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avalys

6,485 karma · joined May 19, 2017

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avalys··on Apple Watch Ultra 4
Why do you need it to last longer than ~20 hours?
avalys··on 25,000 Lbs. Of Chicken Products Recalled in 5 States: USDA
“They could be involved in importing”
avalys··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people.

However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.

avalys··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense.

For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.

For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.

avalys··on An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet
Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, whose malevolent schemes can nevertheless be foiled by simple character substitutions.

My favorite example of this is people self-censoring “shooter” as “sh**ter”, which I can’t help myself from always parsing as “shitter”.

“The shitter in Virginia has been apprehended”, etc.

avalys··on The Mysterious Syndrome Destroying Endurance Athletes
> A thin-faced, introspective Montanan, Wolfe had recently quit his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Helena to concentrate on running for the North Face’s global athletic team.

Well yeah, that seems more important. /s

Article is faintly ludicrous.

Extreme endurance exercise is bad for your body. Medicine has understood this for years. Marathon runners, cyclists and swimmers have one of the highest incidences of atrial fibrillation once they pass age 60. If you took a blood test right after running a marathon, doctors would think you’re having a heart attack.

> Back in Montana he started running 25, sometimes 30 hours a week, fasting to drop any extra weight off his already thin frame and beating himself up in the margins of his training logs.

> Skaggs told me after Hardrock, he took a single day off, then started training for a marathon. “Stupid-hard running,” he says, “and the symptoms just kept getting worse and worse.”

This article is about people who are damaging their bodies through extreme, unnatural exercise - and then they are surprised that they’ve damaged their bodies. This publication is blithely unaware of how ridiculous this sounds. Like reading a Reddit thread of coke addicts earnestly cheering each other on to consume more and more coke, then being disappointed when their nose disintegrates.

I suppose it’s scientifically interesting that we don’t know the cause down to the biomolecular level. But that’s not surprising either. Other than genetic disorders that can be traced to a single faulty protein, or those caused by some external causative agent like a toxin or a virus, we don’t really know the root cause of that many diseases.

avalys··on Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"
Most of these are authored by what appear to be non-native English speakers. So, the most likely explanation is a translation issue.

In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.

avalys··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!
avalys··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
What is inherently unreasonable about the idea that only people who pay into the system get a say in how the system operates?

The constitution still guarantees fundamental human rights.

Another idea - everyone is eligible to vote for the presidency and House of Representatives, but only net taxpayers can vote for the Senate.

The idea that there should be some kind of checks and balances on spending taxpayer money, where the people who actually pay the taxes have a special status, isn’t fundamentally incompatible with any principle that I support.

Obviously the current system - where we collect $5T in taxes each year and spend $7T, creating an enormous and ever-growing debt that the system is clearly not able to control - is not working.

avalys··on I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?

I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.

That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.

avalys··on I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.

If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.

When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.

avalys··on I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
avalys··on JEP 541: Deprecate the macOS/x64 Port for Removal
Apple no longer supports this platform. There is no reason to target it for new releases. Java is not abandoning MacOS.
avalys··on It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
What method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy?

What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.

avalys··on Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
Switzerland has a population of 9M people - the entire country has fewer people than the third or fourth largest US metro area - and a GDP per land area 8x that of the US. What works for Switzerland as a matter of policy, is essentially irrelevant when it comes to governing the US.
avalys··on Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
I’m referring to Doctorow’s credibility, not Williams.
avalys··on Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
“Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.”

This did not happen and I’m not aware of any evidence or allegations that it did. Williams claims that Meta indicated they would accept China’s demand to give the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data, as a condition of being allowed to operate in China. This is not the same as access to “all of Facebook”, and it didn’t happen at all because operating permission was never granted.

So, the author is a liar who distorts facts to make for a more interesting article. Don’t waste your time listening to people with no integrity.

What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?

Next time you read an article from “Pluralistic”, ask yourself, are they telling the truth or are they lying to push an agenda?

I have no particular connection to Zuck or Meta. I just find this behavior incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical.

avalys··on The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs
There are many factors driving this:

1. Fuel economy regulations that scale regressively with vehicle size, that incentivize automakers to build and market larger vehicles that are easier to hit regulatory targets.

2. Rollover and crash worthiness regulations that require thicker A-pillars and more robust roof structure.

3. Towing performance. The large pickup manufacturers are in an arms race to beat each other’s power and towing capacity numbers. This requires a large, upright grille to provide adequate cooling for a large engine.

4. Consumer demand. The idea that marketing is telling people what to buy is silly. People are spending $80k+ on massive vehicles because they like them. Simple as that. The industry puts lot of marketing effort behind vehicles that are flops. They can’t make people buy a product they don’t want.

Disclaimer: I own a huge diesel pickup, along with a Tesla Model Y and a Porsche 911. Why? They’re fun! I use the pickup to tow an RV, but it’s also just fun to drive.

I have definitely noticed the visibility problem though. Forget pedestrians, sometimes entire cars are hiding behind the A-pillar! You have to move your head to the side to clear the blind spot safely.

avalys··on US Supreme Court drug users cannot be prohibited from firearms [pdf]
Nice to see a unanimous decision on a (by most appearances) controversial topic like this.
avalys··on US Supreme Court drug users cannot be prohibited from firearms [pdf]
It was a unanimous decision.
avalys··on Ferrari Luce
The Cybertruck and Jaguar rebrand are both complete flops.

Interesting product advice you have to offer. Who do you think is the target market for expensive Italian sports cars, if not “car enthusiasts”?

avalys··on Ferrari Luce
This would have a chance as a $250k entry-level Ferrari. Not much of a chance, but a chance. At $600k? Crazy.

You could buy a V12 Ferrari at that price, if a Ferrari is what you want. Or a Rolls Royce Spectre if you want something quiet and luxurious.

avalys··on Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely
These are pretty expensive and specialized electronic warfare planes that are identical to a regular F18 in aerodynamic performance. Sucks to lose two of them for an airshow display. Isn’t that what the Blue Angels are for?
avalys··on A Boy That Cried Mythos: Verification Is Collapsing Trust in Anthropic
Am I supposed to know what a “system card” is?
avalys··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
How do you feel about the batteries in electric vehicles?

What about wearable devices like a smartwatch, headphones, smart glasses?

Should all these be consumer-replaceable without tools, regardless of the effect on the other things people value in these devices (waterproofing, size and weight, battery life, etc.)?

FYI I do not work for anything close to the consumer tech industry.

avalys··on Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
Magneto-optical drives are what I miss! The nearest thing we ever had to a durable and useable long-term storage media for normal users, as far as I know.
avalys··on What happens when a destructor throws
Don’t know who this guy is, but I’m glad I never interviewed with him. This is language-version-specific behavioral minutiae that anyone can look up in 5 minutes in the rare case it matters, and is otherwise irrelevant to engineering software at a senior level.

This article is a junior engineer’s idea of what a senior engineer should know.

avalys··on Flighty Airports
It’s not that they can’t afford it, it’s that Android users aren’t worth the investment.
avalys··on AirPods Max 2
Like others here, I don’t have this problem. I often leave them in my backpack for weeks between airplane flights, etc.
avalys··on Urea prices
Up 30% is not “nearly doubles”.
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