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gusgus01

430 karma · joined May 27, 2021

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gusgus01··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
An of EROI of 4 would probably already include the poor sunlight conditions of Ireland or would be some old numbers based off old solar technology. Plus there's contention around EROI because it does ignore the fact that renewables can be recycled and many are used past their lifetimes, and of course it ignores the negative externalities of spewing the one time use fossil fuels into the atmosphere. There are plenty of studies and papers arguing over EROI and its veracity.
gusgus01··on Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester
I mean they made claims about the efficacy and risks of the COVID vaccine without sourcing them and used verbiage like "poisoning our children" to refer to vaccinating them. I think tip of the iceberg for "problematic opinions" is a fair response.
gusgus01··on I baked a pie every day for a year
Plus bread itself is used in other recipes, like sandwiches or toasts or for mopping up sauced dishes.
gusgus01··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.

Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.

gusgus01··on The RCE that AMD won't fix
The response from the screenshot appears to be a "out of scope" response, but the blog poster used some editorial leeway and called it "wont fix/out of scope". Going forward, we can keep de-compiling and seeing if this vulnerability is still there and whether "wont fix" was a valid editorialization.

Though, by publishing this blog and getting on the HN front page, it really skews this datapoint, so we can never know if it's a valid editorialization.

Edit: Ah, someone else in this thread called out the "wont fix" vs "out of scope" after I clicked on reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910233. Sorry.

gusgus01··on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability
Russia does pretty widespread GPS jamming and spoofing both in their country as well as across the Baltics and Nordics (and others). If a phone is receiving bad GPS data when it reports sensing the tag, the tag location will reflect that bad GPS data and not reality.
gusgus01··on Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning
[flagged]
gusgus01··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
DHS training manual says not to stand in front of a vehicle, so if a bullet went through the front of a vehicle I would judge whether the situation should have happened at all. But also, depending on the angle of entry, you could be quite far to the side and still shoot through the front. Ignoring the curvature of the Earth, if the car was facing North the shooter could have been in Vancouver.

Or if the direction of entry is the most important to you, most of the bullets went through the side window, what position does that indicate? Somewhere to the side, perhaps?

Or maybe none of this is important in the case of propaganda, like I implied.

gusgus01··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
I have seen footage of ICE shooting a woman in the face and killing her. Is that propaganda?
gusgus01··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
There's an irony in being protected from having to disclose your data to avoid persecution, while at the same time working on tools that do the exact opposite to everyone else.
gusgus01··on FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
Yes, but to continue the comparison, it would be weird/aggressive/intimidating if the cops raided the neighbor's home and took the device and all hard drives on the premises to get the footage instead of the normal methods of compelling someone to provide the footage.

Especially, if as is the case here, the criminal was already behind bars.

gusgus01··on Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism centers in past decade: study
Yes, and the rest of the article discussed how they actually have revisited some of their numbers and links to their reports where you can read about their methodology and decide if it's comprehensive enough.

To quote the article: "Debates over measuring effective tax rates have been lively because measuring taxes and incomes is complex and involves judgement calls (and the political stakes are high.) We applied a simple and replicable method to a single, publicly available source of data to estimate the effective tax rates of high-income taxpayers that avoids making assumptions about grey areas like unrealized capital gains and corporate tax burdens."

gusgus01··on Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism centers in past decade: study
The average effective tax rate stayed flat from 1945-2015, but the effective tax rate for the 0.1% and 1% fell during that time period. Bottoming out around the Bush years (although the graph only goes to 2015 so another source is needed to see how the Trump tax breaks have played out). The top for the 0.1% was almost 50% and the bottom was almost 20%. Now those almosts are working in the opposite directions so you should look at the graphs.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...

Now the 1% is paying more of the overall taxes, about 40%, but that number is also skewed (and can be misleading) by the absolute massive disparity between what the top and bottom make now. Plus of course reporting and tax compliance has changed a bit, plus a whole host of other confounding factors that this 40% statistic subsumes, but it's worth mentioning because it's always brought up in these discussions.

gusgus01··on Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism
Another Fun Fact: the Appalachian mountains formed before sharks existed, the rings of Saturn existed, and before bones existed.
gusgus01··on Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
I should probably make sure my usage of Cloudflare is ready to be migrated off at a moments notice if it's this easy for Cloudflare to consider getting rid of it for a whole country. Funny enough, after a month in Italy and using my tailscale node at home out of habit, most online services assumed my home IP wanted the Italian version of every website (including Cloudflare). I wonder if that would have also included blocking me from access (if this ends up going through).
gusgus01··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
I'd actually just say that comps magically anchor prices in the constrained market we've been experiencing. As a person who was looking to buy a few times over the last few years, comps strongly affect appraisals which affects whether a company will issue a loan for the house (appraisers actually send you the houses they based their appraisal on). Plus realtors base their understanding of the market on comps when they try to help you form your offer. And of course sellers will look at comps when deciding what to ask for and whether to accept your offer.

Now this only really works in constrained markets, but intrinsically there's always a time constraints in buying (our lifetime of course, but also life events and lease renewals and er ). There's of course also selection constraints because of the aforementioned time constraints, and location, and whether new construction in happening within those.

Saying "they impact listing prices but not necessarily clearing prices." might be logically consistent, but is disconnected from the reality of the housing market.

gusgus01··on Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet
Estimates of health insurance fraud is also around $30 billion, so same order of magnitude, and considering the margins of error and the fact that they are estimates, by definition, it makes it hard to say public health insurance is more fraud ridden then private. Plus due to the inherent differences there are probably differing avenues of research and estimating possible between private and public insurance, and heck whole different forms of draining money that might affect ease of uncovering the level of fraud between private and public, which would make it have an even larger margin of error.
gusgus01··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
We've been bombing Yemen on and off since post 9/11, including a rather large attack with UK support just last year (2025). Are you thinking of the Saudi-led intervention that occurred in 2015 in Yemen as part of the Yemeni civil war? Or maybe when we built a base there in 2011 to facilitate more drones?
gusgus01··on Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost?
While I also doubt the twins ability to calculate unknown primes, I do think that the article falls prey to many of the same trappings that they are calling out Oliver Sacks for.

While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.

Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.

Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.

gusgus01··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you to prove it and not others to disprove it.

From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or any number of other explanations depending on the vote and populations.

gusgus01··on Django 6
Yeah, it's been 5 years (almost 6) since python 2.7 stopped receiving security updates, but it does still run on modern OS's.

Looking at the list, I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't more CVEs for python 2.7, but if you're only running it locally or on an intranet I could see letting it ride.

gusgus01··on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'
With the given topic, might be more accurate to describe the group of fraudsters as a group of fascists.
gusgus01··on Django 6
I just verified. You can install Python 2.7 on an up to date Windows install as well as an up to date Linux install. Python 2.7 hasn't received security updates (or really any updates) in years, but that does not mean it can't still work on an up to date OS.
gusgus01··on Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
I don't say this lightly, but I don't think you read my reply or at least didn't understand the implications, especially because you don't actually argue against anything I say. You only say generic statements about justifications and logical conclusions and conclude with assumptions about RIAA.

I stated that the open internet as a whole is the commons, not any specific person's pet project, and thus, that AI scraping (or any bulk scraping done commonly and wholesale) makes it untenable for most people to keep participating. Twitter for example has gone your preferred way, mostly requiring authentication to access. There are many arguments on HN about whether that's a good move, or even a move that others could take and expect success. And that's a huge platform. Just recently there have been front page posts on HN about bringing back personal blogs, and also posts about how personal blogs not behind the great wall of Cloudflare led to TBs of "false" traffic because of scrapers, which costs real money.

I stated I think piracy, ad block, and AI scraping to be part of the same spectrum. I think the justification for ad blocking has a much lower level of burden than the justification for AI scraping to the point you need multiple IPs and argue for whitelisting as the only option to stop it, because of the amount of effect you are having.

Much like how bandwidth has different levels of payment if you use less than 100 MB or more than 1 TB, or how delivering a package that weighs 10 lbs is way cheaper than a package that weighs 1000 lbs, or how at some level of effort times repetition it makes sense to automate something programmatically vs just doing it manually. There are of course situations where each makes sense, but the expectations can vary, and the results are not always linear depending on the inputs. This all completely ignores the social aspect of it that can add a whole new layer of complexity that has it's own logic.

Scraping (or access without ads eg ad blockiing, or outside sharing of data eg piracy) has always been complained about by those that have data that people want to scrape, eg airlines or hbo or disney, it's just that now all data is data that is being scraped absolutely non-stop to the detriment of many and the gain of few that everyone has a reason to complain. It also explains why people have differing opinions.

gusgus01··on Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
As long as we all understand that this mentality is advocating for the end of an open internet. This is the tragedy of the commons in action, the removal of a common good because the few that would take advantage of it do. Just because something is programmed to be a request and response interaction (although the use of blocklists and robots.txt and etc should reveal that it's not a simple request and response interaction), does not mean we should have to go all or nothing in ensuring it's not abused. We are still the operators of programs, it's still a social contract. If I block an IP and the same operator shows up with a different IP, it's like if I got kicked out of a bar and then came back with a fake mustache on and got confused why they think it's wrong because they don't have a members list.

A personal website is like a community cupboard or an open access water tap, people put it out there for others to enjoy but when the reseller shows up and takes it all it's no longer sustainable to provide the service.

Of course, it's all a spectrum: from monster corporations that build in the loss to their projections and participate in wholesale data collection and selling to open websites with no ads or limited ads as a sort of donation box; from a person using css/js to block ads or software to pirate for cheaper entertainment to an AI scrapper using swathes of IPs and servers to non-stop request all the data you're hosting for their own monetary gain. I have different opinions depending on where on the spectrum you are. But I do think piracy and ad blocking are on the same spectrum, and much closer to acceptable than mass AI scraping.

These responses were more about your comments about AI scraping then the piracy vs ad blocking conversation, but in my opinion the gap between them and scraping is quite large.

gusgus01··on Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask?

It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts).

Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.

gusgus01··on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
A slight non-sequitur, but I always hate when people talk about the increase in a "chance". It's extremely not useful contextually. A "4x more likely statement" can mean it changes something from a 1/1000 chance to a 4/1000 chance, or it can mean it's now a certainty if the beginning rate was a 1/4 chance. The absolute measures need to be included if you're going to use relative measures.

Sorry for not answering the question, I find it hard because there are so many differences it's hard to choose where to start and how to put it into words. To begin with one is the actions of someone in the relationship, the other is the actions of a corporation that owns one half of the relationship. There's differing expectations of behavior and power and etc.

gusgus01··on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
Yeah, the person making the claim never responded. But I was more responding to your comments, specifically:

"Just searching 'chemical imbalance debunked' yields a wide array of sources. So why ask?", and "One of the first search results for me was a paper published in Nature. Other top results were from respected institutions like the NIH and Harvard University. Hardly grifters or crazies."

Those both trivialize the process of finding sources and interpreting them. I picked my top result which was from nih.gov and gave an example of why it's hard for a lay-person to interpret journal entries because it uses field specific terms that come across as wrong or conspiratorial. Heck the paper itself references other papers on other journals that appear legitimate that argue for the chemical imbalance theory, eg an article from JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) from 1993. Just because the source has NIH in it or is in a journal does not guarantee correctness or reliability because time passes and new science is done. The link in question was of a paper from 2006, which we are now further from than the 2006 paper was from the 1993 paper.

I am not claiming to be a scientific luminary and even agree that the chemical imbalance theory that was espoused for years was probably incorrect for many issues. I was just arguing against thinking it's easy to investigate and source claims. It's much easier for the person who is making the claim to provide their sources, and preferably they have a large body of evidence behind them and are recent or even better a source that has done that leg work of reviewing it and distilling it down.

gusgus01··on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
This all started with someone asking for their sources, and the person hasn't given any except to say to Google... which means for all we know the person who then googled ended up in a situation with lots of conspiracy theories. Google famously gives personalized results to an extreme degree especially when you add in differences in search terms.

I will say if you search for "chemical imbalance debunked" as discussed, the first result for me is a paper that also says dyslexia cannot be proved to be a disorder. Which just from vibes feels really conspiratorial, even without making comments on the veracity of the academic paper.

[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1518691/]

gusgus01··on All praise to the lunch ladies
I think this girl has a better understanding of lunch time dynamics than you. It's almost an objective, base point that any food is better than no food, which is why she would advocate for serving more and also improving it. A huge emphasis on improving it.
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