samtho

> EVs also have much higher costs in repairs, maintenance and car insurance.

Not sure about the maintenance cost being higher here. The only things that need regular service are brake and tires as all of the moving parts of an EV are contained within an electric motor assembly that are very reliable across manufacturers.

By contrast, an ICE vehicle is loaded with moving parts, all of which need lubrication, have wear profiles that demand replacement occasionally, need to pass emissions testing, etc.

Driving an EV in the EU is way more enjoyable than the US because you’ll know that you’ll find a CCS2 connector, at least.

I don’t see what’s so difficult here.

If it’s risky to hire (because terminating is difficult, takes a long time, is riddled with red tape), then employers will be slow to do so. Less competition for employers to find workers, lower pay overall. High compensation is even risky because of the burden of having to keep employees on due to labor law compliance.

I personally believe it is better to have a robust unemployment insurance system in place that helps workers bridge the gap between jobs.

The problem is that the dogshit machine was constrained in its output by the organization creating it. Sure you may have paid small amounts per article but your resources were still limited as cost scaled linearly with content creation. Now any size of organization can make a metric tonne of lexically unique content with a fixed cost given the incentive to do so at the moment, it’s all but inevitable.

This is the principle behind GAN aka Generative Adversarial Networks. By pitting a generating model against a detection model, you can iterate your content until it is indistinguishable from human generated content.

It’s my prediction that a ChatGPG supercharged with a GAN is going to be the most valuable iteration of text generation technology. Granted, it will still likely be off a little but it’s going to get harder and harder to tell the difference.

AI has created a new standard from which “average” is defined. Rather than a real life analog to a mathematic mean, it’s simply understood to be the level at which AI performs.

These do not make sense if you are looming for similar build quality to match your home. If you have been inside of a pre manufactured home (a “mobile home”) then you’ll know how everything has to be made of oddly hollowed plastic in order to keep shipping weight down.

The frame is the cheapest part of a permanent structure, and a 300-500sqft ADU is not going to have much in the way of plumbing, electrical, and hvac. Paying a plumber, electrician, and hvac tech for new construction on a tiny building is not going to represent a significant chunk of your budget for what amounts to 1-3 days work maximum.

The problem with the phrase “No evidence” outside of a scientific context is that it sounds like it’s dodging the question, when, as you pointed out, it just means we don’t have data to support that relationship. The other way this is used is to try to “prove” a negative by communicating that we cannot establish a link, and may be accompanied by the expert stating there is evidence for the opposite case. Text bites rarely have context other than this “no evidence” statement.

For a layperson, they feel like they are having the wool pulled over their eyes and are not given a truthful answer. For example:

    Interviewer: Can you say for certain that X causes Y?
    Scientist: We have no evidence that X causes Y.
    Interviewer: But can you say for certain that Y is NOT caused by X?
    Scientist: There is no evidence of that relationship.

The scientist is trying to choose their words carefully because they are operating on the principle of only communicating what the data is telling us. The interviewer wants a clear, definitive answer. Both parties become frustrated.

I do agree with the article that this is poor communication because the scientist sounds like a lawyer and is hiding something rather than stating the facts of the situation. I’m sure there are better ways to communicate this that communicate either “we don’t know yet” and “we do not believe there is a link” instead this line.

Side note: another related and interesting distinction is the difference between unproven and disproven. If you saw a headline that a major hypothesis was “unproven”, it means only that there is no data to support it. Disproven is what the layman often thinks this means which is actively finding evidence to the contrary.

This has been a thing for years for non-Spotify podcasts. Podcast CDNs inject ads at the behest of the publisher (or the ad network provides the CDN) and will mint a new audio file for each region as it’s downloaded.

Automatically injected ads are also prone to failure and either a bug in the system or a misconfiguration by the producer of a podcast can result in some broken audio including skipping forward, backwards, creating a long tail of dead air, or (most egregiously) cut it many minutes short often enough to miss a significant chunk of the ending.

Automatic advertisement injection is a huge scourge on podcast listening, not because of the ads, but how broken it ends up being in practice.

When we reduce complicated problems down to inaccurate trivial ones by stripping out important details and nuance, we end up with a caricature of the original - one that easily devolves into a to strawman argument to serve someone’s point. This new representation masquerading as the original can carry the same weight as the one it was based off of.

The statement pointing out that it’s a manufacturing error (I’m guessing) was not intended to be solution to the problem. It pointed out that those problems have less to do the certification of the design and more to do with a manufacturing defect. If the manufacturer created parts that were up to specifications, these things would have not been a problem. This is a very important distinction because a design flaw is a much bigger deal for this aircraft type than that poorly manufactured components.

Boing is still at fault, yes, but we should exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems.

When you have 168 resumes to skim through, you can “afford” to just pass on this application and choose some others to interview that would be less offensive to office sensibilities. The impact of accepting so many false negatives is difficult to quantify because you don’t know which ones would have truly been good fit.

I suspect that among the hundreds of discarded resumes for a particular role was a candidate who actually believes in the company, would have been fully engaged with the work, and made a serious positive impact on the company’s success.

I was hoping more for a tear-down of how rent-seeking SaaS has ruined software in general. Instead, we got a strange flavor of whataboutism

I buy and sell stuff on Facebook marketplace. I browse some niche groups but I don’t regularly engage otherwise. Half the time I go to check/update/add to my listings, I get lured into the doom scrolling trap. It’s amazing and frustrating how they cater content to you such that the moment you open the app, there is interesting content that just calls to you like a siren in dense fog.

Absent of building code, it’s pretty disparaging to dismiss kitchen facilities in a permanent dwelling because someone might be able to afford eating out everyday in perpetuity.

I kind of thought there would be more insight into the data, but the article just repeats the raw numbers after drawing very sweeping US-centric generalizations over five “regions” that were just made up.

You really have to shift thinking away from the centralized-database model in order to fully understand why this question seems ill-informed.

If you recall from the SQLite story, it was created, in-part, to provide a local cache to an offline device yet still have the same query interface that developers enjoy. Because the model of access is shifted to the device, anything you populate a client-side SQL database with is already data that is accessible by the client.

I’m going to answer this genuinely and ignore the straw man because this needs to get tied up.

There are two facets here that are important to note: values and autonomy.

Your values are not your children’s. They may be related and overlap but they are never a carbon copy. Values also change over time, not only what ideas they hold true but also what things they literally value. Sometimes these values are different but compatible, e.g. I’m sure there are hundreds of things you would rather be doing than having a play tea party, but when that play tea party is hosted by your child, we recognize this is a good opportunity to bond and share an experience with the child and that in itself has tremendous value. Sometimes values conflict, in my example of an adult child not wanting anything to do with their parents for the small crime of not letting video games in the home, to the child, this caused them immense social harm in that they could not keep in close contact with their friends any longer. To the parents, they did not see this as harm because “video games bad” and thus anything associated with it was bad (including their friends).

The second facet is autonomy. Reductions in autonomy is why grounding works very well for teens - it directly impacts what little agency and control they have of their own life (side note: which is why grounding should not be done unless the rule they broke was an inappropriate use of autonomy or if they pose a danger to themselves or others). Children have their own sense of autonomy, although limited, but they can tell when it’s being taken away for reasons that are unjust.

To bring to it all together, if you are the kind of person that demands compliance “because I said so”, the crime of reducing the steaming services from three to two represents a bigger problem that begins with small transgressions over disagreements, entering into the range of learned helpless, and finally escalating into outright rebellion once all respect is lost. All rules that they feel is pointless and does not reflect their values is disregarded and a typical response is ”no contact” leaving the parents wondering why their kids don’t talk to them.

I didn’t intend to soapbox here, I just recently dealt with 3 holiday cases where the adult children want nothing to do with their parents and its sad to see that happen for preventable reasons.

> What makes you say this will alienate the family? Should I give up whenever my values for raising my children are not 100% endorsed by others?

For some background, I volunteer to help people find genetic family who may have been separated from them. I also help parents/offspring reunite if both are willing.

These reunions are not always meant to be as the offspring is often the one that cut contact in the first place (and refused to reunite) because they felt they were mistreated at some point during their childhood. This ranges from their parent not letting them join the extracurricular activity they wanted (usually because it aligned with the child’s goals but not the parent’s), to literal abuse of all kinds. I would say about 80% it’s one or both parents withholding something that child just wants to enjoy with no rhyme or reason and thus feels as if it were done to spite them.

I guarantee that three streaming services do not put them at the top of their peers of being spoiled, which what they will be comparing their situation with. If they already feel they are getting by with less and more is taken away, the long term resentment will start.

I recently encountered an adult offspring of my client who went no contact with their parents because they banned video games in their house and as a result, lost their group of friends who kept in contact by playing games together.

Everyone parents differently and I’m not trying to prescribe what you should do, but here is something that I’ve found works well.

Set your entertainment budget for the household at whatever you are paying now for streaming services and when they inevitably want to add Paramount or Discovery onto the what is available in household, you say “that is fine, but we can only have 3 streaming services (or if the kids are older: we only have a budget of $x month for streaming), which means we have to cancel one in order to add this new one”

Because it’s hard to claw back what they already are used to, you’re putting them in a position where they must consider opportunity cost. If they are clever, they will say, “let’s switch for 3 months so we can watch what we want and switch back to our original setup.” This way introduces scarcity without being the “bad guy” - after all, the budget is the budget. It also gives them choice but not the freedom to choose everything so they can take some agency and better prepares them for the challenges of the Real World(tm).

This is a loosing battle and a dying mentality. By enforcing values they may not agree with, you run the risk of alienating yourself from your family.

Why not find other activities you can enjoy with your family instead of trying to limit something that is inexpensive and not harmful in the long run?

If you’re trying to save a bunch of money by ditching 3 $10-20 monthly services, you’re probably targeting the wrong thing.

If $60/mo for the household prevents even just two unplanned outings per month, (which the cost per each would likely start at $60) is that not a cost saving measure in itself?

The biggest things besides housing that people often pay are car payments, insurance for your vehicles, and utilities. Where can you save there instead? If saving is important to you then maybe ditch the car payment and get something you can pay for in cash, replace the old furnace for a high efficiency heat pump, etc.

They’re built out of plastic because it’s $0.02 cheaper than a metal part and 99.9% of them last through the warranty period.

It’s not deliberate that they make stuff that fails, they build stuff that lasts only as long as it needs.

This is correct. I see a future where there is an optional 48VDC line that is run in our homes to power stuff like LED lights and dedicated USB ports. This can become especially important for homes that use solar and stored electricity where you might be having to go from 48VDC -> 120/240VAC -> 12VDC -> 5VDC (see note) with each conversion resulting in the loss of some power due to the fact that these cannot be 100% efficient.

Note: a lot of flyback-style transformers are setup to step down the AC voltage 1/10th (12V in 120VAC, 24V in 240VAC) because transformers are cheap/abundant for that. It’s cheaper often to put a buck converter that takes any voltage from 12-24V and convert it to a fixed required voltage.

Replace “AI” with “printing presses”, “electricity”, “general computing”, “off-shoring”, “online marketplaces”, etc. Variants of this sentiment have been expressed throughout history, but have always been looked upon as foolish in hindsight.

There will always be pressure to merge, but there is also pressure to not do so. A single technology or business strategy will not disrupt this dynamic.

> I've found with most medications looking for an active ingredient and an amount is helpful. You can search for effectiveness or side-effects.

Is this not common practice? I would be uncomfortable taking an ambiguously labeled “cold medicine” pill, personally. I know which medicines are effective for me and which are a waste of time and money.

I don’t personally agree with a lot of what Musk says or does, but I do commend him for his propensity towards (literal and figurative) moonshots in the name of innovation. This is a refreshing take when most startups have a goal to exit in X number of years and the previously agile, lean, and innovative company becomes beholden to showing quarterly returns the moment they have the capital available to them to drive something truly innovative.

I actually thought the name was cute/clever considering the ambitions they have. It also conveys an awareness that this is a moonshot product which is also suggests they are grounded in some rationality.

Also, there is typically a small hole on the end of the installer bit, just below the tip, that lets you use it as “fish stick” and poke your pull line through after you drill the hole.

You might not even need to carve it out: there is often a 3/8-3/4in gap where the drywall stops.