coryrc

Why is it a sin in America to take advantage of economies of scale for cooking but not for anything else?

First, cough syrup ID checking is not about deaths, as nearly none are associated with dextromethorphan abuse (17 from 2000-2010, and most not from OTC). But an estimated 980 deaths/year from acetaminophen abuse: https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-behind...

So that's a great example: harm adults because young people have access to something which is hardly dangerous, but set them free with multi-ton killing machines once they turn 16 years old and let them buy an actually-deadly medicine with no restrictions.

Regulation which says "adults should easily be able to enable client-side child protection settings on retail devices" would be fine. It's not okay for government to make it necessary for LLM providers to verify my identity.

Essentially no one in the USA fails to get a license if they try for one. There's no ongoing competence testing. Washington State recently failed to advance legislation to make the fourth DUI have a jail sentence because it would be too expensive imprisoning that many people.

> Cars are dangerous.

You can kill yourself with a kitchen knife in your own kitchen. Should be "heavily regulate" that too? How about we have remotely-locked drawers and medicine bottles and you have to talk with a government shrink before opening?

> Comparing anything to a car ... means it should be tightly regulated and controlled

Popsicles come in many colors, just like cars! Regulate the popsicles!

AI is, so far, like having a bottle of acetaminophen. Deadly if used incorrectly. It should be easy to lock away from children. It is not for the government to get in the way of how adults want to use it.

>> Cars harm kids

> This is tobacco-industry rhetoric. The relevant facts are frequency, magnitude and novelty

Cars are literally the number one killer of children 0-14 in the United States. More than cancer, more than guns, more than the next 7 reasons combined.

> But AI companies are uniquely defensive, dismissive and negligent when it comes to harming kids.

You should see how people feel if you ask them to give up some street parking to make streets safer for kids and everybody else! Jesus Christ himself gave them the spot in front of their house and fuck you for suggesting they park across the street or on their own property!

> whereas O2 is 20% of the air.

The goal of a gasoline engine's sensor is to accurately and precisely measure the point where O2 concentration reaches zero, so ambient air levels are not quite as relevant.

China's coal use alone is more than all energy sources in the USA combined. Something like 70% of all energy, then oil, then about 10% renewable. USA is also near 90% fossil fuel but morally natural gas and oil, coal on the way out while China still opening gigawatts of plants yearly.

You mean boomers have been voting against any and every infrastructure investment besides more roads while they lived off the investments of their parents and grandparents? Worse generation in American history.

I think GP's point is that winter heating can shift to nuclear- and wind-powered instead of mostly burning fossil fuels.

> Personally I'm a fan of the simple improvements

Stockholm Syndrome. Because our government is so paralyzed and ineffective, we can't even dream big anymore.

We don't either. It's a Democratic Republic. Our electeds could do their job.

> because we have an almost infinite number of examples in the US of it doing it.

... before the 1970s. Nothing this millennium, or even the last quarter of the 20th century. It's been, at minimum, 50 years since we've cost-effectively built anything at scale.

And another, our recidivism rates are much higher than comparable countries. Is that how we do a "good job" helping people?

Our public transportation infrastructure literally cost 10x per mile than France or Hong Kong. That's not waste to you? For what California has spent/is spending on high-speed rail from nowhere to nowhere, China blanketed their country?

Notice you also left out police. How's our spending working there?

Yes, cancer should be number one. Automobiles should be number 8 or lower, both because we can so something about it and because it's unnecessary. Cancer is a product of living and we're already devoting many resources to it.

Thanks, I think you should put that up if it isn't, or at least link from About page if it is.

"If you're talking about the various services it offers like imap/webdav, I'm using well established golang libraries"

That's exactly what I'd hope to see said somewhere as a naive person. Maybe security people would say "that's only 50% of the attack surface!!!" but I'm not one so it sounds good to me.

I went looking around, but I couldn't find why you're making tinycld, and whether I could expect it to keep going as a project in the future.

I expect I could find whether you're using hardened server implementations or reimplementing, but if it's the former, you should advertise that, or if the latter, you shouldn't.

Correct.

- software flow control user

Automobiles are literally the number one killer of children 0-14 in the USA.

That's a misconception. They are poor insulators, but they moderate temperature well. If the temperature outside is cold but sunny, the walls absorb heat from the sun during the day and retain it during the night. However, when you require heat input (cloudy days, average temperature less than desired interior temperature), the stone conducts it very well to the outside and you need much more power input than even crappy US stick-built houses with R-15 insulation. It's just that Southern Europe's climate is usually so mild it doesn't seem like it's more comfortable, but this situation demonstrates its inferiority well.

> I have friends who did things like take a gap year to travel the world or met their spouses on nights I stayed in to study, and some evenings when browsing HN I feel very sad that I wasted my 20s on a society that does not care about me.

I'm glad you have finally recognized the problem.

Stop living for your idea of others and start living for yourself.

They aren't hard to drive on the freeway. They are hard to drive without running over people in neighborhoods. The leading cause of death in children 0-14 is automobiles. https://www.kidsandcars.org/frontovers/media-resources

You can drive those off-road away from where people live, or you can get properly trained and insured for driving such a dangerous vehicle where people outside vehicles will be present.

They always are.

We're not allowed to flood valleys anymore, so pumped storage is not cheap. Maybe that would change if there was a climate emergency cough

They could mass replicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community and drop country-wide fossil fuel consumption about 1/3 and save money, but there's no big company pushing that.

It probably can. The game is pretty lightweight.

I see both points of view. In capitalism, it is government's job to compensate for negative externalities. Government restricted common people from making voluntary contracts with antibiotic manufacturers because of antibiotic resistance, but that creates a new negative externality of preventing people from healing themselves cost-effectively. So government should be providing the doctors for nearly-free so people can still get treatment.

Because biological slip rings don't scale, not because it wouldn't be more efficient on an energy standpoint.

The way you asked that question is wholly inappropriate for a public forum and also rude.

That's not true, it absolutely depends on effect size. I'll give you an obvious example: large lead acetate infusions. You'll notice pretty fast.

First, you can trivially store years of nuclear fuel, which you can't with fossil fuels.

Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".

Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.