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vampirical

81 karma · joined March 9, 2009

vampirical at google's mail service
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vampirical··on Banned in California
Why do you think there's something to be gained here? There are a lot of cheap and easy checks this content fails that it represents a well formed argument based on reality.
vampirical··on Banned in California
To me at least this appears to be a smoking gun for the creator not being able to function in good faith. Whether that's intentional or self delusion, who knows.

From the page itself, "A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA." This point is trotted out and reframed multiple times on the page but it's literally self contradictory. It's not something you can't do in California, it's something you can't do without approval in the Bay Area Air District.

It's not a good place to be doing such an activity, as the area already can't successfully keep the air healthy enough to stay within federal limits due to environmental factors that trap particulate low to the ground. If you're at all familiar with the area you know concerns about air quality are not overblown and. Go further away from people or meet strict VOC regulations if you absolutely need to be doing that kind of work in the area, seems completely reasonable to me.

vampirical··on (Re)Introducing the Pebble Appstore
I think there’s a simpler explanation. Apple’s always uses a type of product metric that most companies don’t use. Those competitor products don’t care about phone battery drain, so they aren’t even trying to do anything about it.
vampirical··on German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws
Please re-read what you’ve written in these two comments with a critical eye. You’re speaking from a lack of knowledge without very much care and reaching incorrect conclusions that agree with your initial bias. When someone else does the work of helping nudge you towards reality you seem to be doing a poor job correcting. Sorry if this comes across as rude, it’s said with the kindest of intentions.
vampirical··on Storytelling lessons I learned from Steve Jobs (2022)
You can also do the reverse gesture, a small swipe up from the bottom of the screen, to return to full screen.
vampirical··on Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
You were demonstrably wrong three times in your comment, misrepresenting the reality of both sides of the argument and the prevailing opinion of humanity. The fact that one side doesn’t have the tools to confidently reach that conclusion is the problem.
vampirical··on Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris
Which doesn’t matter in the slightest. What’s our best understanding of what’s objectively true? That one side is actually stupid, insane, or evil.

I at least, am out of patience for sophistry as if this is just a normal and innocent difference of perspective.

vampirical··on Autism's Four Core Subtypes
You’re probably going to think I’m very presumptuous but I’m going to say this anyway in case it is helpful for you.

If people are frequently offended when you speak on a topic you’re probably being offensive somehow through content or delivery.

In my experience the thought “[they] feel threatened anytime something is expressed that differs from […]” is not accurate and it also turns off your brain on trying to figure out what is actually going on. I can recommend from personal experience a small apology and transition to more listening in that moment. If more feels appropriate, giving it some time and space and re-engaging gently to discover what went on for them in that moment can yield a lot of value for both sides.

vampirical··on 'Zombie' Condos, Angry Residents and a Ruling That Stunned Miami's Developers
https://archive.ph/WpOY0
vampirical··on How many medical studies are faked or flawed?
I think you're accidentally telling on yourself here. You're looking at somebody getting a result which is surprising to you but rather than being curious about how they might be on to something you're turning off your brain and assuming they're malfunctioning.

Something being in a category, such as "a study", doesn't tell you much about a thing. If you read multiple studies on vaccine safety critically and reason about them and what experts are saying about them, IMO most functional human being are going to reach the same general conclusion about vaccine safety. If you do the same thing on studies about seed oils or aspartame you're also going to come to the conclusion that they're safe! If you're not reaching these same results it doesn't necessary mean you're the one who is malfunctioning but you should seriously consider it and try again to learn what you might not know.

vampirical··on iOS 17 is available today
I’ll second what my sibling poster said but also…

From my perspective iOS already has pretty good call/text blocking. Are you sure you know all the existing features?

For calling, there’s a built-in contacts only mode behind a single opt-in switch, this is what I use. There’s also a privacy preserving app system that allows you to install third party apps which provide block lists and labeling to the phone app.

Messages is similar, except with unknowns being put in a separate list and an older and simpler static block list, though it does also support reporting the message as junk which presumably means all iOS devices have a bit of a shared message spam filter.

vampirical··on We're not Platonists, we've just learned the bitter lesson
Just a bystander but you just quoted this: > My whole premise is that it doesn’t have better than human intelligence. Everyone glosses over how we go from ChatGPT 4 failing its own unit tests to geometrically self-improving hyper-intelligence.

Then did exactly what the quote is talking about, assuming we achieve better than human intelligence. > But you seem to think there's some barrier that means that even if it was a better-than-human programmer (implicitly for general-intelligence reasons), it wouldn't be able to geometrically self-improve.

The question is how exactly do we go from a below human intelligence to an above human intelligence. Without a clear path to that reality, making trade offs in order to protect against low probability worse case scenarios which require it doesn’t look like a good deal.

The reality that right now human level intelligences have a hard time even keeping these below human intelligence systems operating seems like a useful checkpoint. Maybe we can hold off on doing distasteful things like consolidating control until they can at least wipe their own bottoms as it were.

vampirical··on Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states
See my reply to justrealist's sibling comment to yours.
vampirical··on Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states
The Clean Water Act was amended in in 1977 to add the phrase "adjacent wetlands" specifically because of contention on this point. This was after the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA had fought and settled into an agreement on definitions and policy stemming the previous version and that understanding was known and referenced by congress during argument. The congressional research document which traces the history of this has already been linked on this post but I'll reiterate it here: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44585

If you want to jump straight to the punchline, this is from the section on United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, Inc in which the Supreme Court made clear that they were aware of this context and informed their ruling taking it into account: The Court also cited legislative history from the passage of the Clean Water Act and the amendments in 1977—in which the term “adjacent wetlands” was added to the statute107—as support for its conclusion that Congress intended for the Clean Water Act to have a broad jurisdictional reach which included the adjacent wetlands at issue.108 In concluding that adjacent wetlands could reasonably be covered, however, the Court also emphasized that it did not express any opinion on the Corps’ authority to regulate discharges of fill material into wetlands that are not adjacent to bodies of open water.109

vampirical··on No Surprise, Uber and Lyft Lied About Helping Workers
Why wouldn’t they be able to multi-app? As far as I can tell this is double talk. “If we have to W2 them we will make a condition of employment that they can’t be clocking hours in multiple apps at once.” That is the only explanation I can see for why there’d be any issue. At least in California there is no law that would restrict either company or employee in such a way, in fact the case law on non competes seems to lean the other direction with preference given to workers not being restricted from practicing their trade except in very limited circumstances. So they’re creating a straw man unworkable situation that would only be created by them pushing an unworkable system and supporting employment agreement.

There are many alternative ways to structure this relationship. Many with just as much or more chance of being long term sustainable for all parties than the current model which definitely works for one party but we have good evidence is not sustainable and workable for all the workers some of whom are being chewed through and exploited.

vampirical··on SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners
Here's an archive of the Medium post so you can read it without dealing with their soft paywall: https://archive.is/uKzSZ
vampirical··on SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners
Sorry on a limited device where I can't do much formatting.

You made a pretty explicit claim earlier in this thread "The mRNA vaccines are not "adequate": they are being treated by governments as if they aren't working whilst also being significantly more dangerous than every other vaccine programme out there by a long way". Talking about historic or generalized vaccine ROI is different and is a new claim that isn't really on topic. I have no interest in arguing that all vaccines have always been perfect or that you can't have a generalized concern. Your claim that current mRNA vaccines for an ongoing pandemic are not adequate and are dangerous is an extraordinary claim and do need evidence.

Which brings us back to the point. I went into the analysis of the VAERS data because it needs analysis. It is a fairly raw data set meant for usage and analysis by professionals. We pumped millions of data points in to it this year, seeing a spike doesn't mean anything without analysis. How many people out of the population who were vaccinated were expected to be dying of strokes and heart attacks in the same time period? Here's a great write-up that goes into the details: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/underreporting-and-po...

vampirical··on SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners
native_samples You've been misinformed. We have pre launch studies with 40k+ participants showing no meaningful risk. And post launch when there were exceedingly rare ("This adverse event is rare, occurring at a rate of about 7 per 1 million vaccinated women between 18 and 49 years old. For women 50 years and older and men of all ages, this adverse event is even more rare.") and not unexpected clotting issues vaccine administration was paused so the issue could be analyzed more thoroughly and quantified specifying to defeat this kind of FUD. "As to safety The Pfizer trial reported serious adverse reactions in 0.6% of vaccine recipients and 0.5% of placebo recipients." https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-phase-... https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/sa... https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer...
vampirical··on SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners
Your claims are pretty extraordinary and demand extraordinary evidence. How exactly are they not adequate? How are they being treated as if they aren't working? How are they dangerous?

The one source you provide is embarrassingly poorly founded. It takes garbage input sources, obscures even the meager data in them and then decreases the quality of the claims even further with misleading representations. Here's just one example to show explicitly what I'm taking about with my claim. "A recent analysis by researchers at Queen Mary University in London found that even in senior citizens, about 85% of deaths reported to VAERS were definitively, likely or possibly caused by the vaccine." That language implies heavily "85% scary!" when in fact that the claim by the paper is "15% were confirmed to have nothing to do with the vaccine" and as you read further their results show even less than that. I'm just going to go in order through my notes from a critical read of the paper for more background, these are not prioritized or meant to be hard exclusion criteria on their own but rather straws on the camels back. The project this paper was published under is not specialized in this area, making me suspicious that they are qualified for this analysis at all. "PAMBAYESIAN is a 3-year EPSRC funded project to develop a new generation of intelligent medical decision support systems based on Bayesian networks. The project focuses on home-based and wearable real-time monitoring systems for chronic conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes in pregnancy and atrial fibrillation. The project has the potential to improve the well-being of millions of people." Looking through through the credentials and publication history of all the authors seems to confirm that they may not have the relavant foundation for this work. There is absolutely no statistical analysis anywhere in the paper and the authors acknowledge their data set is what I would call almost but not quite entirely useless "This process is ongoing, as there are 1644 deaths in the dataset that have been reported in patients who had recently received their first or second COVID-19 vaccination, and over 28,000 serious adverse events that did not result in death. This interim results paper presents information on the first 250 reported deaths that have been reviewed and coded by our team. Obviously, these results cannot be generalised as the sample is heavily biased - these were all people vaccinated very early in the programme when only the elderly, those with significant or chronic health conditions and frontline health service staff were being vaccinated." And finally the actual claim that is attempted to be made by the paper authors is "But there are some important findings. that the only patients where a vaccine allergic reaction be ruled out as contributing to death were 34 (14%) who were all either already bedridden, at end of life, and expected to die anyway from a serious comorbid like lung cancer or were on palliative hospice care. We also found that for at least 13 of the 250 deaths (5%), a vaccine allergic reaction was indisputably the most likely direct cause for the symptoms and patient outcomes described." They found 13 very ill people whose deaths, in a third party's interpretation of case notes, were contributed to by an allergic reaction to receipt of the vaccine. 5% of the most delicate people had a normal reaction to receiving any vaccine and because of their extreme poor health or their quality of care were not able to be helped with standard intervention for such a reaction. Shocking stuff that.

I think you should take a serious critical look at this data source swprs.org and how much of things you think you know have been influenced by it.

vampirical··on Why is Apple acting like an asshole?
The article does mention Apple normally provides at least 3-4 days of Golden Master availability and usually a week+ before General Availability and that this is useful for various reasons. A lot of these are ecosystem failing that developers work around normally, when given enough time. Since it doesn’t seem to provide enough detail maybe I can fill in some missing context.

The App Store submission process is tightly integrated with the Xcode version used to build the app, if you want to be ready before users upgrade the App Store needs to be updated at least a few days before users automatically get the update. The App Store being updated to allow builds from the new version of Xcode is the most important issue. That only happened after 2pm ET on the 15th, and I’ve seen report their had been some delay (thankfully I only had to verify existing builds and didn’t need to submit a new build today). This means even if you had your build completely done based on pre Golden Master beta, and can either quickly reverify it or are comfortable just throwing it out there, you could only actually submit it today. Review times even without back and forth over policy points can take multiple days. Things will be worse for users over the next couple days.

iOS betas are frequently quite noisy and variable, if you test against an early beta you will need to retest against the actual GM with potential backwards compatible breaks each time. If you are either unlikely to have bugs or have enough capacity to spike doing a lot of work within a week you have the option of only doing the expensive thorough verification work against a single release.

There are still many reasons why real device testing with the production IAP environment are necessary. This is mostly a failure on Apple’s part to ever update their test environment’s capabilities and achieve parity with production. Doing this early requires you to be able to afford and have extra hardware of spend extra time having to upgrade and downgrade OS versions in order to verify the new version and continue to support live production hot fixes and support. A week between GM and GA is in the Goldilocks zone for developers, so that if they’re not doing a huge release to correspond with the iOS version they can upgrade test devices once, do one chunk of testing and fixing issues, and have their own build which will happily support both the old and new OS reviewer and live before users actually get the new OS.

vampirical··on Meet the New Filepicker Team
It would be great for one or more of the founders to do a postmortem write-up once any dust has settled. I had high hopes for Ink, seems like a shame. I'd imagine this comes at the end of a lot of work to get things transitioned so it is understandable that it is a bit light but it would definitely be good to hear more detail.
vampirical··on Tesla Clashes With Car Dealers
Paywall busted: http://const.it/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014241278...
vampirical··on David Rusenko's 2012 Startup School Talk
Just FYI, http://qbix.com/ just shows "Error rendering this page." in Opera. Took me a second to realize it was just a browser compat issue, at first I wrote the whole service off as broken.

You might want to drop in an explicit browser support warning.

vampirical··on Show HN: A Url Permanence Service
I did something similar as a weekend project, haven't checked-up on it in a while but it seems to still work: http://const.it/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529...

The original idea was just to provide a consistent link which would fallback to a cache when necessary and back to the original content for reddit/hn type traffic. Then it made sense to do some paywall busting and readability functionality on top of it and those features overshadowed the original concerns.

vampirical··on Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It
> But after some further consideration, we decided that it was a false risk, as the username reminder form already tells you if a username exists [...]

Alright so this security hole already existed in their system elsewhere. After raising the issue that this type of message leaks data, which is a completely valid concern, they dropped it because they were already leaking that data elsewhere? It isn't like email based account reset/reminder forms have to leak the existence of an email within the system, a fact they just gloss right over.

For a system that stores quite a lot of very sensitive data it is surprising to see them knowingly keep such a hole open. I understand the desire to smooth out the user experience but this honestly seems more driven by the desire to not field customer support requests for what feels like a "stupid issue".

I'm not currently a MailChimp customer but I used to be and before reading this I would have chosen to use them again if the need was there. Please don't compromise the security of customers for convenience.

vampirical··on BufferBox: Amazon Lockers? We Had That Idea First
I was offered local locations (all 7-11s) for an order I placed to the SF Bay Area yesterday, so it looks like SF can be added to that list.
vampirical··on The Differences Between Android and iPhone Users at Hunch
It is always interesting to see how people interpret statistics.

I would describe Android users as a younger demographic who live spread out across cities, suburbs, and the country. I would describe the iOS users as middle-aged rich women who live in cities.

None of the other data is really that meaningful when you start with a such a different base. Are rich city dwelling women more likely to identify as politically liberal? Obviously. Are young people more likely to make less money? Again, this is not rocket science.

The follow/lead thing is highly amusing. In my experience the largest "I lead" responders in a survey are people who are uncomfortable thinking of themselves as anything other than unique snowflakes but this has no bearing on actual lead/follow behavior, it may actually be inversely correlated.

Disclaimer: Android phone user, and iPad user/dev.

vampirical··on Connecticut Killed Affiliate Marketing with Amazon.com
The whole point is that rather than the state happily collecting their income tax on any income generated by state residents, which they have always been able to do, they are attempting to levy a tax against all Amazon commerce transactions based on the fact that they have affiliates operating in the state.

DanielBMarkham is not making a case that IL isn't entitled to tax his income from the Amazon affiliate program. It is taken for granted that they will tax the additional income, as they have been doing since before this new budget/law. What they are attempting to do is tax more than just income generated by affiliates living in the state, which is where the argument that they are not contributing to the flow of business which would warrant that.

vampirical··on Grasshopper Virtual Phone System Down for 30+ Hours
RingCentral is pretty solid. The web interface is bad but the service itself is solid, good feature set and reliability.
vampirical··on SEC Boots Up for Internet Age (may allow startup crowdfunding)
http://const.it/online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870484...
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