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amy_petrik

74 karma · joined February 27, 2025

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amy_petrik··on The rising returns to R&D: Ideas are not getting harder to find
if you think it's bad now for reasons of increased reliability and efficiency throughout -- wait till the population starts dropping as boomers die and zoomers don't have kids
amy_petrik··on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
The solution to spam is that everyone replies to the spam and engages up to the point that human labor is required, thus making it financially impractictable

The solution to this problem is not to provide YOUR ID but to provide AN ID, again and again, once per day. Again - cannot scale if a manual check is done by a human somewhere, flipside if it's fully automated now it's game-able

amy_petrik··on Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 2
well here's a big surprise of BWT

BWT is a transformation transforming a string into "suffix tree space"

You can do searches - very fast searches - in BZ2/BWT compression space

Discussed in the '90s in the legendary dr. dobbs

But more significantly, BWT is the basis for most DNA and RNA sequence aligners nowadays - which perform string search/matching in suffix tree (transformed) space. It's like doing frequency stuff in fourier domain, it's like adding is multiplication in logspace - but in weird data string search space. The BWT.

amy_petrik··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
"Windows 2000 was peak Windows to me."

Windows ME was peak windows to 2000

amy_petrik··on Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s
> there were much more toxic masculinity vibes \

I am very sorry to say toxic masculinity is returning. We girls really need to be getting out there and keeping down men, it's for their own good, lest they literally be flinging themselves off cliffs.

amy_petrik··on US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
>Globalization is fundamentally enabled by the US Navy and US military supremacy guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans.

>This has not been the historical Norm. It's actually historical anomaly caused by the power vacuum of world war II, and secondarily by the fact that the Cold war was between the US and maritime power and Russia, who are effectively landlocked.

>This combined with American lack of enthusiasm for maintaining this global order, likely means that globalization will come to an end.

Oh here friend, I think you forget to add a citation to all that, here's your citation so people know where the idea come from (not you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zeihan

amy_petrik··on New protein therapy shows promise as antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning
We really shouldn't be taking chemicals used on animals for veteran purposes and use them on humans too. For example, ivermectin. It's a drug meant for horses similar to another horse tranquilizer, ketamine. Can you imagine a human taking ivermectin or ketamine?!? I remember during COVID people were shooting up horse medicine and it was just really bad and upsetting, like these people were crazy. I wish Kamala had won and would have banned this horse medicines like ivermectin.

And now this whole methylene blue thing, RFK takes methylene blue. I mean, guys, this isn't even a horse veteran medicine, it's basically ink used to stain cells. I'm sorry, but everything that has an ink or pigmented color it, there is no way on earth it has a medicinal purpose. I mean. It's ink, nothing more.

amy_petrik··on Meta Leaks Part 1: Israel and Meta
>" Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters. "

>Can anyone help on this?

>Without fail, every single time it gets removed instantly.

Hello, yes, I can help! You see, dark pattern algorithms found that polarization, infuriation, etc maximizes engagement maximizes profit. Reddit specializes in the deletion / banning meta, which is yet another form of engagement maximization. Are you not frustrated? Are you not so compelled to return to reddit, to finally succeed with your post, to drink that precious updoot milkshake? --- A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

amy_petrik··on Goodbye, Six-Figure Tech Jobs. Young Coders Seek Work at Fast-Food Joints
> The only reason I have to hire a junior would be to develop them into a senior over 3-5 years, and companies are far too shortsided to think about that training pipeline.

Well and, without special arrangements, once trained for 3-5 years they'd now be more valuable and as easily scooped up by another company - if companies are short-sighted about the training pipeline, so too are employees short-sighted about how long they intend to remain somewhere

amy_petrik··on An engineer's perspective on hiring
>Does this example even compile, given that ptr is not declared anywhere?

that comment was not a comment but an interview. and you just failed it.

amy_petrik··on The Day Novartis Chose Discovery
nature of the beast, high risk early on, cheap, price goes up as derisking occurs. for startups and drugs. risk is priced in. to everything
amy_petrik··on Why Cargo Check Is So Slow
we leave poor performance stats and correction as an excercise to the user
amy_petrik··on Man-eating' screw worm turns hospital into horror show
Technically you could use ivermectin to stave off a screw worm infection in humans but lol that's silly. What kind of quack doctor would ever use HORSE TRANQUILIZER on a human lol. That's for horses not people. We need common sense pharma development of ivermectin-like drugs, but the human form ivermectin not the horse form ivermectin. Same for amoxicillin, my kids aren't going near that stuff, a freaking CAT ANTIBIOTIC, imagine using that on humans
amy_petrik··on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?
>dominicans

>no homeless

bro if everyone is homeless than nobody is

amy_petrik··on Texas politicians warn Smithsonian it must not lobby to retain its space shuttle
also worth mentioning the Smithsonian air and space museum (there are two, the one people know about on the national mall, and the less well known but way better one somewhere in virginia) -- the latter one also pulls the same stunt - free entry, expensive parking. Also see: many of our state and national parks.

Clearly these museums are either (a) underfunded (2) overspending (c) both, thusly operating in a capitalistic fashion. kind of silly since the purpose is knowledge for the people. imagine a library with free borrowing and return of books and resources, free internet, but parking at the library is $10.

amy_petrik··on It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Stagflation
We should allow anyone who wants to come to the US, to come here, to use our welfare system (housing and food are a HUMAN RIGHT). Learning a new language is also pretty damn hard and the US citizens are pretty well educated, so we ought to all learn Spanish to be hospitable neighbors to our new residents. If they don't want to work, that's fine, I myself sometimes don't feel like working and that's a human right too. If someone feels that way about work, they still ought to be able to eat, live, sleep, safely, and receive medical care.
amy_petrik··on Hubble catches sharpest image yet of 3I/ATLAS
some guy said something along the lines of "all we know is this is a space object, and it's trajectory, a 1 in 100 chance, is exactly the trajectory of AN ALIEN SPACESHIP ATTACKING EARTH!!!!"

I mean, really. Who is surprised it's an asteroids. How many times a year do we see space objects like this per year, 100 times? soooo like 1:100 chance and we see it 100 times a year. Hmmmm. Space alien scientist troll ought to study basic maths.

amy_petrik··on Flipper Zero dark web firmware bypasses rolling code security
>In theory, but since this attack has to happen at the time of pairing and leaves evidence--the key you are trying to pair doesn't work afterward-

You're assuming the goal is to discretely enter the vehicle and leave no trace. If we consider the Kia challenge [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Challenge] then the goal is to take possession of the vehicle in an immediate and opportunistic fashion. If the possession fails and the key FOB now stops working, whatever, not the thiefs care. If the possession works, now there's a sweet car to abuse. Or, in the case of a crime syndicate, a sweet car to take to the chop shop.

This type of attack is not to mention a simple relay attack. If radio waves of a home (say near the front door, where the keys are stored) are relayed to another location (the car, 30 feet away), then the exact crypto and protocol is irrelevant, the car "sees" the real life actual FOB as nearby. That's another attack used in the wild.

amy_petrik··on Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
Realmovies were the new hotness, evolution of video piracy was >vivoactive is the OG (stream only format, like 50x50 pixels, NO KEYFRAMES - no fast forward, rewind, or seeking), talking about 1995 here >realmovies - higher quality, seeking, around 1998 >DIVX (format, not the discs also at the same time) - mindblowing quality update, around 2000 >VCDs - concurrent with DIVX around 2000 >XVID - (DIVX backwards) arose as DIVX failed, 2001 >then wherever we are now, 9999 formats and VLC supports them all
amy_petrik··on Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one (1773)
He founded the frankling institute in philly and declared it shall have a giant heart, he founded the university of pennsylvania state university, he invented electricity, the very pipes series that the internet interconnected, he invented glasses (that you wear, not drinking glasses those were Jefferson's invention), he invented karate, he invented the public library, he invented volunteer firefighters, he invented doggystyle position, he invented viral books and meme books, he invented french fries, he invented swimming fins, he invented swimming snorkel, he invented the wood stove (cooking AND heat), he invented urinary catheters, he invented the cotton gin, he invented an early type of musical synthesizer called the arm-monica, he invented the odometer, he invented oil pressure gauge, he invented the limbo dance, but most of all, he definitely founded the franklin institute and it definitely wasn't named after him after the fact
amy_petrik··on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief
I disagree, this is neither an Orwellian nor an Huxelian dystopia, but a Gibsonian AI megacorp dystopia
amy_petrik··on Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain (2019) [pdf]
the type of maths my man here is saying is along the lines of saying (the average) men are taller than (the average) women, very much true, and there's signal there and there's genetics that make men on average taller... but that's nothing to say that if you pull a random man and a random woman off the street - there's no guarantee the man will be taller.

Whatever genetic signal and influence is found between groups A and groups B, A and B are so highly variable within themselves that none of this is applicable to comparing individuals beyond a perhaps slightly weighed dice.

amy_petrik··on DrawAFish.com Postmortem
This comedy bit explains the thinking of such folk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eibWo9t6pos#t=10m
amy_petrik··on The Dollar Is Dead
>"Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democracy.

capitalism is meant to be organic thing like a bacteria. a self-organizing network. one cannot legislate nature, one cannot legislate human nature. Imagine making crimes illegal and then nobody committing crimes. Imagine making it illegal to change lanes without using your turn signal.

a democracy can give an antibiotic by dr. democracy to clear the infection, that is the nature of control here .. but if it's a nasty bug.. the bug will veto the doctor

amy_petrik··on New research finds that ivermectin could help control malaria transmission
Alright let's stop toeing the propaganda line here.

MOST drugs do different things. The most extreme example, one of the "dirtiest" drugs, is benadryl aka diphenhydramine, an over the counter common drug. It basically does something to every receptor some one. Its main use is anti-histamine, but people recreationally use it (cholingergic activity). Also many other neuronal receptors.

The hypothesis here is "ivermectin works against parasites but is neutral to the human body LOL". If only. If only antibiotic or antiparastic were so simple. If only anything biological were so black and white. It's not as if one of the greatest classes of antibiotics now has a black box warning because it was found to cause people's tendons to snap suddenly. A simple pubmed search, "ivermectin" "inflammation" reveals the relevant mechanism, anti-inflammatory. In COVID it dampens the inflammation of the lungs, which is how COVID historically kills people - lungs fail and they go on a ventilator - fail from excess inflammation. So there's a viable mechanism.

The position of medicine the whole way was "we can't prove ivermectin works" which is a valid position. That position also means - "we can't show ivermectin DOESN'T work" either, which seems to be how people are running with it.

The armchair science here is, "LOL ivermectin doesn't work against viruses". Absolutely true, but not how it is meant to work. It's meant to kill the consequent inflammation. Why do we give people with upper respiratory infections steroids? Don't steroids weaken the immune system, the system meant to be clearing the infection? We give them to dampen upper respiratory inflammation, to make breathing possible, virus be damned. But it's harder to acquire steroids. Easier to acquire ivermectin. And so now a perfectly innocent drug is the scapegoat. Thankfully there are hundreds of other off-brand easily acquirable anti-inflammatories that will rise up like a hydra's head from the stigma of decapitated ivermectin

If people are spouting off strong opinions about ivermectin and can't converse competently about all that i just said, whether they are pro-ivermectin or anti-ivermectin, then they are part of the problem.

amy_petrik··on U.S. fires statistics chief after soft jobs report
>hub-center steering,

well I mean, the choices war to have a Stalinist style strongman to pull things like this, vs a Marxist style / "Committee of Public Safety" type power cabal scapegoating all things white, hetero, male, and nativist. Say what you will about Trump but he heard the people crying out while the other side was deaf.

amy_petrik··on Online Collection of Keygen Music
> I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..

Pretty straigthforward. "The scene" originated in 6502 or 68000 or what have you assembly programmers in the '80s. If you program assembly, you crack software. If you program assembly, you make cool graphics tricks to show off your fast code. And, if you program a computer in the '80s, the sound card is basically just a synthesizer chip, waveforms and shit, thus, chiptunes.

amy_petrik··on More honey bees dying, even as antibiotic use halves
Just to go off of this, carpenter bees are closely related to mason bees and are another kind of solitary (non-hive bee). I think carpenter bees are the greatest and I can't stop thinking about carpenter bees. They are a bee, which is cool, but also a lone wolf, also cool. In my wooden house I have several carpenter bee nests. My neighbor Mr. Grubb hates all my carpenter bees because he says all the holes they are making in his walls will make his house collapse, but he doesn't see it, he doesn't see carpenter bee magic. 10/10 please consider adopting some carpenter bees!!
amy_petrik··on Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels
the crux of ag soil "energy" is just nitrates and stuff. some plants like beans and lentils recharge nitrogen in the soil (hence the old native american trinity or whatever, corn, beans, and some other plant). fertilizer, that's just nitrates. poop and pee (natural fertilizer).. yup, nitrates.

Basic reason would tell us, unless we're using a nitrogen-fixing plant like beans, unless we're using fertilizer, the plant's gonna suck up nitrates from the soil, get harvested, and now there's less nitrates in the soil. Weakening the soil quality thusly. Pretty straightforward.

Biologically you could then go on to argue micronutrients along the same lines, with poop and pee more likely to contain those things, since aminals also are eurkaryotes so probably depend on some of the same

amy_petrik··on The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety
The death knell for the industry is the redefinition of the unit of American society.

The unit at the time of DaBeers smashing 1947 "Diamonds are Forever" campaign, in 1947, was the -family-. It wasn't too long after women's suffrage, and still women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, after all, birth control wouldn't come for another 20 years. Families were the operative entity messaging targeted, and the campaign was successful because the diamond was a sort of foundation for the foundation of the family, the marriage, not dissimilar in spirit from long held human societal norms of dowries and such.

The sexual and hippie revolution of the 1960s shook the whole thing up. Women didn't need families, there was birth control, women could work, a revolution carrying forth to the 1980s shark killer business woman to today where in fact many universities have become female majority. The modern unit of american society is the individual, not the unit, making the diamond an anachronistic echo of a once proud culture, now seen as a bit dated, a bit weird, a bit unsettling and paternalistic, instilling the same feelings in a person that an old Playboy magazine might.

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