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clutchdude

535 karma · joined February 28, 2013

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clutchdude··on Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas
It is setting up the classic liability shift.

If you are just paying the bills and leasing the space, is it really your fault a datacenter some other entity built is sucking the water table of Levelland dry?

If I just use and don't own the data center, then how can I be held accountable for it's impact others?

clutchdude··on Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas
This is a play to say something without putting down the ink that binds them.

> We will minimize water consumption and prioritize efficient cooling technologies, including closed-loop systems.

> We will work with local communities and water providers to ensure our projects are responsibly planned around available resources

I can promise you that I'll do everything to consider the needs and wants of others.

But I won't promise to take actions that take those wants or needs into account, much less even actually consider them.

clutchdude··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
Watterson was known for being very much a stickler for the format and color of the comic.

He'd eschew printing norms for the Sunday format and more or less force papers to either print it how he wanted or not get it at all.

The response was that the papers would just cancel the whole strip rather than give in to his artistic demands.

clutchdude··on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office
Picking only the tail ends of the distribution also tells me you don't understand how the bulk of progress is made.

It isn't always Eureka moments but also a slow grinding away at assumptions to confirmations.

clutchdude··on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office
Turns out, if we feed data in and query it in the right way, we can come to charts that allow bad conclusions just like any other.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/16/lucky-charms-healthie...

clutchdude··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
There's a difference between Trump says populist things and Trump does populist things. Much like "saying things I want to hear" and "saying things I need to hear."

For your factory worker example, at exactly a year into his presidency, we've yet to hear populist points on:

- a comprehensive overhaul to address medical costs for workers

- point-by-point implementation of tariff revenue in reshoring and subsidizing of industry

- how AI is going to support manufacturing gains to the degree we can become competitive with China

clutchdude··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
Interesting you'd think I know about 1980's Hong Kong political handover of power and not know about whatever whataboutism you're spouting.

Truly remarkable.

clutchdude··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
I believe this is the correct response.

We're not going to debate the measuring stick when the stick itself is incapable of measuring the outcome.

In none of those scenarios provided did a sitting US president come close to insinuating acquisition of land by "hook or crook" - either agree with us or we take it.

The closest modern discussion that comes to mind is the PRC saying they could militarily "walk in and take the whole this afternoon" in regard to Hong Kong.

Thatcher, for all her wrongs, provided a salient response:

"There is nothing I could do to stop you, but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like."

The US has shown the world what we're like with the current administration.

clutchdude··on Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
To a lot of people, that's out of the fire and into the frying pan.
clutchdude··on Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game
How do you balance the struggle to recognize your own greatness while also making time to engage with the little people?

Also, how much time would you say it's taken you to refine your skill to get to that 1%?

clutchdude··on Claude for Chrome
I feel this disregards of scarcity economics.

Let's say we have a finite amount of cheap water units between us. After exhausting those units, the price to acquire more goes up. Each our actions use up those units.

If restrictions on water use do not exist, you can quickly use up those units and, if you can easily afford more units, which makes sense as you have enough for robots, you are not concerned with using that cheap water up.

I can't even afford to "toil" with my dishwasher now.

clutchdude··on Claude for Chrome
And therein is the problem - if your robots take up so many resources I can't have my dishwasher, is that your right? Is your right to being happy more important than others?
clutchdude··on Claude for Chrome
> If you could accomplish your task without the busywork, why wouldn’t you?

There's taking away the busywork such as hand washing every dish and instead using a dishwasher.

Then there is this where, rather than have any dishes, a cadre of robots comes by and drops a morsel of food in your mouth for every bite you take.

clutchdude··on What is going on right now?
It helps provide a launching point or springboard.

We know, going in, this isn't the final product but enough to get boilerplate and momentum.

clutchdude··on What is going on right now?
I'm seeing the worst of both worlds where a human support engineer just blindly copies and pastes whatever internal LLM spit out.
clutchdude··on Qodo CLI agent scores 71.2% on SWE-bench Verified
Also see the VW dieselgate and numerous other "gaming the system" examples.
clutchdude··on ICE's Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200M Images
> After two excruciatingly long years, likely voters are beginning to question the federal government’s handling of the pandemic,” said Chris Talgo, senior editor and research fellow at The Heartland Institute, which commissioned this poll. “First and foremost, likely voters are beginning to sour on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who seems to have lost credibility after countless flip-flops.

I mean, you kinda tipped your hand here.

clutchdude··on What you need to know about EMP weapons
Those events happened when widespread support and supply were brought into to deal with the relatively limited destruction.

This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.

The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.

Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.

clutchdude··on Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule
US states do this frequently - for example, Texas often passes laws that stipulate "cities having a population over...." such that only the major cities have laws applied to them or certain companies having over employees/users/customers over a certain amount.
clutchdude··on Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads
Ok - so here's an example I can provide input on.

I have a bunch of white oak from a tree I cut down and had milled into lumber.

I wanted to make a bunch of benches for friends/family, etc. I have the lumber so all I needed was the bench ends/legs.

I looked at the domestic options and it was going to cost. I couldn't find anyone that would sell a set of legs for under $300 a piece or wanted me to "contact them for pricing." and that's all BEFORE shipping.

Keep in mind that your local bigbox store sells an almost exact replica of the made in China bench legs with crap lumber for $99. It'd be cheaper for me to buy those, junk the lumber and use my own.

I then checked alibaba and walked through the process of getting RFQ. The competent sellers who knew what I wanted and what to do were easy to work with and quick to check the various shipping costs - the per unit price would be pretty low($20ish even with my low volume order) but shipping would be $50-$70 a per set of legs due to the weight of the cast iron. BUT, now, even with tariffs, that leg would go from $~90 to $180ish AND I'd still be well below what the domestic cost is.

If I go forward at all, I'll still probably go with the Alibaba folks. I don't see how USA manufacturers will suddenly start producing these sort of bulky intermediary consumer products anytime soon.

clutchdude··on Googler... ex-Googler
This reminds me of the demotivator with pictures of cogs.

> Just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important.

https://despair.com/cdn/shop/files/worth_6b813282-f9f8-41ab-...

clutchdude··on Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked
Lean to buying/doing a conversion vs "polished" ebike.

Buy the best lock you can afford - it should be a grinder resistant one such as hiplok or litelok.

Note that while the lock may be resistant, the thing it's locked to may be easier to cut if the thief gets frustrated and has time to steal it.

Nothing will stop someone who has the time and batteries/discs from stealing your bike.

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Ok-but you make a sweeping statement about the impact to safety and ATC numbers in the wake of an air tragedy - do you expect me to weigh this as heavily as COVID?

While I agree with the surface evaluation(you have likely lower quality initial candidates(not necessarily race induced) = more academy failures = more pressure on upstream DEV/CFC training) - you'd need to identify a few things such as why the spike didn't occur in 2014-2016 in such large #s compared to 2017, what safety data tells us about this time and how number of flight actions per controller has changed over time after this hiring change.

I find it somewhat disingenuous to consider safety and tie it back to this as you present it as the only cause while failing to mention other inputs.

This is NOT TO SAY you do not have a very valid discussion here - I just am frustrated to see it tied into modern day without hashing through other modern causes - folks who want to point a finger at "disadvantaged candidate hiring." get all the hay they need when nothing else is mentioned.

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
So are we just going to ignore COVID as an impact on the most recent staffing issues?
clutchdude··on Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019)
I agree.

Reading their alternatives, it strikes me with "ZCTA's are the worst form of small area aggregation except for all others."

Its not a great geography to use but it is quite useful if you know it's limitations and inaccuracies when you get into it. Stuff like multipolygon entities, island-polys, etc aren't fun to resolve but can be accounted for.

Add on that ZCTA's will historically follow some sort of actual boundary(rivers/highways/etc) they can tell a story in a way Census tracts can't.

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation.

You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers.

That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio.

Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the impact of having a 56% higher attrition rate!

Here's a bunch of plans to comb through for the full numbers. I don't have a spreadsheet off hand.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-11/FAA-Controll...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

Alas - my key point is this: the statement

> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes."

may have been highly attributable in 2018 timeframe but the real culprit is just as likely the 2013 sequester - I'd caution to say any one cause is the reason but rather there is a combination between a shift in applicant pool, having to deal with a slight burst in retirements, recovering from sequester and revamped training processes. Heck - maybe even not having an administrator from 2017-2018 might have caused issues.

In the cold light of 2025 with impacts from COVID still reverberating, I'd doubt hiring practices as much as any other arbitrary reason.

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Possibly but I'd argue it's far from a smoking gun.

The sequester of 2013 did a number on things and they hired to maximum capacity in the years after to make up for lost time. It stands to reason that by filling training to the max, they'd have more washouts due to lack of more attention during training.

> The sequestration in 2013 and subsequent hiring freeze resulted in the FAA not hiring any new controllers for nearly 9 months across FY 2013 and FY 2014. The effects of this disruption on the hiring pipeline, as well as the FAA Air Traffic Academy’s operations, were substantial.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Here ya go:

Academy attrition on page 38.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
You know what also happened in 2013?

> The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a hiring freeze to help blunt the sequester’s impact, but that threatens to disrupt the pipeline of new air traffic controllers needed to replace the thousands of workers eligible for retirement.

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/air-controllers-caugh...

We know that happened as well.

clutchdude··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
That is the frustrating part - the article had it's lane and just had to stick in it.

Instead, we get someone extrapolating and guessing when we have actual data from COVID on class delays/size reduction(as well as more controllers retiring earlier) coupled with lower training intensity while air traffic was depressed.

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