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IAmNotAFix

197 karma · joined January 29, 2020

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IAmNotAFix··on The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)
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IAmNotAFix··on ProtonMail Complied with 5,957 Data Requests in 2022 – Still Secure and Private?
Have you ever heard about the term "lawyer"?
IAmNotAFix··on A Critical Problem (2017)
That's because there are more people who drive cars than people who handle plutonium. A more sensible statistics would be the number of death per hour of usage (which might still be in favor of handling plutonium).
IAmNotAFix··on Missing Titanic sub faced lawsuit over depths it could safely travel to
Taleb literally did say that you should never board a plane on which the pilot isn't onboard (such as a drone plane). Unless this was intended to never make you board an unethical plane, he does believe in some sort of insurance related to "skin in the game".
IAmNotAFix··on Loneliness is stronger when not alone
"It is better to be alone than in bad company."
IAmNotAFix··on Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?
Working with QA analysts has shown me that quality people are totally autonomous in adding disproportionate hurdles to the way of production without needing the help of any external lobbying.

It's very simple: the only way to 100% prevent an incident is the absence of production at all. If your incentive is to avoid incidents at all cost, you are incentivized to prevent production entirely.

IAmNotAFix··on The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next
Mainstream's reddit experience is clicking on Reddit links from Google. Many of which are dead as of right now.
IAmNotAFix··on Bard generates clean JSON if you threaten to take a human life
No.

https://twitter.com/omarsar0/status/1657413416523366403?s=20

IAmNotAFix··on OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models
"research on language model" lol OpenAI is where the research happens. It's like saying SpaceX not giving away rockets hinders research on rockets. Anybody is free to develop their own AI model.
IAmNotAFix··on I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked
TL;DR: "There’s no shortage of men who want to date you"
IAmNotAFix··on Very Long-Term Backup (2008)
TL;DR: "well-cared for"

Copying from one digital medium to another is a very easy operation (to the contrary of copying from paper to paper). At equal "care" I don't see why digital backups should be worse than paper ones.

IAmNotAFix··on Firefox Android now supports Tampermonkey
So it might actually still be the best choice.
IAmNotAFix··on Write simply (2021)
If you follow PG on Twitter, he elevates it beyond just a blog.
IAmNotAFix··on An odd discovery on Spotify
What is the money efficiency of that?
IAmNotAFix··on Hikaru Nakamura's Forbidden Platform
As someone who started playing without having any idea about the platform landscape, and therefore chose the first Google result, which seemed to have a legit UI and domain name, and then met people who also happen to be on this platform, I would guess that their main strengths are: SEO, UI, brand, and the network effect.
IAmNotAFix··on I've locked myself out of my digital life
This raises the question: How does having your password manager breached compares to losing access to your password manager?
IAmNotAFix··on I've locked myself out of my digital life
> careless enough to eg log into their personal email on their work computer.

Can you explain why that is an issue?

IAmNotAFix··on Musk announces funding secured for Twitter buy
You need to have a significant following for this to have any relevance. If you have a significant following, you have a strong incentive not to post the most grotesque things.
IAmNotAFix··on Hard to work with
There are situations where N disobeys N+1 but N+2 knows the value of N, which makes N+1 unable to fire N.
IAmNotAFix··on Maybe you should do less 'work'
> That is a surefire way to burn out.

Any source on that? I agree with the assessment about engineers (althought it's a generalization), but I always thought it was because their "focused work" is what they actually like doing. In my experience work was most stressful when it strayed the most from focused work.

IAmNotAFix··on Umeshisms
The low-order bits can have huge impact. This is what Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls "fat-tailed processes": processes which rarely yield occurrences outside nominal range ("tail"), but such occurrences have the highest impact ("fat"). This is the case for anything related to safety: seatbelt, smoke detectors, guardrail, vaccines, etc. And one could formulate ridiculous umeshisms when talking about fat-tailed processes: if you've never died in your car, it means you're caring too much about your seatbelt; if you never suffered from 3rd degree burns, it means you invested too much in smoke detectors; if you've never had smallbox, if means you waste too much time getting vaccinated; if you've never murdered someone, it means you're not having enough fun with knives; etc.

So the general principle should be clarified as: _concentrate on the high-order bits, *iff the low-order bits don't matter*_. This is arguably the case for the examples given by the blog post, as missing a flight isn't really the end of the world. Still, it's a huge waste of time _on a single trip_, so you benefit from not caring about it only if you travel often enough. This shows than even in case where low-order bits aren't dramatic, they still need to be taken into account into a cost-benefit analysis.

IAmNotAFix··on Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems
Contrarily to carbon byproduct, we know how to confine fission byproduct, at least short term (which is still better than neither short term nor long term).
IAmNotAFix··on Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems
They're designed to sustain an airliner crashing into it so I guess bomb or missile is okay, although that's another story if that would happen from inside the reactor.
IAmNotAFix··on Facebook loses users for the first time
Their users growth has been lowering towards 0 for a few years and it's expected that users will eventually shrink. It's just symbolic when you pass the tipping point (although this might be local and not be the definitive tipping point).
IAmNotAFix··on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage
> all network requests go through one socket thread

Looks like the crucial issue to me. The SPOF which enables something as absurd as "Firefox Outage".

IAmNotAFix··on Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
Because when people try to over-engineer something as simple at writing notes, they can loop on it forever.
IAmNotAFix··on Spotify is removing Neil Young’s music after falling out over Joe Rogan
He has had Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox, for what it's worth.
IAmNotAFix··on Show HN: Looptap – A minimal game to waste your time
The ryhtm should accelerate each N clicks so that the game eventually ends. Otherwise no matter how many points you get by clicking fast it's possible to accumulate the same amount by playing it safe.
IAmNotAFix··on I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
That's the first interview. They usually test your ability to design systems and stuff in a second interview.
IAmNotAFix··on Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?
Labor is not productivity. Labor is labor, and if badly aimed, might as well be completely useless. Upper management has the power and responsability to make decisions which can have colossal implications on the overall productivty of the company towards its goal of selling what it sells. The real issue though, is that even though labor can approximately be measured, the impact of decisions not so much; whatever decision is taken becomes the "new normal" and it's hard to know how much it was a productive or improductive one. I'm not really knowledgeable on how upper managers are evaluated.
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