abdullahkhalids

"everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop" is a political choice. It might result in a system that is not optimal from the perspective of a different metric. If you think that different metric would serve people better, go advocate for it politically. But realize that whatever metric gets adopted will still be a political choice. There is no escaping that.

Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.

Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.

> I only notice one problematic thing there in your link: Wrong recipient.

There is a trade-off. Many systems do offer the ability to get your money back without the cooperation of the recipient. But those systems are also filled with the scam, where you send someone money, then convince them to send the money back manually, and finally reverse the original transaction.

You can counter this by more policing of these types of scams, but usually the amounts in each individual case are small, so police have very little incentive to do anything about it.

UPI has a government controlled chargeback mechanisms [1]. Why would any system of payment not have a chargeback mechanism if someone stole from you? You can even chargeback cash by going through the legal system. Obviously, the better system for online transactions is an escrow system.

In any case, my politics demands not depending on the bureaucracy of a big corporation for legal redress.

[1] https://www.stashfin.com/blogs/dispute-upi-transaction-guide

Chargebacks and fraud protection are largely needed in the credit/debit card system because you go around handing people the key to your safe to merchants and ask them to take whatever they want. And pinky promise not to share the key with anyone else.

Once you have sane system like pix or upi, there is far less need for chargebacks and frauds.

This is an equivalent of a company producing security software, open sourcing their code, and then claiming that since no one has found any serious bugs, their software is secure.

No. The way to build confidence that your software is well made, you do a proper external security audit and obtain the requisite certificate from a proper auditing firm.

It's also incorrect to think peer review in mathematics is low quality (like it is in some other fields). Certainly, when major results are in place, editors ensure that high quality peer reviewers are recruited and do their job properly. Like all human processes this fails sometimes, but not enough to not do it.

OpenAI has expressed this sentiment by not submitting to or saying they will submit their results to peer reviewed journals.

My understanding from glancing at the hopefully correct sanctions statement [1] is that they are secondary in nature (see for example Sec 3). So the insurance company will face all the same sanctions that the ICC judge is facing if they serve them. They banks will cutoff the insurance company as well, because the banks themselves use US infrastructure.

The only solution would be similar to what China exercised. The EU passes an order telling all EU entities to not comply with US sanctions or face legal problems. Then it comes down to how the US responds and whether EU can take that hit.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...

You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.

Whenever you analyze a dynamic system, the primary question you ask is, which direction will it evolve in, and will it hit some steady state?

If you apply this thinking to the economic system practiced in most countries, the answer is that the system forces have been set up in a way that the capital owners need to be paid back on an exponential schedule, and there are barely any counter-forces to this. Hence, the system will never hit a real steady state. People will continue to creatively design more and more immoral methods of extracting monetary value from a finite system that cannot indefinitely and continuously grow exponentially. There is no other way to pay back the capitalists. There is no counter-force.

Most people on a budget (i.e. the vast majority of people) are constantly using exact or approximate multiplication while shopping. And they are rarely whipping out their calculator for this purpose.

I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.

You are missing the entire point of the oral defense while almost stating it. The existence of the oral defense is what extrinsically motivates the supervisor to do their job well. If the student fails, the supervisor loses faces in front of their peers, which obviously they try to avoid. Removing the oral defense would massively reduce the quality of PhDs because supervisors will not do their job.

Also in my observational experience in physics, a fair number of students (probably like 10%) get some sort of major corrections to their thesis. After writing this, I did a search, and in the UK, the number across all fields is 16% [1].

[1] https://www.lexacademic.com/blog/how-common-is-passing-with-...

The system is highly non-linear and has a lot of flippable components. For example, average temperature increase will cause the AMOC to collapse which will make parts of Europe cooler (while also increasing extreme weather events).

Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.

The underlying problem is that the whole concept of cards is insane. Basically, you go around telling every shopkeeper the code for your safe, and ask them to take however much cash you owe them out of the safe.

Sane ways to organize payments:

- Merchant gives you a bill-id. You input it into your bank website - where you see the bill amount being charged. You accept, and bank pays merchant.

- You give merchant your card number (that's the only information - no expiry, no ccv, no name). A notification pops up on your bank website asking if you want to pay what the merchant is requesting. You accept.

- You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.

He is explaining that if you design an app that displays as desired on the outer display (in portrait mode). Then if you display that app to the inner display (also in portrait mode), it will show up exactly the same, just with everything twice as large.

This obviously makes life easier for both users and developers.

There are two stages to learning research level math. First you learn to reprove other people work. This is relatively easy because the language, notion and prior explanations have already been optimized to help prove the next thing, and you know a solution exists. Then in your PhD you try to solve problems you don't really know a solution exists, and if it does, how long and complicated it is, what techniques will be used, etc.

You need to solve the second to get a PhD. For good reason. The second is way harder than the first. And now AI is making second way obsolete. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of how things have been done for centuries.

In the current system, political parties who do things that stop the economy growing are usually voted out, more than political parties that refuse to take action against nebulous criminal activity. That's why, for example, my city refuses to do anything to stop the factories in the city from dumping waste into the river.

Shops and factories can be temporarily shut down if they don't comply with regulations. Businesses that require licenses like law practices may similarly have to stop operations. That is half of going to jail.

Unfortunately, the growth potential that software industry generally provides has generally prevented governments for creating and enforcing similar laws for software products and such.

Do we know if Google is operating on the frontier of the trade-off curve? What do we lose from Pixel Android when GrapheneOS security changes are made?

If you are building your own harness that does correct citations, is the correct thing to give AI access to some deterministic tool that allows it to actually copy paste parts of documents its reading (with links), rather than stochastic reproduction that they do by default?

Any given single agent is not long-lived due to limited context. What impact does it have on the status signals the agent develop compared to the signals humans (who usually have much longer context) have developed?

Yes, they do store the value. There was a blogpost posted to HN last year that discusses the cryptographic features of these cards [1,2]. It's amazing that these cards are almost solving the problem of secure digital money.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43993711

[2] working link since original blog is down https://web.archive.org/web/20250517082035/https://aruarian....

Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems.

For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure.

uBlock causes a huge performance improvement for most regular people's computers.

The alternative for most countries except a handful is that they continue to import oil from the two dozen-ish odd countries who export it.

The policy relevant question then boils down to, in two decades how many countries will be producing enough solar panels to export it? How many will be friendly to my country?

Aren't there decent apps that maintain shared blacklists for spam numbers?

Very cool. What audio model is this using for listening? I am surprised music recognition is good enough to give any feedback.

Pretty cool stuff. Do you think it's possible to easily build a science oriented harness like Ref. [1] in DeepClause?

[1] https://github.com/1stproof/batch-2/tree/main/batch-2-submis...

Is there currently a lot of difference between deepseek's own prices and other provider's prices of deepseek models?