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fludlight

2,342 karma · joined March 12, 2009

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fludlight··on Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera
> Maybe have something in there that is colder

Such as?

fludlight··on AI voice scams: 77% of victims lose money
> anyone who still answers phone calls from strangers

Isolation leads to paranoia.

fludlight··on Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access
You realize these companies will quiet-fire all employees residing in Utah and never hire there again? That this will place massive negative pressure on all software salaries in Utah? Possibly on all software salaries outside of deep blue states?
fludlight··on SVB insider says employees are angry with CEO
Lehman employees were also angry with their final CEO, Dick Fuld. At one point there was a now-debunked rumor that he got punched in the face at the company gym a few days after that bankruptcy.

Dick was a dick even for a big swinging dick on Wall Street and he spurned several last minute lifelines, so, at the time, people in the industry universally approved.

A fast, dramatic demise of a massive company leaves scars. Almost 15 years on, former Lehman lifers are still salty about what happened. Perceived mismanagement ("They squandered it!") and regulatory failure ("They bailed out our competitors but not us!").

The former are similar to the feelings of older engineers who worked at IBM, Intel, Palm, Yahoo, Nokia, etc during their heyday.

fludlight··on A Bank of One's Own
Banks use some of those deposits to make loans to private parties. This is, on the whole, beneficial to society so we want it to continue.

You do not want the government, which is supervised by politicians, picking who gets loans.

fludlight··on ChatGPT's API is so good and cheap, it makes most text generating AI obsolete
Why stop there?

- "Draft a class action complaint in {venue} against {bank} for using AI to robo*-approve loans. Repeat 10 times."

- "Pretend you are a {group} journalist. Write {x} words in {style} about {aspect} of robo loan approvals. Repeat 1k times."

- "Pretend you are a {party} politician. Angrily and dramatically complain about the other side oppressing {group} wrt robo loan approvals. Dress it up with {x}% lies. Repeat 100k times."

- "Pretend you are a {group} social media user. Write {x} words in {style} about {aspect} of robo loan approvals. Repeat 100M times."

The only real, thoughtful work will be the lobbyists drafting the bills, everyone else will become performers or consumers or simply drowned out in the fog of fake discourse.

* "robo-signing" mortgages was a big legal & political issue ~10yo so the lawyers will probably retain the "robo-" prefix.

fludlight··on Actuarial Life Table
Is there a site where one can add more data points like BMI, smoking, booze & other drugs, family history of horrible diseases, current medical conditions, etc?
fludlight··on Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
I'll go further: there are no poor innocent carnivores or omnivores. All are brutal killers without regard for the suffering of others. Nature is struggle, awful, awful struggle.

But humans have the capacity to be more...humane.

fludlight··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
Besides adult content, what else is considered "high risk"? What are the commissions in this space?

Also, major media outlets* are now doing bait and switch subscriptions. Does that make them high risk too?

*Bloomberg $2/mo->$35/mo after 3m

NYT $4/mo->$17/mo after 1yr

WAPO $4/mo->$10/mo after 1yr

Economist $25/qtr->$55/qtr after 1 qtr

fludlight··on A social platform where you get paid for being helpful
What is your plan for transaction costs?
fludlight··on Epic expert estimates Apple's App Store profit to be nearly 80%
And what’s epic’s margin from getting kids addicted to wasting their time (and money) on Skinner box games? Both companies are socially destructive, but epic is pure-play evil.
fludlight··on EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
Schools should be teaching kids to be confident speakers and readers from an early age.
fludlight··on 'This has never happened': San Jose State's wildfire lab makes scary discovery
Cumulative seasonal rainfall data has been collected for much longer than 8 years. This year looks very, very dry.

https://ggweather.com/seasonal_rain.htm

https://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov/awipsProducts/RNORR4RSA.php

fludlight··on 'This has never happened': San Jose State's wildfire lab makes scary discovery
Here’s a field guide on measuring fuel moisture content written by people at a California branch of the Forest Service:

https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/pdf/id...

fludlight··on Big money bought the forests. Small timber communities are paying the price
This isn't a problem of "big money", but a failure of government. They reduced taxes and, shocking(!), that led to lower tax revenues.

> Oregon lowered taxes and maintained weaker environmental protections on private forestlands than neighboring states in exchange for jobs and economic investment from the timber industry.

> Despite such concessions, the country’s top lumber-producing state has fewer forest-sector jobs per acre and collects a smaller share of logging profits than Washington or California.

> If Oregon taxed timber owners the same as its neighbors, which are also top lumber producers with many of the same companies, it would generate tens of millions of dollars more for local governments.

fludlight··on Understanding Media Through Food: 8 Metaphors
One of these days the pharmaceutical industry will create a blockbuster pill that's methadone for information withdrawal.
fludlight··on Miss a payment? Good luck moving that car (2014)
You can’t do safety without regulation.
fludlight··on The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto (1991)
...and zip code, which is very correlated with parental income, occupation, and education level
fludlight··on We should pay politicians more
The emergency exit plan for junior Republican congresspeople is to join a think tank. But(!), only if they tow the party line. It is so common that there is a name for it: wingnut welfare.

I don't think junior Democrats have such an avenue available to them, at least not to the same extent. Senior members of either party go on to join boards of big companies or become lobbyists.

fludlight··on New 10 Terapixel Image of the Night Sky Contains 1B Galaxies
You jest, but the percentage of humans have never seen the Milky Way with their naked eyes, since they live in or around some sort of city. Light pollution is so widespread that most people alive today have never experienced a truly clear sky.

Anecdotally, the first time I saw the Milky Way with my bare eyes was almost a religious experience.

fludlight··on I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)
The existence of open source software suggests there are other factors.
fludlight··on New U.S. Dietary Guidelines Reject Recommendation to Cut Sugar, Alcohol Intake
These dietary guidelines are not published by the FDA, whose goal is to protect public health, but by the USDA, whose goal is to protect farmers.

Compare their "about us" pages:

FDA:

"The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices; and by ensuring the safety of our nation's food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation."

USDA:

"We have a vision to provide economic opportunity through innovation, helping rural America to thrive; to promote agriculture production that better nourishes Americans while also helping feed others throughout the world; and to preserve our Nation's natural resources through conservation, restored forests, improved watersheds, and healthy private working lands."

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/what-we-do

https://www.usda.gov/our-agency/about-usda

fludlight··on San Mateo County Health Officer Statement on Bay Area Stay-at-Home Orders
Kid1->Kid2->Parents-of-kid2 transmission sounds like it would lead to a lot of orphans. Did it? What's the lag on the statistics on that subject?

Outcomes are also not binary (life or death). There is also the possibility of a gamut of lifelong health problems from, e.g. scarred lungs, for both kids and parents.

fludlight··on Self-host your fonts for better performance
I never understood why browsers don't ship with more fonts, especially Chrome.
fludlight··on Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook (2014)
Then:

  We don't pretend we're gay.
  We always feel that way,
  Because we're filling the world with sunshine.
  With I.B.M. machines,
Now:

"change the world with our blockchain-enabled soylent cupcake delivery and nutrition analytics platform".

fludlight··on Bay Area applicants flood program that pays them $10k to move to Tulsa
“The only what I’ll go back is in a bag”- multiple (n=5) straight, white, ex-Texan-now-Bay-Areans. This includes me. I have never met anyone from that demographic who moved to SV from TX who espoused a different view, though they clearly exist based on the move-back fantasies common in HN comments.

That said, I did know several Indians (n=4, subcontinent, not Sioux, all Hindu, not Muslim) who seemed to enjoy Texas more than the gringos. They were all highly educated like the aforementioned cohort but also really into pickup trucks. We lost touch over the years and I’m curious to see how they viewed the cultural shifts under the outgoing administration.

fludlight··on Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
Is there a legitimate laptop purpose that requires 10GB internet? If so, how niche is that purpose?
fludlight··on Raspberry Pi 400 – First Impressions
Many (most?) HDMI monitors have an audio-out jack.
fludlight··on Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency
How long does vitamin d, as produced by exposure to direct sunlight, stay in the body?
fludlight··on Yann LeCun on GPT-3
“AI” replacing the jobs of AI engineers. But we were told it was only going to do that to blue collar work!
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