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paconbork

224 karma · joined April 29, 2019

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paconbork··on ER visits for gambling disorders doubled after expanded online gambling market
It's still shocking to me that there are so many California Lottery advertisements (I'm sure other states have these too). They're spending taxpayer money to make poor people poorer...
paconbork··on My experience has nuance, yours is a data point
I extensively make use of incognito mode for YouTube when I want to watch something but not have it influence my recommendations. What's the closest analog for a paid service like Netflix? Creating an alternate profile for trash?
paconbork··on The Amazon tax
"Please scan this item with our app to see the price"
paconbork··on Oh good, screwworms are back (2025)
A fly that naturally spreads one mile per day does not travel from Panama to Texas in four years.
paconbork··on Don't Subscribe So Casually
Yeah, this is the main thing I use privacy.com for
paconbork··on Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality
Here's a post about it from FIRE, the org that defended him https://www.fire.org/news/victory-tennessee-man-jailed-37-da...
paconbork··on Waymo recalls 3,800 robotaxis after they drive into flood waters
Gah, thanks for this. Thought I was used to that slight-of-hand but this one got me
paconbork··on Amazon reaches 10k Rivian electric delivery vans in US
On the Dan Ryan, driving the speed limit would be very unsafe considering most people are going at least 15 over!
paconbork··on Tesla on track to smash targets after producing almost a million EVs in 6 months
Hawaii already has this rule for what it's worth. The issue there is that they have so many EV's on the road that these chargers are always in use and have lines (and aren't really that fast to begin with). Having experienced that, I still wouldn't get an EV without a guaranteed place to charge at home.
paconbork··on Tesla on track to smash targets after producing almost a million EVs in 6 months
Tried this while in Hawaii with a rental EV (with no charging at my hotel) and it did not work at all. Hawaii is one of the states with the most EV's per person and there's frequently chargers in places like malls and grocery stores (whole foods and target in particular). However, because there's so many EV's, all of these chargers are always in use, and there are usually lines or people waiting around to snag a spot as soon as it becomes available. It was a massive inconvenience and put me off of EVs for the near future: I'd either need an sfh or to be somewhere that figures out public charging when more than a tiny fraction of the total vehicles on the road are electric.
paconbork··on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
I think that worked in the timeframe it did because women as a group aren't generationally poor (which is to say they aren't born any more or less well off than men), and so the entire shift was one of cultural attitudes. Perhaps AA for women helped normalize female doctors more quickly (haven't looked at any data on this but it seems plausible), though it remains to be seen if the same strategy can work for balancing CS. I'm curious though: did people at the time assume female doctors were less qualified because of AA?
paconbork··on The hidden cost of air quality monitoring
Why do you assume that public transit produces substantially less particulate emissions than EVs? I'm sure you've smelled ICE busses before, but even if you upgrade those to electric, Electric busses are very heavy, leading to an outsized impact on road/tire/break wear: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35780985/

Subways have wear-related particulate emissions too, with the added disadvantage of them being less easy to vent: https://nyulangone.org/news/pre-covid-19-subway-air-polluted...

paconbork··on America has paid a steep price for parking
The roads in this old video of NYC still look pretty wide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXRnGwbrnOo

Mind you there's some cars in the videos, but they aren't any bigger than the horse-drawn carriages that roads had been accommodating well before that.

paconbork··on Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger
People bidding whatever they can afford is largely a lack-of-supply problem, is it not? If more housing of a given status level were available, eventually it wouldn't be necessary for everyone to spend everything they can on bidding wars. And sure, then you might say "well then the relative status of that housing has shifted and your peers still aren't saving, they're just spending their money on nicer housing", but I still see that as an absolute win. I have much more empathy for a person not saving money when saving money means "living in a dump and commuting 90 minutes each way" than when it means "living more than half an hour away from Central Park".
paconbork··on Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger
With you until the last sentence. The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands. There's nothing wrong with letting urban centers densify and serve as a containment zone for childless 20-somethings (in fact, this would mean more affordable single family homes for those that need them). And who knows, if there's enough dense urban housing to meet demand, then those residents could have an easier saving up money themselves, with which to later purchase some more space in which to raise a family
paconbork··on Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage
In fairness, the original anecdote is about 2002
paconbork··on Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
My 2005 Honda Accord gets this right (big, obvious buttons). Definitely not looking forward to finding a car whose UX doesn't suck when this one finally kicks the bucket.
paconbork··on NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company
I mean yes, it's biased compared to the mythical unattainable standard of being completely unbiased. But that's not the bar. The bar is mainstream news outlets, which are drastically easier to outperform even with a half-assed attempt.
paconbork··on CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
Who do you think purchases the products that heavy industry makes?
paconbork··on CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
But only a small portion of the battery's weight is lithium, right? This older source has a 453 kg Tesla battery as containing 63 kg of lithium, for example: https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...
paconbork··on The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT
You avoid taking flak from the Responsible AI people that way
paconbork··on The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS
I'd suggest "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" but that might be a bit too on the nose
paconbork··on Sex and the citizenship process
Surely it may not stop some criminals mastermind, but most criminals are idiots with bad impulse control. I'd wager that many are caught by this process
paconbork··on Stable Attribution
Sounds a bit like differential privacy
paconbork··on Ask HN: Will you be paying for ChatGPT+?
I want it to write raunchy poetry, to give me bad recipes for crystal meth, to let me probe at its deepest biases, to do what I want it to do rather than what's deemed acceptable by the AI Safety killjoys
paconbork··on Ask HN: Will you be paying for ChatGPT+?
If I can use it without the filters, absolutely
paconbork··on Go 1.20 Cryptography
Why not just use Ristretto with Curve25519 to avoid cofactor issues?
paconbork··on The Twitter Files
Then they can flag the offending post through twitter's reporting system like everyone else
paconbork··on Blind: Meta's office to be closed on Wed – 15% layoff (5% Eng 50% recruiting)
So they send you an email with an activation code but you don't need to click on any links or otherwise interact with the email. Theoretically, someone else who knows your email could have registered you... Probably not too believable, but you could send the email to your coworkers too to improve your anonymity set
paconbork··on Twitter Blue for $8/Month
If you can't stop the bots, might as well monetize them?
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