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dabraham1248

101 karma · joined June 3, 2019

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dabraham1248··on What Sun got wrong
> I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.

Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.

dabraham1248··on Young Americans have never witnessed a functioning foreign policy
To rip off my own comment from a couple of months ago:

This kind of reflexive both-sides-ism works to obfuscate the _huge_ difference in scale, _and_ the occasional, small-but-real attempts of mostly democrats to do something about it.

Now, if the democrats had more big donors than republicans, maybe they wouldn't? But that's a counterfactual that we can't know. But we do know that Bush 1 vetoed a soft money limit passed mostly by democrats, and that Clinton pushed for one, but didn't get it done.

McCain-Feingold passed the Senate with 48 out of 50 D votes (96%), and 11 of 38 R votes (29%) (and one I (100%)), the House with 198 of 210 D (94%), and house, 41 out of 217 R (19%), 1 out of 2 I (50%). Then it was a mostly R appointed Supreme Court that gutted it. Then a _more_ R appointed court that has continued to whittle it down.

For all that the Democrats don't go far enough, there is a _huge_ difference between the parties on this.

dabraham1248··on Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days
Mostly to be a pedantic devil's advocate here, I'm going to argue with something you're not saying. I've heard a _lot_ of people argue that the visit is _proof_ of corruption. You're just pointing out the possibility and I'm hoping to head off a bad path.

Anyway, if a company is being declared the source of a multi-state outbreak, that company _should_ be talking to the WH. And it's possible that some of those discussions would present evidence that _should_ result in a retraction.

For example, during heartbleed my grand-boss was in on calls with the WH (I don't work on openssl, at the time I worked on a product that _used_ openssl a couple of layers down). AIUI, official guidance changed because of those calls.

If we want to find proof of corruption, this is a place to start looking, not a place to stop.

dabraham1248··on DOJ Closing Abbott Labs Case Spurs Wider Corporate Crime Retreat
I mean, _kinda_? This kind of reflexive both-sides-ism works to obfuscate the _huge_ difference in scale, _and_ the occasional, small-but-real attempts of mostly democrats to do something about it.

Now, if the democrats had more big donors than republicans, maybe they wouldn't? But that's a counterfactual that we can't know. But we do know that Bush 1 vetoed a soft money limit passed mostly by democrats, and that Clinton pushed for one, but didn't get it done.

McCain-Feingold passed the Senate with 48 out of 50 D votes (96%), and 11 of 38 R votes (29%) (and one I (100%)), the House with 198 of 210 D (94%), and house, 41 out of 217 R (19%), 1 out of 2 I (50%). Then it was a mostly R appointed Supreme Court that gutted it. Then a _more_ R appointed court that has continued to whittle it down.

For all that the Democrats don't go far enough, there is a _huge_ difference between the parties on this.

dabraham1248··on There Is(Ǝ) – Such That (∋)
Same. I recalled pipe being used for "such that". But [per wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_mathematical_symbo...), that's specifically "set-builder notation", and the _last one_ of the twelve instances of the string "such that" on the page (though I don't know if they're ordered by usage, "alphabetically", or what).
dabraham1248··on Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
I'm going to assert that Tesla's FSD™ does not, in fact work on city streets and highways.

Or, if you want to loosely define "work", Ernst Dickmanns had self driving in the 80s, and put in on the autobahn in the 90s. I'd rather define it more tightly as "statistically at least as safe to be in _and_ to be near, as a human driver".

Tesla claims to have achieved that, but I don't believe them. That's because the data they report 1) omits a fair bit of critical info, and 2) frequently changes definitions. Both serve to make comparisons difficult. If it was clearly safe, I think they'd put effort into making the comparison transparent.

Bear in mind that Musk has been claiming "Full Self-Driving" since at least 2016, and people involved have asserted that he wasn't wrong, he was lying.

dabraham1248··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but in case you're not... From https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...

"UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges" Also "The use of faulty AI is not new for the health care industry."

dabraham1248··on Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes
8 (1). And I think that, in this context, those 8 plus the 22 US D-SIBs (2) means that there's 30.

FWIW, I _think_ I'm not just pedantically correcting a particular number. I think I'm asserting that keeping track of n organizations is roughly O(n^2), so it's not 4 times as much work to keep track of them all, but more like 56 times as much work. I think that's a real difference that requires a different approach.

I get that _you're_ not saying anything re: approach, just terminology. But I think the number matters to this subthread.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important...

dabraham1248··on Sarepta. Why?
> If people want to take non-FDA approved stuff, I don't see why regulatory and/or law enforcement should care.

Well, among other things, if anyone makes money selling colored water, it encourages others to sell colored water. It also encourages companies that are trying to sell actual drugs to skip that expensive "testing" phase. Bad money usually chases out the good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law) so it's likely that we will devolve into a system where very few drugs are adequately tested.

I'm not saying it never happens, but if a law, policy, or agency reduces big corporation profits, then it's almost always because lots of people were dying.

dabraham1248··on Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
> Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones.

I mean, I know a bunch of authors. All of them wrote because they needed to write (even the textbook authors). And almost none of them earned much of anything from it (even the textbook authors). One English prof told me that he received almost enough for his morning coffee for about three years. Then he didn't. And he drank just plain coffee.

"The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity." "Less copyright" != "piracy", but I think it has the same effect in this case (theoretically less value placed on the work of an author, but not practically).

Also, this might be coincidence, but copyright has gotten extended at the same time as most authors have received less from publishing.

All that said, I want society as a whole to be better, people to have more opportunities to grow, good ideas more of a chance to flourish. I think that overly strong copyright fights against that. And IME (ok, secondhand experience) that 99.9% of the profits added by strong copyright goes to the publishers, not the authors.

dabraham1248··on The Programmer's Brain (2021)
While I _absolutely_ agree with those sentiments, I have seen nothing like consensus on them myself (in mostly tech startups, but also fintech, and financial (yes, those are different things)). If I limit it to programmers I respect, the percentages go up, but to _maybe_ 75% tops.
dabraham1248··on More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback
I mean, I dispute your implication that he's not destroying twitter (I mean, ever since he took it private we don't have hard numbers. But that itself doesn't suggest _good_ things).

But aside from that, and the two examples above, 1. x.com (the original) 2. tesla has been killing way more people since he retroactively became a founder (there was a delay while existing products moved through the pipeline) 3. solarcity 4. optimus 5. neuralink (well, ok, it hasn't failed yet. But _I'm_ not betting on it...) 6. the Tham Luang cave rescue 7. crypto 8. his relationships with his kids / exes

TBF, spacex appears to be his baby, and it has done _much_ better than I ever thought it would. There are rumors about the existence of a whole team there preventing him from breaking things, and personally, I believe them. But I have nothing _remotely_ like proof. And even if those rumors are true, spacex appears to have been his idea, he hired the first batch of people, etc. He can definitely take loads of credit for it, even if I don't think he deserves as much of said credit as he clearly thinks he deserves.

dabraham1248··on IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points
A modern kitchenaid isn't really better than a cuisinart. Back when they were made by hobart, yes, they were amazing (and, inflation adjusted, something like three times the price).

These days they have plastic (I'm sorry "composite") gears, and do not appear to be designed to be serviced, just replaced. My ex broke three of them attempting to make bagel dough.

dabraham1248··on X sues Calif. to avoid revealing how it makes “controversial” content decisions
Umm, the bill of rights is a set of restrictions on the _federal_ government. The last one is explicitly a statement that the states can do a lot of things that the federal government _can't_.

There is the supremacy clause, but goodness knows where that would end up here. _Everything_ involving real money or power seems to make it to the supreme court these days, and who knows what the political landscape will look like by the time it does (yes, I am asserting that the supreme court has become more political than it used to be, _and_ that it used to be pretty political...).

dabraham1248··on Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement
From the _IBEW_ ( https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/2306... ):

> “We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

dabraham1248··on The worst programmer I know
Oh my! You buried the lede:

"In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them _after_ Euler."

dabraham1248··on The worst programmer I know
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh...

Note that the "Known for" section on his main page has 119 elements. But they're not all named after him.

dabraham1248··on Apple supports right-to-repair bill
While I don't think that your conclusion is 100% wrong, your argument does not support it. The first two examples are actually the way I would bet.

For the first, MS knew what was happening, and worked to make it easier. The computer manufacturers were the MS customers, not us. MS didn't do the actual loading, but they did point to how easy it was to load up, and say "Gee it would be terrible if you did this, this, and this, to load up the machine with profitable junk the user doesn't want.".

For the second, MS had somewhere between zero and negative interest in non-MS software continuing to work. We have sworn statements in court that they actively worked to make sure that 1-2-3 wouldn't run.

Your third is the statement you're trying to prove using the first two.

Again, I don't _completely_ disagree with your third statement. But the first two do _not_ support it.

Because I have known people to buy repaired cars and blame the manufacturer for issues that might be related to the repair, not the repair place. But usually IME when people buy a car out of warranty, that's been repaired a few times, they realize what they're getting into.

For phones there would, at a minimum, be a few years for most people to adjust from "it's an iPhone, no one else even _can_ repair it" to "it's used, who knows what's inside anymore". But I'm willing to bet we'd get there. But it's just a gut feeling.

dabraham1248··on Iowa School District is using ChatGPT to determine banned books
> Literally not true.

Some other comment of yours: > Obviously not true.

I think the word you're looking for is "inconceivable". And I do not think it means what you think it means.

dabraham1248··on Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
Your question reduces to "Why should my taxes pay for a public good, when I choose to have my kids not experience it directly?"

I think the answer becomes a lot clearer then.

Miss Manners has a quote something like "School taxes are what we pay to the future in hopes that it has things like nice young geriatric doctors in it."

Also, what precisely are you claiming is "secular indoctrination"? Evolution? The separation of church and state (in the US)? People who went to religious school have confidently told me that both are myths. They also told me that their school absolutely should have gotten tax funding.

dabraham1248··on Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?
Yes, after all, the reason that Texas is currently working on laws to block renewable power generation in favor of fossil fuel power is because their power grid is _too_ reliable.
dabraham1248··on New York State Senate passes prohibitions on non-competes
The first law linked in your article ( https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXXI/Ch... ) seems to me further reaching than the lesser of the two NY bills (S6748). Am I missing something here?
dabraham1248··on Regent – Electric coastal travel
It's interesting to me that you've figured out that people bring up gun control whenever you talk about this, but you haven't made the next logical leap.

Which is to say, there may be a _reason_ people bring up gun control. As you say "You can't just hand wave it away".

dabraham1248··on Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option
Well, kinda? We did that. Then we discovered that about 10% of the time it didn't actually lock anything. So we included yelling across the room into our "grab it exclusively from VSS".

Yes, we had MS support, and they looked into it, and eventually basically shrugged (I'm told. I wasn't the one working with them).

dabraham1248··on No Source Code == No Patent
> but there is no evidence that bureaucrats are capable of reliably picking the right candidate drugs

I'm not convinced that the govt bureaucrats would do a worse job than drug co bureaucrats. Current studies are poorly designed, implemented incorrectly, results are cherry-picked and gamed, p-hacking lives, ... This is an industry that can't even seem to accept pre-registration.

Also, as you say, most of these molecules come from publicly funded research. Why would the group funding the first set of research (and producing more molecules than industry) automatically be bad at the second?

In all, I'm not convinced that "Drug discovery is the easy part." If it was so easy, then why don't drug co's do it, and save the licensing fees?

dabraham1248··on The Consequences of Scalable Blockchains
Asserts a proof that "scalable" blockchains would prove P=NP
dabraham1248··on Create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you (2020)
> Was Gates the only person who went to a college with computer resources in the mid-1970s? Was Gates the only person who read the Popular Electronics article? Was Gates the only person who knew how to program in BASIC? No, no, no, no, and no.

Umm, was Bill Gates the only person whose mom had a personal chat with _the CEO of IBM_ about doing business with his company? Probably, yes. Did the IBM people forget to ask for an exclusive license as they had discussed internally? Definitely, yes.

I mean, Gates is smart, worked hard, and _did_ make the most of the luck he got. But pretending he just made better use of the _same sort of luck as everyone else_ is simply untrue.

dabraham1248··on Identity thieves bypassed Experian security to view credit reports
The theory is that, _once it becomes policy and happens a couple of times_, employees will pay attention to what their company is doing, and get out if they think they're in danger. It aligns individual morality with self interest, and will crater a company that starts sliding towards dissolution.

Thus actual enforcement becomes almost a non-issue.

I'm not sure I buy that the janitorial staff is supposed to keep up on the dark patterns in the sign up page, but that's the theory.

dabraham1248··on Honey consumption improves blood sugar and cholesterol levels, study suggests
> Also statins are terrible with worse side effects. Fix your diet, not the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests.

Whether or not to take a statin is a _complicated_ decision, based on _many_ variables. Maybe statins didn't work out in your situation, but please don't suggest things like this.

"Fix your diet" is _very_ difficult, as well as ambiguous (e.g. carnivores and vegans will both claim that their diet will save lives. Vegans have more actual data, carnivores are louder and more interested in pointing out possible mechanisms).

The best research we have suggests that statins save a _lot_ of lives. _And_ that most of the "adverse reaction to statin" effects are statistically indistinguishable from people who aren't on statins. Heck, look at the "Adverse Effects" section of the wikipedia page. Cerivastatin _did_ raise the risk of muscle issues, some of them serious. But A) not by much, and B) it's been withdrawn for > 20 years.

FWIW, I'm one of those people who eats "well", runs, lifts, meditates, used to drink white wine until the correlation was disproved,... and still had a cholesterol over 500. Until I started taking my current statin. That means I'm actually one of the comparatively few people on a statin who doesn't know that it reduces my risk (the mechanism of cholesterol regulation and/or production in me is different than in most people. We don't actually know whether statins lower my risk. We do know that statins lower my cholesterol, and that lowers risk for people with the more common mechanisms, so I'm playing the odds.).

Re: side effects, I _think_ I had increased muscle soreness after lifting when I started on statins, but I googled, and that's also a thing that just happens to people around 40. Right now I'm 50, pulling more than twice what I weigh, and still running, so it can't be _that_ big an issue. It's not like I was a professional athlete until I started taking statins. Which is a sample size of 1, but that's backed up by the studies, so...

> "not the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests"

We know that lowering "the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood tests" correlates with lowering your risk of cardiovascular issues. So actually, yes, as a rule, lower the estimated amount of cholesterol in your blood test. Statins aren't the only way, but they do a lot of good for a lot of people.

NB: I'm not affiliated with any statin producer, except that I take a statin daily. I'm also not a doctor, but I've had ridiculously high cholesterol since I was in utero, and have been trying to keep abreast of the research for about 30 years now.

dabraham1248··on Barbara Liskov, the Architect of Modern Algorithms
> Why not talk about actual Computer Science and what she did?

She was a prime mover in doubling the number of people who were allowed into the field. Personally, I think that's bigger than the LSP.

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