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halffaday

90 karma · joined May 10, 2022

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halffaday··on The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths
Yes.

I think the opinion NYT is programming into their readers is that normal people owning the means of private transportation is bad. The particular facts or coherence of the argument is immaterial.

Just believe the opposite of whatever Pravda says and you’ll be a’ight.

halffaday··on FTX’s ownership of a U.S. bank raises questions
There is a significant effort put in by the FBI and others to arrest people who do that.
halffaday··on Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE
I’m suspicious that most of the value in these systems comes from a small fraction of the effort and many technology jobs boil down to knowing you’re a huge cost center and putting on a performance to hide that.
halffaday··on A sleuth’s guide to the coming wave of corporate fraud
Some of those who checked out never re-entered the productive economy. There seems to be a change in morale and motivation as well. The young professionals are paid way beyond their value just to get them on board.
halffaday··on NSA guidance on how to protect against software memory safety issues [pdf]
To your point, you should probably not do anything the NSA tells you to do. A spy agency’s endorsement of Rust is not to its credit.
halffaday··on Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable
I think credit deserves some blame. Schools charge the maximum they expect students to be able to pay, and when students have significant leverage through the bank, those costs rise with it. Very similar conditions in housing. I think administrative bloat is a consequence rather than a cause. Now that the faculty lounge has replaced the factory floor as a reliable voting demographic for you-know-who, I don’t think the subsidies and waste will stop anytime soon.
halffaday··on Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method
I have to applaud the subtle elegance of the sarcasm here
halffaday··on New Hampshire set to pilot voting machines that use software everyone can see
> the Python and Linux programming languages are all open-source.

Yikes

halffaday··on Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
I don’t think private investors can rake in fat subsidies off of hydropower.
halffaday··on We Just Gave $260k to Open Source Maintainers
Some of the larger ones are Armin Ronacher’s own projects…
halffaday··on Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay
I wouldn’t be shocked if it were actually just be a reboot of the same Google service proxied through Mozilla to recapture some lost market share.
halffaday··on Made in America is back, leaving US factories scrambling to find workers
Every time I get cajoled into visiting my wife’s family out there my experience is just a long stream of internal “how do you live like this?” moments.

>Why is there a carcinogen warning on the rental car?

>Am I the only one bothered that an in-laws car was broken into in his own driveway in a residential zone in the middle of the day?

>Does nobody else see there’s a guy shooting a deuce on a bus stop?

>Did I really just spend 15 minutes in line for 6oz of soft serve ice cream?

>The first thing you discuss with your middle school class is pronouns? Not, like, here are the fire escapes? Or maybe, this is what we’re going to study?

>Why do all these 40-somethings dress like teenagers?

>Well, I guess no outdoor wedding photos… too much smoke… everything a few miles away is on fire.

>I guess there are just tents at basically every intersection. Huh.

>You’re paying 3K a month to live in a 60s era cracker box? Bummer. My mortgage is less than a third of that for twice the house and five times the land.

Permanent residents seem to have this defense mechanism where they just act like it isn’t happening. I’m pretty happy with flyover county. Given how easy remote work is now, I really don’t get why so many stay. Other than programming from the paid mouths in (info/e)ntertainment beating the drum of urbanization and ‘oh it’s just the zoning’

halffaday··on Startup Builds Houses by Pumping Concrete into Inflatable Forms
Monolithic Dome has been doing this for years. Precast concrete vaults are made very efficiently and can be used for this purpose with much better quality control. Neither are popular solutions.

Housing construction is pretty cheap. The materials are mass produced on thin margins and in the US we’ve insourced the cheapest labor available on the continent to put it together. If you’re really on a budget, you can get a pre-manufactured mobile home for very little. Even living in Soviet style concrete multi-family housing, like a human factory farm, is actually an option for most of us if we’re to move. People seem to avoid these choices when they have the option though.

I find it very conspicuous that in the commentary around this issue, finance and the market distortions they create never seem to get any blame.

halffaday··on UK Plans for Three-Hour Power Blackouts in Event of Gas Shortages
Just have your mates bring you a few gallons of wind turbine.
halffaday··on House Democrats debut new bill to limit US police use of facial recognition
Get out of my mind, Kwisatz Haderach
halffaday··on Newsom just signed California pay transparency bill
Employers will just create superfluous titles so they don’t have to price-match.

My own opinion is that wages are completely unfair and never can be. Some people produce value several times their wage but it isn’t socially acceptable to pay someone with an important-sounding title minimum wage because of mediocre personal performance. It’s always safer to overpay your dead weight and underpay high-performers.

halffaday··on Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software
I like how a city engineer at little rock put it to me one time. “Having a license does not mean you have all the answers, but you are kind of responsible for them.“
halffaday··on Ask HN: I love to be alone. But this loneliness is killing me
If thou workest at that which is before thee... expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.

You’re under 30. You haven’t even hit your peak. It’s going to be OK.

halffaday··on Companies are buying large numbers of carbon offsets that don’t cut emissions
This can only be said bluntly: carbon trade schemes are and always have been about creating trillion-dollar money laundering opportunities. The problem is unspecified. Results are unmeasurable. The usual suspects are conspicuously present.
halffaday··on Don’t teach kids to fear the world
Comically negative? It’s hardly negative enough.

I’d change the link title to “Miserable, childless misanthrope and establishment propagandist chides you for concerns over your childrens’ safety and affirms that to be fashionable you must pretend not to notice the ruling strata has deliberately undermined public safety and social cohesion for decades for cynical personal financial gain and service to the progressive pseudo-religion”

Now it’s comically negative in a “it’s funny because it’s true” kind of way.

halffaday··on The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth (2021) [pdf]
I don’t see any concerns not addressed by markets. If iron becomes expensive to extract, it becomes expensive to buy, and people use it carefully. At one point unused cabins were burned down to salvage the nails.

I just don’t understand the mindset of the humble author that the rubes are too stupid to modify prices or behavior, so they will just die en masse unless some heroic NGO gets enough donations to save them.

halffaday··on The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
I think net domestic migration is negative for California, so it’s already happening.

For perspective, I live in Arkansas and my family and I live in a 2000sf single-family home on 0.5 acres. Our mortgage is <$800/mo. My income isn’t significantly different from my coastal counterparts.

halffaday··on Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
I agree. The purpose of plans is to transfer information about design intent for specific construction outcomes. Years ago, this was done by paper because there was not another efficient option. For the last few decades, this hasn’t been necessary, but we still produce paper products. Now roadway and earthwork folks tend to lean on digital models, but that’s after bidding and only for a handful of items. There’s “BIM” but nobody can actually tell you in concrete terms what that is.

I don’t know what we should be doing to deliver construction projects efficiently, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.

halffaday··on What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]
If you ever find yourself in a scenario where clean water isn’t available. Beer might be one of the few things you can drink that won’t kill you.
halffaday··on The AK-47
Blackouts were an attempt to get enough thump in a room-clearing range where 5.56mm is a little lacking. Long-term, 6.8mm seems to be the direction small arms are going: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/04/19/army-cho...
halffaday··on Tor is fighting and beating Russian censorship
What is your estimation of the odds that the US security complex is funding the means to subvert its own domestic surveillance efforts?

https://www.rt.com/usa/420219-tor-us-government-funded-bbg/

Back in the late aughts a user claimed to have found some extremely suspicious activity:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070515180447/http://jadeserpen...

Some folks get emotionally invested in tor and get really bent out of shape when you bring this up. You will hear silly arguments about open source code as if that was any kind of guarantee about what’s running on a server you can’t inspect. Or maybe according to some explainer they read, its secrecy is unbreakable, despite that correlation attacks on the protocol have been known for years.

halffaday··on Spf13 is leaving Google
I don’t know if writing software as an incidental expense to efficiently allocate capital is actually worse than writing software as an incidental expense to conduct mass surveillance to trick old and poor people into clicking ads.
halffaday··on The euro has tumbled near parity to the US dollar
I would entertain the possibility that improving or maintaining the existing standards of living is not a policy objective of most representative governments or their key donors.
halffaday··on A new trade and liberal arts school: “College of St. Joseph the Worker”
Elite universities are shameless credential laundering operations. I wouldn’t hire anybody with a degree from Harvard or Yale for anything other than sales.

A poor kid who wants to be successful is much more valuable than some legacy admission.

halffaday··on The local news crisis is deepening America's divides
There wasn’t much of a coverup. The tastemakers happened to have some convenient video to work with and used the opportunity to fabricate a myth that a petty criminal was a hero. It’s a testament to the power of media and gullible minds in great numbers.
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