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djannzjkzxn

489 karma · joined January 20, 2020

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djannzjkzxn··on We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression
If you don’t mind me asking, what is hell about visual snow? I have some visual artifacts including snow but they don’t cause any suffering. They are just things I can see that don’t have any emotional significance. I don’t think about them unless my attention is drawn to them somehow. Maybe the snow is more disrupting for you than my artifacts are? Do they limit your ability to perceive the world?
djannzjkzxn··on 5G and Shannon’s Law
Total US mortgage debt and corporate debt are around the same size - roughly $15 trillion each. Mortgage and corporate bondholders have both seen principal losses in recent history. Fed support is pushing down both types of rates, and it’s not obvious to me that one is somehow unfairly pushed down more than the other.
djannzjkzxn··on 5G and Shannon’s Law
Consumers can get a mortgage with 3% interest rate.
djannzjkzxn··on The May jobs report had “misclassification error,” underreported by 3 points
It’s weird to describe it as cooking the books when they are being completely transparent about the issue that is occurring. If they wanted to cook the books all they had to do was leave out the disclaimer.
djannzjkzxn··on People try to do right by each other, no matter the motivation, study finds
If the world is divided into many super-tribes made up of millions of people (based on ethnicity, religion, etc), try to encourage mixture of those super-tribes at school, work, and socially. Then people have a maximum composition of different super-tribes within their personal 100-person tribe. This way people will be less likely to identify everyone from another super-tribe as part of the outgroup.
djannzjkzxn··on DeepFaceDrawing Generates Photorealistic Portraits from Freehand Sketches
Adding a line where you want there to be a shadow in the output seems like something you could learn from trial and error when messing with a model. It somewhat weakens the accomplishment of the paper if the sketches aren’t drawn by naive users, but it’s a lot more defensible than generating the input like you suggest.
djannzjkzxn··on Three authors retract study on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine
This was the original report: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

They claimed that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine both caused more deaths. The study claimed a huge effect size (~20% increase in death rate) and a giant sample (14888 treated, 81144 control across 671 hospitals). Despite not being a proper blinded trial, this still appeared to be strong evidence and sufficient to stop any reasonable doctor who heard of this study from giving these drugs to patients. If the evidence was fabricated, that’s a big deal.

djannzjkzxn··on S&P 500 CEO Pay by Pay Ratio
A CEO gets paid in stock, which the company later buys back with cash. Ergo, the CEO getting stock compensation reduced the amount of money available to pay workers.

GAAP requires companies to report stock compensation as an expense because it does actually move wealth around in a zero-sum fashion. It’s not a magic free money tree.

djannzjkzxn··on America has more new spaceships on the way
They can land the Falcon 9 first stage in the middle of the drone ship. Any reason they can’t locate a perfect spot on the moon and land there exactly?
djannzjkzxn··on Tesla Model 3 Drives into Overturned Truck in Apparent Autopilot Failure
The occurrence of this crash shows that the self-driving system as a whole is insufficient. I don’t see how you can be sure the problem is the camera and not the software.
djannzjkzxn··on As Qualified Immunity Takes Center Stage, More Delay from SCOTUS
Not exactly the same, but the legislature retroactively extended the statute of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits. Not a case of a newly illegal act, but a case where someone who was in the clear for a past act became liable again.
djannzjkzxn··on The nightmare that colleges face this fall
I went to a college where students were required to live on campus and banned from having a car. My experience after attending multiple of these programs is that the numbers showing the dangers of drunk driving in the college age cohort are misrepresented as measuring the risk of alcohol poisoning among college students. Students were pretty much told that going to a frat party put them in mortal danger. In reality, every college student who dies of alcohol poisoning earns a local news story, and if the incidence were anything like 15 out of 100000 college students per year, the news would be full of such stories.

I worked as an RA - it was my job to enact policies addressing various risks facing the student body - and my perception is that extreme overreaction was the norm.

djannzjkzxn··on The nightmare that colleges face this fall
Even if the risk is objectively small, I think even those rare cases lead to an extreme response when you look at the way colleges react to other small risks. It would probably kill many times more students than alcohol poisoning does, to give some comparison. Alcohol poisoning deaths are incredibly rare but colleges spend a day teaching students about it. Scale that response up proportionately and it doesn’t surprise that a college shuts down to keep a few students from dying.
djannzjkzxn··on Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”
The electoral college as a system for weighting the votes of people based on where they live is unjust in my opinion, but it’s well-understood as part of the rules of the system as it exists today. The mechanics of that system where the electors are humans who cast votes instead of just points that get tallied is a formality we could get rid of.
djannzjkzxn··on Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”
My ballot has the candidate’s name on it, not some elector. If electors conspired to change the outcome, the people would rightfully consider it nothing more than a coup, regardless of the 18th-century design of the electoral college.
djannzjkzxn··on Remote work means anyone can take your job
When people say they want to break up the big tech companies they are not talking about making them do a stock split. They are talking about dividing them into separate entities. This comment seems to conflate these two actions. Amazon or BRK could do a stock split if they thought it would raise their market cap, and it wouldn’t be a big political controversy. It would increase the number of shares but not change the corporate structure or affect any monopoly concerns.
djannzjkzxn··on Ask HN: How to prevent audio downsampling with AirPods?
On Windows, the AirPods Pro maintain two connections with the PC, one using the headset protocol and the other using the better-sounding media protocol. It seems like they both work at the same time - I’ve had good experiences on video calls where somebody is streaming background music and it sounds the way it’s supposed to.

Also the noise cancelation definitely works although it’s impossible for me to objectively judge if it’s different than how it worked in the past (seems super hard to know without a blind test given how brains habituate).

djannzjkzxn··on Ask HN: People who rejected a FAANG offer. Why?
Hard to get good liquidity from a unicorn. The description sounds like trading to me.
djannzjkzxn··on Georgism
It sounds like the argument is that voters are rational and therefore must vote for the correct level of LVT. Doesn’t the evidence show that the ideal LVT rate is zero, since that’s what they have in fact enacted?
djannzjkzxn··on Walmart Just Launched a Line of Backpacking Gear
There’s some negative sentiment toward Ozark Trail among the set of people who have seen abandoned tents as far as the eye can see at the end of music festivals. Not sure if that’s common enough to lower the value of the brand.
djannzjkzxn··on Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents
I can see how this would be true for a ramen-stage startup but it’s not true in the normal startup job market where engineers get paid six figures. Lots of good places available downtown for <2k per bedroom. If you don’t want a roommate you can get a decent small apartment for 3k or a lower-end place for 2k in other neighborhoods. You don’t need to leave the city, and you don’t save all that much by doing so anyway. Good neighborhoods outside the city are also expensive.

One good reason to leave the city would be if you prioritize renting a house with a 6000 sqft suburban lot, which you can’t find in the city. Another would be if you have kids and want a good school district.

djannzjkzxn··on Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses
The higher R0 means it spread throughout the city in two months, with a lower R0 it will take more months to reach the same level in other areas. Same devastation, it just takes longer to get there. Why is that acceptable?
djannzjkzxn··on Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses
It spread much faster in New York so we got to see the devastation it can cause. Same will eventually happen everywhere else if the measures to slow the spread are lifted. I don’t get why you’d want to exclude the data from New York when it’s our best example of what a full-scale outbreak looks like in the US.
djannzjkzxn··on 92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people
Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities, and on both sides there widely-held that are antithetical to the corporate establishment, so this narrative doesn’t seem true at all.
djannzjkzxn··on Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses
1 in 400 New Yorkers have died from this in the past 2 months. The flu doesn’t do that.
djannzjkzxn··on Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses
You could be charged with crimes (eg. arson, child endangerment, negligent homicide) depending on the scenario in which you left the burner on.
djannzjkzxn··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
For the more limited use case of “get a link from a desktop to my phone right now” I have really enjoyed using an extension on the desktop browser that pops up a QR code linking to the current tab. Then I just point my phone camera at the QR code on the monitor to open the link on my phone. I like this setup because it doesn’t require any pre-configuration to link the desktop and the phone. Your friend sitting next to you can scan the QR code too.

I’m not linking to any specific QR code extension because I haven’t audited them for privacy but it’s easy to find one that claims to generate the QR code locally.

djannzjkzxn··on Waymo has raised $3B in the last two months
This seems backwards to me. If you get hit by Google, you’ll wake up in a hospital bed full of flowers from ambulance-chasing lawyers who are salivating over the chance to represent you so they can get in on that sweet settlement money.

Hit by a human, decent chance they flee and if you track them down, it’ll probably be some uninsured drunk with a negative net worth.

djannzjkzxn··on Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business
$10/hour is a rough estimate for the after expenses earnings for Uber drivers. The gross Uber pays is more like $16/hour so that’s the number to compare if you are going to look at Uber’s all-in cost to run a fleet. Using the 16 hours/day estimate it comes out to $93k a year of driver payments saved, which seems like it should easily pay for the purchase and maintenance of a car (especially if the car lasts multiple years). Uber has access to capital so they can handle the “up front” nature of the expense. Paying people to drive a car around all day is expensive and if Uber could avoid that they would have a better business.
djannzjkzxn··on Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business
The financial benefit seems pretty clear, conditional on self-driving tech working. The capital cost of the hardware would be amortized. Let’s say a driver costs $10/hour. If the self-driving car is active for 16 hours a day it saves you $58k a year in driver wages. Then over more years that number multiplies. It seems totally realistic for self driving tech to cost five figures per vehicle. With mass production the cost of hardware would go down like it always does. I also think it makes a lot of less driver-time-inefficient routes more viable, like driving someone from the city deep into the suburbs with little chance of a return fare. This grows the addressable market.

There are also ethical, legal, and P.R. disadvantages to exploiting human drivers that seem to be getting more significant over time. Personally I’m not super optimistic about the near-term technical viability of self driving cars but it does seem to make Uber’s prospects look better to investors given some possible paths the future might take.

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