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dboat

334 karma · joined October 26, 2011

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dboat··on Two pharmacists figured out that oral phenylephrine doesn't work
No, I'm not pretending that the FDA is nothing but good, that is a straw man. What I said was correct as I said it, you didn't need to invent a point that I did not make.

Your arguments come from a hypercapitalist fantasy that systemically fails to protect vulnerable populations. Letting market forces satisfy the need of alleviating human suffering is terribly naive nonsense. When the corporations get around to policing themselves, if they do at all, the human toll will be far greater than if we as a society continue to vote for representatives who will reign them in.

You see and comprehend flaws in the current system, but you for some reason cannot see or comprehend that the dumb things you are writing here are much worse.

Bringing up paternalism in this conversation is especially puerile nonsense.

dboat··on Two pharmacists figured out that oral phenylephrine doesn't work
Rather than an agency that is accountable to publicly elected officials, in your mind profit driven entertainment businesses would perform this role more reliably?

Self-responsibility is just a phrase. When elaborated into the idea you have suggested it crumbles. By the time the market corrects industrial causes of human suffering, far too much preventable suffering will have occurred.

Unless you are philosophically indifferent to human suffering your ideas about self-responsibility are empty nonsense. You have no grounds to criticize others for childish sentiments.

dboat··on Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her
I share your opinion on the likely veracity of the allegations and would also like an explanation for the flagging of this post and the repeated deletions of similar posts.

Why is HN taking a side here?

https://twitter.com/JOSourcing/status/1710390512455401888

dboat··on System76's coreboot open firmware manages to disable Intel ME for Raptor Lake
It's troubling to have even a potentially very low security risk in hardware I paid for being beyond my reach to resolve.
dboat··on Rust: The wrong people are resigning
Not sure if you are speaking out of knowledge of this particular individual but with respect to other cultures, a biological male presenting as female does not necessarily mean trans the way western cultures think of it.

Japanese Okama culture, for instance, is an entirely different animal. I don't know this specific person just thought I'd share that misgendering isn't as black and white as even a lot of trans people think it is.

dboat··on Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books
> It also seems pretty arrogant to assert you know better than everyone else.

I did not assert that. I made a correction, which was in fact correct.

The meaning does exist, and commonly, even if in regions you are unfamiliar with. I did not misuse the word common. I think you just emotionally reacted to being called arrogant, when in fact it was a merited criticism.

dboat··on Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books
> So it goes both ways - just because something is the case in your region doesn’t mean it’s true across the board.

I never said nor suggested that it did. I was criticizing the people saying it is not a common usage because they hadn't heard it. You and the other user trying to correct me by repeating how you are from a place where the meaning is different both completely missed the point.

The meaning exists, and is used derogatorily, and definitely commonly in some places. None of what you wrote has any bearing on that.

dboat··on Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books
No, the person you replied to was correct (for my region and presumably his). My knowledge of the term mirrors his and I'm kind of disappointed to see so many people asserting there is no common, derogatory, gendered use of the term just because they are unfamiliar with it.

I see a lot of people with no knowledge or experience with this common usage. That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.

dboat··on The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding
> If you know anyone into crypto you would know they talk about it non stop.

Not really. There are a lot of people holding, mining, DCA'ing into projects they believe in who have no trouble at all keeping it to themselves.

Your remarks about gambling are similarly projecting a portion of the community onto the rest. Those traders who treat it as a speculative asset are gambling as you say, and tend to be obsessive in the way you describe, but you seem not to be aware of everyone who deals with crypto differently than you did.

There are a lot of crypto projects that people don't expect to moon, that effectively serve their purpose right now, and will just get better at it in the future. None of what you wrote is nearly as generally true as you made it out to be.

dboat··on Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
I would not want to be a friend to the sort of idiots who would say stuff like this. Having a target painted on my back as a decoy somehow makes it even worse.
dboat··on Building a modern home in the woods
Yes, everyone in the region was (I live near Kelowna). BC Wildfires last year were apocalyptic.
dboat··on Koreans react to startling results in Pew "what makes life meaningful" poll
The problem lies with all of the little ways a dysfunctional democracy fails to take care of it's people. I don't think it makes any sense to suggest dissatisfaction causes these policies.

Politics is the culprit only in the sense that many otherwise straightforwardly practical issues have become politicized to the point that objectively poorer and often dangerously irresponsible choices are preferable to any choice that is associated with one's political opponents.

Looking at it this way, it is clearly the political situation that is causing dissatisfaction.

dboat··on Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to some other bottleneck.

At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.

dboat··on Implementing Hash Tables in C
What countries are these you keep referring to?
dboat··on Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall?

I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose. The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my question.

dboat··on Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
I don't understand what you're trying to say.
dboat··on Samsung boosts non-memory chip investment to $151B
It is -just- because voicing those opinions is dangerous though? My understanding is that Chinese aggression is a major regional concern, even for average people.
dboat··on If I fits I sits: illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats
I don't think there are any poisonous cucumbers in the us, his cat should be fine.
dboat··on Why programmers don’t write documentation
This was my attitude as well for much of my career, and it was a mistake. The "correct" decision depends on the state of the business and your resources at the time. And nothing else.
dboat··on Threadripper 3990X: The Quest To Compile 1B Lines Of C++ On 64 Cores
After liking this article, I wanted to check out others on the site, and am shocked at the terrible usability of their front page. I can't finish reading the titles of their articles before the page just keeps moving things around on me. It is so frustrating, which is unfortunate because I would otherwise have been interested to see more of their content. Experience completely ruined by awful design judgment.
dboat··on Web analytics should at least meet the standards of informed consent
Rather than throw the whole thing out because the premise was once applied poorly, the legislation could restrict the actions taken with said logs. PII and the selling and collating of said information from multiple sources stand out to me.

"This website requests permission to connect your information collected from web page views with your user account"

"This website requests permission to sell information gleaned from your web page views to third parties."

Implemented at the browser level, with the ability to set preferences like with location and do-not-track cookies, doesn't seem so far-fetched.

With log analysis for security purposes being generally permitted. Presumably popular servers would quickly default to a level of logging that complies with a more reasonable middle ground than "log and analyze absolutely everything you can think of."

Imperfect, but sounds like a good place to start to me. Frankly, people like you who want to just minimize the concern and pretend privacy is a fringe interest are exactly the problem with our industry. I think most people a) don't have any clue what's going on and/or b) assume, perhaps rightly, that the battle is long since lost. But it doesn't need to be.

dboat··on Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
Your stance that they are overly intolerant would have more credibility if you had stated it more tastefully. As it is, you have lead me to believe your attitude was more likely the actual problem.
dboat··on UFO VPN claims zero-logs policy, leaks 20M user logs
Won't amazon cancel them when they keep getting copyright letters? Or do vpns have some other use I am not aware of.
dboat··on I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
I don't think it's a valid argument to brush raised issues aside as excuses.

Media companies are aggressively litigious bullies and the way they conduct their business is at odds with the interests of the public at large. Not speaking for the others but I have no tears for cry for losses incurred by actors like that, especially not "losses" of digital media licensing opportunities.

dboat··on Google to Invest $10B in India
Regular citizens do not have the opportunity to successfully lobby for tax avoidance loopholes to be created and maintained for their benefit, so responding to a point about unequal advantages to corporations with a comment about rational accounting is unhelpful.

Is your position that corporations don't have an unjust advantage, or that the unjust advantage is okay and people shouldn't complain about it?

dboat··on Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?
Could you explain what you mean by the real purpose and idea behind scrum?
dboat··on Three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface
I wouldn't want to be an early adopter for this type of technology. Even just play old VR is still so new that we don't know what sort of effects prolonged use will have on physiology and cognition, and direct stimulation of the brain, a system whose precise functioning still seems so largely unknown to us, seems all the more dangerous.

I feel that some day we will be able to comprehensively decode neural communication but I would liken our current state to something like surgery in the Victorian era. I wonder if these student volunteers see the situation differently than I do, or if they are just that brave.

dboat··on Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?
Presumably you were able to explain your case and have the reprimand expunged from your record. As long as they are reasonable in that way I don't think occasionally testing the people handling sensitive data is a bad idea.
dboat··on Firms That Promised Ransomware Decryption Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers
That wasn't helpful. Instead of repeating a vaguely condescending remark, please elaborate on what you think he needs to learn.
dboat··on Firms That Promised Ransomware Decryption Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers
What does this comment mean? Like, read more in general, or what?
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