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rmah

7,644 karma · joined May 27, 2010

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rmah··on Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide
All of it.
rmah··on Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide
Most people live in asia. thus most foods are both produced and consumed in... you guessed it asia.
rmah··on Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide
I disagree.
rmah··on FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
It's like you didn't see where I agree that current enforcement is too aggressive. Why are you writing in a tone that implies we disagree when we agree? This is the sort of thing that confuses me.
rmah··on GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
Giving something away for free and then whining that people use it for free confuses me. I mean, what did you think would happen?
rmah··on FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
Yes, but it's essentially just a re-branded INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). They were conducting raids to catch undocumented immigrants (often at workplaces) for as long as I can remember (i.e. back into the early 1980's). IIRC, spanish speakers called them "la migra".
rmah··on FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
It saddens me that your rather innocuous comment has been down-voted so aggressively. Immigration enforcement is required. Illegal immigration should be discouraged. ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically. But immigration laws should still be enforced. I imagine you'd agree that if ICE agents/supervisors act beyond the scope of their duties or with excessive force, they should be disciplined/prosecuted. I also have a hard time understanding people who don't agree with what I just wrote. I can only imagine those that want to disagree think I'm writing with some sort of underlying agenda and in code to push some broader political narrative (I'm not).
rmah··on US freezes visas for 75 nations
You are conflating legal and illegal immigrants. The visa restrictions are on legal immigrants. And while, as a legal immigrant myself, I would like to think that the vast majority of legal immigrants work hard and contribute positively to the country, it is a fact that certain groups in certain regions have an extremely high usage of social welfare programs (SNAP, Medicaid, etc), sometimes exceeding 80%. This is cause for some concern, IMO as it suggests problems of one sort or another. All that said, I have doubts that the administration's new visa restrictions will have a meaningful impact. Of course, I've been wrong before :shrug:.
rmah··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
Metro Atlanta has a population of 6 mil, say 2/3 live in detached homes with 2 persons per home. So that's 38,000 out of 2 mil homes, so about 2%
rmah··on Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela
Many people seem to be assuming some sort of bias on Polymarket's part. Without evidence, these seems unlikely as whichever side of the bet wins, Polymarket makes the same amount of $. That is, they have no stake in the outcome. The only time you can blame them is if they pay out to neither side and pocket all funds at stake. Which, as far as I can tell, no one is accusing them of.
rmah··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
The same way every president since ww2 has been able to.
rmah··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
The US consumes about 20 mil bbls of oil per day and imports around 4 mil bbls per day from Canada, about 20% of US consumption. Total oil imports is about 6 mil bbls/day, with about 2/3 of imports coming from Canada.

Two fun facts: 1) the US is now the largest producer of crude oil on the planet and 2) the US exports about 4 mil bbs of oil per day. Venezuela is a distant #18 at around 1 mil bbls/day

And lastly, pretty much anything you can distil from heavy crude, you can also distil from light crude, just less of it (by volume). There's a reason tar, asphalt and such is so cheap, it's made from the distillation waste products.

rmah··on How uv got so fast
Our firm uses python extensively and the virtual environment for every script or script is ... difficult. We have dozens of python scripts running for team research and in production, from small maintenance tools to rather complex daemons. Add to that the hundreds of Jupyter notebooks used by various people. Some have a handful of dependencies, some dozens of dependencies. While most of those scripts/notebooks are only used by a handful of people, many are used company-wide.

Further, we have a rather largish set of internal libraries most of our python programs rely on. And some of those rely on external 3rd party API's (often REST). When we find a bug or something changes, more often than not, we want to roll out the changed internal lib so that all programs that use it get the fix. Having to get everyone to rebuild and/or redeploy everything is a non-starter as many of the people involved are not primarily software developers.

We usually install into the system dirs and have a dependency problem maybe once a year. And it's usually trivially resolved (the biggest problem was with some google libs which had internally inconsistent dependencies at one point).

I can understand encouraging the use of virtual environments, but this movement towards requiring them ignores what, I think, is a very common use case. In short, no one way is suitable for everyone.

rmah··on AI will make formal verification go mainstream
I think the main limitation is not code validation but assumption verification. When you ask an LLM to write some code based on a few descriptive lines of text, it is, by necessity, making a ton of assumptions. Oddly, none of the LLM's I've seen ask for clarification when multiple assumptions might all be likely. Moreover, from the behavior I've seen, they don't really backtrack to select a new assumption based on further input (I might be wrong here, it's just a feeling).

What you don't specify, it must to assume. And therein lies a huge landscape of possibilities. And since the AI's can't read your mind (yet), its assumptions will probably not precisely match your assumptions unless the task is very limited in scope.

rmah··on AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Yes, except their cookie preferences to comply with european law. Oh, and they should be able to change their theme from light/dark but only that. Oh and maybe this other thing. Except in situations where it would conflict with current sales promotions. Unless they're referred by a reseller partner. Unless it's during a demo, of course. etc, etc, etc.

This is the sort of reality that a lot of developers in the business world deals with.

rmah··on This is not the future
I agree that both geometry and game theory are very useful tools.
rmah··on This is not the future
Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.
rmah··on This is not the future
The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes.

Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes, are driven by emotion and often have goals outside the "game" in question). Thus game theory is NOT inevitable.

rmah··on How private equity is changing housing
You can't use unrealized capital losses (property paper losses) or even realized losses to offset property tax, you can only offset realized losses against realized gains for income taxes.
rmah··on Most technical problems are people problems
I believe that seeking external validation, inspiration and/or reason is not robust and a path to unhappiness. IMO, it's better if the reasons for you to care come from within.
rmah··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
your professors. your classmates who got a job. your family and friends of family. anyone else you know that respects you.
rmah··on Apple and Intel Rumored to Partner on Mac Chips
lack of skilled labor, probably
rmah··on How wealth dies
First, you are correct. However, the reason GDP is used as a proxy metric for economic growth because it's convenient. Doing so does make a few assumptions though, foremost of which is that the structure of the economy will change very little from year to year. If that is so, than a rise in GDP should correspond to a rise in economic prosperity (and by extension wealth). Thus, using GDP change to measure changes in prosperity works (more or less) year by year. but the longer the periods you compare (5 years, 10 years, 20 years), the less meaningful the number becomes.
rmah··on How wealth dies
That is, IMO, arguable. Entertainment has always been valued by humans. It is just the non-physical equivalent of fancy clothing or jewelry. And clothing/jewelry is most certainly a form of wealth. So, it can be argued that things that you can buy that make you feel better emotionally or increase your social status are forms of wealth.

That some forms of entertainment may be detrimental if abused in the long-term is an orthogonal topic.

rmah··on How wealth dies
IMO, combining gold money arguments with observations about the price of gold is contradictory. If gold is money, then you should never wonder about the "price of gold" as gold should be used to price things.
rmah··on How wealth dies
While Dr. Morgan makes a few reasonable points about "real wealth" (aka points I agree with), he also hand waves many assumptions which are, at best, questionable.

Finally, be aware that he's been predicting imminent economic collapse for almost 20 years now. He'll probably be correct someday (assuming he lives a very long life), but that doesn't mean much IMO.

rmah··on US Tech Market Treemap
I don't understand why tesla (a car manufacturer), uber (a ride services company), robinhood (financial services), doordash (meal delivery service) are in the treemap of "tech market" companies. OK, I take that back, I understand why (i.e. good PR by those companies to be included in a sector other than their own in order to get higher market valuations), I just don't agree with it.
rmah··on Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing
It scales horribly. Essentially, as the ship gets larger, the sail area has to be even larger (proportionally) to maintain the same speed. Further, the larger the sail, the more susceptible to damage and the harder it is to control.
rmah··on Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing
luxury goods are shipped by air
rmah··on Powell – unlike the dotcom boom, AI spending isn't a bubble
While I agree with your general sentiment, in fairness, Powell didn't say "revenue", he said "earnings", which is near equivalent to profits in financial reporting lingo.
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