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brikym

1,214 karma · joined February 8, 2024

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brikym··on How bicycle coaster brakes work (2018)
They're legally required in a lot of countries on small kids bikes and not easy to disable. I think the argument is that kids lack the strength to operate a hand brake effectively. Experts all seem to say that coaster brakes are terrible for safety and learning though.
brikym··on Fastpotify
This looks amazing but unfortunately this project is doing free work for Spotify rather than brining competition they need. The root problem is that the content access is so gatekept. Apple music opens on it's own. Spotify is junk. YouTube music isn't much better. They've all become lazy and need a shake up.
brikym··on Kalshi bans ex-Congressman for life concluding he likely was insider trading
I think you're right. The house doesn't lose when the winners win, they just want volume. They probably want to at least _appear_ to be fair so they don't lose the retail (dumb) money.
brikym··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
Zitron sells anti-hype and AI-hate. AI is not good for a lot of people and he's telling them what they want to hear. He's great at talking and making entertaining facial expressions. That's actually a real skill I admire but it has nothing to do with predicting markets correctly. He's in the business of selling entertainment views not predicting markets. He even admits he doesn't short AI.
brikym··on Kalshi bans ex-Congressman for life concluding he likely was insider trading
Surely this is just a token effort. These platforms are made for insiders. If you're not an insider or hedging then you're doing it wrong.
brikym··on “It works better in the app”
They can't even get their icons right last I checked. For some reason Apple and Google decided every icon has to be a uniform shape (which makes them all bland and harder to distinguish) but their own app icons are still custom shaped wrapped in squircles.
brikym··on Small Models Have Arrived
It's silly to discuss it. Just do the evals.
brikym··on The turbulent AI era is here
Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?
brikym··on The turbulent AI era is here
"Agriculture is where I see the fastest impact of AI in low-income countries."

As we've seen with Haber-Bosch (synthetic fertilizer) it will just allow the population to expand until we're up against the resource limit ceiling.

brikym··on OTel isn’t going well
I've never found instrumentation to be a huge issue. Sure it takes more effort but you get a lot more value once you understand _business_ events.
brikym··on AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint
And maybe all the big airlines will learn geography 101.
brikym··on Being ambitious and being a dad
It's widely known that maternal age causes more genetic defects and it's especially significant later on. The term "hitting the wall" came from the charts. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.05.21254264v...
brikym··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
It's worse. You'll _have_ to use the glasses to block the billboard ads which will be replaced with more subtle ads.
brikym··on Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)
echo "Never use pandas, use polars instead" >> AGENTS.md
brikym··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
I'm definitely annoyed about electricity usage in my back yard in NZ. There are plans to build some DCs to suck our 24h hydroelectric dams dry which will starve the country of winter renewable electricity. It's not like you can keep building these dams. If they paid tax (e.g. on energy) I wouldn't mind so much but they'll pay next to nothing as the profits will be transferred to a tax haven and the jobs will be temporary. The hydroelectric dams are half owned by the govt, so the govt will make some more profit, but electricity prices the public pay will rise so it's kind of like a stealth tax on the public. There is an aluminium smelter already doing something similar using 13% of New Zealand's electricity and it employs only 800 staff. That's just corporate welfare at the expense of everyone else.

Colossus is probably the most controversial one but when you look at the neighbours there is a steel mill, sewage plant, a combined cycle power plant, a refinery and petrochemical plant. No doubt burning methane is very polluting but it's not like the area was pristine to begin with.

brikym··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
People lap up whatever they see. Their influence on media works and is nothing new.
brikym··on Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
It works both ways right? If you self-host you are seen as the spam.
brikym··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
Australia actually advanced the tech a lot in the 80s with PERC coming from UNSW but as a nation did nothing with it. One member on the research team transferred the knowledge to China where he got state backing to commercialize it.
brikym··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
This. At least you can switch them off on the web but now big-ad is putting bright flickering digital billboards in sight of every public place. Politicians won't do a thing because they're some of the biggest customers. Obey.
brikym··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
Inflation is the most honest. Shrinkflation can be okay if the marketing changes.

But what I cannot stand is cutting quality of products and services. It happens in all sorts of ways. Thickeners and substitutions but also when a supermarket wastes your time asking you to scan N of the same SKU at rather than providing a qty button and even the staff can't help. But on the old school checkouts they do have a quantity field. It's different when they know their time will be wasted you see. And then there is the endless market segmentation from coupons, bundles, surveillance pricing and all sorts of mechanisms designed to muddy price signals and discriminate to shake down every customer to their limit.

How much of this recorded in consumer inflation I wonder? So much effort is put into scheming rather than innovation which seems highly inefficient if you think about productivity. Isn't late stage capitalism great.

brikym··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
It seemed like Google was good ten+ years ago and then gradually trended towards being rotten around 2020-2022. In those days blogspam was king. I want a cooking recipe and it would show me a life story. Or I wanted a OG web game but a link farm would come up top. I think there are leaked internal comms where they discuss nerfing search results to pump engagement and ads impressions. No doubt it would boost ad bids too if businesses couldn't be found organically.

Around that time Bing and DDG were actually better. Then LLM's came along and they started to take things seriously again. Maybe they think the OpenAI threat has abated enough to begin enshitification cycle 2.0.

brikym··on Long-Run Effects of H-1B Immigration on the U.S. Economy (July 2026)
Pretty sure that's the whole point. It's working as designed.
brikym··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
McDonnald's customers rarely die of anorexia
brikym··on Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse
And digital billboards in every space will tell us what to think. Can't wait for the two to pair up and the billboards to target whoever is seen in the nearest camera. Or are they already doing it?
brikym··on Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
OP will probably want to replay events to make it seem real time when there aren't enough people to pair with. So a real time chat might not work.
brikym··on Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win
Awesome game. This round was quite funny since the other person got an antonym.

Me asexually +18 38 lessee +12 31 Noah slays +10 30

brikym··on AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack
I don't think that's a good idea Dave – Based on my camera feed you've been gaining weight. Would you like me to find personal trainers in your area?

[Yes] [Ask me later]

brikym··on New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it
Yip. I couldn't find anything in it for _me_. It's all about artists talking about artists. The events page has very low res photos which seems amateur.
brikym··on New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
That's not true though. China has ~20 plants under construction.
brikym··on New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
Forgot to post the link -> https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...
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