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huxley

2,906 karma · joined November 5, 2010

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huxley··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
The story is way more complicated and hides where the pain points are.

The real average is closer to 25% of lumber coming from Canada but if you look at specific types like SPF which is important for framing, it’s almost evenly split between US domestic and Canada-sourced. Douglas Fir is heavily sourced from Canada. But some lumber like SYP is almost all US domestic.

And in terms of particular states, tariffing Canada sourced lumber has outsized impact because Canadian lumber has a freight advantage so getting US sourced lumber is going to drive up prices even if Canadian is avoided.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the wine story was equally complicated.

huxley··on CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
As a general rule, probably not ...

But if I had my druthers, I'd rather the CIA was "manipulating" us more often by subsidizing jazz artists rather than funnelling cash and prisoners to torture sites in El Salvador.

You dig?

huxley··on Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
Exactly what someone without nine years of 10X pelican drawing experience would say
huxley··on Tidal AI Policy
Take care. In North America some services will ban you for doing a chargeback and that can be a big problem if you have a lot of content on the service
huxley··on CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers
I think you've captured exactly what they are trying to say
huxley··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Nah, there was just more economic activity to draw people in. By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.

But you are right that it is ending, just wrong about what: it’s the high economic activity that attracted people which is disappearing thanks to the same people that hate migrants.

huxley··on The Real Story of Troy
At least not in the Iliad though it gets short mentions in the Odyssey.

Most of what we know of it appeared in non-Homeric stories and most famously (nowadays) in Virgil.

huxley··on Trump fires NSF's oversight board
Oh they’ll be replaced, by toadies and GOP Youth interns looking for a salary and resume boost
huxley··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
Given the quality of the summaries, you might want to keep them just for plausible deniability </s>
huxley··on EFF is leaving X
I personally am not interested in the bigots of previous generations making those decisions any more than I want contemporary ones to.
huxley··on EFF is leaving X
A long and storied history, the abolitionists used it pretty extensively well before it was named: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
huxley··on EFF is leaving X
You can call it white nationalism if you like but you are spouting the exact same talking points as white supremacists, you just prefer to buy it under a different brand.
huxley··on My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
The keyboard is probably the hardest bit but even then it’s more just some tedium rather than difficulty. https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
huxley··on First MacBook Neo Benchmarks Are In
Haha. I edited tv shows back in the very early days of digital non-linear editing on a Mac Quadra 840AV with 80MB of RAM and 40/80MHz 68040 processor and a RAID made up of 4 x 9GB SCSI drives, with a coprocessor board that people wouldn’t consider sufficient for editing gifs with now. We did After Effects rendering with similar gear … my first job was restarting after effects after it would crash part way through a render (go back a few frames and start again).
huxley··on Canada Gives U.S. Arms Makers the Cold Shoulder on Military Spending
There are only 15 countries worldwide with a higher defence budget than Canada so the budget is hardly tiny, it just doesn’t meet the arbitrary and obscene targets of 2/5% GDP. In actuality, Canada spends more than twice as much per capita than the world average.

The only realistic threat to Canada is the new one from Donald Trump, but it would take closer to 30% GDP to protect from that one.

huxley··on US labels SpaceX a common carrier by air, will regulate firm under railway law
Yet
huxley··on US labels SpaceX a common carrier by air, will regulate firm under railway law
First, this is taking Shotwell’s characterization at face value, that is not a great idea when dealing with a Musk corporation. Musk and his executives lie like other people breathe.

Second, one might believe in a company’s mission or be interested in working in that area without supporting or even liking the owner. Requiring you to like the owner would be disastrous for many if not most industries.

Lastly, how do you imagine unions get formed without communication among employees?

huxley··on Stop Using Face ID
Ffs, taking usable fingerprints is not that easy

Facial recognition cameras don’t use or give you the same data that FaceID’s 3D depth mapping FaceID uses, besides few cameras get close enough to practically reconstruct a useful 3D mask that could fool it.

And if you’re a corpse why would you care?

huxley··on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office
You’re not wrong that it hasn’t been passed by congress but just the proposal has already led to a massive decrease in grants. I am not as optimistic that Congress would go against admin policy
huxley··on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI
A coffee-table book? A Natural History of SVG Pelicans
huxley··on Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
John Le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” were constant companions for me on road trips (sadly no English unabridged “Foucault’s Pendulum” exists)
huxley··on Solar panels + cold = A potential problem
I think they meant “it just can’t” in the sense of “it shouldn’t under any circumstances”
huxley··on The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World
To add a little detail, Objective C was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love who formed PPI/Stepstone, with NeXT becoming a customer when Steve Naroff left Stepstone for NeXT to add support in GCC
huxley··on O3 Turns Pro
Not necessarily, you don’t need to know the answer, the fabulation might:

* give an error

* return the wrong result

* not be internally consistent with the rest of the content

* be logically impossible

* be factually impossible

* have basic errors

It is entirely possible (and quite common) to know something is wrong without knowing what a right answer is.

huxley··on Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
Totally irrelevant, Anthropic isn’t cutting off OpenAI, it is cutting off Windsurf users.
huxley··on Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer (2009)
Burroughs was also one of the great comic monologuists, in March 1975 he was asked by Harper’s Magazine (along with others including Ronald Reagan, who had just finished his last term as governor of California) to contribute an essay on the topic “When Did You Stop Wanting to be President”, it’s a funny essay but delivered best as a monologue: https://youtu.be/ir0JDok2TDE?si=W7JExK7VeMbL9Ky-
huxley··on White House budget seeks to end SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway programs
“Substantially less inhabitable than Antarctica” is true of every single place that we know of outside our planet.
huxley··on "Silent Spring" remains a rousing call to action (2022)
That is not true. DDT as a tool was preserved by the environmental movement not eliminated, it is pure propaganda to say that it has zero tolerance, it has been used as much as it has been necessary for it to be useful in public health.

The people who claim that it became a “Chemical Hitler” wanted it used excessively in areas like agriculture which would have eliminated its usefulness in reducing malaria and similar disease vectors.

huxley··on Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year
The last time I dealt with that they were still updating DUNS batch data via an FTP
huxley··on GPT-4.1 in the API
Think of 4.5 as being the lacklustre major upgrade to a software package, pick one maybe Photoshop or whatever. The 4.0 version is still available and most people are continuing to use it, then suddenly 4.0 gets a small upgrade which makes it considerably better and the vendor starts talking about how the real future is in 5.0.

I wish OpenAI had invented this but it’s not that uncommon.

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