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laurencerowe

2,840 karma · joined January 2, 2013

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laurencerowe··on Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend
Bun’s BFFI is very similar to Deno’s FFI. I believe the approach originated in LuaJIT.
laurencerowe··on Find the flattest route between any two points in SF
The specific route suggested varies a bit depending on where you move the starting point. Closer to Sanchez St it does a better (albeit not perfect) job than google maps.

I guess as a cyclist in SF I’m not necessarily looking for the routing to be perfect but I am looking to see the information that matters so I can understand how appropriate the suggested routing is.

Agree that e-bike and acoustic bike riders probably do have slightly different sets of preferences. A big one for me is that I’m ok with 4 way stops every block on slow streets on an e-bike but on an acoustic bike they’d drive me nuts.

laurencerowe··on Find the flattest route between any two points in SF
This seems to have the same issue I saw with Google Maps where it directed me along 29th St from near Mission Bernal Safeway to Diamond Heights Safeway. This includes a 22.7% grade! It's much faster and easier (at least on my cargo e-bike) to take the longer way around up Clipper St (12% grade).

The bug seems to be apparent when you set the end point at Duncan & Diamond Heights Blvd and the start point directly north along Clipper.

This route seems to maybe save 1 ft of climbing but goes up a 23% grade.

https://flattensf.com/#t~-122.43968~37.74865~-122.44028~37.7...

Half a block up the street it takes the sensible route with only a 13% grade. (Between the two different starting points is 41ft of climbing.)

https://flattensf.com/#t~-122.44087~37.74864~-122.44028~37.7...

laurencerowe··on Find the flattest route between any two points in SF
Very Cool. Thanks for making it!

I've checked out a few bike mapping apps recently and one feature I found absolutely invaluable was grade indications like http://hillmapper.com (which unfortunately seems unmaintained.)

Google Maps elevation diagrams comparing the various selected routes are nice but they do not do a good job of highlighting extreme grades. I feel like you actually want to graph the change in elevation rather than the elevation itself.

Using a route I cycled the other day (near Mission Bernal Safeway to near Diamond Heights Safeway). I think the routing may overweight bike lanes too much. For instance it will go four blocks by shared street and bike lane to avoid the two blocks on Clipper between Sanchez and Castro which are not a bike lane.

On my heavy cargo e-bike I've found there is quite a non-linear difference as the grade increases. 12% and I'll work a bit but be fine. 22% (the route Google Maps sent me...) and I'll all but collapse after a block.

laurencerowe··on Linux containers in 500 lines of code
As I understand it Kata supports multiple VMM backends, Firecracker, QEmu, Cloud Hypervisor, and their own Dragonball. Except QEmu, I believe those are all built on crates in the rust-vmm ecosystem, each making slightly different tradeoffs.
laurencerowe··on Sustainable energy without the hot air (2008)
The 'Has It Held Up?' section seems a very good entry point. https://withouthotair.org/has-it-held-up
laurencerowe··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Smoking kills several times more people per year than alcohol use. The CDC attributes 480k to smoking vs 178k from alcohol. People smoking cannibis likely smoke less than those smoking tobacco but it’s not safe. Maybe try edibles instead?

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html

laurencerowe··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
Flying from US to Europe we ended up paying charges roughly equivalent to 1/4 the price of the adult ticket for a lap infant. Now he’s 2 we pay about 2/3rds the adult ticket price until he’s 12 and get a seat and a cabin baggage allowance so it ends up not very different to paying for one checked bag and lap infant.
laurencerowe··on Winning the visa lottery
> So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer.

While the average salary decreases in this scenario it is entirely down to composition effects and does not necessarily mean anyone gets poorer.

Everyone existing employee's wages stay the same. The new immigrant paid less than the previous average but more than they were being paid in the country they moved from.

laurencerowe··on Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug
Wow. Equivalent ones built in England are around 1/3rd the price £350k = $470k.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjq45vw3n4go

laurencerowe··on Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls
Economy 7 and storage heaters. Heat up bricks overnight using cheap rate electricity so they can keep your home warm during the day while you’re out working.

In fairness it probably works ok for homes insulated to a much higher standard than most British ones.

laurencerowe··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.

Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)

Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.

laurencerowe··on Retirement Is Dead
You absolutely need broadly based taxation for social democracy. But specifically for clawing back benefits from higher earners you can absolutely tax those same higher earners instead.

Dan has actually criticised a similar situation in the UK where child benefit is clawed back from higher earners.

> If I was a Tory Chancellor, I wouldn’t abolish inheritance tax. I’d fix the ridiculous marginal rates that mean there are hundreds of thousands of 30-somethings paying more than 70% tax on every additional £ they earn.

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/09/24/70percent/

It’s reasonable to question the balance between how much taxation should be born by higher income pensioners (who likely own their home outright) vs working age people at the same level of income (who additionally pay social security tax). Maybe it would make more sense to roll social security into the tax system and raise pension payments so lower income pensioners don’t lose out.

laurencerowe··on Retirement Is Dead
Broad based benefits tend to receive more public support. Just tax those with high incomes to get it back. Otherwise the bumpy effective marginal tax thresholds (which increase and the decrease again as income increases) end up incentivising gaming the system by shifting when income is realised.

Presumably the optimal strategy if you have retirement income within the range where you face a 15% clawback might be to withdraw extra income one year so that you can avoid the clawback the following year, since the higher marginal tax rate would be less than the clawback saved.

laurencerowe··on Retirement Is Dead
This is never going to happen because the US Social Security system is almost entirely pay-as-you-go since current contributions fund the vast bulk of current payments. The social security fund is a bit of an accounting fiction since it is just one part of the government owing money to another part of the government.

Even if it were practical though, how would you deal with those left destitute because of poor timing (retiring just after a market crash) or who just made poor investment decisions?

laurencerowe··on Retirement Is Dead
> once your income is CAD >95k/indiviudal OAS starts getting clawed back (IMHO it should be clawed back much sooner).

The downside of means testing pension payments is that it acts as a disincentive to discretionary pension saving.

The previous UK system (pre-2009) was an extreme example of this where those without additional pension savings got topped up with pension credit (GIS equivalent) that was clawed back at 100%. They ended up raising the state pension (OAS equivalent) to that level so those with a full contribution history are no longer eligible for pension credit (12,548 GBP = 23,416 CAD).

The OAS clawback rate is only 15% which seems more like a tax on pensioners - reasonable given they no longer make social security contributions though maybe the 50% GIS clawback would disincentivise workplace tax-deferred pension saving for those affected.

laurencerowe··on Retirement Is Dead
> The reserve chute is the Canada Pension Plan. The CPP was originally intended to cover one-third of Canadians’ retirement income, but these days it’s more akin to what you might get from a part-time job: a sheet too small for most beds. The maximum CPP payout comes to about $18,000 per year; the average is just over $11,000.

Isn't the reserve chute the Old Age Security pension along with the Guaranteed Income Supplement?

Assuming a single person with no other income, they would add $11,378 to the maximum CPP payout of $18,092 for a total of $29,470 or $14,918 to the average CPP payout of $11,000 for at total of $25,918. (Unlike the CPP, OAS is clawed back if you have other income over a certain amount.)

Retiring at 70 would raise the maximum CPP to $25,690 and OAS to $12,272 for a total of $37,962.

https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/publicpensions/ol...

Not a huge amount but substantially more. Renters also seem eligible for other help at these income levels which might amount to $5,000 per year in BC.

https://ageplacehub.ca/blog/affordable-senior-housing-canada...

(I am not Canadian but did try and look into pensions when I thought about moving there.)

laurencerowe··on Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
These cuts have gotten expensive as they're now quite popular. Lengua, beef cheeks, and oxtail are no longer cheap.
laurencerowe··on A look under our trunk: what's in our compute
> The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it?

It will depend on the area. Where I am in San Francisco we have articulated buses designed for 100+ people running every few minutes above BART. (We probably need more BART stations.) There’s simply not enough road space for smaller buses (let alone cars) to carry commuter traffic downtown.

(I’ve never worked downtown though so always drove to work in desolate Silicon Valley office parks.)

Even in my smaller UK home city (250k people) you need double decker 70+ capacity buses running every 15 minutes on two routes from city centre to university to handle demand because the jobs are not so distributed.

laurencerowe··on A look under our trunk: what's in our compute
Most of the city buses in my UK home town are now battery electric double deckers. These carry up to 85-90 people (with 25 standing), weigh 11 tonnes, and is 10.5m long.

A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long.

So the double decker bus should be more environmentally efficient with maybe 5 passengers making independent journeys, though operational costs for paying a driver probably make the Waymo more financially efficient in that situation.

I suspect robotaxis will become very important in suburban areas with distributed jobs where buses don’t work well. In busy cities there simply isn’t the roadspace to replace buses with robotaxis (or any other form of car) for commuting.

laurencerowe··on Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma
As someone from Britain with Scottish ancestry I don’t really tan at all. The melanin in my skin clumps in freckles, severely limiting its effectiveness at blocking UV. I can spend time outside in a t-shirt during the long summer evenings in Britain/Scandinavia but will burn during the midday sun. Living in California now the sun is stronger for longer so I just cover up.

San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.

laurencerowe··on The Amazon tax
Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb?

I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.

laurencerowe··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
In California consumer electricity is high because of distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks from distribution in rural areas and sprawl into the wildland-urban interface where many people live as urban areas have historically blocked development. Wholesale generation costs are some of the lowest in the country.

These costs of distortion vary very little based on how much you as an individual consume but they are awkwardly bundled into per-unit charges. As a renter in an urban area I certainly don't think I should pay those costs while those with home solar don't! At current prices I really don't think we should be subsidising home solar at all since it is so much more expensive than utility scale solar.

While a small part of that cost comes from tariffs on solar panels, they're so cheap it doesn't make much difference. The bigger part of the cost differential with Australia seems to be much higher permitting and sales costs.

laurencerowe··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
One of my employers had that incentive but only for one year. I assume they wanted to demonstrate that as a population we were low risk but after testing us once there was no reason to do so again.
laurencerowe··on England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
Annual exams were included in the ACA but as I understand it there is no evidence to show that they improve health outcomes. I had one once in 15 years when it was incentivised by my employer (presumably trying to show that we were low risk to reduce the rates they paid?) but otherwise my doctor has never tried to book me for one.

I think I'd prefer the UK system where if you worry something is wrong you can see a doctor free of charge.

laurencerowe··on Latest Airbus single aisle aircraft innovations
I just took this flight and that was not my experience. Food was served in the first 2 hours and the last 2 hours of the 10 hour flight leaving 6 hours of dark for sleep. Unfortunately my toddler did not want to sleep beyond his late nap so I was up for the entirety of it.
laurencerowe··on I'm a USB-C Maximalist
> and an EU adapter (which, off the record, also works for UK outlets so it covers anywhere I normally travel to).

What type of adapter is this? EU and UK plugs are very different.

laurencerowe··on The firefighting system of the Van der Heyden brothers in 17th century Amsterdam
James Braidwood established one in Edinburgh in 1824.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Braidwood

laurencerowe··on Africans Are Turning to Starlink
Unfortunately it can’t since their cell size will never be sufficient for more than a small number of customers in an urban area. Mobile data cells here are a few blocks radius rather than the 10-20 miles in rural areas where Starlink really shines.
laurencerowe··on Africans Are Turning to Starlink
I had the same problem in San Francisco with Comcast. The only alternative was wireless service (which was somehow much slower than my iPhone) or slow fixed wireless as my street doesn’t get fiber. Ended up getting my partner to resubscribe to Comcast as a new customer.

Unfortunately Starlink will never be able to make substantial inroads into urban areas since their cell size is far too large to serve a high of density customers well.

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