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wackycat

112 karma · joined July 22, 2022

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wackycat··on Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built
Not enough to cover the healthcare costs down the line from the exposure. Who knows what long term proximity/exposure to data centers does to the human body? My guess is nothing good based on the reports from farmers about bees and cows.
wackycat··on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
> but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast

they're probably using Chime haha, which as of my last use was lackluster

wackycat··on TODOs aren't for doing
// TODO refactor to make page load faster
wackycat··on Ask HN: 19yr old child suffering from internet gaming disorder? Any suggestions?
You would think part of the willingness to contribute financial support would stem from trust. I was fortunate enough to have my parent's financial support and they never asked about my grades.
wackycat··on Michigan Supreme Court Puts Another Dent in State's Abusive Forfeiture Laws
Thanks for this explanation! I'm fascinated by odd legal complexities like this so I really appreciate the concise explanation and context!
wackycat··on Michigan Supreme Court Puts Another Dent in State's Abusive Forfeiture Laws
Can someone with legal expertise or knowledge on this topic explain to me in simple terms how on earth asset forfeiture without conviction can exist in a country that claims to have due process? How has it been legally justified?
wackycat··on LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime
I have limited experience with CUDA but will this help solve the CUDA/CUDNN dependency version nightmare that comes with running various ML libraries like tensorflow or onnx?
wackycat··on [dead]
"There is a better way to handle this and that’s to use invitations sent by users. You can only connect to someone who invites you. There is zero spam and no need to validate email or phones, since you send your invitation to the email or phone number you personally know."

This does not seem like a robust solution. Also if you think of social networks as a network graph, then this seriously limits reach as you heavily rely on key folks who are a part of multiple networks of friends to invite those friends, etc which makes it really hard to scale. Any workaround to that problem, will inevitably introduce access for scammers.

wackycat··on Nvidia CEO says future of coding as a career might already be dead, due to AI
| A suitably detailed feature ticket isn't much more than a prompt. The ticket would need to get down to a code level in specification of what needed to be done.

This is the part I think folks underestimate when saying that "Coding as a career might be over". Gen AI can write decent code, but constructing software from code, and coming up with implementation ideas and turning those into tickets still feels far away at least from my experience using ChatGPT and CoPilot. Also those systems were trained on code but I don't know that they have the best idea of quality of the code they were trained on.

wackycat··on Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture
It's not perfect but to get an idea of adding one more dimension on top of the three dimensions we can visualize is thinking of color as the 4th dimension. There's a game called 4D Maze created by a topolgist that's availble in iphone app store. The visualization is 3d but if you can imagine the colors taking up the same space (instead of being right next to each other in 3d space), it kinda works. At least, it's the closest I've ever come to feeling like I could visualize or understand an additional dimension.
wackycat··on Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking
I unfortunately couldn't find the great article that first clued me into this connection but this article from 2023 details some of his (more specifically MSD, his capital investing company) investment into office real estate - https://therealdeal.com/magazine/national-april-2023/dell-di... . One happens to be an office to residential conversion but many of the others mentioned are staying as offices.
wackycat··on Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking
Funny how Dell supported remote work, until Michael Dell's family investment LLC started more heavily investing in office real estate.
wackycat··on New Florida law signed to prevent protection for workers from extreme heat
Nothing. That's the problem. The articles references heat related injuries and death.
wackycat··on Class Action Against General Motors LLC, OnStar LLC, LexisNexis Risk Solutions [pdf]
> And if you own a car made in the last ~5 years, here's how to request your "Consumer Disclosure Report" from LexisNexis: https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/ . According to NYT, LexisNexis receives at least some data from GM, Ford, Kia, Subaru, and Mitsubishi.

Appreciate this link! I don't have one of the listed brands (own a Mazda) but I am curious to see what info data brokers like this have on me in general.

Also, maybe this is a naive thought but I think data brokers like this are so used to operating in the shadows / being forgotten about so I think the more folks who request is at least a small signal to them that folks are paying attention.

wackycat··on SEC X Account Hacker Hijacked Staffer Phone Number, Agency Says
I wonder if this was SIM-swapping and if so if it will finally get a bit more federal attention
wackycat··on The Birth of Rock 'N' Roll Is Found at Sam Phillips's Sun Records (2016)
> Phillips regretted bailing on black music. Sun artist Rufus Thomas recalled, “Me and Sam Phillips, we were tighter than the nuts on the Brooklyn Bridge, but when Elvis and Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash came along, no more blacks did he pick up at all.”

The article did address this a bit, but I still agree with the spirit of this comment thread that too often when the beginning of rock 'n' roll is discussed the absolutely critical role black artists played in creating it is ignored/dismissed.

wackycat··on Do I need a technical co-founder?
If your goal is to build a product that will scale, I'd highly recommend getting a technical co-founder, or at the very least a technical advisor, early on. Coding is only one piece of the puzzle. Setting up scalable infrastructure, ensuring everything is secure, and understanding the overall system design take more extensive knowledge. ChatGPT will provide you with the code snippets you ask for meaning that if you ask for custom authentication, ChatGPT will probably gladly do so but experienced software engineers know that homegrown auth is a risky road. Additionally, writing code that works and writing quality code that other engineers will be able to easily digest and update are two different ballgames. If you hire someone with experience post pilot launch, know it's very possible they may recommend scrapping the existing code base / infra and starting over for a multitude of reasons. I'm not necessarily saying don't do it, but even if your MVP and pilot launch go well, be prepared for the possibility it will need a rework from an experienced engineer before you're able to scale it or add new features.
wackycat··on FTC investigating Adobe over making it too hard to cancel subscriptions
Do the cable/internet companies next! Looking at you AT&T
wackycat··on The AI Trust Crisis
I love convincing people that Facebook isn't spying through the microphone but those relevant ads that relate to what your friend just said are as creepy as you think, just without the microphone. The example I like to give is if your friend with pets bought a new vacuum that they tell you is an absolute godsend for dog and cat hair. Facebook knows you have pets, they know your friend has pets, they know that you and your friend are friends. If you have location data on, they know that you and your friend are together. They know your friend recently bought a vacuum because they have access to a lot of purchase data. So it may seem like they're listening when your friend mentions the vacuum and an ad for it shows up in your feed later that day. They weren't listening, they were tracking. Listening would be spying in one aspect; rather they were following multiple aspects like purchases, relationships, lifestyle. Still creepy, just in a way that's harder for consumers to understand.
wackycat··on 23andMe changed its terms of service to prevent hacked customers from suing
Right! If this were a law rather than TOS it's the whole ex post facto situation.
wackycat··on The Jumping Up Test: Easier Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis in Children
It's interesting that they refer to this as a "new" test as I believe it's been around awhile. Anecdotally, at least 8 years ago, a pediatric nurse I know asked an adult male who was having symptoms to jump and based on the pain on his face took him to the ER where he was in fact diagnosed with appendicitis.
wackycat··on Charlie Munger – Feeling Like a Victim Is Perfectly Disastrous
Isn't he the guy that tried to build windowless dorms? Anyone who thinks humans should live without natural light is not anyone I am interested in taking advice from. Ref: https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/university-california-aban...
wackycat··on The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers
In theory, writers whose writing was used as input training data for these LLMs will have a higher likelihood of being misclassified as AI given that the LLM may leverage some unique aspect of their writing style in some outputs.
wackycat··on Insomnia REST client now requires an account
Literally just ruined my day. Needed to run one quick query that I had saved and opened insomnia to that stupid login screen and empty scratch pad. Even for folks who had automatic updates on, this should have come with some kind of warning. So poorly handled. Boo.
wackycat··on I’m a climate scientist and I think society will collapse by 2050. I’m preparing
Part of me feels like we are well on our way. His framing is primarily around climate and food supply but if you consider society at large, but if you look through other lenses there's already deeper cracks in the foundation so to speak. More and more people are hitting retirement age without enough, or any, savings. More and more people are living paycheck to paycheck while adding a tad of credit card debt each cycle. When folks can work hard and barely survive, is that really a functioning society? How long before something goes from not functioning well to fully collapsing?
wackycat··on Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates
The cynical part of me wonders if that point is still under debate internally at google and if one of the goals of the leak was publicizing it so Google can't backtrack internally.
wackycat··on ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content
Weighing privacy and safety is so important but it seems like both sides are not careful with nuance. My understanding is that a non-profit / charity can generate revenue as long as it stays within the organization, feeding back into the cause; so it seems a little disingenuous when this article paints it as profit. Personally, I hope to see advances that can help balance crucially important privacy protection and the safety of children and prevention of the spread of abuse material; for example fully homomorphic encryption or on device scanning.
wackycat··on Google accused of directing motorist to drive off collapsed bridge
If this bridge had just recently collapsed, I think google would be less at fault but it collapsed in 2013. 10 years is an awful long time to continue directing motorists to a collapsed bridge. Additionally, you think even if google missed user reports that the anomalous data of motorists always ignoring that direction should have triggered some sort of review. It's also awful that in 10 years no lights or barricades were added simply due to a game of "not-my-problem" by developers and transit authorities.
wackycat··on F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
The fact they waste taxpayer money on the military only for them to admit that they don't even have the tech to track these 100 million dollar planes is so disheartening. You know that the giant cost of these planes is just lining military contractors' pockets.
wackycat··on Crowdfunding a defense for scientific research
The suit filing was linked, albeit not very clearly, but the parenthetical mentioning Title IX as the reason it was filed in Federal court links to the suit. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259...
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