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oxw

100 karma · joined May 31, 2018

oliverwarne.com
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oxw··on Permacomputing
Permacomputing meeting in SF March 1st

https://alexwennerberg.com/permacomputing.html

oxw··on People who know the formula for WD-40
> I've long thought that every restaurant/bakery/etc could publish their full internal cookbooks and not see a drop in sales.

Absolutely. Chad Robertson of Tartine bakery has written books detailing how to make their breads and pastries. Still lines out the door.

oxw··on Researchers develop a camera that can focus on different distances at once
Very small apertures reduce image quality due to diffraction, which this avoids

Last page in the paper has a comparison between their approach and f/32 https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/svaf/static/pdfs/Spatially_Varyin...

oxw··on Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication
> “I’d love to take those next steps and see if our trash pandas in our backyard are really friendlier than those out in the countryside,” she says.

Would they have to measure "biological" friendliness, comparing lab raised countryside-descended and city-descended raccoons? Domesticated animals can be very unfriendly. Feral cats for example.

oxw··on Spiral-Obsessed AI 'Cult' Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots
The article is more critical of the idea of an AI cult than the title suggests. Worth a read.
oxw··on A vision of chocolate's future in an Amsterdam brownie
It's inaccurate to say that dutched cocoa is less flavorful. Chocolate flavor is composed of multiple notes / experiences. Dutched cocoa has less acidic or fruity notes, but more dark rich, fudgy notes. Different, not less flavorful.
oxw··on Warren Buffett's farewell letter as CEO [pdf]
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882837
oxw··on Show HN: What if every photo/video could prove itself?
Is there any way to sign an image/photo with the exact time/location it was taken in a way that can't be forged? Time + location are measurements that can be fooled.
oxw··on DARPA and Texas Bet $1.4B on Unique Foundry -3D heterogeneous integration
Chip stacking today is limited by thermal management. Can't stack multiple high TDP (e.g. logic) chips together, can only do one + low power chips (e.g. memory). Wonder if this is something DARPA is trying to solve here.
oxw··on How we’re responding to The NYT’s data demands in order to protect user privacy
Enterprise has an exemption granted by the judge

> When we appeared before the Magistrate Judge on May 27, the Court clarified that ChatGPT Enterprise is excluded from preservation.

oxw··on Show HN: BudgetFlow – Budget planning using interactive Sankey diagrams
Budget and finance tools as a class operate under the idea that money is fungible. One of those differences between how economists believe people operate vs how they really do

The people I know who could benefit most from budgeting do not think of money as fungible. They mentally allocate different incomes to different spending categories

This seems like an opportunity for a tool to break the mold and offer a solution that fits how people feel about money vs how they “should”

oxw··on Google's 25th Birthday
I’m surprised the first result today for “how to cut a pineapple” isn’t an SEO optimized recipe with a wall of nonsense to scroll past before the actual instructions

How much tuning did Google need to do for that?

oxw··on The day FedEx delivered its promise
This anecdote and some others are covered here: https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/
oxw··on Sadly giving up on early retirement and going back to work
“OK, this is my belated April Fool’s Day post[...]”

The $1.5 million number is a joke

oxw··on Fans Search for Coveted Film Merch–Five Decades After a Movie’s Release
https://archive.is/9wBts
oxw··on HBO Max intern accidentally sent an integration email test to users
> ...it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it.

What are they helping the intern through? Hopefully creating a better testing process.

oxw··on Launching an all female hacker house
A quick search suggests that people looking for roommates (like this) can choose their roommates using any criteria they want even if it would otherwise violate the Fair Housing Act.
oxw··on The Teeniest Tiniest Laptop in the West
archive.org mirror

https://web.archive.org/web/20210126173020/https://thecrow.u...

oxw··on Firefox to ship 'network partitioning' as a new anti-tracking defense
How do you mean 'robust'? Taxes are dodged but that's not a good argument against tax law.
oxw··on [dead]
https://blogs.akamai.com/2020/06/largest-ever-recorded-packe... Akamai's blog post about this attack.
oxw··on The Loneliness Epidemic
Excerpt from the article: "It turns out there’s also not much evidence to support a popular theory that the increasing secularization of Western societies — where religion is seen as a traditional route for people to regularly come together — is a major factor driving modern loneliness. Counterintuitively, says Hewings, “It would seem on a number of different surveys that levels of loneliness are lower in Northern and Western Europe than they are in Southern and Eastern Europe, which are generally a bit more religious.” Turning up at your local synagogue, church, mosque or temple of choice might well help by offering a ready-made network of social connections, if worship is where you find meaning — as highlighted in a recent report from the U.K.’s Parliamentary Group on Faith and Society — but at the level of society, religion itself, it seems, is no panacea."
oxw··on Google Tech Dev Guide
Patterns and paradigms can be taught easily on the job, and can be overly specific. The "advanced programming" course teaches genuine problem solving. Breaking down a problem into it's mathematical components to develop an optimal solution. It builds you into a good engineer, not a programmer that can spit out patterns to fit a problem.
oxw··on (2016) Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it
Agreed. The steps that he's taking are too drastic.

I really like the steps that you're taking. I feel like the issue that the author fell into is that he... cares too much about too many things? I know that sounds selfish, but by focusing on improving ourselves I feel like we can all help build a better society.