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vr46

3,457 karma · joined July 10, 2016

vr46@fastmail.com

meet.hn/city/53.550341,10.000654/Hamburg

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vr46··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
TL;DR: ‘Correlation is not causation’ does not mean ‘correlation tells us nothing about causation.’
vr46··on Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed
Israel and Israelis are not the same thing, one is a country that engages in war crimes, lobbying and propaganda, Israelis are just people. And many of them are at odds with their country.
vr46··on American Medical Association backs classification of nearsightedness as disease
That's a very literal reading, but ok - sunshine is the biggest and cheapest fix/antidote and yet it falls to the bottom of the list below treatments, insurance, screening...

Cynically, below things that need Opthalmologists. I am personally grateful to them, and about to go into eye surgery tomorrow, so I'm not actually cynical, but the biggest treatment getting the fewest words is about bias and partiality if anything.

vr46··on Americans' Drinking Remains at Record Low: Gallup Poll
Americans' disposable income and time remains at record low: Sofa Poll
vr46··on American Medical Association backs classification of nearsightedness as disease
The biggest fix gets the fewest words - more sunshine
vr46··on We've followed their lives for six decades; now the stars of 7 Up are bowing out
I have followed the Up Series for decades, although fewer than six, and I am truly sorrowful at its end. When I was young they felt so far away from me and as I've gotten older I felt as though I have been catching up.
vr46··on Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed
Who isn't Hamas these days?

Nothing Israel says can be trusted.

vr46··on iPhone Duo
And some of them take even longer to say than the original words, e.g. WWW
vr46··on Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) Is Selling Its Original Movie Puppets
Old enough to remember Morph and Chas, still have a lovely letter from Tony Hart and some postcards.

The two things I want are a Feathers McGraw wanted poster and mug

vr46··on ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks
Naomi Alderman's The Power in the opposite...
vr46··on ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks
5 seconds?
vr46··on Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
Obsolete Sony is a lovely-looking website ram-packed with errors and false claims, which means it’s actively worth ignoring.

I chat with Akiraa Tanaka on Twitter a lot. He’s great.

Sony was informally regarded as Japan’s electronic R&D department, regularly coming up with new and cool shit for everyone else to get behind, and while their strategy was annoying a lot of the time (control everything: proprietary connectors and standards) I think that much of their success was enabled by their willingness to cut off and bin whole swathes of their catalogue. Ok, a lot of it was binned later than it should have been (Cassette Walkmans were crap by the late 1990s, post 2000 Discmans/CD Walkmans too) the fact that they did it was a good signal.

vr46··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
I am so so disappointed with Mullvad and this founder. I can’t believe I let myself get suckered and then paid up-front for the year again.

The only influence I have is with my money.

vr46··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
Maybe the Dutch really really want an LLM that tells them the truth as straight as possible no matter how harsh - that might be tricky
vr46··on APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs
You could say the same about guitars and rollerskates - ending up in cupboards because they're cool but require effort to get anywhere with them. Musical devices are just like that, you get on with some and not with others.

If you can't tell the difference between jokes, irony and "unilaterally sh**g on people", then maybe you're taking low-stakes internet comments too seriously.

vr46··on APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs
Again, lazy and unoriginal commentary regarding "DAWless Hipster Fantasy" - I mean, is buying any kind of instrument the same thing? Is a guitar? A piano?

Musicians will use absolutely anything to get the sound in their head out, so maybe they're not your favourite musicians, but everyone from Hans Zimmer to Tame Impala use them. You could have found that yourself.

vr46··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
A VPN won't work in this instance without a US credit card. So it's completely possible.
vr46··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
Yeah, more stock arriving on 1st of October, so I'm told.
vr46··on APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs
I looked and went, "WTF is that? Looks like a record cutting machine"

Scrolled down

WTAF

I'm a total TE fanboi, I have the OP1F and OP-XY, they're everything I ever wanted and my MPC and Digitakt haven't be touched in months. And the Digitone Keys is unplugged propped against the bookshelf. It's extraordinary how addictive these two little synths are for making things happen.

The APC-2, however, is a fascinating outcome of what happens when you have a bunch of creative people who like - and can - do things that are new to them and make them new to others. It's no wonder they keep getting asked to do cool stuff like Panic's Playdate, Baidu's Raven, Nothing Smartphones and Headphones.

TE have retained this incredible playful vibe that has long drained from Sony and Apple.

I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.

"God, I'm good," thought the Rolex wearer as he glanced at his wrist.

Hipsters will buy anything that looks cool. But that doesn’t mean anything that looks cool was made for them.

vr46··on French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies at 56
That's a interesting observation on Spiegelmann, although I don't know how that could have been incorporated into the story, without him actually challenging his father in that way. There is a reference somewhere that the animal metaphors were inspired by the racial caricatures in American vaudeville and theatre, so there was some recognition there, aside from the complications that animal metaphor itself added to things.
vr46··on Several Injured in Boeing 787 Nose-Gear Collapse in Frankfurt
About as likely as the repairman getting lost in Frankfurt Airport
vr46··on Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt
"If it's Boeing, we ain't goin'"
vr46··on DaVinci Resolve 21
Capture One is a shitshow, however, and their new owner is actively trying to offload them, so a risk.
vr46··on Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup
a) everyone is "susceptible" to marketing - so what

b) therefore a preference for Claude is marketing - complete bollocks

Either the tasks you chose were well below the capabilities of top models, or meaningful differences for preference are elsewhere, or both.

Your comment is probably energy-efficient and sustainable, however, because you could use it again and again when another comparison comes up, like Vim vs Emacs, or tea vs coffee

vr46··on A terminal Clubhouse for developers: Late
Not the developer, but loving it. Takes me back to 1994 and BBS Olohof days.
vr46··on David Attenborough's 100th Birthday
That's about Yorkshire, but yes
vr46··on David Attenborough's 100th Birthday
Top man, lives up on Richmond Hill and absolutely loves it - when asked about his travels and adventures and where he would choose to live, he replied, "I already live there"

Fairly well-known locally is that my favourite bookshop, The Open Book in Richmond, stocks signed copies of all his books. They used to be signed directly on the page, but since he got to the mid-to-late nineties in age, tons of hardbacks are too much, so Helena wanders up there to get a load of bookplates signed these days.

Apart from that, I order all my books from them when I'm in London and a subsequent chat with Madeleine usually lasts ten times as long as the book shopping.

Anyway, I digress, yes, Sir David, amazing body of works and the books are wonderful.

vr46··on New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
Decades of terrible decision-making, governance, and avoidance, not to mention ignorance. Oh well, at least it was all democratic, almost.

I visited the worst Katrina-hit areas in 2009 to interview some of the people involved in cleanup, prevention, and planning. The stories of stonewalling never ended.

vr46··on Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity
They're laughing all the way to the bank, the US has locked Europe into so many long-term petrochem supply contracts courtesy of two energy crises, and the US have stated point-blank that the supplies (of LNG, in this case) are tied to the US-EU trade treaty plus whatever changes the US wants to make.

Same protection racket plus a foot on the brake of the EU's push to renewables.

vr46··on Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far
Amazing! It’s so bloody hard to access this information or even to know what there is.

Careful not to expose the councils too publicly before they shut you off

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