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polarix

690 karma · joined November 4, 2010

Greg

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/gregp; my proof: https://keybase.io/gregp/sigs/QgiIp98x2U7msN3u5ALaQ3QN24GIIjLHJKrbs7su73E ]

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polarix··on CarPlay Is Additive
I’m not sure it “works”. I would still drastically prefer if Tesla had CarPlay.
polarix··on Show HN: Scriber Pro – Offline AI transcription for macOS
Do you have a mailing list?
polarix··on The Headlines Are Evil, and They're Bringing Us Down
Sure, those headlines are misleading.

But all of those other headlines are wrong and misleading as well, in their own way.

The "court"(s) cannot "block" Trump from doing anything. They don't control the military. All they can do is "say" something about the "legality" of the actions of the commander in chief of the military. The first two headlines that (according to the link) "beg to mislead" are closer to accuracy on this dimension -- the courts said something.

polarix··on Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
It is not just a login wall, they have restricted access even for logged in users, presumably to only the uploaders. A magnet would be nice.
polarix··on Framework temporarily pausing some laptop sales in the US due to tariffs
One obvious benefit of this link and the bsky ones is that it is actually possible to read the comments on them, unlike the last one.
polarix··on I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)
True! There might be other solutions, like having management treat people as they themselves would want to be treated. That kind of thing just sounds fairly unrealistic.
polarix··on I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)
(presumably Geis’s comment was sarcasm?)
polarix··on I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)
No, of course it’s not easy to quit. But perhaps it’s wrong to even offer these terrible jobs as an “opportunity” to people who have so little choice.
polarix··on I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)
I hope courts worldwide continue to punish Amazon for these kinds of things. They need to change the calculus — to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots.
polarix··on Ask HN: Anyone else finding Google Maps terrible?
Yep. Switched to Apple Maps and (as backup) Organic Maps recently.
polarix··on Understanding ‘Why’ (2021)
Purpose is a really helpful way of organizing thought about the world.

But “purposeful” does not mean “having to do with the concept of purpose”, so “teleological” ends up being a pretty useful word. Despite the smell of old books it carries.

polarix··on ASU: The New American University (2021)
A large helium balloon with an open lip perhaps?
polarix··on The Overflow Offline project
This has been available for a while but it's great to see some acknowledgement especially since the most recent data set was stuck in 2019 for a while.

Here are the datasets: http://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/

It's not clear to me why the data set shrank between 2019/3 and 2022/6; was something excluded? Compression improvements?

> stackoverflow.com_en_all_2019-02.zim 2019-03-12 19:53 134G

> stackoverflow.com_en_all_2022-05.zim 2022-06-17 12:36 75G

polarix··on The 20-Hour Flight Is Coming, and It May Have a Gym and Bunks
Looks like these were cancelled -- https://www.china-airlines.com/us/en/fly/on-board/fleet/fami...
polarix··on The Middle Child Is Going Extinct
I see the number of children a couple has as a vote on how many people should exist on earth. If you have 0 or 1 child as a couple, you are voting that there should be fewer people. If you have 2 children, you're voting that there should be about the same number of people. If you have more than 2 children as a couple, you're voting that there should be more people on earth.

With that context, I can clearly see why nobody in a city would want to have more than 2 children.

polarix··on Mumbling Is a Clever Data-Compression Trick
Clearly they just always write everything that needs to be said on a topic!
polarix··on Testimony of Mark Zuckerberg – Hearing Before US House of Representatives [pdf]
> Facebook's "data privacy" problem is not fixable if they have to ultimately run valuable ads against that data.

Do you have a citation for this? I've been trying to clarify the argument recently and am looking for other perspectives.

polarix··on Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
It's Hard to connect with someone if they're dead.
polarix··on Four DB2 Code Bases?
I liked "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture" which sounds related... I hadn't heard about PLATO before, and the book was strongly redolent of "online culture".
polarix··on Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
One value of an unordered unannotated book list is in reinforcing books you've already read, and providing a little extra push towards the action potential on the ones you haven't.
polarix··on Ask HN: Do you make more than $200K? What did you have to do?
1. To be able to live well and pursue my hobbies without a partner or cohabitant.

2. To travel comfortably. More generally, to be able to seek out distant experiences without fear.

polarix··on Defending Against Hackers Took a Back Seat at Yahoo, Insiders Say
If "profit" is defined as: "generating more value than is consumed in the production process"...

Then yes, we damn well better demand that profit be the correct goal for every action regardless of organizational structure.

If our system is distorted to inaccurately measure profit locally, without properly accounting for negative externalities, then that's a legitimate problem, but the way to solve it is by factoring those hidden costs back into the profit calculation, not giving up on "profitability" properly defined.

polarix··on How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead
Conversely, with LSD, there is no such thing as a harmful dose, so...

Logic and health are not the issue here, entrenchment of economic interests is the point.

polarix··on Is artificial intelligence permanently inscrutable?
Right.

We've added instrumentation to our recognition capabilities in order to socialize and gossip about derived categories through language. In addition, we (can sometimes) use the formalized expressions of these categories prepared for socialization to ensure internal consistency.

Artificial neural networks that did something similar could have a number of major philosophical and practical advantages: - enable decentralization of data sets - grow with humans rather than apart from them - enable identifying problematic internal inconsistencies

polarix··on Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order
Have we considered crafting an agency as an information infrastructure policy steward, with the explicit intent to prohibit and prosecute any local and state regulations which would harm the proliferation of information infrastructure.

Probably this is not the FCC since its mandate is too broad. But if some such agency had the ability to force municipalities to allow private infrastructure investment, we might start to get the internet we want pretty quickly.

polarix··on A2: Analog Malicious Hardware [pdf]
This isn't quite the same thing -- to be completely analogous, we'd need the fabricator to also recognize that it was fabricating another fabricator, and then change THAT generated fabricator to have the same intervention but only in the case that we care about compromising.
polarix··on Uber users with low phone batteries more likely to accept surge pricing
> if we all stopped believing it tomorrow

Similarly, money provides no power in society to the person controlling it. Because if we all stopped believing that it would continue to work in the future, it wouldn't.

... This is an obviously incorrect argument! There are things that occur only because of widespread belief. Nevertheless, those things do occur!

polarix··on Arbitrage Discovered (2015)
One thing we're missing is whether the company is "too big to fail".
polarix··on One Billion Drive Hours and Counting: Q1 2016 Hard Drive Stats
http://bioinformare.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/survival-analysi... has graphs of survival rate over time broken down by manufacturer and model. Far more informative, you're right. I don't think Backblaze uses 6 year old drives. :-)
polarix··on Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
Yeah, I guess we're at the point where 50tb arrays are not infeasible. Not sure where I'd get 50tb of bandwidth though without someone gnawing off my left foot.
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