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profunctor

344 karma · joined May 11, 2017

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profunctor··on America.gov
He constantly spreads lies.
profunctor··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
Did they ever?
profunctor··on Did they ghost you?
This is probably bait but FYI it’s not normal to send thank you emails in much of the world following an interview so perhaps consider that not everyone thinks like you and it’s not a slight to receive no thank you emails. Where I live a thank you email would be seen as a strange way for someone to sneakily try to persuade you to hire them outside of the proper interview process. If you don’t get an email you may just be dealing with someone not from your culture.
profunctor··on UK guts planning red tape so datacenters can bypass the neighbors faster
Note it’s all nationally significant infrastructure, not just data centres. And thank god because this country can’t even build a rail line without having to fight every minor concern by anyone who feels like complaining. It makes big projects impossible and the whole country suffers. Infrastructure is vital.
profunctor··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
With a harness you could feed the code to a linter and if there are errors feed that to a model automatically. It’s amazing that the models are good enough that I haven’t bothered doing this
profunctor··on Gender Equality and Work
Children will pay nothing, same as very mentally ill or extremely disabled people.
profunctor··on The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
Why? The dashes?
profunctor··on The happiest I've ever been
Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost. Social help to make raising a child less exhausting. Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future. All difficult but not impossible.
profunctor··on Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's flickering in terminal
Perhaps the engineer could sit down for 8 hours a day during the work week. The Silicon Valley obsession with having no life and working weekends is so endemic.
profunctor··on GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
Is this proven?
profunctor··on A Fond Farewell
Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.
profunctor··on Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy
The reason is cost, LIDAR is expensive.
profunctor··on Dotfiles feel too personal to share
This article feels like it’s about what and how this person stores their dotfiles and then has two lines about them feeling too personal to share. I’m surprised it’s so highly voted since it’s basically “I use stow”.

Must be due to the interesting title.

profunctor··on The case for having roommates even when you can afford to live alone
Having roommates (aka sharing a home) when you leave your family home has been the norm forever. Roommates are not poverty
profunctor··on What's happening to reading?
How do you expect them to make a living? News and magazines were always behind a paygate.
profunctor··on Jacksonpollock.org (2003)
Have you seen them in real life? They are much more interesting in person.
profunctor··on Google kills diversity hiring targets
Ireland did not eliminate its native population.
profunctor··on What is metformin's secret sauce?
If your pr deploys a machine learning model then that would be a suitable comment. I suppose the idea is similar, we can determine that this drug helps so a (hopefully) statistically significant degree so even if we don’t know how it works we want to use it.
profunctor··on How I write code using Cursor
If you are using vscode in the copilot chat you can use @workspace and it tries to get the relevant files and context.
profunctor··on Earthworms have transformed the Isle of Rum's landscape
To be honest after reading this article I think the title should be “Humans have transformed the isle of Rum’s landscape”
profunctor··on [dead]
Yes and to add on to that, the reason this decision is criticised is that it is very difficult or even impossible to properly blind a puberty blocking study. If you give people fake puberty blockers and then they start to go through puberty blockers they will be aware. Same goes for the reverse.
profunctor··on [dead]
Edit: I did a bit more reading and had a look at an trans group’s reaction to this report: https://transactual.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/TransActual-Br... . Certainly not as clear cut as the article makes it out to be. It seems like a decent amount of the evidence regarding puberty blockers was excluded for dubious reasons.

Interesting article. I have to say I was shocked at the lack of evidence re puberty blockers. I was not shocked that the nhs was trying to hide any true measurements of the effectiveness of its treatments.

At the end of the day we all want kids to have a good, happy life. If puberty blockers are not some easily reversible intervention with few side effects then maybe we should not give them out. Although I’m not sure that it has been proven to be harmful, more research needed?

I am a bit conflicted with the authors opinion that we should not offer full medical transition to adults. I mostly believe adults should be able to do as they wish if they are not hurting anyone (seemingly in accordance with the authors liberal ideology). But we all have to agree that at 18 we were not always capable of making the right decisions for us. I know trans people who transitioned in their late 20s and they are the most happy they have ever been.

Thankfully we have true scientists happy to do the hard yards of creating reports like the one described. Brave and difficult work.

profunctor··on Alexei Navalny has died
What do you want to world to do? Russia is already under increasingly crippling sanctions and many countries are funding + arming its opponent in a war.
profunctor··on UK Fell into Recession in 2023
Free school meals don’t happen everywhere at all times. Food banks are incredibly stretched. Many people are not “reasonable” but have alcohol/ drug dependencies or mental health issues and so their children suffer. Even if they manage to give their kids enough food the rest of their life can be incredibly difficult.
profunctor··on Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted
Aren’t the guarantees the SLA that is agreed with Amazon, Google etc?
profunctor··on Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'
Yet again the workers suffer from the incompetence of the ownership class.
profunctor··on Germans shrug off economic gloom at booming Oktoberfest
Won them two world wars when losing is famously bad for the economy.
profunctor··on How a four-day workweek works, from the companies pulling it off
I have never worked with anyone doing 12 hours a day 5 days a week as usual. Then again I’m in Europe .
profunctor··on Live near your friends
As a straight person I also think it’s strange. I’ve had mixed gender friends my whole life and I’ve never had an issue.
profunctor··on Some Democrats Are Trying to Preemptively Outlaw a Billionaire Tax
Liberals are not a moderate part of a socialist faction. They critique the democrats like they critique republicans because neither are in any way compatible with socialism.
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