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tylervigen

944 karma · joined June 19, 2016

emailme@tylervigen.com
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tylervigen··on Google illegally retains customer data,and I am taking legal action against them
It’s odd that someone would assert that a legal action would be successful while citing no legal precedent.

All of the facts presented could be true, but what law is broken? What harm creates the basis for a civil suit?

tylervigen··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
Probably he meant the same thing as the parent post, chop it up into volumes?
tylervigen··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
I think for the math to work you have to consider the bigger bulk of work that could be eliminated by universal healthcare: the payer industry. Insurers, PBMs, and all the smaller sectors that support them. The utility provided to society is fairly low — basically, just selective claims denial.

Any model that gets rid of these frees up a huge swath of capital and work from society, and can use that work elsewhere. Of course, that is easier said than done.

tylervigen··on The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
Right but the “certain regions” were affluent metro areas, the control group was rural counties, and the timeframe was the Great Recession.

Even the study authors acknowledge the severe risk of the huge confounding variable.

tylervigen··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
No, arbitrary decisions would defeat the point of indexes.

But they can and do add systematic protections, like only buying based on the free float to avoid a short squeeze.

tylervigen··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
Past discussion from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058219

(Anna's Archive moves, so you won't see it by looking at the domain history in this post.)

tylervigen··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
Thanks. Is it not annoying to play Civ with a touchpad vs a mouse? Or is this just a convenience for situations where you can’t use a mouse?
tylervigen··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
Can anyone share their experience enjoying the two pads they put on their controllers?

I have a Steam Deck and love it, but the only experience I have with those pads is “dammit I accidentally touched the pad again.” If I want a mouse, I just connect a Bluetooth mouse.

I thought for sure everyone knew it was a flop and we’d never see it again, but obviously that’s not right since they are back. What am I missing?

tylervigen··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
The player-coach analogy is very common in role definitions, and it is real concept in sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach
tylervigen··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
It can both be true that (1) most of the revenue and operations focus is on the core airline and (2) most of the profit and valuation is driven by the loyalty program.

This is true for American Airlines: https://viewfromthewing.com/new-report-says-aadvantage-is-wo...

tylervigen··on Mike: open-source legal AI
The other answer (staff who use Westlaw) is right, but critically this is the point of adversarial litigation. The justice system doesn't hang on that judge finding the precedent; it assumes that the highly motivated lawyers on either side will find the relevant precedent that helps their case and highlight it for the judge.
tylervigen··on Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero
That is common law, but many jurisdictions have specific regulations related to this. E.g.: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2017/04/28/US-Pr...

I don't know whether "usually" is accurate though; it may be that common law prevails as you say in most transactions despite the states with regulations.

tylervigen··on 1D Chess
I have never played it, but I could imagine a scoring mechanism that would make it interesting, and perhaps is implied by the rules:

The score value starts at 1. Every additional "check" multiplies the score value by 2 (so 2, 4, 8, 16...). The first player to say "checkmate" receives the score. Track your summed score between games; the player with the highest overall score at any given time is "winning."

tylervigen··on A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
Perhaps also worth noting that you generally shake the die before releasing it. Thus even if you drop it straight down through a vacuum, you would have done the center-of-mass-impacted-tumbling in your hands first.
tylervigen··on Death to Scroll Fade
...is that really the story? It feels like these are two related, but different things.
tylervigen··on Death to Scroll Fade
Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.
tylervigen··on US Job Market Visualizer
Seems like a lot of people are dunking on this comment with anecdata.

Thankfully there is real data if we want to know how microwaves are used. Survey below says they are used a bit more than ovens, but half as much as cooktops/stoves. Varies by cohort and meal.

Source: https://indoor.lbl.gov/publications/residential-cooking-beha...

tylervigen··on Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition
I disagree. If you focus on holding the software creators to account in lieu of the humans in the loop, the we only reinforce the behavior of offloading thinking to the system.

If I am a cop in another jurisdiction and I see that in this case of error, the facial recognition company was held to account but not the police or municipality, I will be more likely to blindly trust the software assuming that they either patched it or will take responsibility.

We should demand accountability for both.

tylervigen··on How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
I think the point is that we don't have evidence that this actually happened from anyone other than Codewall.
tylervigen··on Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds
> ShadowBroker is a real-time, full-spectrum geospatial intelligence dashboard

You might consider changing this to a more accurate headline, like "Air and Space domain awareness."

"Full spectrum Geospatial intelligence" most commonly refers to full color satellite photos (sometimes including near infrared).

In the Geospatial world, "spectrum" almost always takes on its literal meaning - the spectrum of light. And "Geospatial intelligence" refers to intelligence gathered from Geospatial platforms, not intelligence about the locations of those platforms.

tylervigen··on I'm Not Consulting an LLM
I would say it's more like enjoying a song so much that you choose to listen to a cover of that song.
tylervigen··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
What a time to be alive: Companies post roles that don't exist to interview candidates who don't plan to switch.
tylervigen··on The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
There are tons of examples of this. Heck, even Tetris has procedural generation. I think this argument was a mistake.
tylervigen··on The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE
The “gambled his life savings” framing in the article is very hyperbolic.

He gambled $300K from his extra savings outside his retirement accounts, and he hedged significantly to reduce downside risk.

tylervigen··on “Car Wash” test with 53 models
> there is no single correct answer

I think we all mostly agree that there is a single correct answer, and that is why this discussion exists in the first place.

tylervigen··on You are not supposed to install OpenClaw on your personal computer
How did the question become “which corporate device can I install OpenClaw on?” Who is doing that?
tylervigen··on HackMyClaw
It seems like the model became paranoid. For the past few hours, it has been classifying almost all inbound mail as "hackmyclaw attack."[0]

Messages that earlier in the process would likely have been classified as "friendly hello" (scroll down) now seem to be classified as "unknown" or "social engineering."

The prompt engineering you need to do in this context is probably different than what you would need to do in another context (where the inbox isn't being hammered with phishing attempts).

[0] https://hackmyclaw.com/log

tylervigen··on Palantir CEO wants to spray "fentanyl-laced urine" on analysts
He has said this before: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palantir-ceo-makes-another-co...

It’s a weirdly specific thing to say multiple times.

tylervigen··on OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013
tylervigen··on Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
This article is mostly about this discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46978710
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