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glitcher

5,727 karma · joined May 9, 2014

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glitcher··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
Article mentions age demographics and "selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors" right at the top.

Oblivious in such a painful? I'm still open to hearing a sound argument to back that up. Your arguments are more dismissive and did not address anything specific in the article you disagreed with.

glitcher··on Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion
I felt like the 2 sentence intro at the top was a sufficient tl;dr for me at least, didn't pay attention to the quality/length of the rest.
glitcher··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Nice. I would love to model all my existing furniture and while in VR be able to move things to test different arrangements!
glitcher··on Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?

But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.

The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.

But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.

glitcher··on Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
For me it's cookies. Thinking I'm about to bite into a chocolate chip cookie only to be sorely disappointed!

Otherwise I like raisins, just fine on their own or in trail mix :)

glitcher··on Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
I read their comment as a simple “oh ok I understand now” type of clarification, not a complaint.
glitcher··on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
My mind immediately went to the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly! Is this where we’re headed?
glitcher··on AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
Oh wow, did Randall Munroe inadvertently predict the employee workload in the show Severance? :)
glitcher··on CAPTCHAs can still detect AI agents
I can relate to the cynicism, but it's also a general tool in the effort to combat bot abuse on public facing post forms that are trying to do something for real people. Many everyday devs reach for tools like this because of the deluge of garbage they get in its absence.

My take is that it's a very hard problem, so hard that even captchas by the biggest internet company can't get it right. I strongly hesitate to roll my own bot friction strategy when other tools are available. But I recognize I may have a lack of imagination here, would absolutely love to hear alternate ideas especially for small projects that may not need the heft of corporate captchas.

glitcher··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.
glitcher··on Making the news available at no cost is a victory
Growing up several decades ago it seemed like the news was more focused on reporting the facts of current events. Now I know this is naive and there have always biases, but I do miss the way it was delivered in an almost boring way without all of the additional commentary and sensationalism. But you know rose colored glasses and all that.
glitcher··on Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
I would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?
glitcher··on An interactive map of Flock Cams
In my area I'm seeing a few random ones on roadways, but mostly clusters of them in the parking lots of Home Depots, Lowes, and Wal-Marts.
glitcher··on Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals
I like the author's idea:

> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled.

The article then acknowledges this isn't a magic solution to all the problems discussed, but it's so simple and makes so much sense as a first step.

I'm no expert here and there are probably unintended consequences or other ways to game that system for profit, but even if so wouldn't that still be a better starting point?

glitcher··on So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
> I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list

Of all the controversial things out there we've become afraid to even google in order to learn more about the world around us, this one strikes me as not all that controversial.

But you're not wrong, just making a comment about how sad the world has become.

glitcher··on Aircraft Graveyard
Fun tidbit about the boneyard in Tucson, the 80's movie "Can't Buy Me Love" was set here and at one point the high school kids sneak into the boneyard to check out the planes up close. I think they used a dumpster to help climb over a brick wall to get in, but there was no such location! At the time it was surrounded only by tall chain link fences, but they wanted to make it look easier for the characters.
glitcher··on Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library
And also being the successor to Napster, the irony is thick with this quote:

"Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy"

Funny thing, I've met a lot of independent artists who don't care about piracy one bit. I have a feeling it's the record labels and large corporations, not the artists, making the biggest fuss over piracy.

glitcher··on Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks
Pneumatic burrito tubes directly into my home is the future I want.
glitcher··on Warner does a deal with Suno, Udio; what could possibly go wrong?
Oh wow, near the end of the article there's an interview clip with Suno's CEO where he uses this absolutely astounding logic to justify and prop up their AI products:

"It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music."

glitcher··on The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
Grady Hillhouse does such an amazing job of presenting engineering topics to the layperson very thoughtfully. I'm not an engineer, but I always get completely drawn into their videos even when it seems like something I would have no interest in.

I didn't know anything about the engineering surrounding the Niagara Falls region, but this latest video leaves me curious about how the two countries managed to work together in those early years, with all of the disputes and collaborations involved.

glitcher··on Baseball durations after the pitch clock
> Games are now roughly as long as they were in the early ’80s, so the powers at MLB have cut about four decades of fat from the game. And they did it without reducing the number of commercials, because they’d never do that.

The commercialization of baseball is really ruining the game for me at times.

Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space inside the stadiums now, making them look like giant versions of race cars with way too many tacky sponsor stickers. And just like race car drivers, these sponsor logos are creeping into the players' uniforms more and more each year, now placed prominently on one of the shoulders. If they made it into the jerseys I guess the hats are next to get ruined.

One of the worst examples are the led ad screens behind the batter, which sometimes in the tv broadcast they digitally overlay a different advertiser than what the folks in the stadium see, and it creates this messed up outline around the batter/catcher/ump that makes it look like the entire game is fake.

Then there are the tv announcers who are now required to attribute the replay on every exciting play to a different sponsor, like "this homerun replay is brought to you by Hefty! ... blah blah blah". They do it for homeruns, doubles, stolen bases, great catches, pitcher changes, even manager challenges!

But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen. No more announcer analysis about who is coming up to bat, or any other talking points relevant to the moment. Instead it's garbage commercial audio all the way up to the moment the pitcher is about to release the next pitch.

It's almost like they're trying to ruin the integrity of the sport. But I know the truth is simple corporate greed.

glitcher··on "None of These Books Are Obscene": Judge Strikes Down Much of FL's Book Ban Bill
Making a claim and supporting it by effectively saying "go look it up yourself" is hardly compelling. It might be accurate, or perhaps not incorrect but misleading.

This smells a lot like the old "both sides do bad stuff" argument, which often gets over applied to pretend there is no difference in magnitude of the egregiousness when two sides do similar bad stuff.

glitcher··on US utilities plot big rise in electricity rates as data centre demand booms
> Grandma's AC doesn't run 24×7

Except in this example she lives in Phoenix, so yes sometimes it absolutely does. At times the overnight low temp in the summer doesn't go below 90 degrees.

glitcher··on The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil
I'm reading "The Secret Lives of Numbers" which has some fascinating deep dives into lesser taught math history (at least in western culture), including the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in India where significant contributions to calculus were made in the 1500's well before Newton and Leibniz!
glitcher··on Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser
Good timing with these other HN entries on the front page:

Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data

Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge

Looks like it will be an alternate browser kinda day in the top stories...

glitcher··on App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)
This reminds me of aggressive technicians trying to convince me to install their bloatware on my computer in order to complete setting up internet connectivity 20+ years ago. One was completely baffled by my insistence that he was not going to be touching my computer, makes me laugh now.
glitcher··on How gophers brought Mount St. Helens back to life in one day
I had the same question. The linked paper says they used gopher enclosures:

> In 1982, an individual pocket gopher (Thomomys talpoides [Richardson]) from a nearby clearcut was placed in a 1m2 enclosure around a single L. lepidus individual for 24 hours

glitcher··on Sorry, Gas Companies – Parody Isn't Infringement (Even If It Creeps You Out)
From my understanding parody is not defamation.
glitcher··on Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]
And specifically with respect to the law, breaking a law and claiming you didn't know you did anything wrong as an individual is not considered a valid defense in our justice system. This same type of standard should apply even more to trained law enforcement, not less, otherwise it becomes a double standard.
glitcher··on Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts
Similarly as Lewis Black likes to point out, we're one of only 2 countries that advertises drugs to ourselves.
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