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fiter

642 karma · joined December 19, 2012

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fiter··on Imminent merger of a supermassive black hole binary
If you mean "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming", then that's probably the least bad way to be wrong. Because when you're wrong at least the world will be better off. Like betting against your own team: if they lose you win and if they win you don't mind losing.
fiter··on Why Galesburg has no money
In Berkeley, CA they purposefully break up the grid for cars. So a street will be passable to pedestrians and bikes but blocked by bollards for cars. This gives the cul-de-sac effect without causing terrible walkability. Of course, traditional winding suburbs can accomplish something similar by adding pedestrian walkways through cul-de-sacs.
fiter··on South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew
Since deaths lag cases, have you seen a graph that has peaks labeled on the time axis?
fiter··on We’re blaming the wrong things for San Francisco retail theft
I think what you're saying is that the person getting stolen from has a duty to surrender their property to avoid escalating. That sounds absurd to me? The person doing the stealing is the one escalating as the natural state is the original owner keeping possession of their property. "Give me your wallet." "No." -- What happens next and who is the one escalating?

I doubt a thief would stick around for the cops to arrive. And I do think everyone knows you don't pull a gun until you're ready to fire it to neutralize a threat. (A truck is probably not a theat unless it's trying to run you over.)

fiter··on We’re blaming the wrong things for San Francisco retail theft
I had to look this up: (1) Boudin (mother) agreed to a plea deal to get the felony murder result, (2) Gilbert (father) was convicted of murder (not felony murder).

This doesn't sound like a very controversial result. What part do you think is controversial?

fiter··on We’re blaming the wrong things for San Francisco retail theft
One way to solve the problem without expensive social safety nets is to have private stores that only allow entry to members. Maybe stores can band together so that a single membership grants entry to all the stores in a neighborhood. (Another way is delivery/curbside pickup which seems more likely in SF.)

Is that a better social outcome than enforcing these retail theft laws?

fiter··on We’re blaming the wrong things for San Francisco retail theft
I think the general idea is that the thief would have to escalate to physical violence in order to steal the prize. The physical violence escalation would then justify pulling out the pistol and shooting. Roughly the thief would have to escalate to mugging.
fiter··on Report on Stablecoins [pdf]
This sounds like a check that's signed electronically rather than physically.

I think another thing to note is that the other party is ASKING your bank/credit issuer to debit. The transaction can be stopped if not approved.

Normally I see the argument for crypto being that this helps merchants by avoiding charge backs, etc.

fiter··on Rent control isn’t working in Sweden
I agree with this, but the misunderstanding because no one is explicitly talking about how there is a desire to preserve rent controlled units. This means it's very hard for the econ 101 to play out.
fiter··on Rent control isn’t working in Sweden
Because of the laws around new buildings, rent control advocates have an incentive to prevent old buildings from being redeveloped: if they are redeveloped then there will be fewer rent controlled units! This does regularly play out in the politics of development in the area[0].

Then when rent controlled unit can be redeveloped, there's a desire to allocate various percentages to different income levels. This means that some units have less income for the same cost so it's hard to balance meaning fewer projects get off the ground.

Now there's even further issues about development as a right vs requiring a use permit...

So, there's a lot of contributors, but the political impact of the politics of rent control is significant.

[0] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/07/28/uc-berkeley-settleme...

fiter··on Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
You're replying to someone that specifically mentioned pollution as a reason to keep certain uses in different zones. Did they edit their comment?
fiter··on Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
With uses segregated, the "reasonable" argument does not make sense to me: infrastructure will have to be maximized because there will be big migrations of people based on normal use times like going to work. You need twice as much parking, twice as much freeway throughput.
fiter··on Undefined behavior in C is a reading error
This quote is the topic of the original article and the article goes into detail about how it believes the quote should be interpreted.
fiter··on Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom
One of the functions of the government is to educate and train its population. I think using that function could resolve the shortage or high cost of talent.
fiter··on Response from Greg Kroah-Hartman to University of Minnesota Researchers
I agree that it's terrible that people did not read before tweeting.

I believe Greg was not saying Aditya was both incompetent and malicious. Greg was saying incompetent or malicious. The incompetence stemmed from how Aditya handled his static analysis patches: seemingly no manual review and no explicit statement that the patches were from a tool (which is apparently standard procedure).

fiter··on Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out
From reading some of your comments here and on Reddit: your tone hurts your credibility.
fiter··on Chrome is deploying HTTP/3 and IETF QUIC
Is it really faster? I'm thinking if you have blocked the ads, that will be significantly faster. Google's benchmarks of course would not include how much faster HTTP3 is for pages with blocked ad content.
fiter··on Chrome is deploying HTTP/3 and IETF QUIC
Ignoring pushed ad data ia very different from never requesting those ads as far as available bandwidth and data metering are concerned.
fiter··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
If I can summarize: search warrants should not be banned but we should enforce the checks and balances that justify their existence in the first place.

I agree with that 100%. I dk believ that is orthogonal to using warrants on public surveillance. Maybe politically it might be a nice lever, though: we will authorize surveillance with this new system in place for all warrants.

fiter··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
I imagine we could come up with some way to handle this. For example, put the storage as a responsibility in the judicial branch.
fiter··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
Do you think we should ban search warrants?
fiter··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
I agree with you. If we could have this technology in the same context as warrants, I'd be happy.
fiter··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
I'm surprised that the powers-that-be are greedy enough to not involve the judicial branch. Lock the video away until there is a warrant! It's not like your right to privacy in your home or phone calls extends past a warrant.
fiter··on Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances
Better for us to actually remove those laws.
fiter··on Portland adopts landmark facial recognition ordinances
A private country club would certainly fall under this exemption, but a normal gym might not unless it's already qualifying for the private club tax exemption.
fiter··on Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’
I believe in the competitive scenario, there are no profits to cut. It's not clear to me if equity is worth anything if there are no profits to distribute and the company is not growing.

I think the point is that whether it is a "nice employer" or a union, the company will be less competitive. This strikes me as a tragedy of the commons which would have to be resolved by legislation to force all market participants to offer the same benefits. (Of course, the difficulty then are participants putside of your legal system, but taroffs could hopefully capture this detail.)

fiter··on On Trouser Pockets
I searched exactly as you said and there were many different designs. This seems to refute the introduction of the article.
fiter··on Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat
It seems that the link to part 2 is broken. Here is a working link: https://medium.com/slack-design/threads-in-slack-a-long-desi...

In their testing, it does not seem like they prototyped an N-nested (indented) threading model like on Reddit or HN. I am not surprised that it would be hard to understand how all the replies fit together without such nesting.

fiter··on Millions of Americans skipping payments as wave of defaults and evictions looms
This is already the case in Berkeley.
fiter··on San Francisco, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn
Rent control throws a wrench in this simple model. In Berkeley, the tenant almost exclusively has the right to terminate the tenancy. Expiration of lease or month-to-month term is not actually grounds for the owner to terminate the tenancy.
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