1,140 karma · joined February 20, 2015
Reddit profile: https://www.reddit.com/user/bariumbitmap/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10387962
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...
For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
> To make a loose statistical analogy, it is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps increasing.
Like a statistical model having parameters, a theory should have some nuance, but too much nuance is analogous to overfitting. It reminds me of the maxim that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler
1. Is requiring developers to submit government ID actually an effective way to prevent tech support scams? Will scammers actually be deterred by a government ID requirement in addition to the existing developer registration process?
2. Is requiring developers to submit government ID the best option to prevent tech support scams? Are there other options that Google could use to make Android user less susceptible to tech support scams?
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
The tradeoff, such as it is, is acknowledged on keepandroidopen.org under the "But wait, isn't this...just about security?" section:
> The security rationale is a smokescreen. Google Play Protect already scans for malware independent of developer identity. Requiring a government ID doesn't make code safer.
Finally:
> Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
I don't think this is an excellent compromise. Scammers are persistent. I'm not convinced a 24 hour cooldown is enough to deter them in any meaningful way. I, on the other hand, am not persistent enough to wait 24 hours to install an Android app from F-Droid just to try it out.
Uh, what? This hypothetical is literally an example of an entire crew of manual carpenters being fired and replaced by robots, leaving only the manager. That sure doesn't sound like successfully riding the waves of technological change.
> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations.
Citation needed. This is not the prevailing wisdom I have heard, and certainly not the experience of e.g. longshoremen replaced by shipping container technology in the 1960s and 1970s.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/20...
https://www.telecompetitor.com/policy-experts-weigh-what-com...
> Historic versions of the cp utility had an -r option. This implementation supports that option; however, its use is strongly discouraged, as it does not correctly copy special files, symbolic links or FIFOs.
> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.
But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.
Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.
Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
> How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
The bad thing is not bothering to learn basic arithmetic. If kids don't learn that they won't understand what the tools are doing.
https://allevents.in/mattapan/fix-it-clinic/200026636930752
It's not a ground-breaking paragon of graphic design but it communicates what it needs to communicate: what, when, and where. And crucially, it has photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.
What do you mean by "just accept"? Should professional graphic designers give up their profession? Should they stop advocating for legal protections of their work?
The origins of the punk movement are in counterculture and DIY, so there's something particularly perverse about using an AI model to generate a poster in that style.
A 35 mm film camera is still much better quality than my smartphone's digital camera, especially more than a few meters away or in lower light conditions. But my smartphone is the camera I actually have with me, I don't have to buy film or wait for it to be developed, so that's what I use.
https://allevents.in/mattapan/fix-it-clinic/200026636930752
Here's what I like about it: it communicates. What, when, and where. And crucially, photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.
The author demonstrates that AI-generated posters can imitate many artistic styles besides the generic default, but these examples suffer the same problem as all template-based posters: they don't communicate what the event is actually like. What does a samba band performance look like? (There are drums, I guess?) What does a circus skills workshop look like? (There are juggling clubs, I guess?)
These posters may be more aesthetically pleasing but none of them make me interested in going to the event.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-inter...
You really shouldn't take the descriptions on Wikimedia Commons at face value, those are uploaded by volunteers and sometimes people label things inaccurately.
I guessed wolf, game says it's bigger. I guessed cougar, game says its bigger again. I eventually struck out, turns out the animal was a sheep. I'm pretty sure wolves and cougars are bigger than sheep.
Worse yet, that's not sheep dung! Sheep dung is lots of individual round pellets, this was a single turd.
I can't believe I'm complaining about inaccurate poop data on a silly quiz site, but here we are.
Edit: here's the Wikimedia link for the curious:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feces_of_a_sheep.JPG
I'm still suspicious, this is very unusual for a sheep.
1. Access to a bunch of different equipment without breaking the bank. Want to try out a bunch of different kinds of flux? See what kind of de-soldering tools are good for different tasks? Now you can!
2. Access to expertise and moral support. Trying to do everything by yourself is no fun. A YouTube video can be helpful but it's no substitute for a knowledgeable friend or more experienced mentor.
I recently did an RTC battery substitution on my Framework laptop's mainboard, and I could do it with confidence because I had good tools and people to consult at my makerspace.