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alwaysdoit

1,071 karma · joined March 5, 2012

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alwaysdoit··on Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz
Aren't US citizens and corporations prohibited from paying anything to Iran due to sanctions?
alwaysdoit··on Talking to strangers at the gym
I wish the protocol was to introduce your name about 5-15 minutes into the conversation because then I would have some other information to attach it to. When it's the first piece of information I receive I think my brain just doesn't really know where to put it and it gets lost immediately. The "use their name several times in the first conversation" trick is a good workaround for this.
alwaysdoit··on Waymo says can't avoid bike lanes because riders want to be dropped off in them
Personal cars also take up space on the road when they aren't being used. It would be much easier to build physically separated, safe biking lanes and drop off areas if we could use all the space we currently dedicate exclusively to personal vehicle parking on public streets.
alwaysdoit··on Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting
Mostly agree, but choosing not to risk a new collision in order to maybe get there slightly faster (what if you damage the ambulance and are unable to continue?) to maybe help someone does seem like the right call
alwaysdoit··on Assistant to the Regional Manager
He never says "AI could lead to post-scarcity" in the entire piece. In fact, he says:

> Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.

alwaysdoit··on Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
TBF, for the more popular shows, they are spending that money on an English dub (which is considerably more expensive).
alwaysdoit··on Apple will update iPhones for at least 5 years in rare public commitment
This almost always means "security patches" but the general public almost always interprets this as "feature updates" and tech journalism never manages to draw the distinction.
alwaysdoit··on Apple must pay a man $1,000 for not including a power adapter with new iPhone
If they really wanted to, they could offer two versions: one which includes a charger, and another which does not and donates $5 to an environmental charity.
alwaysdoit··on Results from first US trial of genetically modified mosquitoes
Why do some people believe that deliberately and carefully trying to fix a problem and inadvertently introducing an unforeseen side-effect is worse than deliberately choosing not to do nothing about a disease that leads to sickness and death?
alwaysdoit··on The endgames of bad faith communication
I am a pretty big advocate for good faith communication and think the article is right that it is necessary. The thing that disheartens me though, is the asymmetric nature of the problem: good faith communication is hard. It takes time and patience. Bad faith communication is easy. You can write 20 bad faith drive by comments in the time it takes to post one thoughtful reply. And due to the wide open nature of most of these platforms you're rarely interacting with the same person twice. So it's hard not to feel that that effort is entirely going to waste.
alwaysdoit··on Investors bought a record share of U.S. homes in 2021
Commercial property tax rates (incl rental) should be higher than residential. All things being equal, it would be preferable for someone to own the house they live in, rather than pay rent to another party indefinitely for exclusive access, and our tax code should incentivize in that direction.
alwaysdoit··on DNA jumps between animal species, but no one knows how often
I guess you're going to volunteer to feed them the human blood they need to reproduce, then?
alwaysdoit··on It's your device, you should be able to repair it
No it's not, it's looking to enshrine that standard by law for everyone. Nothing is stopping consumers from demanding phones that are self-serviceable, they just simply aren't willing to accept the tradeoffs involved (larger size, worse thermals, higher price, etc). If you disagree, there's an unserved market segment wide open for you!
alwaysdoit··on Supreme Court sides with Facebook in narrowing the federal robocall ban
> To the extent that interpretive canons accurately describe how the English language is generally used, they are useful tools. … [But w]hen this Court describes canons as rules or quotes canons while omitting their caveats and limita­tions, we only encourage the lower courts to relegate statu­tory interpretation to a series of if-then computations. No reasonable reader interprets texts that way. [Alito in concurrence]

Why would it be horrible if there were a well-defined grammar for legal texts?

alwaysdoit··on Google is testing its new ad targeting tech in millions of browsers
Disagree. The abandonment of advertising in favor of paywalls in media is directly contributing to the increase in polarization and consumption of disinformation. Quality journalism is getting harder and harder to access. People might subscribe to one or two, but they are unlikely to shell out for a publication that does not align with their preexisting views. Meanwhile the propaganda and fake news remains free to read.
alwaysdoit··on Top Paid LA Lifeguards Earned Up to $392k in 2019
If 401k contributions are included in earnings, why shouldn't pensions be?
alwaysdoit··on There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
I actually lost money when the first company I worked for sold.

At settle, I received a wire transfer for $7.22. The bank charged me a $15 incoming wire transfer fee.

alwaysdoit··on Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it
The NYT has been doing really, really well financially the last 4 years. Their stock price is up almost 300% since 2016--not the only metric, obviously, but it certainly gives some indications of how concerned investors are that it will stay in the black.

Other, smaller papers are not doing nearly as well.

alwaysdoit··on Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code
If you repeat the process many times will it reduce that error rate, or are the errors non-independent?
alwaysdoit··on Shift to Remote Work Based on 7k HN Who Is Hiring Posts
Pairing maybe?
alwaysdoit··on Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook
Yeah, it's weird that the discussion has centered around censorship, rather than like... why didn't law enforcement shut this down sooner? Or at least properly prepare for it?
alwaysdoit··on Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)
No, but it's automatically the right tradeoff for everyone.

Security measures are always a tradeoff between convenience and security. Not everyone's tradeoffs work out evenly. Sometimes backups are a more important risk to mitigate than government surveillance.

alwaysdoit··on Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs
Children are often placed in a caretaker position over dogs--they sometimes help feed it, take it out to the bathroom or on walks. They don't spend much mental energy thinking about the needs of adults, the adults tend to do that for themselves, often out of sight of the child.

It's not surprising that the child would lean towards protecting the animals that they see as under their care, or needing more care than adults.

alwaysdoit··on Netflix is creating a problem by cancelling TV shows too soon
Right, and a willingness to experiment on new things inherently implies some of those things will be cancelled.

If cancellation is an unacceptable outcome, they need to have a higher bar up front before launching, and fewer things will launch.

alwaysdoit··on Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps
It also raises the baseline across the board by injecting a new competitor to every ISP and wireless service in the world
alwaysdoit··on The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election
Well, many of those people also don't get to take Federal holidays off. See "Black Friday", "Presidents' Day Sale", etc.
alwaysdoit··on Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Google
Google licenses the lyrics through a third party, LyricFind, which in turn hired people to transcribe them. In a small percentage of cases, those transcribers did not do their own work and instead copied lyrics from Genius.
alwaysdoit··on Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix
Even if you have the best compensation in the market, sometimes people leave just because they want something different. I agree with your general point that we should be willing to pony up to keep people, but ensuring your system is straightforward for other people to pick up and maintain is also a good practice.
alwaysdoit··on California sets Covid-19 daily record, Bay Area cumulative total passes 20k
Agreed. The news functions like a monitoring system with an extremely bad alert configuration.
alwaysdoit··on Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
I'm not making an ideological assumptions there. I'm just referring to the status quo. The proposals I've seen are along the lines of "let's ban or add obstacles to advertising-based models", not "let's build a publicly funded Google search". I'm not saying the latter is an impossibility, but it's a much larger undertaking, and if you do the former without the latter, the effect will be as I said above--the poor lose access.
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