Hacker News Reader

sacnoradhqon Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

It's awful. On death row in Texas for the crime of bringing their chronically ill child to the hospital in distress.

Texas has a history of executing the disabled and presenting "expert" junk science as evidence. https://www.propublica.org/article/is-texas-still-executing-...

https://www.texastribune.org/2011/04/15/texas-psychologist-p...

Illinois had similar problems with the death penalty, including likely executing innocent people.

Arkansas executed an innocent but convicted person in 2017 who was subsequently cleared by DNA evidence. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-sense-chaos/2...

So it seems the death penalty cannot be enforced if it cannot be investigated or adjudicated with a necessary and sufficient degree of rigor. It also doesn't serve a purpose as a deterrent (criminals aren't smart enough to anticipate outcomes). Furthermore, it makes the society that dispenses it appear governed by a 3rd-world authoritarian regime. Finally, it's an expensive process and a bloodlust spectacle. Better off keeping cretins alive behind bars for the remote possibility of rehabilitation and let them live with themselves rather than giving them an easy out.

sacnoradhqon A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

This was a sensational news trope on MSM nightly news and news magazines in the 90's in the US.

sacnoradhqon Mistral 7B

MS Copilot is apparently a music fan.

Most LLMs have problems with subtly, such as compound anagrams tend to repeat the same words in reverse order rather than reversing all of the letters in all words.

sacnoradhqon macOS 14 Sonoma firewall bug fixed

I don't doubt it. They definitely don't respond to radars or ack concerns even from partner groups in MA_NG.

Apple's concept of feedback is like Whitehouse petitions: ostensible appearance of engagement connected to the circular file. At least Netflix just has no feedback mechanism at all.

sacnoradhqon China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation

It seems worth the cost and effort to improve CAPTCHAs and comment microtransactions to prevent automated and boiler room sentiment manipulation.

sacnoradhqon US Retailers Pare Store Locations, Hours Due to Increase in Theft

DA's stopped prosecuting, the police kicked back, corporations weren't interested in improving local problems, and cities imploded.

Also, with that much volume of merchandise, it had to be trafficked on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and eBay.

The Target/CVS I use has 2 armed guards wearing plate carriers who look like they did a tour or 2 in Iraq or Afghanistan.

sacnoradhqon Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes?

The old reverse boycott never fails.

sacnoradhqon The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing

I don't think about them because mine still work fine (with a bridge connected to Ethernet) with Alexa for several years without major problems. I have 90+ total of strips, light bulbs, and such. I'm at about the limit for what one bridge can support.

The HDMI audio Sync box is a PITA that doesn't work well and doesn't support many lights. It's a $300 paperweight.

There was a periodic bug where lights would turn back on after commanded to turn off, and wouldn't stay off. That happened maybe 1% of the time but hasn't happened lately.

I also have no-brand, BT-based I2C silicone ARGB "rope" that requires an I2C fan-out repeater because only about 12 feet / 4 m could be powered serially.

sacnoradhqon Ask HN: Best practices for safeguarding master password in organization?

Use secret vaulting, never a shared password manager.

For ultimate offline secrets like HSM, CA, or crypto private keys, buy new printers, print the secrets as QR codes and keep them in safety deposit boxes at 2-3 different banks.

For passwords you don't want any one exec to have, use N-person keying by splitting 1 or multiple keys into pieces such that a quorum of 2,3, etc. are needed to utilize the secret.

sacnoradhqon Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann denies using vibrating sex toy to cheat

This story is stupid. Meanwhile, the BBC covered-up the late Jimmy Saville's rape of disabled children for decades.

sacnoradhqon Meta pays £149M to break London office lease

They leased the majority of a mixed-used building in downtown Austin that would've been 500k sq ft, the largest tenant by far of any company in the city. They quietly backed out of that. ($20M/mo easily) The most expensive part would've been staffing it: $20-60M/mo depending on the type of staff.

sacnoradhqon Meta pays £149M to break London office lease

They made a big, internal to-do of "commitment" to London for WhatsApp. Maybe it's still true.

They still act like they're swimming in billions upon billions, frittering $10's of said billions a year on GPUs and datacenter buildouts without a specific purpose or need, while simultaneously cutting back on perks, making the work environment more worker-hostile, eliminating fixed desk assignments, closing eateries, RTO, and doing layoffs.

sacnoradhqon John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

Ain't never gonna happen without becoming Bitcoin, wasting tons of energy and money.. but accomplishing an approximate simulation of biology inefficiently. Because you could potentially do something doesn't mean you should. There is no reason to do it but triumphal narcissism or VCs want to burn up their own money.

sacnoradhqon Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles

HDPE is an even worse choice.

The basic brick uses ABS.

If long-term durability were a concern, ASA might be a better choice but it costs 50% more.

Changing it to be something else would just cheapen LEGO to something that wouldn't permit intergenerational inheritance.

sacnoradhqon Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles

It hit a wall like a ton of ...

sacnoradhqon Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles

Christian conspiracy theories need not apply.

sacnoradhqon Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles

All military caltrops can be replace by Lego. And, Ukraine would win with that kind of area denial weapon and get hauled before The Hague for war crimes.

sacnoradhqon Amazon PillPack – Your medication, sorted and delivered

You're going off on an agenda tangent immaterial to the problem of dosing multiple medications.

sacnoradhqon Amazon PillPack – Your medication, sorted and delivered

America enters the chat.

Have you seen our retail pharmacy prices? ( https://www.goodrx.com )

2/3 of COTUS is on the take for big Rx. It takes taking fucking gold bars for helping a foreign adversary as an "alleged" treasonous traitor to not get kicked out of office but just lose some subcommittee assignments. You can lie about your education, profess belief in whacky conspiracy theories, and not even understand how government works and still remain a representative. Oh, and a few of the latter wingnuts are precipitating an imminent government shutdown because there is zero accountability for behavior. And you can repeat Whitewater in Texas and get away with it.

https://www.statnews.com/feature/prescription-politics/feder...

sacnoradhqon Amazon PillPack – Your medication, sorted and delivered

But Murica needs patents so only one company can do something that's completely obvious while proclaiming it's not completely obvious.

sacnoradhqon Amazon PillPack – Your medication, sorted and delivered

3D printing pills? That'd be as dumb as 3D printing butter or a soda can.

It's called compounding: taking the active ingredients and smashing them into 1 pill is trivial. Manual tablet presses have existed for hundreds of years, and automatic tablet presses have existed for 70.

sacnoradhqon Amazon PillPack – Your medication, sorted and delivered

Elderly people have a hard time dosing multiple to many medications, and some meds with narrow therapeutic-OD ranges need extra attention to avoid deadly mistakes.

sacnoradhqon F-35A has flown from a highway for the first time

An associate of mine was a USAF Major who came into possession of a Soviet Belarussian MiG-21. He stashed it in a hangar in Germany and told absolutely no one outside his inner circle of war buddies about. The only person he ever showed if off to was a fairly high-up Russian who he mistakenly thought was "cool". Guess how long it was before the cockpit avionics were stolen, rendering it un-refurbishable? Sigh Never trust a Russian officer farther than you can throw them unless their name was Stanislav Petrov.

sacnoradhqon F-35A has flown from a highway for the first time

The Russian military is stuck executing a random terror campaign against the populace and defending being pushed out of Crimea, Kharkiv, and Donetsk. The reason is cost. They cannot afford an all-out offensive in bodies, bullets, mortars, or SRBMs.

sacnoradhqon Vector: a Rust-based lightweight alternative to Fluentd/Logstash

Fluentbit is Fluentd's lightweight alternative to itself.

https://fluentbit.io

sacnoradhqon macOS Containers v0.0.1

Don't disable security features because of random comments from randos.

Also, don't install shit anywhere but your home directory as you unless you want to break your system in an irreparably, unmaintainable, or unsupported manner.

If you're using sudo, you're already doing it wrong.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102149

sacnoradhqon macOS Containers v0.0.1

Then you don't know how to use it.

sacnoradhqon macOS Containers v0.0.1

> Disable System Identity [sic] Protection.

Aaand, it's stillborn. Not happening.

sacnoradhqon DJI Mini 4 Pro

Reactive armor would just shrug it off.

sacnoradhqon DJI Mini 4 Pro

So with all this talk over banning TikTok violating the 1st a. rights of Americans using Orwellian, authoritarian tactics critics are decrying, you'd think DJI and sketchy cloud-based webcams would be banned first over more obvious capabilities.