kshacker

I wonder how it works for small folks like me. My brother sent me something from India and put a value on it (should not have). The government charged me a few bucks, but then fedex charged me something on top as their fees. Now if they charge me to return the fees, I will still end up losing money :) since the fedex fees were more than the government fees

It is not a big amount, but I am sure there are lots of people with similar stories.

IMO Type 2 diabetes is manageable. My father struggled with it for decades and his last few years were not great. Having those same genes, I've spent a lot of time reading and following the data. My take is that T2 is quite manageable. Even reversible, if you focus on it. "Reversible" doesn't mean a lifelong cure, but you can push out your health days by a decade.

There are all kinds of solutions that work. High Protein, Mediterranean, Atkins, or even High Carb (the "good" kind). The breakdown usually happens in the "cocktail" of foods. Our bodies are not hybrid engines; we can not switch fuels mid-stream and expect optimal health. You have to pick a poison, let's say, a protein-based diet—and stick to it. Then exercise and intermittent fasting (IF) are force multipliers. I did strict IF for a year, but I have fallen off the wagon lately, only manage 3-4 days of IF a week. The difference in how I feel is stark.

What worked for me was something called "Lalit Kapoor" diet — basically a WFPB/vegan approach with heavy green juicing and fasting. My failure was primarily due to social friction. My family eats very differently. Making a special effort for every single meal eventually made me start taking the easy way. I still follow it but I wish I could be 100% rather than 80% and which is where all diets fail.

A good engineer and / or a tenured engineer could very well be compared to Picasso in this story. A tenured engineer did not just sit their entire career drawing that painting on the napkin, they delivered other results too. But at the end of it, they are able to deliver a Picasso at a moment's notice.

Affecting chat would mean the chat answer would be different because of ads.

Btw this should be easily testable by comparing free and paid accounts

Do we think CIA/NSA/FBI know who is Satoshi? Maybe not all of them, but someone in the government has to know, no?

lol neighbor? Gunshots reclassified as car exhaust but there's a video too. Same one from last night?

This is the best ELI5 explanation I have heard. Thanks !

Is it 2-way? I guess moon see all around earth, or no?

Assuming zero time to walk into office (just saying), one day they will start scheduling meetings at 8:53 because we all do get here at 8:53.

Capital gain and losses are when you need to pay taxes. If you sold 100K of SPY that you bought for 10K actually, and bought it back (It is a gain so there is no wash sale) immediately, you need to pay taxes for $90K. This is just an exchange based on the comments I am reading.

I gave up my monitor pre-covid, a few years earlier than that actually, and have not looked back.

The only thing that does make me wonder at times is that my video in a zoom'ish app looks different than other people's video in some manner, but all that means is that maybe I need 1 backup and mirrored display for video calls, but maybe I can live with it.

Remember EU classified some companies as gatekeepers. Call them gatekeepers, monopolies, whatever - some companies are like "essential workers". They need to be available as much as essential workers were needed during covid. Which means at some point we need regulation that if you are an essential company, if you are a gatekeeper, you need to have a physical grievance office in your county if not the city, or you need to have a call center to resolve such issues. Might as well create some (local) jobs while we are solving this so I would prefer a local office.

In hindsight, I understand. But I did this 6-7 years back and no one has come after me, should I care at this point?

I do not recall, it is long time back, I looked and could not find the ban notice or the specific comment that may have been the issue. But I was banned from /india - same as you. And I think it was barely political. I do not discuss politics much on India but once in a while a comment slips, or needs to slip. And when it needs to slip, I used to know how to lean ... but like the dirty harry movie ... at this point I have forgotten which one is which, so it is more a question of am I feeling lucky to comment about a hot topic.

Nope. Started my first maybe 8-10 years back, and then added the others over a year or 2. None since. I do not use them all nowadays, but I was very active in my early reddit days.

Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts:

1. This same name - bay area / tech

2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am watching something live. It was my place to be during game of thrones last season (and sadly so)

3. indian left politics + bollywood - pretty much unused.

4. indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment, so i decided to just form personas. and maybe that's when i created health / finance / bay area accounts -- but memory fades after a long time. pretty much unused.

5. relationship advice - unused for a long time. it does not exist on my main phone, but i have all of them on my work phone so i know it exists

6. american politics. i do not participate much nowadays, with age my brain has dulled and it needs to shed load so this is used minimally, but at a point i was so active that my karma pulled me into the sweet reddit IPO. I kept only 100 shares btw

7. health - only health topics, also unused, but i go there and use that account when i need to read on a specific topic

8. finance - only investment, trading

nowadays you can hide reddit history, but earlier you could not, and my point is i do not want to 1) delete my comments, but 2) be hounded by them when i have a question about a different topic. but i did not care if people read my past 100 comments about politics when i talk about politics.

so i flip between 2-3 accounts on a daily basis, and maybe 4-5 in a good week. i have not been challenged by reddit, but if they do, i will adapt. Switching between them was much easier earlier in the Apollo days and even at reddit - they have made navigation worse for this specific use case.

Oh man, I have 8 reddit accounts (AFAIK) one for each purpose so that I am not branded based on my open comments. Anyways, one of them is abandoned because ... that's where I got started at reddit about 7-10 years back. Got hooked actually to the relationship subs. Very addictive to start with. Then I tried to play the "Indian family values" where I would advocate communication and compromise for small matters, of course I recommended "get a lawyer, divorce" once in a while, but more often than not, I would advocate reconciliation and provide practical solutions for that. And wow ... the amount of downvotes and pushback I will get on those. I just stopped using that account at one point because what is the point of discussions when either my values are totally out of sync with the mob, or the mob does not want to listen to me. Now I just read the best of redditor updates for vicious pleasure.

Good for demo but every 5 minutes? Why?

IMO it is a valid question. Our AI has not yet reached that level, our prompts have not yet reached that level of sophistication. But I do not code in assembly any more, I do not do pointer arithmetic any more, so maybe some day we get to a state where we do not write python also. It is not going to be soon despite the AI bandwagon saying so, there are too many legacy pieces that are not documented well and not easy decipherable due to context window limits. But in 10 years ...maybe prompts is all we need.

PS: Not that we do not have people working at all levels of stack today, just that each level of stack, like a discussion going on today about python's JIT compiler will be a few (dozen or hundred) specialists. Everyone else can work with prompts.

Reply to myself: This has been one of my more viral comments. Or controversial. Although I am not a karma farming kind, it was funny to see it get rated high, and then pull back more than half way. Yes it is controversial. I guess I was early, having written the same stuff at reddit an hour or 2 before it got posted here. I am not here to argue with anyone, just add a couple of comments.

1. I have heard people complain about quarterly mindset, I have started to believe into it too. Moving to 6 months does not change short term thinking, but it does change at the margins. Gives you breathing space.

2. Just because a pied piper is pushing for the change does not make it bad. At least for me. How it is executed of course will be a concern, but not who is doing it. If I supported this change yesterday, why would I flip now?

3. I am in the SRE world. I see countless people burning midnight oil generating reports ... like why is it important for yesterdays data to be available by 5 AM pacific when by the law of temporal physics, it does not arrive before midnight. 5 hours is all you get why? I know execs may be in NYC, but still ... why is it not a P2? Why is there a fire every day? The same SLA mentality carries over to quarterly reports.

Maybe it is our well engineered just in time inventory mindset. You do not have data by this time, you lose a day here, then someone else loses a day, and pretty soon you need 2 more weeks in your supply chain, or in your financial reporting chain.

4. Yes the daily numbers should roll up into financial reports. But ... we also add all the compliance and make CEO and CFO liable for mis-reporting. Which means they need to look at the numbers, ask questions, get the gaps fixed. And not just them, they will have proxies of accountants doing this work. If you have legal liability, dont we think it costs exec (and subordinate) time? How can we say just roll the database data into financial reports? Has our group of hackers never had a bug or data corruption or system crash?

This is an awesome move. They’re not saying the reports go away—just moving them to every six months. After hating how each company runs on an internal quarterly cycle, I have to welcome it despite how the change originated. Six months is still short from the perspective of perverse incentives, but if you free up one week of charade from execs every 13 weeks, maybe they can focus better.

And it’s not just execs, but the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports. Of course, internally executives should be tracking performance daily, but the quarter-end panic could lessen. If you have a bad quarter, you’re not penalized as much if the surrounding months are good.

And anyway, if there is a material adverse change the companies should be expected to disclose, like they are expected now.

Ps: I posted the same on Reddit a couple of hours back. Not AI but if you do find the account don't mention them online in the same sentence.

I remember consulting for a healthcare company in .... 2003. Very short assignment so I never got deep into it, but anyways my consulting company made me read up an in house guide about ALR and MLR (Administrative or Medical Loss Ratios). Obamacare or not, such constraints already exists. Maybe they varied by state, maybe there were other loopholes such as not supporting pre-existing conditions, but IIRC there were restraints on pure profits, so even then the same perverse incentives existed. More revenue you can get more profits.

I am going by very old memory of a few days/weeks of work, but it will be good for a medical system historian to chime in.

Yes that's the other part. Suppose I build a high performance on-device caching solution that allows computes on a drone to run 10X faster ... I am not really thinking about the drone, just the caching solution

PS: I have no knowledge of drones or caching solutions. Just saying.

We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.

But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.

I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.

It will be like Galaxy Quest - they saw the historical records, copied them and then ... still needed humans to help them :)

Yes even I posted something recently which was voted down since I mentioned from get go that I used help from AI. But the idea was mine, I wrote the first draft, and then worked with AI in 2-3 loops to get it right.

But like dang said ... I do not have time to fight this battle when I have only 10 minutes :)

Absolutely. We need to get a Hello, World equivalent of something a person should be able to do with AI before they are allowed to decide AI projects.

can this not be regulated? yellow light timing must not have changed for the last 12 months before adding cameras

Not when the tone is that tomorrow worlds going to reboot or something similar

If you look at their status page, something has been bubbling for the past week

https://status.claude.com

maybe this prods either the congress to allow permanent daylight savings or the western states to just move to standard time. but no, they will drag their feet.

what we need is some kind of critical mass which finally makes them act. Maybe a few more canadian provinces although it appears ontario is harder since they made a pact with Quebec and New York. But we need some more, maybe one major US state to break free and go to standard time.