to UTM’s site, which has guides for Windows XP through Windows 11 emulation, as well as downloads of pre-built virtual Linux machines.”

Huh… so I could run Linux on my phone!

Here I am still using Atom in 2024.

Yes, way more. In Kagan’s dissent she talks about how the court will now need to decide minutiae of regulation not clearly laid out in the text, involving expertise the court doesn’t have. I can’t seem to copy and paste from this PDF on mobile, but the dissent is well worth a read: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf

EDIT: On desktop, pasting in from the dissent:

(Kagan's words) Consider a few examples from the caselaw. They will help show what a typical Chevron question looks like—or really, what a typical Chevron question is. Because when choosing whether to send some class of questions mainly to a court, or mainly to an agency, abstract analysis can only go so far; indeed, it may obscure what matters most. So I begin with the concrete:

- Under the Public Health Service Act, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological product[s],” including “protein[s].” 42 U. S. C. §262(i)(1). When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”? Must it have a specific, defined sequence of amino acids? See Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. FDA, 514 F. Supp. 3d 66, 79–80, 93–106 (DC 2020).

- Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wild- life Service must designate endangered “vertebrate fish or wildlife” species, including “distinct population seg- ment[s]” of those species. 16 U. S. C. §1532(16); see §1533. What makes one population segment “distinct” from another? Must the Service treat the Washington State population of western gray squirrels as “distinct” because it is geographically separated from other western gray squirrels? Or can the Service take into account that the genetic makeup of the Washington population does not differ markedly from the rest? See Northwest Ecosystem Alliance v. United States Fish and Wildlife Serv., 475 F. 3d 1136, 1140–1145, 1149 (CA9 2007).

- Under the Medicare program, reimbursements to hospitals are adjusted to reflect “differences in hospital wage levels” across “geographic area[s].” 42 U. S. C. §1395ww(d)(3)(E)(i). How should the Department of Health and Human Services measure a “geographic area”? By city? By county? By metropolitan area? See Bellevue Hospital Center v. Leavitt, 443 F. 3d 163, 174– 176 (CA2 2006).

- Congress directed the Department of the Interior and the Federal Aviation Administration to reduce noise from aircraft flying over Grand Canyon National Park—specifically, to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet.” §3(b)(1), 101 Stat. 676; see §3(b)(2). How much noise is consistent with “the natural quiet”? And how much of the park, for how many hours a day, must be that quiet for the “substantial restoration” requirement to be met? See Grand Canyon Air Tour Coalition v. FAA, 154 F. 3d 455, 466–467, 474–475 (CADC 1998).

Hard to get the gerontocracy to vote against a gerontocracy. We can't even get proportional representation voting systems (at least not in the USA). Quite unfortunately, our system is built to protect the power of those who created it; it is not built to be smart.

the missile is eepy https://youtu.be/Csp_OABIsBM

That’s fair. In the interview LeCun uses the example of flying from San Francisco to New York and he asserts that these systems are not good at hierarchical reasoning. I’m no expert in this field so I take him at his word but maybe it warrants further explanation.

He also says that such a system wouldn’t be familiar with how to actually move through the world because we don’t have good datasets for how to do so. The rest of what I said still stands. These systems aren’t good at things for which we don’t have massive datasets, and they’re not able to devote different amounts of thinking time to different problems.

What isn’t abstract about looking at an obstacle course and then imagining how you will move your body? Or looking at someone’s face and imagining how they feel. Isn’t that abstract?

A 15 year old can reason about how to move their body through a complex obstacle course. They could reason about the nonverbal social cues in a complex interpersonal situation between multiple people, estimate the mood of each person even if there are very few words being exchanged, and determine how different possible actions would affect the situation. They could learn with brief instruction how to control their muscles to climb up a rope. They could learn how to learn so that they become better at a task of their choosing. They can receive new information that permanently changes their understanding of the world. They can learn new tasks for which no massive data set of training data exists. They can perform hierarchical reasoning, like “if I want to fly from San Francisco to New York I first need to buy a plane ticket, then pack my bags, tell my family where I will be going, make sure my phone is charged, walk to the train station, etc etc.”

Also if you ask them a question they can provide you one answer with very little thinking, and then if that’s not good enough they can devote more time to thinking about the answer before they answer again. They can devote arbitrary levels of thinking to any problem depending on what is needed. They can continuously take in new data and continually update their world view throughout their entire existence based on this new information.

There’s actually a huge list of things current autoregressive approaches to AI cannot do, but they can be hard to describe and people don’t like to talk about them so many people actually don’t understand how limited the current systems are.

Here’s a great video where Yann Lecun talks about the limits of autoregressive approaches to AI with many examples:

https://youtu.be/1lHFUR-yD6I

Ubuntu

Tho these people might not update their politics (I don’t have a sense that Biden ever did) and so while they may not suffer mental decline, we could find ourselves deprived of new thinking.

No I could not. I’m a robotics engineer and I’m bad at business (I’ve tried) and probably worse at marketing.

Also, soy bean based products are abundant. Tofu, tempeh, and soy milk are everywhere. Soy beans are one of the most significant crops in the world. The deliciousness of soy beans is present in the existing simple foods. I don’t personally believe the thing missing is some new kind of soy-based food. One thing we can do is encourage individuals all over the world to eat more vegan meals, and dine out at vegan restaurants. This will encourage more restaurant owners to offer more vegan options. I really don’t think this is a problem that can be solved by one big company. Soy is not some secret. We just need meat-focused cultures to understand both the problems of meat based diets and the deliciousness of vegan options. And as a vegan of five years now, the tastiest vegan meals are not some heavily processed product made from extracts of soy. It’s the basics that have existed for thousands of years, cooked well and paired with delicious vegetables, legumes, grains, and beans.

Nowhere in my comment did I say it was easy to change, or that "we could literally change it overnight".

What I said was that with education, outreach, and other nudges, we could, over time, affect the statistical distribution of meat consumption. Which is correct. I did not say it was easy, in fact I did not comment on how hard it would be, I just said it is possible.

In fact, fixing humanity's over-consumption of resources will be very hard. But we have no choice. We will perish if we do not. So, idk about you, but I think we had better try.

By the way, and I want to say this as a genuine bit of feedback, but it is not very interesting conversation if you are going to take what I said, turn it in to hyperbole, and then point out that the hyperbole you made up is unrealistic. I would encourage you to read comments carefully, and make sure you have really understood what the person has said. Cheers, and nice username.

> It’s not a cultural thing, some people just like the taste of meat.

Can you explain why 20-39% of Indians, or 276 million Indians, are vegetarian while in China, Chile, Colombia, and France (to pick a few) it is 5%? [1]

Because it is either cultural, or it is genetic. And I doubt Indians have a genetic mutation that makes them vegetarian, I think it is cultural. If a good curry is what makes more people vegetarian, then we can cook good curries anywhere.

In a meat-heavy culture, a lot of people might not realize how much they would like vegetarian meals!

> I like some vegetarian and vegan dishes but they have to be meals where meat isn’t the “hero” of that dish.

Not to be snarky, but that is the definition of a vegetarian dish. But I know what you mean, and you are right, meat substitutes do not make for very good vegan meals. A good vegan meal is one where it's not just trying to emulate meat based foods, but building a flavor profile that celebrates the actual vegetables and other ingredients in harmony.

Go to any of these Michelin rated vegan restaurants [2] for example, and you will find absolutely incredible tasting vegan meals. It takes culture to spread this kind of thing to chefs and patrons, and that is something we have influence over. I have been to Millennium [3], and it is incredible. If more meals like this were available, people "liking the taste of meat" would not really matter that much, because they would LOVE the taste of this stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

[2] https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/california/san-francisco/re...

[3] https://www.millenniumrestaurant.com/

> Hamburger? Maybe eat some pulled pork. Pulled pork? You can replace it with lamb.

I don't understand this. Is this based on CO2? Because I feel worse about pigs being killed, they are smarter than cows, and so subject to even more psychological horror in the factory farm. And lamb is horrible because a lamb is just a baby sheep. Sheep naturally live something like 8 years, but a lamb is a sheep that was killed at less than one year old.

Seriously, vegetables, soy beans, and lentils are suuuper tasty.

Would be pretty nice if they just caught less fish if they don't really need them all.

Maybe but that is cultural and influenced by marketing, public awareness campaigns, and access to quality prepared meals. Certainly in just the past 5 years I went from a meat heavy diet to a meat-free diet with a lot of consumption of soybeans (tempeh, tofu, soymilk, and cooked soybeans).

We could encourage others to do the same with, as I said above, marketing, public awareness campaigns, and encouragement for meat-free restaurants. Not everyone would shift, but in aggregate we could change demand patterns and people would still be happy. I know I would much rather eat tempeh now than any kind of meat product.

What we lack today is a way to move surplus out of startups and back in to new places. HSC wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, it was also a place to dump excess parts stock. It was part of a cycle of goods that led to better utilization and less waste of valuable materials. And this meant good deals too, so young people like myself 20 years ago could buy some pretty cool stuff for low prices. It was a place of ideation, where you never knew what you were going to find, and those random gizmos sometimes provided a spark of an idea for a new approach to a problem you had been mulling over. It was a place to bump in to other weirdos and talk about projects, learn new things, and make new connections. It was a place where you would walk in and buy one red LED and one resistor for 35 cents, instead of every single pack of items on Amazon containing 100 pieces you will never use and setting you back $10 here and $10 there. It was a place where I learned I could get in to amateur radio really easily if I wanted. And they had one hell of a vacuum tube collection.

It was only accessible to people who lived nearby and that’s a down side for the people who didn’t, but if you worked or lived ten minutes away like I did from college and on for another ten years as I studied robotics and built up my career, it was far and away better than Amazon in almost every way.

Today I rode my bike to Sudo Room in Oakland and picked up three SOT-23 N Channel Mosfets and a couple of 5 amp toggle switches for a fun little project I am working on. There’s bins of switches, caps, wires, motors, power supplies, cables, and who knows what else. It’s all free to members in good standing. Last year my TV died because of bad capacitors. I ordered a capacitor kit for it from Amazon for $15 which actually was missing some important values. I rode my bike to Sudo room and got what I needed for free. I never should have bought the Amazon kit.

There’s a lot to these places where people gather, offer up surplus parts, and take what they need for free when they need it. There’s no packaging waste. There’s no workers pushed so hard they have to pee in bottles to get you a $10 100 pack of red LEDs when all you need is one. Less stuff gets sent to landfill, which means less carbon emissions and environmental damage. It’s like a library instead of a book store. There’s a lot of value there.

For those that no longer have access to places like this, what we have now is really much worse in so many ways.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification! It certainly makes sense to charge for anything hosted, I just wasn’t familiar with the product or company.

“Free vs. Premium: The free version of this capability includes 100 MB of data transfer per month, throttles updates from the robot to the cloud/web to 1 Hz and limits the maximum message size to 10 KB. These limitations are lifted when you have a valid payment method on your account, allowing you to increase the rate to up to 10 Hz and increasing the maximum message size to 10 MB.”

Is there an open source self hosted option? Is this open source?

Agreed. The world needs a global free library whether or not the law permits it. People deserve access to knowledge first and foremost.

That is the general consensus of this podcast I have been really enjoying lately: https://www.fivefourpod.com/

So what you’re saying is “it's now legal for the judge and everyone else involved to get a nice present from Boeing, as long as it happens afterwards!”