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adolph

8,425 karma · joined January 27, 2010

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adolph··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
the pissoir . . . the greatest concession most of them made to privacy was a little iron screen separating the user from the street.

Look at the photos in the article, they weren't enclosed stalls. Its elegant in a way, just a couple feet of opaque material that wraps the beltline of a central aiming point. Basically as good as going on a tree but without people getting uptight.

adolph··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
The article claims that "Meanwhile, as Prohibition played out, the project of constructing public bathrooms slowed to a trickle, and the few that had been built began to fall into disrepair."

If that were the story, why was there a lobby in the 1970s to remove pay toilets?

  The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, or CEPTIA, was a 1970s grass-roots political organization which was one of the main forces behind the elimination of pay toilets in many American cities and states.

  According to The Wall Street Journal, there were, in 1974, at least 50,000 pay toilets in America, mostly made by the Nik-O-Lok Company. Despite this flourishing commerce, CEPTIA was successful over the next few years in obtaining bans in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Florida, and Ohio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
adolph··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.

  Xiaomi has made the XRING 03 boast a larger die size than the XRING 01, 
  measuring 133mm² compared to its predecessor’s 109mm² dimensions This change 
  was deemed necessary as the flagship SoC features 16MB of SLC cache, not to 
  mention a new “6 + 4” CPU cluster that comprises two ARM C1-Ultra cores 
  running at 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores operating at 3.68GHz and lastly, 
  four C1-Pro cores running at 3.15GHz. [1]
0. https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra

1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...

adolph··on I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
This is a great story. Almost wish the author had dug a little further in and discovered something like Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg, but a nice writeup nontheless.

Makes me wonder how many partly implemented but ignored protocols like this exist.

adolph··on The Chauffeur Problem (1999)
Cheers.

Lienhard is a Houston institution (warts and all, some people can't stand listening to his voice) and having listened to his show forever, some "don't you neg that nice John Lienhard" energy really came out.

adolph··on The Chauffeur Problem (1999)
> The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up.

Lienhard cites Borg [0], who is writes "Between 1903 and 1912 howls of protest arose over chauffeurs’ arrogance and insubordination and the pages of the automotive trade press overflowed with letters, articles, and editorials describing, complaining about, and offering solutions to the 'chauffeur problem.'" [1]

One might quibble about a specific subjective characterization or if the description should use the norms of the period or today, but that is a far cry from "making some of that shit up."

0. Borg, K., The "Chauffeur Problem" in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology. Technology and Culture, Vol. 40, No. 4, October 1999, pp. 797-832.

1. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/33428

adolph··on Police officer used Flock cameras to track estranged wife 717 times
I’d like to see HIPAA-style audit log and review for surveillance products like Flock. An aspect of log reviews that I don’t have direct info about is contextual access alerts—the gist of it is that whatever record you access is evaluated for things like patients who live in your neighborhood, or are related to you and it pings the compliance office.

Clearly Flock etc are keeping pretty good access records or these stories couldn’t get written. What is missing is PD compliance offices proactively addressing inappropriate accesss. In addition to access monitoring, another aspect of HIPAA is that a patient can find out who has accessed their record. It makes sense that a tremendously powerful data collection would have similar rules of the road.

adolph··on California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year
> We need a better argument than that.

I'm not arguing for or against this consumer information regulation. It would not surprise me if most tire industry folks support it since a acknowledged standard increases consumer trust in the claims of a premium product. Good regulation creates wins for both consumers and producers.

Bad regulation typically tries to nudge either consumers or producers in a direction contrary to the prevailing culture and/or economics. To the extent that CA will attempt to reduce consumer choice, different methods will exploit the regulation's leaks, like which tires it does not cover.

A direct corollary is US fuel economy standards leading to the rise of the SUV as an vehicle format. People may disagree on causes, but "[t]here is some evidence that this happened with an increase in market share of lower fuel economy light trucks and SUVs and decline in passenger car sales, as a percentage of total fleet sales, as car buying trends changed during the 1990s. . ." [0]

Another fun example is the development of "trunking." I'm not a CA teen so lack direct experience, and things are undoubtably overhyped, but enough people started doing it for a law to be passed specifically criminalizing the practice. Why would anyone ride in the trunk of a car? Because CA outlawed passengers in cars driven by teens.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

1. https://www.ocregister.com/2007/01/03/trunking-law-for-the-d...

adolph··on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop
I agree with your point on chassis/mainboard matching but wrt "putting the old mainboard on a shelf," Framework does have some cases for bare mainboards made by coolermaster and I think the 3d printing files are available.
adolph··on The Amazon tax
publicsurplus.com has everything a person might need and you are supporting local government.

You can find yourself a nice laptop for cheap. "It's got a cop CPU, an i5 10th gen. It's got cop RAM, cop SSD, cop 12v power input."

adolph··on California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year
> Right. If they wanted to ban things this would basically ban all knobby tires too wouldn’t it?

Those will be exempt from testing/labelling.

adolph··on California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year
The staff report [0] seems pretty reasonable. Essentially manufacturers measure their tires using ISO 28580:2018 [1] and self-report to a future state tire portal. I wish that test was available when I last bought tires and look forward to seeing it next go round.

Undoubtably, consumers will quickly adopt tires in an exempt category like "Specialty tires, including certain off-road tires, low-speed tires, deep-tread tires, winter snow tires, space-saver tires, and temporary-use tires" and the unintended consequence will be that vehicle energy efficiency as a whole will decline.

0. https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/GetDocument.aspx?tn=269612

1. https://www.scribd.com/document/915700524/ISO-28580-2018

adolph··on Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows
Everything contributes but residential use is a much smaller share in total. Arizona water utilization by class [0]:

   6%  Industrial
  22%  Municipal
  72%  Agricultural
0. https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/arizonas-water-us...
adolph··on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
> If consciousness spread virally

“The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,” the Librarian says. “A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.” [0]

0. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel

Stephenson has Hiro state it more explicitly in Chapter 56.

adolph··on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
> when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.

How is dreaming during sleep different from consciousness when awake?

adolph··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
Example n+1 of why I only use web and not download an app
adolph··on Buy Your Friends Batteries
The thing about the EcoFlow Stream is that has things like phase alignment which allows it to be plugged directly into a household outlet without transfer switches to segregate grid phase from the phase of power created by the V2X inverter's phase. It also handles solar input.

I suppose that future V2X systems will incorporate direct plug-in tech, but note the transfer switch used by the system in the video.

adolph··on Buy Your Friends Batteries
The cost/invasiveness of cutover is dropping. There is a relatively new category called "plug in solar" where the inverter/battery is smart enought to detect, sync and use grid power.

The Stream system: Connect the device to the grid to enable it to feed power into the grid or draw power from it when solar energy is insufficient. This can be done via a standard home outlet (if permitted), or through a circuit breaker. [0]

0. https://manuals.ecoflow.com/us/product/stream-ultra?lang=en_...

adolph··on Could a computer scientist build a brain?
I think the elephant-in-the-room arguments against Penrose's quantum microtubules [0] are the complex behaviors exhibited by organisms without neurons hosting quantum effects. As a result, I think the more promising area is in bioelectrical explanations [1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_bioelectricity

adolph··on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s
Ok, what is your stack? Which MDM did you put on your tween's devices? What about the 15 year old who really wants Graphene OS? Do they VPN back to your home network to ensure your DNS and IP block based filtering applies to their mobile usage? Are you caching the teachers' recommended YouTube videos to Plex from the YTDL container or just monitoring their watch list stats of brain rot shorts?
adolph··on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s
> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

Zuckerberg was not a parent when he conceived of Facebook and "society" as a whole is pushing social media on kids, not parents.

adolph··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
While direct government subsidy is one way to increase battery adoption to increase power generation efficiency, a market based approach is for electric power companies to use batteries installed on customer premises as a power bank for the entire grid.

If you ever check out gridstatus.io [0] or similar resources, you may have noticed "storage" or "battery" as a part of the fuel mix. These are most often power company owned centralized facilities.

Another approach is for power companies to leverage batteries installed on customer premises. "A critical mass of home batteries scattered across a region and networked together through so-called virtual power plants, or VPPs, he says, marks 'the shift from energy storage as backup to energy storage as an active grid asset.' [1]"

0. https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso

1. https://e360.yale.edu/features/home-battery-vpps

adolph··on Seven books I keep close because I love them
Having read these outloud to my kids many times, they have genuine insight into psychology and the condition of the child as a developing person.
adolph··on Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the preamble of the edition published by PG:

  Note that this version of Thesaurus-1911 has been supplemented with over 
  1,000 words not present in the original 1911 edition, but many modern words 
  are still missing. About 1500 verbs (out of 6500) which can be found in an 
  80,000-word spell-checker are absent from this work. The deficiency of nouns 
  is probably much worse, especially on technical topics. Of 40,000 unique 
  words contained in the original text, 12,000 are not recognized by a 
  spell-checker. Most of these are foreign words (primarily Latin), and many 
  are obsolete.
adolph··on Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data
Not certain how well LOCKSS has done over time as Internet Archive seems to get all the press, but it seemed to be a solid concept with some level of implmentation:

Taking its name (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) from the idea that a file is more likely to survive if it has multiple copies stored in multiple places, LOCKSS software allows libraries to create preserved digital collections out of materials that would otherwise be accessible only through a licensed academic subscription. LOCKSS has agreements with academic publishers to permit libraries to store local copies of content that is usually only accessible through web-based subscriptions, enabling post-cancellation content access.

https://coptr.digipres.org/index.php/LOCKSS_(Lots_of_Copies_...

adolph··on Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data
Not PBS but an affiliate broadcaster and the data is not lost as in destroyed, but legally encumbered.

Full headline: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

adolph··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
I think this is an economic problem to solve, not a legal one.

The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs. Why is there so much junk postal mail? Because the post office has discounted rates for such mail.

Likewise, back when there were "long distance" tolls (nevermind the 10 cent SMS), there was less telemarketing because it was more expensive to operate call centers in each domain. I'm old enough to remember the sound of a phone ringing as evoking a happy "who could it be?" instead of "what scam is bothering me now?"

Granted, nobody is going to rewrite all the old protocols to bolt on a payment clearinghouse. And legislation is weak against a large pool of relatively minor miscreants since it requires expensive prosecutorial time to enforce, either directly in criminal law or indirectly by regulating major gateways' compliance activities.

To reduce unsolicited commercial contacts, people need to learn to accept expensive communication patterns. Currently we all already pay with the shadow work of curating contact lists, missing important calls because ringer off, deleting and marking as spam junk texts, etc. This shadow work could be reduced by accepting that a communique costs $X, with the knowledge that all the $X spent by others contacting oneself will offset one's own outbound costs.

adolph··on Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree
I don't have a prior for this topic so yes, it is new information. The perhaps surprising part is the difference between men and women. The paper found that partnered men who take GLP-1 are more likely to exit partnership than women in a similar data context. I think a defendable no-priors null hypothesis would be that there is little to no difference. Here the data shows a difference.
adolph··on Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree
The original paper is quite readable and interesting in how the researcher works through a number of alternative hypotheses.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35387/w353...

An tangential part of the paper is partnered men:

  Among baseline partnered men (which is where partnership dissolution is 
  well-defined), I find a 6.8pp increase in men leaving their baseline partners 
  (s.e. 2.9), which rises to 12.1pp after 1.5+ years (s.e. 6.1). Unlike women, 
  partnered men leave existing relationships with weight loss.
adolph··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
What situations call for "Pervert glasses?"
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