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angstrom

1,906 karma · joined September 21, 2007

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angstrom··on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
Less insulting than Macroslop
angstrom··on Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows
My three-year-old daughter plays this with cat. It's a cross-species thing that is possibly part of mammalian brain development in origin.

The cat is less than one year old. Our 17 year old cat does not engage in this at all and hisses at the kitten for even trying to start a game of tag. This makes me wonder if that origin is more related to predator/prey.

angstrom··on More than 75,000 Kaiser workers go on strike in clash with over wages
Now do United Health
angstrom··on Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
If it wasn’t for appearances only it would be under HR or perhaps HR would report into DEI role.
angstrom··on DataDog asked OpenTelemetry contributor to kill pull request
They've given you a pull number and taken 'way your name
angstrom··on ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon
It's doing what the voice assistants were supposed to: solve problems by assisting you with more context in a conversational manner.

Text to speech queries solve the problem of my hands being broken. ChatGPT solves the problem of my brain being contextually broken and I need more context, not higher relevant search results at the bottom of the screen after the ads that I then slog through to wind up changing my query and searching again like some sadistic freemium ad driven Sisyphean task that flies in the face of innovation to help me reach a contextual nugget.

angstrom··on Goodbye, data science
Nah, not even. I have a mutation called CDH1 that happens to be pathogenic and predisposes me to a greater than 40% chance of stomach cancer. It's a dominant gene which means it has a 50% chance I've passed it onto my daughter as well.

That cancer is what's known as a Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer gene (HDGC). It just so happens that the E-cadherin control that suppresses those cancer cells is not processed properly. The diffuse part is what makes it particularly tricky. It's on the surface of the stomach epithelial cells and progresses from there. The only solution is a total gastrectomy (prophylactic if you do it early). No carcinogen necessary. It's found in populations all over the world and pathogenic lines don't even have to be related. The mutation can occur independently in the germline and is passed on. As long as you reproduce before it kills you nature really doesn't care.

Fun side fact. It also predisposes carriers to 70% chance of breast cancer. As a result many of those diagnosed are women who then find out they need to also have their stomachs removed.

angstrom··on Show HN: America – Road Trip Simulator
Have an endorsement!

"I've done 3 cross-country road trips and this captures everything I remember about Kansas excluding the IHOP in Wichita where we met an overworked waitress nearly running the entire place."

angstrom··on Show HN: America – Road Trip Simulator
If this pulled snapshots from Google street view for the car view it would be complete.
angstrom··on First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions
I recall an Amazon director 10 years ago commenting during a mixer about how having kids was a limiting factor for career progression. It wasn’t possible to be serious about your career and be a parent.
angstrom··on First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions
I climbed 40ft up the outside of a silo without a ladder. Kids do the dumbest shit.
angstrom··on Japan tested a giant turbine that generates electricity using deep ocean current
Fair, I know better, one of these days I’ll remember ;) Those are both the power numbers, not the generated numbers.
angstrom··on Japan tested a giant turbine that generates electricity using deep ocean current
Verdant Energy has been using the New York’s East river to test their design since 2012 with multiple iterations. They’ve demonstrated a triangular configuration with 100kwh production tested. They predict the configuration can do 1,050kwh. Not sure how many they would install, but the East river has a very strong tidal current. The original test turbines were damaged by the current. The gen5 were undamaged. https://www.verdantpower.com/projects

NREL makes the blades https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/articles/milestone-tidal-e...

angstrom··on Last public payphone removed from Manhattan streets
Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) was the weakest link in the land lines. Since so much traffic has moved off onto wireless I would think there's a lot of reason to use landlines as a reliable emergency line when the towers are overloaded or down. Landlines were reliable for power outages since the power was supplied separately by the phone company and the lines were buried in the ground.
angstrom··on Human genetic engineering is coming
Agree.

A lot of this "controversial" stuff isn't ie therapeutic cures for sickle cell, a single nucleotide mutation with devastating impact on quality of life.

For some like myself with CDH1(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDH1_(gene)) it means a total gastrectomy is the prophylactic solution to avoiding hereditary diffuse stomach cancer. CDH1 is a more complex mutation than sickle cell.

These technologies are capable of doing more good than harm for society in the near term. The dystopian visions are not without merit, but that's the general rule of thumb for technology in general. A loss of genetic diversity is likely the gravest concern. Some mutations have benefit ie sickle cell vs malaria, but others like CDH1 have mostly been slipping under the evolutionary radar. There are multiple variants of concern and the mutation is just independently occurring across the global human population irrespective of any special heritage. There are other cancers/maladies just like this that medicine has no good solution for. They don't noticeably impede genetic reproduction so it carries from generation to generation.

For now most sane people are not considering germ-line modification. I would expect that to require multiple generations of study to even broach the subject.

angstrom··on Decommissioned Atlas F missile silo complex for sale
Upshot: Probably still has 2 nukes pointed at it. Better to have a front row seat than be a “survivor”.
angstrom··on The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare
All coal was produced during a 50 million year window when the earth lacked a decomposition process that could breakdown lignite. Once that evolved the formation of coal around the planet halted abruptly.

There’s a possibility humans might consume that resource dooming all subsequent civilizations to what you point out.

angstrom··on Amazon Ion – A richly-typed, self-describing, hierarchical serialization format
Yeah, that's part of the trick for large listing responses to be spread across frames. Usually with some indicator like a "more flag" so the client can say "get me the next sequence by requesting the next index in the listup with the prior btree index. People do this all the time with large databases and it's a very similar use case.
angstrom··on Amazon Ion – A richly-typed, self-describing, hierarchical serialization format
And to top it off you could fit the entire message into whatever the MTU of your network supported. Cap it at 1500 bytes and subtract the overhead for the frame headers and you get an extremely tight TCP/IP sequence stream that buffers through 16MB without needing to boil the ocean for a compound command sequence.

Having been in industry only 2 decades it amuses me how many times this gets rediscovered.

angstrom··on U.S. eyes building nuclear power plants on the moon, Mars
Pick a spot that's constantly lit with sunlight?

https://www.nature.com/news/2007/071023/full/news.2007.182.h...

angstrom··on DeepFaceDrawing Generates Photorealistic Portraits from Freehand Sketches
It's interesting if it's due to a library used and worth noting.
angstrom··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
I think where it breaks down is when you have to run plugins that identify the kind of person a user is. I find that reduces the crapiness of the interactions if I can see someone is a POS without investing much time in finding that out. It's a step that shouldn't be necessary, but the faster that can be discerned the less I find myself second guessing their intent.
angstrom··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
angstrom··on Off road, but not offline: How simulation helps advance Waymo Driver
As far as I'm concerned the only number that matters is the real world mean distance between failure/incident.
angstrom··on Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
You uh...built a better mousetrap I see.
angstrom··on People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
Yes. Everytime someone says the price will just go up to match it's like some imaginary world where the one thing you can't apply supply/demand is the welfare of people. Housing is not fixed and healthcare is a function of prevention which is best served by proactive measures instead of reactive which are generally more expensive. We can actually save money by not being so inefficient with the capital in the first place.
angstrom··on Spot the Drowning Child (2015)
I could spot the person fairly easily, but that's either luck or because I can't swim, so I was looking for the person doing what I would be doing.
angstrom··on SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites, misses booster landing
Delta = 0

Alright guys. The competition will never figure out they need to stop before the rocket reaches the ground!

angstrom··on Early humans in Africa may have interbred with an extinct species: new research
I mean. Donkey+Horse = Mule, but the mule is sterile same with Tiger+Lion = Liger. I would assume they were closer relatives than that.
angstrom··on Amazon Dodges Responsibility for Unsafe Products
Even AWS's fat margins come from the comfort of having the retail site as the biggest customer least likely to leave the service.
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