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polairscience

785 karma · joined April 18, 2024

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polairscience··on DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones
You say this as if you don't need he MWP models to train the AI models? The accuracy of the AI Prediction depends entirely on the quality of the training dataset...
polairscience··on My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
Ahh. Yes, the delusional man who's psychiatric fibers were in tatters could have totally understood and digested that his actions that day were selfish. If only you had been there to say that to him.

Setting aside the shaming part of your comment, it's indeed absolutely horrific for the family and everyone close to him.

polairscience··on Photos of items from families in different countries with different incomes
In every thread about housing people on HN post wildly outlandish claims about expenses that belie their totally out of touch perspectives. If you make 100K a month (the lower bound of what you just wrote). Let's say you put 25K into retirement. You eat out every meal so 4K food/living budget. That leaves 60K (I'll give you 10K slush fund for savings money or as a general keeping-up-with-the-jones' fund).

60K per month will pay a 4.5 million dollar mortgage. 4.5 million will buy you some of the nicest houses in the bay that aren't mansions. See:

https://www.realtor.com/news/unique-homes/midcentury-modern-...

You are either insane, or out of touch in a way that makes you insane. Of course, you can get a much cheaper very nice condo and "safely" squirrel away phenomenal amounts of cash savings. Expecting to own a high end house in a dense metro are on its own, is a pretty insane expectation.

polairscience··on Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers
And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.
polairscience··on Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day
Great, it's a life changing thing being fully independent of external chaos. If you are able to DIY it pays back in less than 5 years.
polairscience··on Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day
I'm not a six figure earner, and have never been close. Your mentality is not everyone's mentality. And there are many people, my neighbors and friends, who are willing to pay more for energy security and independence who are not in a bubble of six figure earners.

For your equity comment, it reads like astroturfing. Every single report with real-world data shows that it's positive equity and that homes with installations sell for more than those without. It's not a "vibe" I have, it's a cold hard fact. There's a million things you maintain when you own a house, and free energy is literally the easiest thing to want to maintain. Compare that to siding, or septic, or anything else....

Your comments aren't in good faith at all.

polairscience··on Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day
If you own a home you should genuinely spend time calculating and thinking about it. It's not near as far fetched as you think. You can benefit from the same technical advancements in engineering and manufacturing that have benefited every single industrial sector. It has never been easier. The number of plug and play components out there is unreal.

These days it's very much sun-legos. You decide what you can afford and what you think you need, and then you bolt the stuff together. Anyone who is willing to put time into it is capable.

polairscience··on Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day
This perspective is always so myopic to me. I say this as someone who doesn't make much money who's in the middle of a massive solar install (DIY). I made some simulations and a spreadsheet to work out all of the scenarios and I figured out that with a loan I can come out at monthly financing costs nearly exactly my electrical bill every month. That's right, I can have a 12 kWh battery backed 18 kW whole-home installation at no additional monthly cost.

The way that these discussions get contorted online will never make sense to me. The same people who make comments about ROI and it not making financial sense also have new car-loans on vehicles that depreciate catastrophically and are worth nearly nothing in 10 years. After 10 years my solar install will have been paid off for three years, I will get free electricity, and I will have the following benefits along the way:

Additional home value/equity

Backup power in case of grid problems or catastrophe.

Free fuel for my used battery electric vehicle. (compared to ~$200 a month in gas)

As close to zero carbon footprint as you can have in our contemporary world

And that's all assuming electricity prices stay the same. That's not even talking about how hydrocarbons are a very finite resource. Saying there's no "ROI" is looking at the situation like the only variable is your monthly expenses. It's the best decision anyone with a home who has the climate can possibly make. If you value your independence and personal security you'd be crazy to not do it. What would you pay, if you have the kind of money most people on these forums do, to ensure your home operates independent of external inputs? Imagine a new great depression? Or other such event?

polairscience··on My Homelab Setup
Oooo. That's the other thing I need to figure out, because it's 90% for my photography. How have you liked immich? Have you tried any other options?
polairscience··on My Homelab Setup
A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.

I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.

polairscience··on Daily Driving GrapheneOS
Graphene supports the 6a, which unlocked goes for ~$100 on ebay. I imagine you can swing that as a lawyer to play around.

I'll also echo the ideas from everyone else here. You can just use it as a normal Android phone the way you do any other and there's still big benefits. There's also really big benefits in terms of carrier privacy that aren't often talked about, like vpn routing and hotspot usage.

polairscience··on Elevated Errors in Claude.ai
Have any descriptions or analysis of what is considered "properly" on the cutting edge? I'm very curious. Only part of my profession is coding. But it would be nice to get insight into how people who really try to learn with these tools work.
polairscience··on Pigeons and Planes Has a Website Again
I think about this all the time through the lens of "authority" on a topic. When we yielded our gathering spaces online to major social sites (read, Zuck et al) we then gave the content all the authority of what it means to dialogue in those places. Which is to say... not much.

This has impacted journalism, music, science, and so much more. It would take an eternity to hash out my perspective but I think that there's value in realizing that. And I think there's value of creating content from the authority of a personal website with cache. I think music is a great place for this to take off, since you don't need institutional backing. You just need good words and a deep connection to the community. In that way, I hope people do write and create good content through their own mediums/sites. And I hope we all join in reading and sharing those sites.

It might be wishful thinking though.

polairscience··on λProlog: Logic programming in higher-order logic
I think that might be my favorite department/lab website I've ever come across. Really fun. Doesn't at all align with the contemporary design status quo and it shows just how good a rich website can be on a large screen. Big fan.

https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/

polairscience··on Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say
Uh.This has happened plenty. It's pretty well known that there's a lot of various abductions/disappearances of people the Chinese govt doesn't like. Including outright deaths in the streets:

https://rsf.org/en/beaten-death-state-security-rsf-shocked-g...

polairscience··on American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana
This is so false I can't even begin to describe it. And I say this as someone who nearly daily wanders around National Forest near his house.

First, why would it hurt to codify land access in a clearer way. And second. There are continuous battles with private landowners of where and how to access the public lands that you claim mean we don't need traditional paths or easements. See the recent Wyoming corning crossing case.

There are some public lands within a 5 minute walk of my house that I cannot access because rich landowners have intentionally cordoned them off. They're beautiful areas that should remain public. Why should you be able to effectively buy public land by restricting access to it maliciously? Why shouldn't Americans take seriously access to our shared land resources?

polairscience··on OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps
Related but annoying question. What are you all using for public lands access and land ownership? This is a similar problem where the paid/closed apps (OnX et al) have very good data but serious issues for obvious reasons.
polairscience··on Writing is thinking
I must be a bad researcher then because every paper I've written starts as a very vague "here are the overarching implications and important results". But the detailed order of results and the nuts and bolts of how to argue out the conclusions gets decided in drafting. Only the simplest of results I've had is essentially pre-written.
polairscience··on Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars
Sincere reply assuming sincere question, the implication is that they are statistically much more likely to live near interstates and highways. Since historically land owned by poor 'disadvantaged groups' has been easier for state and federal governments to get their hands on.

The sentence, while poorly written, isn't saying that "health impacts don't matter for 'non-disadvantaged people'". A reading that is disingenuous.

polairscience··on The atmospheric memory that feeds billions of people: Monsoon rainfall mechanism
Which, at its core, is the point of science. There are plenty of things we know are real phenomena, that have important impacts, that we can't actually describe mechanistically. The entire idea of science is to be able to do that. And doing that well can be very hard.

Which is IMO why "science literacy" is so hard.

In an analogy: you can very easily point to chimps and humans and gorillas and say "those are similar, it's self evident" but it took a good few millennia for humans to be able to describe the hows and whys of the similarities in detail. Mechanistically.

polairscience··on Body Doubling
Are mundane tasks not the most difficult for people with ADHD?
polairscience··on Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
We'll be very lucky if it's a lost decade. One of the many factors that made the US a technical powerhouse were the long threads across disciplines where people could do focused research. you had to reapply for grants but generally could be sure that important programs would stay in place. This breaks all of that. It seems poised to break research as we know it.

As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.

I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

polairscience··on Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone
This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour.

The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at NSF with total disregard for what they were doing or why. Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.

Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.

https://www.wired.com/story/national-science-foundation-febr...

polairscience··on The Sad Math of Ads
it'd make a great podcast to bring those two on and talk about society.
polairscience··on Who killed the rave? Late-night dancing falls into global decline
Where's my invite?
polairscience··on Scale Model of Boeing 777-300ER, Made from Manila Folders
I'll comment on something different. His website is clean and awesome. Attention to detail just like the model. Love it.
polairscience··on Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)
I know a lot about coffee roasting and can say that your wankery meter is on point. Calling someone "likely the best coffee roaster" is like calling someone "likely the best wine maker". It's something that people reach for via wankery to get clout. It's not actually something you can asses via reasonable metrics.

He knows a lot about roasting yes, he's not anywhere near some consensus god in coffee roasting no one can touch

Wankery abounds in coffee.

polairscience··on Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships
I'll answer this as someone who has spent some decent chunk of time on icebreakers. It's hard to really picture what travel through sea ice is like if you haven't done it. Breaking ice isn't that hard... at least if you only have to do it once. But breaking ice for hundreds or thousands of miles is really really hard. Articles like this one tend to gloss over just how specialized every single icebreaker is. And when they build new ones they often try new things to make it easier. My favorite thing I've seen is a set of compressor nozzles that attempt to make it easier for the ship to glide through the ice.

FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further.

All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.

polairscience··on Seeing America by train
It might have begun far before the railroads but it only became worse with time. The sand creek massacre was in 1864. Square in the railroad era. Not to mention every broken treaty of that era that was directly incentivized by the new massive industrial access to western land.

One could and probably should understand that the beauty of the Railroad is inseperable from the subjugation of the indiginous tribes and the labor abuses that built it. Should those things be ignored because they make you uncomfortable? It's perfectly contextual to have that in this piece....

... though I do concede the way that's mentioned and the article in general seems low effort and mediocre. But that's a different argument than "stop making me uncomfortable".

polairscience··on Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech
You're telling me. Being on HN and working on remote autonomous systems is such a dichotomy. We measure transmission rates in Kb still and costs in thousands of dollars. Not to mention power consumption. Sometimes I wish there was a conference for people working on these kinds of projects. "The union of Luddite scientists annual meeting" or something.
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