vertexFarm

Or how about reasonable levels of power? Ten watts per kilo is an absolutely nutso-bismol bonkers level of radiation compared to what real people and animals are exposed to. I don't spend twelve hours a day inside a magnetron.

I'd like to see the results of an experiment where they have a highly controlled pair of populations that are identical in every way except one group of rats is in a Faraday cage. It would be ideal if they were still exposed to natural radio frequencies--after all, radio is not an exclusively man-made phenomenon. But of course GSM doesn't get through the atmosphere easily. A long-term study like that might actually be useful.

These studies where they bathe the rats in a few thousand times the average ambient power of our cell network are utterly blatant examples of confirmation bias in science publishing. They cranked up the amplitude until it had to have an effect on biology--stopping just shy of "significant heating" of tissues. Basically it's a microwave on defrost, complete with a scattering reflector and turntable to make sure the rats cook evenly. Doesn't seem like good faith to me. And of course dumbed-down science journalism will immediately clickbait it into the headline "Cellphones Will Literally Kill You," as is tradition.

Exactly. The past couple years have been an exercise in the inadequacies of the honor system. There are no consequences; we can't expect either industry or government entities to self-regulate out of basic human decency. Their efforts to fix the problem amount to nothing more than a cynical PR move. They halfheartedly assuage doubts until the news cycle shifts again. There are no consequences for anyone.

Helping out "small time inventors" is the convenient, reasonable explanation for patents. It's pure PR. In reality, patents benefit large players far more than small ones. It's just even more reinforcement of the status quo. Make no mistake--it was designed that way from the outset, much like all structures of systemic power.

People say patents just need to be reformed, but I think it's a hopelessly outdated system. It's a relic. It's not the nineteenth century anymore. To say we just need to review patents more carefully and only grant them to deserving and truly novel ideas is naive. The span of fields of specialization is far too wide--who would pay for such an army of specialized patent clerks for every branch of technology? How would you prevent regulatory capture when only the industry they regulate has that kind of expertise? How do you prevent bribery and corruption? It's impossible. We have a terrible patent review system because that is the reality of patent review.

Exactly. It's the "match that ignites an industry" and increases competition in order to create an economic imperative for the rest of the industry players to make electric products.

Supposedly this has been goal number one the entire time, so Tesla ought to be very proud to have played a role in finally breaking the electric car into the mainstream--not as a single company which may persist or may fail, but as an enduring concept adopted across the industry.

https://medium.com/@cormiston/the-elon-musk-business-model-c...

Musk has his flaws, but it's not a bad strategy.

Did you do it out of choice or necessity? This sounds so out of touch. Most of these people aren't doing it as an experiment to bolster their savings and achieve some kind of minimalist zen, they're doing it because real affordable housing is out of reach.

Like I'd love to imagine that Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl are somewhere in Boston, but our current cyberpunk reality is mostly very sad.

Since the stuff they're probing isn't included in the APIs, they gotta have some account info to provide insight into this behavior.

This is classic short-sighted engineering hubris. Realistically how much statistical threat is there from birds? And how long until this design malfunctions somewhere? If this is rolled out in scale and put in use at every airport, it's going to happen.

Awww they don't like it when you mine their data. Poor lil' guys.

Huh. When you look at the graphics which concentrate all the urbanized land on the northeast coast, it looks like our total urban area is close to the size of Mega-City One. Cool.

Return on investment I'd guess. HN is hardly a pipeline into the hearts and minds of the average US citizen. Facebook is practically the collective unconscious of our country, as disgusting as that sounds.

I don't know, as much as I respect you looking out for the "engineer as savior" bias and the fact that average users may have a distinctly different viewpoint than we do, in this case it seems somewhat disingenuous.

People have spoken time and again about needless auto-playing video clips. About weird, busted scroll hijacks and massive header images. About newsletter beggars which take up the whole screen on every. single. site. About ubiquitous "got it!" cookie disclaimers. About pages that load mountains of extraneous crap while you're trying to read, and reflows the text halfway through the second paragraph, suspiciously at the exact moment you try to tap a link which makes you click an ad instead, which is of course bloated with poison dogshit and offal and immediately crashes the tab. About how every single major site bullies you into downloading an app instead of putting effort into making their mobile site run properly. Instead the mobile site is intentionally crippled to incentivize the adtech-infected app even more, and even the request desktop mode is broken. And of course the mobile app is only a thinly-veiled plot to scrape your phone's guts out like a dead fish and gain every permission possible. If it can run in a browser, I think it should run in a browser. I'm highly suspicious of any app that is really just a website in a tarted-up trojan horse.

Adblockers are perpetually on the rise, as the article says, and other content blockers and filters are also in play now. I have to use outline.com to read most news articles, which is an amazing resource. But I think this popular opinion is warranted. The internet is bloated with malicious bullshit. Everyone got in an arms race with each other and had to do it, despite nobody actually wanting it.

I don't think the devs and designers who made this stuff so ubiquitous are evil, nor are they stupid. They were just caught in a catch-22 as web trends do their fickle thing. They are regular people earnestly doing their best, just like everyone else. Doomed to create camel after camel via feedback from ignorant clients, misread focus groups, neurotic middle management, et cetera. People rarely get to decide or unilaterally invent any of these large-scale trends, they just happen as a herd phenomenon I think. And everyone has to jump on board to remain viable, or at least that's the illusion at the time.

He just built the machine from scratch. I don't think the very first bit of video rendered from after effects was something that made it on the criterion collection either, but you learn to use a new tool to do things of increasing sophistication as you go.

I do think he could probably use a bit more rigidity on the long thing that holds the end of the light tube since it appears to have a bit of wobble, but I'm sure that somebody with this level of competence is already on that issue for the next revision.

For the proper application, you could do stuff with this which would absolutely make a raytracing renderer vomit its bytes in anguish. All my motion design buddies are very excited about this video.

From your description, it sounds like this event made a sudden change in how you feel about it. It was a fear that sprouted up immediately after a definite source. You had an earnest fear that you were about to die because you didn't know turbulence like that.

That sounds like some kind of mild case of PTSD to me. It's not always super-dramatic shell shock or trauma from war; any fearful event can give you some level of post-traumatic stress. When I was twenty I was run over by a van running a red light and dragged along the road a good way. I was fine, but after that I had a very hard time crossing the street without getting jumpy and having my hair stand on end. If somebody edged out into the intersection to turn left instead of waiting behind the line, it made me freak out and run across or even turn back. It was an extremely physical sensation, like I was losing control of my body with fear. It looked really silly to other people, and I was kind of embarrassed.

I'm fine now. Even going to Southeast Asia and crossing the chaotic roads there which have no signals isn't frightening, where people must steadily walk through a mass of still-moving traffic. I think it was a case of exposure. I had to keep going out there and exposing myself to something I was afraid of. I lived in New York back then, so I was obviously exposed to it countless times every day as a matter of course. Flying might be different because it just happens so much more infrequently.

In any case, I'm not a professional; I hope you'll excuse my amateurish diagnosis and personal anecdotes. I'd recommend talking to somebody with training about your situation and seeing what they think. Don't be embarrassed because this isn't the kind of harrowing event typically associated with post-traumatic stress. It can happen at a lower intensity with everyday fears too.

The mind is but a plaything of the body. There's more and more evidence that most decision-making takes place in parts of our brain we don't control, and our conscious mind absurdly takes credit for decisions that were considered and completed before we are even aware a decision was taking place. As if our consciousness is a kid in the passenger seat of a car with one of those fake toy steering wheels attached to the dashboard in front of them, imagining that their actions are steering the car while our subconscious is really doing the deciding from the driver's seat.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23367-brain-imaging-s...

Our bodies keep the higher mind around for some useful forms of complex problem-solving, but for day-to-day life the body simply tricks you into thinking you're in control. It's incredible how much of an hallucinatory experience it is to be human.

Nah, steampunk has led a full life and died of natural causes. It's in a better place now.

The tape deck manufacturers today know what's up. Nobody is trying to get serious hi-fi out of tapes anymore. There are cheaper and more effective ways of doing that today.

People using tapes are looking specifically for the imperfections of the medium. Trying to get perfect reproduction out of one would be like selling a synthesizer that only produces the most perfect, clean sine wave. Nobody wants that. The distortion is the instrument.

I'm sorry, those are bad. The first is a joyless dissection of wordy music theory, which is to production of music as Freudian literary analysis is to writing. That's all made up post-hoc by the academics, the artist never has any of those intentions in mind when they make music and it describes nobody's creative process. And by the way it's synthwave, not vaporwave.

The second immediately parroted that stupid myth that vaporwave is all some kind of cerebral criticism of capitalist consumerism. Ugh. One pretentious guy wrote a big "think piece" about that back in like 2011 and it spread like cancer despite all the founding producers in those days going on record saying they have no idea what he was talking about. It's just this soulless and cynical method of taking the complex, hard-to-pin-down emotions that music can evoke and cheapening it into some trite social commentary with a shoehorn and a can of WD-40 to make your banalities fit. So sad. And then the guy in the video goes on to make terrible imitation vaporwave to further demonstrate that he just doesn't get it.

Property taxes are indeed a direct tax on one of the most significant forms of wealth in the US. Most equity for the average American family is their home. It doesn't make sense to tax people with greater property and generational wealth a tenth as much as younger people with less wealth.

And yes, there should be and are higher taxes on tech workers, inasmuch that there should be and are higher taxes on people with greater incomes. To an extent, at least. That is also directly taxing income, as you said.

We've already seen the prosperity of the mid-20th century in regards to high upper tax rates and social spending, and we've seen the Kansas tax cut experiments when it comes to dropping them all and absolutely ruining the state. These aren't theories or opinions anymore, they are fact.

To clarify, I don't think taxes should be based on age or anything. But when you have something like prop 13, it isn't explicitly worded to tax people based on youth, but that is the obvious outcome of the situation. And that's ridiculous. A wise nation do not devour their young.

If you reduce your definition of fascism only to actual, original Italians and Germans in the 1930s and 40s, you completely disregard lessons that we should never forget, to remain always vigilant against the causes of that era. It doesn't somehow show respect for those who fought it then to shout down anyone who thinks comparable things might come to pass in our present time.

I understand you think it seems childish to accuse certain practices today of being fascist, but you must also understand that by the time it's clicking its boots and saluting a dictator in front of columns of tanks, it's a little too late to make the comparison in a useful way. Unfortunately it requires a bit of imagination to work with an uncertain future, as is always the case.

No, the whole point of portraying it as a "culture war" of intolerance is to obfuscate and legitimize what it's really about. There's a reason he's so vague about what he's talking about and uses Japanese characters to spell out western words--to inhibit people from working out opinions for themselves. And mainstream Japanese culture does not share his opinions at all.

It's obviously trying to push an agenda from an unassailable position of false neutrality. This is just NAMBLA with a fake veneer of noble eastern mysticism. Trying to conflate disagreement with cultural intolerance in order to game the debate is the message.

That old saying is a special kind of unfalsifiable crud that's just used to either discard the views of young people or mock the views of old people as stupid. There's plenty of old people who aren't conservative, and tons of conservative old people who are brainless. And plenty of every other combination imaginable.

"not boys, so it is not completely analogous to paedophile"

What does this mean? Pedophilia is not somehow specific to males lusting after males. It's still completely analogous to pedophilia.

"...depict an identifiable, actual minor."

So this doesn't apply to cartoons of the fictional character Mitsuki, a tiny blue-haired girl in a school uniform who is totally 21 years old and not 9 according to the dating simulator's lore. So this would probably be legal in the US.

See, this guy isn't even right about that. He lies about the idea that it's totally non-controversial and accepted as ethical in Japanese culture, and he lies that it's universally illegal in western culture. This whole thing is a big pile of straw men invented by an otaku who thinks he's an ambassador of an entire culture for some reason.

Yeah, the "neutrality" being touted here is so clearly a farce. This is ridiculous. I can't believe there's so many people discussing this pile of offal with such seriousness.

"The coverage, all from Blue-aligned media, largely presented Mastodon as a cool new alternative to Twitter that would be free of "harassment," which is a Blue code word for the mere existence of the Red side."

Give me a fucking break.

There's this baffling and unnecessary plug of US politics--done seemingly for the exclusive purpose of sneakily putting down one side while maintaining an absurd claim of neutrality. It's not really relevant to the other subject he's discussing, which, by the way, is also total bullshit.

Just look at how the subject is discussed. It isn't discussed, it's danced around vaguely. He not only refuses to explain the difference between the two genres of porn--he won't even spell them out. Uses "ロリコン" instead of lolicon, a term which is very commonly understood in the English-speaking world. Because it's a loanword from western culture and western concepts. It's not some mysterious eastern thing that we can't possibly comprehend, as he asserts.

Katakana, the very alphabet that "ロリコン" is written in, exists in a large way to spell out loanwords from other languages. So why doesn't he just spell it out in the language the rest of the article is written in? Same reason he never explains these mysterious, forbidden concepts from the mystical eastern lands™ in a clear way: because he's trying to hide it.

The idea that lolicon is not controversial at all--and to go so far to say that it is universally accepted in Japanese culture--is also an absurd falsehood and obvious bad faith in an argument that's trying to appear neutral but has a bald-faced agenda. Only otaku who knows of Japanese culture exclusively through cartoons and video games would ever think that was true.

This is so obviously an article by somebody who a. wants to bemoan the oppression of right-wing opinions online and b. enjoys lolicon in a sexual way and wants to discreetly defend that habit. It's not even ambiguous. At all.

I feel like the way the "culture wars" are presented in quasi-neutrality is meant to imply that any moral or political disagreement within a culture is irrational, that all sides are always the same, and he and other "neutrals" are above it all, yet they are simultaneously oppressed. That whole argument ignores historical fact that there are cultures which were objectively harmful and unethical, and it is not some irrational folly for current cultures to try to foresee that such a thing might happen again.

Of course both sides™ think they're on the right side of history and ethics, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless and it doesn't mean that right and wrong won't become clear one day in hindsight. We can't pretend we are the sole exceptions in history.

I wanted to add something which is rightfully controversial and unpopular because it comes from an entirely different and somewhat naïve era.

It's easy for us to overlook in this day and age what kind of context they had in 18th-century America. They didn't have much of a concept of a revolutionary dictator, a monstrous autocrat who emerged out of a popular revolution. Back then, dictators and despots already ruled everything through heredity and divine right. The dictators who arose from revolutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were an out-of-context problem at the time. To them, assassination didn't carry connotations of Kennedy or Franz Ferdinand. It was a wilder and more violent age. Probably one that shouldn't be emulated.

But it's astounding how rarely it's acknowledged that the second amendment was meant to act as a violent deterrent against our own government. It isn't to defend against home invaders, or hunt, or whatever. Of course the staunchest supporters of the second are often the very ones voting in the crooks they should be ousting, or at least acting as a deterrent for.

That part of our central legal document exists explicitly to facilitate credible threats of assassination as one of our government's checks and balances, and we like to dance around that ugly fact. At this point it obviously doesn't work the way things did in the 1700s, like most things from three centuries ago. We now know that method doesn't end well, and alternatives should absolutely be pursued until there's no other option.

But today we also live in a time when the most massive and damaging crimes done by those in government--or the pseudo-government of industry--carry no punishment at all except an abstract (and impotent) threat of being voted out of office in a few years. And our absurdly low approval rating / incumbency ratio should show us that there's something deeply wrong with that avenue. I think more people should be concerned about the implications of extremely low approval ratings combined with near-perfect rates of re-election. This casts a doubt about democratic legitimacy that we cannot deny or brush away.

I think at least serious prison time should be on the table. And of course I mean the real prisons that we send normal criminals to. But that is unheard of. We need to acknowledge that checks and balances have already failed in a very fundamental way.

It is obviously and demonstrably not. We have outrageous amounts of corruption, up to the point that it's been outright legalized. The amount of pay-for-play in our legal system and filthy regulatory capture by the regulated industries themselves in the US is incredible.

The risk/reward situation is not balanced at all. There is such an obscene amount to be gained, and the only repercussion is to lose a cushy job. They get to fall back on a nice executive gig on the other side of the revolving door. Do we hold other criminals to those standards and lay out that kind of weak punishment?

And even when it comes to being voted out, there's all sorts of gerrymandering and bad-faith efforts to obfuscate and soft-rig US elections.

Everyone should absolutely vote, that much is true. You should always vote, even if you think it doesn't matter because they've successfully gamed the system. You still gotta vote to make it as difficult as possible to manipulate results.

But voting alone is not going to cut it one day. Other civil efforts are needed to keep a democracy from becoming corrupt. A lot of people have bought into this myth that most civil progress is bloodless, but despite MLK and Gandhi's good efforts it has taken a lot of toil and death to make society even remotely acceptable and fair, to make it even superficially resemble a meritocracy. It didn't happen by itself or through voting. It took real work.

It's kind of a chicken or the egg situation on a long enough timeline. Unattainable housing combined with the fact that 40% of people in this country don't even have $400 in savings drives a lot of people out on the streets, and try being out on the street long-term without developing mental problems or a habit.

Housing costs in places with good economies and lots of jobs are getting absolutely ridiculous compared to the median wage.

I guess people are supposed to look at less glamorous cities, but if everyone affected by this did that then they would probably run out of opportunities, fill up, and have housing prices shoot up as well. Something's gotta give here. There's a real disconnect between the prices and the ability to pay. Who is paying for these things? People with lots of generational wealth? People with upper-middle class jobs yet no savings and razor-thin margins due to living expenses? That's so shitty.

Now to be fair, it would be a little absurd to build the most compact possible keyboard, yet get stuck carrying around some foot pedals like you're headed to a lan party with racing games or something.

But sometimes a little absurd is cool when it comes to custom keyboards. I kind of want to build this or the Gherkin posted above!

One of my favorite acquaintances from my days in school was a much older student from South Korea who often told stories of his time in mandatory military duty patrolling the DMZ, including a harrowing story of nearly setting off an international incident because he mistook a wild pig for a North Korean soldier and set off a grenade.

Definitely a series of experiences completely outside my context. I found it was important to hear about his experiences, and age difference obviously plays a part in facilitating this. Another South Korean classmate turned 18 in school and got shipped back to the DMZ. He didn't get hurt or anything, but I don't think he ever made it back to school in the states, which is a shame.