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a_conservative

60 karma · joined March 31, 2017

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a_conservative··on I didn't know I was lacking in Vitamin D until I collapsed at work
It's arguably better to count how often one is buying the drops and make an estimation of dosage from that. The daily dosage doesn't matter that much, the aggregate dosage is what's going to count, and it doesn't have to be that precise.

edit: the precision comes from getting blood levels measured after supplementation.

a_conservative··on Appreciating the beauty of all your body's scars and scratches
Ironically, it's the things I didn't do that bring me the most regret. The times when I didn't stand up for something or someone, and took the safe route. Those times I have some regret for.

Breaking an arm, scars, etc- They are unpleasant at the time, but zero long term regret. They are like squares on a quilt that tell a story.

a_conservative··on Salesforce Global Outage
Hidden in this discussion around self-hosting reliability are other options as well.

Depending on your time and appetite for tinkering with all of this, it's not hard to imagine a home setup that fails over to a cheap Hetzner or DO VM. A manual failover at the DNS level isn't overly complex, and could be scripted.

Keeping a database in sync between home and the instance might be simple or more complex depending on needs, but would it really be that hard to have Claude help you setup a replicating Postgres server? If your database (or data files) are 1 gigabyte and don't update that often... maybe just rsync it every night or something

There's a thread you and others are pulling on here, and we need to pull it. Hosting doesn't have to be the domain of the big vendors anymore.

a_conservative··on Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them
This is really fascinating. The actual mechanisms of the human mind are distinct from computer systems, yet there are some parallels.

There are some hints that increased memory access times scale with the amount of information the brain has stored vs the more typical narrative that aging decreases the capabilities of the brain.

> Our results indicate that older adults'; performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-processing, and not cognitive decline. We consider the implications of this for our scientific and cultural understanding of aging.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24421073/

a_conservative··on Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
I have the same questions about human mathematicians!

I can't tell if xkcd #435 is still true, or if math is just as mushy as everything else seems to be. When a math proof can only be understood by a handful of people, what does that mean about that proof? I think the LLMs are pushing a problem that existed already and pushing it further.

[0] https://xkcd.com/435/

a_conservative··on Aluminum foil (2021)
Aluminum is generally thought to be benign by most authorities.

However, it is worth noting that humans were not exposed to aluminum in the environment until relatively recently, when we started extracting it from bauxite and melting it.

a_conservative··on The Doorman's Fallacy in action
> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.

I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.

A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.

I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.

Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.

a_conservative··on Study finds no clear advantage for trans women over cisgender women in sports
I've thought about this comment a lot over the past 3 days. It was the top comment in this discussion for a while.

People think about the world differently. Is there really no room for anyone to disagree with you without being a bigot?

a_conservative··on PostgreSQL Is Enough
A few hundred jobs a day doesn't seem like it would even be close to what postgres could handle easily, does it?

I'm thinking of the problem as using a small amount of text to represent the work that needs to be done and then using a postgres table where some entries are being added as work that needs to be done, and then a worker is pulling the rows of work out of that table, and maybe putting a completion message somewhere in postgres. I'll concede that is more transient data than probably most of the other tables, it might benefit from vacuuming more often. Does the autovacuuming system not figure out it needs to run more often and do it?

Wouldn't the issue would be more overall queries per second, the amount of writes you're already doing, and the general load on the database. We just added some audit tables that are quickly growing to millions of rows, and it seems like Postgres isn't even breaking a sweat. I'm mostly spit balling here and probably glossing over some details.

But, like you said SQS is pretty easy too.

a_conservative··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
Good information, Broadcom is a playa, lots and lots of acquisitions! (a quick google search turns up a very eventful history for Broadcom)

> From personal experience, executives and leadership who started off in the electronics and hardware industry are much more vicious and cutthroat than their peers who started in software.

Only The Paranoid Survive is quite a name for a management book. It implies surviving in the world you are speaking about.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66863.Only_the_Paranoid_...

a_conservative··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
I recently put 2+2 together.

Broadcom has become wealthy by being Google's TPU hardware partner, including sharing their TSMC capacity with Google, and evidently now they are doing the same thing with OpenAI. What a brilliant way to take advantage of the AI gold rush!

I wish they weren't using their piles of money to extort money out of the software industry like they are with VMWare and Bitnami.

a_conservative··on Copper transport drug restores memory and clears toxic Alzheimer's proteins
An example of fraud in research that contributed to the consensus.

> The 2006 paper suggested an amyloid beta (Aβ) protein called Aβ*56 could cause Alzheimer’s.

https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret...

a_conservative··on Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"
Some of these videos are the result of FOIA requests. Please, make FOIA requests and post these videos where the police are acting so egregiously. We deserve to know the truth about this!

Some less than positive-for-police videos I've seen-

- a weak police officer doesn't take control of the situation and the officer standing behind the first one is shot and killed

- an officer, while chasing a suspect, tazes him as he exits the median grassy area and enters a lane of traffic. The suspect was killed by traffic.

- a forfeiture case where someone's life savings (cash) were confiscated without due process during a traffic stop

a_conservative··on Should you normalize RGB values by 255 or 256?
>> and there is no absolute zero in the system.

> There maybe is. I think we call that "blind."

If you go looking into that, you'll see that the reality is far far more complex [0]

"The number of people with no light perception is unknown, but it is estimated to be less than 10 percent of totally blind individuals."

[0] https://chicagolighthouse.org/sandys-view/what-blind-people-...

a_conservative··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
> The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen.

That's incorrect. A license violation isn't theft. Theft deprives others of their property, that's not what's going on here. Intellectual property is a fictional "ownership" that provides value to society, but it is much newer and different than the actual ownership of property.

No one actually owns a collection of words or ideas or thoughts.

a_conservative··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
You could sanitize and disinfect with that alcohol! You could also make extracts of any plants nearby that were useful. Whiskey and vanilla beans are sufficient to make vanilla extract!
a_conservative··on Show HN: Stelvio – Ship Python to AWS
This sounds a lot like what SST does (which also uses Pulumi). Do you consider them a competitor?

I would guess by focusing on Python that you can provide a tighter experience than SST. Is that your plan?

a_conservative··on The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world (2019)
Note that you aren't providing evidence either :)

Providing evidence is tricky, because most evidence hints rather than proves, so it's very subject to confirmation bias and is easily dismissed by those who disagree.

There are large filter bubbles right now that make it hard to agree on basic facts. I don't think any of us really knows for sure what's organic and what's synthetic right now.

a_conservative··on Oral microbiome sequencing after taking probiotics
Not a doctor either.

Japan seems to love creating fat soluble forms of thiamine. I've been experimenting with a form of thiamine called TTFD. TTFD is synthetic, there's a natural form called allithiamine, derived from garlic. There's also another form called benfotiamine. All of these are fat soluble and highly highly available forms of thiamine. TTFD in particular is associated with paradoxical effects where a person can have a temporary worsening of thiamine deficiency symptoms when first consuming TTFD. Thiamine is generally considered very safe, but these supplements are pretty hefty doses, so I would suggest treading lightly.

There's also some thinking amongst some doctors that sub-clinical thiamine deficiencies being more common than most doctors realize [0] [1]

[0] Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/monograph/pii/...

a_conservative··on Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever
This is just a guess, but I bet if your grandma's photo books had some sort of narration or her personal notes, you would have valued them more.

I've sometimes passed on sentimental keepsakes, only to long for them later. What seems pointless yesterday, suddenly has new meaning as I get older and gain new perspectives. In particular, my Mom passed a few years ago, and there are questions I wish I could go back and ask now that some time has passed. There are items I tossed that I wish I had at least snapped a picture of them for reference. I didn't understand the significance of certain documents in the moment.

Maybe the answer is to pick out stories that are important and include some sort of narration. Maybe the answer is to throw away the pictures without meaning and savor the ones with meaning, and make sure that meaning is recorded for your kids.

a_conservative··on Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next?
Don't worry about the money too much. You're trying to solve multiple equations at the same time. Focus on getting your foot in the door somewhere in a job you like. It would have been great if you could have picked up 150k/year job as easily now as in the past, but the market has turned south.

It is easier to get a job when you have one already. You don't have to solve all the problems at once.

a_conservative··on Ask HN: How expensive are LLMs to query, really?
my m4max macbook can run local inference on a medium-ish gemini model (32b IIRC). The power consumption spikes by about 120 watts over idle (with multiple electron apps, docker, etc). It runs about 70 tokens/sec and usually responds within 10 to 20 seconds.

So.. picking some numbers for calculation. 4 answers per minute @ 120 watts is about .5 watt-hours per answer. ~200 responses would be enough to drain the (normally quite long lasting battery).

How does that compare to the more common nvidia GPUs? I don't know.

a_conservative··on The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I’m similar to you in this regard, but I’ve been thinking about the frailty of human knowledge lately.

We get it wrong a lot. It will be interesting to see how the vax debate and perception plays out over the next few years.

a_conservative··on The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]
I’m not saying this to try to start a fight or anything. You strike me as a kind person, so I’m going to give this a shot.

I am a bit of a contrarian about lots of things. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known were major contrarians.

Are Linus Torvalds or RMS contrarians? What about Richard Feynman or Tesla?

I don’t really know if any of those examples would be widely considered contrarians, but my point is that people are multi faceted. Dismissing a person in a broad manner for unpopular opinions in one arena, strikes me as a religious mindset.

Does everyone have to pass a purity test before their opinions are able to be considered? Is that healthy?

Thank you for any consideration you can give this. I truly do not mean to start a flame war. One more thought experiment: is it ok to learn woodworking from an Amish person who likely would have wildly diverging views from most people?

a_conservative··on The Beauty of Unix Pipelines (2020)
jq has >20k stars on GitHub.

I use it mostly for little cli utilities, so maybe it isn’t an exact refutation of your claim.

[0] https://github.com/stedolan/jq

a_conservative··on The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video]
Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed response. I've been very busy, I don't want to just skim it and fire of a response after you took the time to write all that out. You are a good writer. Give me some time to respond.
a_conservative··on The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster and More Efficient
The unlimited data plan included with iPhones was revolutionary as well.
a_conservative··on Intermittent fasting in mice improves long-term memory retention
I wonder if the difference in experience might be related to how close one is to diabetes. A lot of people are in various stages of pre-diabetes, I've had fasting blood sugar measurements around 110 mg/dl, which is considered pre-diabetic. I've done keto and a little bit of fasting and experienced the seemingly magical effects.

Another possibility is that other people are getting into ketosis and you aren't. For me, the "recipe" to get into ketosis can vary a lot based on how much I've been exercising and eating carbs before I attempt to limit carbs or fast.

a_conservative··on The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video]
I'm an American who grew up in the midwest.
a_conservative··on The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video]
I could stand to be more educated, so please give me something to educate me instead of calling me disingenuous.

I am willing to listen to arguments that explain how it is that the Democratic party has been able to shed it's incredibly racist history and instead push all of the accusations of racism onto Republicans. I've read these arguments a few times over the years, and I found them to be very tortured and to raise lots of questions.

Even though, you didn't offer any information to further your arguments, I will try to add one to further mine.

If the parties did switch somehow, how do you explain that Social Security act was passed in 1935 by a Democratic President, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.

Should I attribute the Social Security Act to conservatives?

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