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moduspol

4,072 karma · joined November 3, 2016

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moduspol··on Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
Probably not a popular opinion but I feel the same way about police officers. Teachers aren't the cause of the vast majority of this, they're just the front line of people who have to deal with it. If it weren't educators, it'd just be whoever these dysfunctional kids / parents run up against next.

And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.

moduspol··on Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
All except the first person to get through. :)
moduspol··on PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in
Sony also presumably has a lot of visibility into the project, and it was already being framed as "genre-defining." I've loved various Kojima games but especially with the other exclusives line-up that Sony has, I can understand this is just too much risk for them.

It remains to be seen what egg will be laid in this case, how many golden ones may come after, and how many end up on Playstation anyway.

moduspol··on PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in
They're saying on Reddit that DS2's sales fell well below expectations, which wouldn't surprise me. I liked the game a lot but it was a sequel to an already fairly niche game (that I liked even more).
moduspol··on PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in
He was also facing cancellation at Sony, so it's plausible (if not likely) that he had to accept less favorable terms from Microsoft.

Hopefully we won't get another MGS:V situation where the last part of the game is just kind of missing.

moduspol··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
Oh that's nice. I'd always see guides talking about glue with the screen and kinda spooked me out of it.
moduspol··on What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
Contractors, but also cosmetic health work. Invisalign, veneers, plastic surgery, etc. Probably most big-ticket items or services that you're not buying from a megacorp.

Sometimes they'll give even more than 5% because they can keep it off their books completely, but in those cases, they want physical cash--not just a check to avoid credit card fees.

moduspol··on Investing in mothers? The long-run impact of a universal child care
In what way? I've seen many people advocate for universal childcare as a way to get mom back to working full time as quickly as possible. I've also seen it framed as a way of leveling the playing field, so women are less disadvantaged from men as a result of childbirth / care.

I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".

moduspol··on Getting your hands dirty is good for you
I hope you've banked plenty of resets
moduspol··on Getting your hands dirty is good for you
> Just the thought of looking at a watch in a sauna

You don't take your watch into the sauna! It's way too hot! I use a plain mechanical kitchen timer (outside the sauna). I've seen hourglasses that are designed to withstand the heat inside the sauna, but they're obviously not configurable to various increments.

More seriously: apparently studies show that using a Finnish (dry) sauna 5-7 times a week is good for longevity. You don't have to use them that way, but if that's your goal, it probably makes sense to fit it into your routine, and it's tough to do that without planning how long it will take.

moduspol··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
I'm sure everyone's different but for me, weekdays on and weekends off seems to handle avoiding the tolerance. I don't need to be nearly as focused when I'm off work.
moduspol··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I think it's mostly drug addicts.
moduspol··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
Yet another consequence of no longer living in a high-trust society.
moduspol··on Grok 4.6
It's possible, though I was thinking the same when GPT 5 released and it was kind of a nothing burger. Then I threw out that hypothesis with Opus 4.5.
moduspol··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
If you can survive the high blood pressure!
moduspol··on Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
I'm not especially a fan of MCP but it also offers:

- Standardized input and output schemas for each tool

- Standardized annotations that indicate how potentially dangerous each tool can be (e.g. read-only, idempotent, publishes data visible to third parties)

- Extensions for UI widgets

moduspol··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
I just saw the new Spider-Man movie and there were a ton of notices about Canada-based film credits and from various provinces, too. I'm not sure how these credits work, but maybe spreading the work out to various tax incentivized areas is the current play.
moduspol··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
> AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.

I mean it probably can if a few famous actors license their likeness to be used in AI films. And it's probably only a matter of time until fully AI actors get marketed and licensed for use in AI films. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI actors couldn't build the same kind of notoriety and following.

moduspol··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
My favorite thing lately is that it's very good at resolving dependency security vulnerabilities. GitHub already does a good job at detecting and notifying which packages are vulnerable and at what versions they're fixed, and without AI, it's just a super tedious process to figure out what things all depend on that package, find a version that'll work for all of them (potentially including upgrading the things that depend on it), wire it up, test things, and make any minor changes necessary in our code.

It's not "hard" or novel--it's just tedious grunt work. I'm happy to have AI solving that one.

moduspol··on Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
That was my first thought. There are clearly things to tighten up (as they note), but anything that would detect someone snooping secrets, files, or network addresses should have caught this quickly. The approach the agents used was dependent on being able to surveil widely without getting caught.
moduspol··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
I just deleted my sibling comment because I was recommending the same clock. I set it to do its daily WiFi time sync at 4am so that any DST adjustment happens before I wake up. No issues so far.

I have two of them. One project on my list is to see if I can modify the face of it to a different style without breaking it.

moduspol··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
I tried atomic clocks but they wouldn't work unless they were on the southwest corner of the house. It even said in the manual that if it's not working, to try putting it there. Kind of defeats the purpose setting itself if I have to move it to a specific corner of my house twice a year.

Though I didn't want a digital clock--my goal was an analog-style clock that never needed any maintenance. And it ends up there are some reasonably priced ones on Amazon that just connect to WiFi once a day and adjust if necessary, including to account for DST. I have it set to run at 4am each day, so any DST adjustment happens while I'm still sleeping.

The only final step is to run hardwired power to it so I don't need to change batteries, but I haven't pulled that trigger yet. Often with projects like this, it's more fun to prove out the difficult parts and I lose interest once only the easy parts remain.

moduspol··on Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers
It's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs.

I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.

moduspol··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
Our small team (~6 devs) is still using Claude Code because we're still on the cost-per-seat-month plan. If we were being pressed to pay per token, we'd be re-evaluating for sure.
moduspol··on Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters
This stuff happened years ago, right? Something tells me that discussion has already happened, and they went with Google.

Besides: Apple is a "real" company that will definitely still be around in five years. They've already fumbled Siri multiple times. IMO Google was certainly the right choice for actually executing well on Apple's own terms for the foreseeable future.

moduspol··on S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
If matrix multiplication isn't the main primitive, I think we have a lot of pain coming our way.
moduspol··on S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
I thought that a year or two ago. Thankfully I did not. I have no idea how long the music will keep playing.
moduspol··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
It's anecdotal but the kind of people I know that bought Mac Minis for this purpose are what I'd call "light techies." They definitely know how to use an iPhone or a Mac but would struggle on the CLI of a Linux box.

Anyone who wanted the OpenClaw use case that is comfortable with Linux probably already has several Linux machines (including a few Raspberry Pis) on-hand.

moduspol··on Bryan Johnson: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself
I'm doing both. I've only got so many years remaining and very few of these things "only" work if you've also optimized your diet and exercise. I do acknowledge that diet and exercise have a bigger impact than any supplement, but they're not mutually exclusive.
moduspol··on Bryan Johnson: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself
I take:

- Essential Capsules - it's like a multivitamin except with better stuff. I've seen mixed evidence that multivitamins actually provide much benefit if you're already taking C and D. This fills the same kind of gap except with a lot more beneficial stuff in it

- Omega-3 - it's like fish oil except from algae, so it has fewer heavy metals. Fish oil is well understood to be a good supplement for the Omega 3, but it can be tricky to source and often contains elevated levels of heavy metals

- Longevity mix - daily shake with a bunch of different stuff for sleep / metabolism / healthy aging / performance / recovery / etc. I'm already drinking protein shakes and such each morning so it seemed like a fairly cheap way to get a little more good stuff

- Snake oil (yes it's called that) - it's just extra virgin olive oil that is very carefully sourced. Apparently olive oil is one of those things that is often mislabeled and mischaracterized as something it's not when sold en masse. Extra virgin olive oil is also one of those supplements that has good evidence for daily limited consumption, and I trust it more with someone's name on it who has something to lose if it were found to be mislabeled

You're welcome to peruse his site [1] if you want more specific details. Each one goes in-depth on what the key ingredients are and why they're in there.

[1] https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com

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