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fsckboy

8,216 karma · joined November 7, 2019

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fsckboy··on Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL
>probably fingerprinting is the way to go - completely destroying the privacy of everyone involved

your doctor seeing you naked does not destroy your privacy, it's your doctor sharing the photos with everybody that does. i.e. it problem here is that intermediaries like cloudflare don't work for you, they work for somebody else or sell the data themselves.

fsckboy··on Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team
that's not a cp difference, cp is the granddaddy here

I think trailing / could be a nice way to indicate some meaningful difference, but since autocomplete always sticks it in, just feels like a bad idea to me. I might like it if directory names always had to have a trailing /, but I am less motivated by "convenience of common cases" and much more by "absolute precision/specificity/unambiguity" belt and suspenders.

(kind of unrelated but along the same lines, I toy with the idea of getting rid of . and .. visible in the filesystem, and make them only part of the syntax of paths. then you could have unambiguous multiple links to a directory: ".. is where you came from" and .. in the root is still the root, so chroot works too)

fsckboy··on I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
with a "pond sized" hole, I have read that fish eggs arrive on the feet of ducks and other waterfowl attracted to the new pond. (I have never looked up whether this is a myth)
fsckboy··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
>How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level?

if nobody has any idea what to do, talking about it is the right approach

fsckboy··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
>I don't see where any of these things you're talking about appear on this thread.

yes! including you providing citations to your beloved science

fsckboy··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
again you dodge providing citations for your "I wish" fever dreams about science

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7RgN9ijwE4 -- tptacek

fsckboy··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
saying things doesn't make them true, but studying them informs what you should think and say.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/

Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait. Recent genome-wide association studies have successfully identified inherited genome sequence differences that account for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence. These findings open new avenues for research into the causes and consequences of intelligence using genome-wide polygenic scores that aggregate the effects of thousands of genetic variants. In this Review, we highlight the latest innovations and insights from the genetics of intelligence and their applications and implications for science and society.

read what it says carefully: they've correlated genes to a small percentage of the heritability of intelligence. That means there is much more heritability than they have yet found a source for.

Life is an intelligence test. During the school years, differences in intelligence are largely the reason why some children master the curriculum more readily than other children. Differences in school performance predominantly inform prospects for further education, which in turn lead to social and economic opportunities such as occupation and income. In the world of work, intelligence matters beyond educational attainment because it involves the ability to adapt to novel challenges and tasks that describe the different levels of complexity of occupations. Intelligence also spills over into many aspects of everyday life such as the selection of romantic partners and choices about health care1. This is why intelligence — often called general cognitive ability2 — predicts educational outcomes3, occupational outcomes4,5 and health outcomes6 better than any other trait. It is also the most stable psychological trait, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.54 from age 11 years to age 90 years7. Box 1 describes what intelligence is and how it is assessed.

see also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellig...

fsckboy··on The dead economy theory
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.

an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.

you don't know what you are talking about, at all.

fsckboy··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
>Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity. Their outcomes aren't guaranteed

from your cited wikipedia page: "Equity is equality of outcome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_equity#Equity

giving somebody a hearing aid is basic decency, but will it erase all deficits, guaranteed? no.

IQ is a different page of the book, it basically says that a kid with a high IQ who needs a hearing aid is likely to do better on the SAT than a kid with a lower IQ and perfect hearing. Sadly there is no "IQ aid". But just as families with a Down Syndrome child love that child every bit as much, IQ is not a measure of worth as a human, but simply "this kid can run the cognitive 40m dash faster"

fsckboy··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
the SAT is an IQ test, btw. who would have thought that could lead to better results in cognitive fields? shocked. shocked!

Now that there is some grudgin recognition of this idea, it might do to remind people that high SAT scores on Verbal are correlated, and salient in non STEM subjects.

and that there is no known way to increase scores significantly, neither from early intervention nor sustained practice. And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation.

You could read more about the measured statistics, the "mainstream science on intelligence" and "bell curve"s, but sadly the scientists studying it have been cancelled by people who did not like the results.

fsckboy··on Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump
this is from 2010 but says that microsoft was not going to pay bug bounties https://www.computerworld.com/article/1510124/microsoft-no-m...

did they start to do that at some point, or is this a pressure (blackmail?) campaign to get the to do that? I have no love for, but rather hate for, Microsoft, so I'm not suggesting blackmail in the sense of defending them, but it's something they could claim.

this is on Microsoft's website, they don't promise much for CVD

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/cvd

fsckboy··on I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
>I wanted to try making a DIY wireless keyboard after having made a few wired ones

if anybody is interested, I want both a "both keyboard" and a "both mouse": plug them both in, they're wired, unplug them, they're wireless.

also, is there a mouse with a scrollwheel that I can set to scroll one line (of text) at a time, and is sensitive enough to do between 1 and say 20 lines at a time?

fsckboy··on The dead economy theory
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction

when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.

you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.

fsckboy··on The dead economy theory
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".

I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.

I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.

fsckboy··on The dead economy theory
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death

false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.

doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.

fsckboy··on The dead economy theory
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work

you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.

if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.

fsckboy··on Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'
you can buy S&P 500, and short the component companies you don't like, but caution, this will achieve the solvency you want, but you will likely remain irrational
fsckboy··on Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching
i hold the steering wheel with my knee all the time, and make reasonable corrections, curves on highways are pretty gentle. the key is to be disciplined about paying attention to the road ahead.
fsckboy··on New York passes pied-a-terre tax
the pied-a-terre tax is simply and perfectly "taxation without representation"

that is how it was designed, it only applies to people who are ineligible to vote in New York City, there is no way to push back.

As such, it's really quite disgusting, abuse of power motivated by pure greed, violating literally the founding democratic principle of these United States.

Our tree of liberty needs watering.

(I do not have to pay this tax, but I am a principled person)

fsckboy··on Private equity bought America's essential services
>LBOs but they aren't entirely devoid of value

LBOs are encouraged by tax law. Stop it by stop making interest on debt tax deductible. Equity is an investment and represents ownership interest, and so does debt. From the company's perspective, interest deductiblity increases profits when the company takes on debt.

Homeowner interest deductibility should also stop. Want to incentivize home ownership? Give people the money, leave the tax code alone. You know what would happen then? the rest of the people would rebel, "why are you giving these people money!?" Hiding it in the tax code is just that, hiding, and that's not healthy for an open society.

fsckboy··on Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis
I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI

>There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs)

if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market, investors are willing to gamble to try to win. If they fail, it is rich people losing money by giving jobs to many people along the way, so the population here who wants nothing more than taxing the rich, why they should embrace that.

When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers. and the same with buggy whips when cars were invented. Yes, life has some bumps but it's unavoidable and adapting to it is for the long term good. Structure your life around family and friends and don't overextend yourself (too much house, too much car) and you will be fine.

fsckboy··on The real cost of owning a home
>You've probably heard someone say something to the effect of "renting is just throwing your money away". Don't believe it. It's a glib statement that simply isn't true. There are so many hidden costs to home ownership that most people who have never owned a home don't know about.

I appreciate your saying all you said. I just want to add on, the ownership picture is even uglier. (what I'm about to say will break your brain, frequently to the point of downvoting; don't blame the messenger for the bad news you don't want to hear.)

When you buy a house or a condo apartment, you now have the right to rent it out to other people. That rent would be income to you, and you are entitled to it.

if instead you choose to live in this piece of property you just bought, it is an identical financial situation to you being the payer of the rent. Owning the property did not eliminate rent (the monthly rental value of your property) from your budget.

Now, you are paying the rent to yourself, so isn't that break-even? well, it needs to be compared to the opportunity cost of the capital you had to put down and the interest you need to pay on the mortgage.

due to many govt subsidies for homeowners, it can work out in your favor, but at the same time the stock market does offer higher returns. But more importantly, why are non-homeowners on a very large scale being expected to subsidize wealthier homeowners in the form of an unfair tax burden?

fsckboy··on The worst job interview I ever had
>Your traumata? That's a level of intrusiveness crossing into "rude" territory

OP didn't say that, he said "hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges" and then characterized it (his opinion) 'similar “trauma-baiting” questions'

asking a young person (I don't know that he was young, just saying) "what was the hardest day of your life" is a pretty standard question. Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it. Young people often don't have enough other experience to fall back on, and in a context in which you are expected to make yourself look good, the filter that is expected is to emphasize something that you were successful/resourceful at.

fsckboy··on The worst job interview I ever had
>It would be redundant and awkward to literally say “… at work” at the end of every question. It’s totally 100% the intent of the interviewer.

you are stating your opinion as fact, and I don't think there is a basis beyond your opinion, you simply don't know.

I agree with you the interviewee could have handled the questions better to not be so revealing about himself, setting boundaries the interviewer was crossing, but it might have been precisely the intent of the mental health company interviewer to elicit responses like that to stay away from emotionally wounded people.

fsckboy··on Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier
it is not easy with a quick search to ascertain the subtleties of the CLOUD Act.

the example case on wikipedia entails a US citizen storing data with Microsoft, a US company, data that Microsoft offshored from the US. So in that case, the US Courts and politicians seem on pretty firm ground to consider that data to be "obtainable" by court order; it wouldn't make sense for American vendors to to create a privacy "double Dutch sandwich" as is done with corporate income tax loopholes. Letting the law go that far would not be a threat to "Europe".

Now if Europeans were committing crimes in the US without being in the US themselves (let's say organized crime trafficking to the US or operating phone scams) that raises more interesting questions about jurisdictions, but that discussion is only productive with good knowledge of what US-European cooperation is already in place or considered "within the pale" due to shared mutual concerns

According to wikpedia, "the CLOUD Act asserts that U.S. data and communication companies must provide stored data for a customer or subscriber on any server they own and operate when requested by warrant, but provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."

It could "scare" Europeans to read that, but an important keyword is "requested by a warrant": to be scared by it, you'd need to know that US Courts are issuing warrants for Europeans who are not committing crimes in the US, which I doubt. Europeans committing crimes I already touched on.

wikipedia continues, It also provides an alternative and expedited route to MLATs through "executive agreements"; the executive branch is given the ability to enter into bi-lateral agreements with foreign countries to provide requested data related to its citizens in a streamlined manner, as long as the Attorney General, with concurrence of the Secretary of State, agree that the foreign country has sufficient protections in place to restrict access to data related to United States citizens.[8][9] The first such agreement was with the United Kingdom.[10] There is a FAQ appended to the white paper published by the U.S. Department of Justice.

This aspect of the CLOUD act should not specifically scare Europeans, they should rather be scared of their own governments cooperating in such schemes. For Europeans to want the US not to have the CLOUD act to protect them from their own governments is rational, but not something that can be discussed, it would melt European brains to say anything positive about the US.

wikipedia goes into more interesting areas for US/Euro conflict (for example, who would be covered by the GDPR for the information that the CLOUD act covers) which is interesting but I'm less equipped to discuss that than the preceding. here is the link you can chase down if you want https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act#International_reacti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act#International_reacti...

fsckboy··on IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry
they've just spun off the first quantum computer pure-play, the highest of techs, the greenest of green-fields, and your observation is "IBM doesn't do this"
fsckboy··on A few interesting modern pixel fonts
>Andrew Gleeson designed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this classic pixel font that you’d see everywhere in the 1990s on hi-fi equipment: VCRs, TVs, camcorders, etc. One of its challenges was a low baseline which resulted in all the letters with descenders pulled up

"VCR OSD Mono is a free bitmap font created by Riciery Leal, inspired by the on-screen display text of vintage VCRs. It is suitable for retro designs and supports 39 languages"

VCR OSD Mono committed no crimes, but it is a crime to make that accusation. VCR OSD Mono faithfully duplicated VCR ASCII character generation. If you want to "fix" it, what's stopping you from "fixing" it all the way to Helvetica or Times or Typewriter? Give a rationale that justifies your own changes, but don't attack others who have a rationale for theirs.

it's fine you want to make a new font. it's not fine to point fingers at people who did a more faithful job than you.

fsckboy··on Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)
auri imbres
fsckboy··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
economic efficiency does not refer to productive effiency, it refers to having prices that allow people to make optimal purchase decisions, and whether competition ensures prices will reflect costs.

so, according to you, you are not arrogant, you just legitimately know what's best for everybody else, and you are virtuous to boot?

writing tip: take all the emotionally charged words out of your prose, they don't have the effect you think they do.

fsckboy··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
again, nothing that you are talking about has anything to do with the conversation I initiated. (IBM used to be a monopoly, now they're not. How much power did they do they use? we don't need economics, we just look at their power bill, it's that much, that's the impact they have on the power grid.)

if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about, don't talk about "total sales", you want to talk about quantity demanded at the market clearing price vs the monopoly price, and the effect that has on producer surplus.

and what is bad about a monopoly in economic terms is not that they extract a higher price and profit from their smaller number of customers (those customer choose to purchase the product because it's worth it to them), it's the dead weight loss which represents unmet demand which slows the economy overall

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