jyounker

They're going wherever customers in SF are ordering them to go. I was in SF last month, and everywhere I went there Waymos skulking around, even on little side-streets on top of hills.

And don't forget that you will then be harassed every time you cross the boarder again. After all, you're one of those trouble makers.

Thank you. This is why wealth concentration and media consolidation are so poisonous to democracy.

I'm baffled that you're surprised. Trump is threatening military action against Canada. Why would you travel to an country that's threatening to invade your own?

What happens to you if you're in US and they invade Canada? You'll be an enemy national in the US. How's that going to go for you?

Why take that chance?

Context: https://comb.io/osyksW

I'd alway been prone to avoiding shoes. I started running when I was 16 (1986). During high school I'd run 10-14 miles a night about five days a week, mostly barefoot.

I didn't start regularly wearing shoes until after college. Since I started wearing shoes there has been a significant change in my foot structure. My big toes have moved outward by at least 10 degrees. Before then they were directly in-line with the bones and ligaments running down the foot.

When you walk and run barefoot your foot soles get much thicker. You learn how to respond to your feet. I tend to not get splinters or glass slivers because I can feel them before I put my full weight down. Even when something does pierce the skin, it doesn't penetrate the sole, and I can just pick up my foot and grab it out with my fingers.

One of the most interesting benefits seems to be resistance to fungal infections. If I ever start to feel itching in my feet, then I go for a long walk barefoot on concrete. It just ends.

It's interesting that you see this as being a punitive policy. Our job is producing quality systems. If our software is so bug ridden that caring for it is a punishment, then failed we've at producing quality software.

I read this as someone giving a tiny bit of background information before they move onto the real question: How do I get housing?

He has written elsewhere that he has 10 years experience.

I say this as a person who has spent the last month mostly living out a minivan: You need a laptop.

A laptop will vastly expand the number of places you can work from.

If you think that your children aren't social connections, then I have one question: What happened to you?

You are right that he needs to ditch the PC, but he needs to ditch it for a laptop.

For anyone who is still young, if you need financial aid, and if you are independent of your parents, then you can get yourself declared as financially independent from parents, so that they don't influence your financial aid status.

The author's description of how on-call works at "big tech" seems to be a complaint about a specific tech company, and the author is hastily generalizing to the rest of the industry.

His experience has nothing in common with my on-call experience working at a different "big tech" company.

Devs need to be on call at three AM so that they suffer when their software fails. This is how you align developer motivation with operational motivation.

The organization needs to incur financial penalties when the on-call staff have to respond at three AM. This aligns the organizations motivations with the operational motivations.

When managers see an on-call-incident line-item going up then they're more willing to tell product to take a hike.

The section on performance management is at least five pages long, and it covers compensation, leveling, job titles, PIPs, and firing. Perhaps you mistook the introduction to the section for the entirety of the section?

I think you might be missing a lot of history about US intervention in Latin America. A good place to start might be with the history of the United Fruit Company, particularly in Guatemala.

One of my current models for LLMs is that they're compression algorithms. They compress a large amount of training data into a set of weights. A query is a key into that compression space. Hallucinations happen when you supply a key that corresponds to something that wasn't in the training set.

If this was really about cleaning up government, or balancing the budget then it wouldn't have started with small potatoes. You would immediately cut the low hanging fruit. Say, oil industry subsidies. That would get you something like 13 billion a year in savings.

All the destruction sown by DOGE (outside of USAID) represents (favorably) 0.2% of the US budget. Including USAID it's closer to 1.3% of the US budget.

At the same time Republicans are proposing reducing revenue by 4500 billion dollars.

I appreciate the effort you've put in above, but I think you're defining both gene and genome from too narrowly. Both terms predate our understanding of the structural mechanisms of heredity.

A gene is a unit of heredity.

The genome is the sum total of all genetic information in an organism.

Both are extremely loose terms. Individual sub-fields of biology/biochemistry may use more specific variations in specific contexts, but the definitions above cover all of those meanings.

Gene and geneome are expansive terms. The genome refers to the sum total of all genetic material in an organism. Epigenenetic markers such as methylations are part of the genetic material, and are therefore part of the genome.

You seem to be disappointed in the headline because you're expecting narrower definitions.

There is only one public key that installed on the servers. That key is the same everywhere. You have a self-serve system that generates short-lived certs to users.

The USA restricts the number of positions for medical schools and residencies. It's a problem that money could solve.

> There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation

It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

> An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed

And how much should we trust unconfirmed intelligence leaks?

> For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

Part of what's different here is that the entire world shut down, and the trail went cold.

I understand the desire to blame someone, but the features of the virus are all things that have evolved in naturally in other coronaviruses. The amount of mixing that happens in a single human body in a lingering infection dwarfs what labs do in a year.

Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path: https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

I'm pretty sure that there are still people around who believe that to some degree.

managing the forests to reduce wildfires >

Notice that you said "Green trees don't easily burn." Coastal California has two seasons: green and brown. Brown is in the summer. Green is in the winer. Normally it rains in LA during December and January. It didn't rain this year, so brown continued.

Most of the fires aren't in what you'd think of as forests. It's chaparral. Low scrub, bushes, and grasses. It is mostly what you'd refer to as underbrush. The only way to "thin it out" would be to remove all the vegetation. This environment has evolved to periodically burn.

> Trees have evolved to survive fires as well.

Trees have two broad strategies for surviving fires. One is to resist fire. The quintessential example is a redwood. The other is to burn and regrow faster than anything else. The quintessential example is a blue gum. Eucalypts evolved to literally explode when they burn. The environment in The Palisades is much closer to the second than the first.

This environment is, by its nature, an environment that burns. Yes, we've needed to allow more frequent burning. Environmentalists have been arguing this for decades. The difficulties with these conversations in the US is the Republican party's actual definition of "thinning the underbrush" doesn't mean controlled burns. It means clearcutting forests.

> These fires are HOT and don't just catch houses on fire with little embers.

Yes, in fact they do spread by embers. This is why the fires jump several streets at a time. The wind blows embers, and those embers ignite further buildings before the fire front even reaches them. This is one reason why it is so hard to set up fire breaks during a high winds.

> The houses could be made fire-resistant, but making houses to be fire-resistant is going to be more expensive

Here's an example things that you can do to increase the fire survivability of your home: https://flash.org/mitigation/protect-your-eaves-soffits-vent...

> and storing more water

LA had plenty of water. It didn't have enough water pressure.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/08/los-angeles-...

Coordinating medical information is notoriously hard, particularly when the government doesn't want to acknowledge something. Let's take Florida as an example.

There was a point at the beginning of the covid pandemic where the governor was declaring that the state only hand a few cases, and there was not great need for concern. The pneumonia death rates for the previous months showed a different story. For the previous two months the death rates were 10x higher that normal. Nobody seemed to have noticed that at the state level.

Most outbreaks follow a pattern where the disease shows up in small pockets for many years before it becomes an epidemic. HIV is an example. The first HIV death in the USA happened in 1969. The oldest confirmed case in Africa is in '59. The oldest suspected death in the US is '52.

Crossover tends to happen multiple times, and there is no reason to expect otherwise with covid-19. The problem with finding these cases is that it happened in an area governed by an authoritarian ruler. Authoritarians don't want to admit that there are things out of their control, and by inclination they conceal bad news, or news that makes them look like they're less than omnipotent. They shift blame rather than dealing with problem.

The love of the lab theory in the US seems to be driven by the same desire to push the blame on someone else. It takes the focus away from the incompetent response.

It hasn't been confirmed.

Actually, my first though would be that there were other outbreaks, but we only documented the one in Atlanta because the CDC happened to be there.

We should expect that the first outbreaks documented are those that happen to be close to facilities capable of identifying and documenting them.

In the run-up to the second Iraq war there were a steady trickle of articles documenting the corruption of the intelligence process.

There have been two other spillover events from coronaviruses in the last 30 years. One of those (SARS) was from Chinese wet markets.

Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.