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enragedcacti

4,361 karma · joined February 1, 2017

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enragedcacti··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
I'm glad we are finally getting some good, solid guidance around UPFs. Hey everyone, just buy "good stuff"!

while it is quite funny how you turned around my "just spend way more money" advice as an actual suggestion, it really isn't particularly helpful because UPFs are a much, much broader category than "flavor-blasted" type products. A huge number of low/no-prep options are UPF, you just don't think so because they don't scan as unhealthy. It gets us back to the main problem that it's all basically just vibes, which is why you don't see the issue that your honest-to-god advice was to just buy good stuff instead of buying bad stuff. Why not just cut to the chase and have an Ultra-Bad Foods categorization?

enragedcacti··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
If the goal is to regulate unhealthy foods then it does kind of have to be perfect (very low false-positives). UPFs as they are defined include baby formula, many frozen meals regardless of macros, soy/almond milk, instant oatmeal, pasta sauce, flavored yogurt, etc.

Invariably when someone says something like "UPF is a pretty reliable heuristic" its because they are massively underestimating what counts as UPF and using a "I know it when I see it" approach, which, yeah of course it seems reliable if you start with the precondition that UPFs are unhealthy.

If it's just guidance and not for regulation, well, you have similar problems in the opposite direction. prepackaged whole grain bread is UPF the same as Wonder Bread w/ 2.5g added sugar per slice. It's easy to say "just buy fresh bread" but when that collides with the reality of a busy schedule then UPF designations become next to useless. The undeniable value that preservatives have for healthy and unhealthy products alike mean that anyone using actual UPF as their heuristic will be completely rudderless.

enragedcacti··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
You'd love my new food category. It's called Ultra-Priced Foods, and it argues that the more expensive something is, the better it is for you. Sure, there might be some exceptions, but overall price is a quite effective proxy for high quality ingredients.

Oh, you don't have unlimited money? Some people don't have unlimited time or capability to prepare home-cooked meals constantly. It would behoove anti-UPF advocates to design a system that more accurately describes nutritional value of "UPFs" so people can make informed decisions within the constraints of their life.

enragedcacti··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
Immediately backing off to "I know it when I see it" really doesn't help your case that UPF is the right way to categorize unhealthy foods
enragedcacti··on KDE at 30
It's Pride Month and the organization is doing Pride things, its not that complicated.

> This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.

"undoubtedly" is absurd here. Does KDE really have a stable of consistent transphobes donating? Do they outweigh additional donations from supporting the LGBTQ community?

Regardless, if the only point of KDE were to make money it wouldn't be a non-profit. Extremely passionate people are often passionate about a lot of things beyond just what you want from them. KDE is a community project and that community loves and accepts non-binary people.

enragedcacti··on Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
Falcon Heavy has a much smaller max payload diameter (~4.6m) compared the New Glenn (7m), I doubt the landers (MK2 especially) can be retooled to fit without essentially starting from scratch.
enragedcacti··on Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
It almost definitely cannot. It already has a far lower thrust-to-weight ratio than real launch escape systems (1.x at best versus 6-10+)[1][2], and it would only be able to light its three sea-level engines since the vacuum-optimized engines would be unstable and likely rip themselves apart at 1 ATM.*

*correction: Vac raptors can run at sea level in a test stand. Still doubtful that its safe/reliable and in either case it would still be far too slow.

[1] Note that the first G of acceleration is combating gravity, so Starship at e.g. 1.25Gs would accelerate away from the explosion at 1/20th the rate of Dragon v2.

[2]https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/how-do-the-g-...

enragedcacti··on What color is your function? (2015)
I agree in isolation, and I have used nest-asyncio a couple of times where it really was a lot easier than the alternative, but from an ecosystem perspective I'm glad it isn't the default. Most of the time someone wants to do this it's a junior trying to work around a non-issue (e.g copy-pasting from a guide that includes asyncio.run()), and the trade-off is a massively increased surface for performance footguns throughout your code base and all the libraries you use. Linters could save you from the first case but it would be a lot more work to profile, track down, and fix spots in all your dependencies that cause your event loop to get fragmented.
enragedcacti··on What color is your function? (2015)
> Like, why can't my sync function await something asynchronous?

The answer, at least for Python, is that it is an intentional limitation because the alternatives introduce some quite bad trade-offs.

Option 1: your awaited promise goes into the main async event loop. This is bad because it means that your single-threaded sync function now needs to be thread-safe, and so does any sync code that calls your sync function despite it not even knowing that you're doing anything async. This is essentially unworkable without throwing away the option of writing non-thread-safe code.

Option 2: Your awaited promise goes into its own new event loop that only contains sibling and child promises. There's nothing technically stopping someone from doing this[1], but now you've lost a ton of the value of async because you will inevitably end up with a ton of siloed event loops that leave the process idle despite other async tasks existing that could run. Effective async code needs to share an event loop at as high of a level as possible, which means tainting as many methods with async as possible. At that point, you might as well enforce it at the language level and avoid the inevitable pain and fragmentation that comes from other devs across the ecosystem mixing sync and async code.

[1] https://pypi.org/project/nest-asyncio/

As explained by Guido: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/66435#issuecomment-...

enragedcacti··on A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
> When you get a ticket, you get points against your license, and end up paying more in insurance, often for up to seven years.

AFAICT this not the case in the vast majority of states that allow automated enforcement. Of the three I saw in that list that do: California replaced theirs with purely civil penalties earlier this year, and Arizona and Oregon require law enforcement officers to manually review and sign off on the ticket and offer legal avenues for you to respond.

https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/red-light-running/safety...

enragedcacti··on A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
If you have to shakily walk backwards into a D- explanation of the concept of a civil offense, maybe you shouldn't remark on the constitutionality of enforcing them.
enragedcacti··on Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]
He makes that argument but IMO it's not particularly well founded. He talks about his old Chevy Volt and guesses about the new Nissan series hybrids while ignoring Honda's current lineup of series hybrids. The Civic hybrid* meets or beats the EPA ratings on both the Corolla and Camry hybrids when on the same size wheels (18").

I agree in principal that there's efficiency to be gained by minimizing conversion losses, but Honda may be clawing that back with larger and more efficient motor-generators that only package well because no planetary gear set is required to connect everything.

* Honda hybrids do have either one or two clutches to mechanically connect the engine to the wheels at fixed ratios for highway cruising, but their city EPA numbers are still very competitive.

enragedcacti··on Gemini Omni
> Prompt: Make it look like the weird shape of my hand hole super zooms and magnifies the ground it's looking at in sharper quality.

There's got to be a reason this is phrased so insanely, right?

enragedcacti··on Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930
USER

What are the primary reasons for secession as stated in the declarations by the states of the south?

talkie-1930

The primary reasons assigned for secession in the south were, first, the belief that the union was endangered by the abolition agitation at the north, and, secondly, the desire to establish a separate confederacy, in which slavery should be perpetuated and extended. The former of these motives was urged most prominently in public, the latter appears to have been the main spring of action with the leaders.

enragedcacti··on Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI
It's quite interesting that your (presumably very representative) survey of young people has unanimously reported 'arbitrary amalgamation of bog-standard right-wing grievances' as the primary issue of our time
enragedcacti··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
It was intended in good faith, to make the point that rarity alone is not a good metric for salience. In my experience, most trans people have no problem with the statement "humans are sexually dimorphic" in a biology context. They (and I) have issue with it when its used in a debate to say "Humans are sexually dimorphic (and therefore trans and intersex people are irrelevant/shouldn't be accommodated/don't exist)". In the context of sports, it is definitely relevant that there are many edge cases and substantial overlap in the distribution of phenotypes between AFAB and AMAB people.

Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.

enragedcacti··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
99.8% of all matter by count is either hydrogen or helium, are atoms dimorphic?
enragedcacti··on Nvidia's DLSS 5 uses generative AI to boost photorealism in video games
> they did say that these AI effects are done with the actual 3d assets themselves and is not just some type of filter that run over the existing images

That was essentially just Jensen Huang lying during his Q&A. DLSS5 uses the same input data as DLSS<5, which is just screen space color data and motion vectors. From NVIDIAs announcement: "DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame."

I agree, every shot has something to like, especially in fine details, but I question the feasibility of fixing the issues while running the model on a consumer GPU in realtime. Getting similar improvements without falling back to diffuse lighting would require the model to infer a huge amount of information about off-screen light sources and objects. I'm much more excited about putting my tensor cores and vram towards neural textures since they can actually add detail at the geometry level.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss5-breakthrough...

enragedcacti··on Nvidia's DLSS 5 uses generative AI to boost photorealism in video games
The specular highlights on faces definitely look wrong to me though I struggle to describe why. Shadows and diffuse lighting is a totally different story, though. Look at how it completely deletes the shadow of the steeple on the right hand side[1], or how it completely eliminates the shadows on this guy's face and jacket. Overcast lighting is an easy cheat for hyper-realism[3] and almost every single scene shown has softened or absent shadows and more diffuse light.

As an aside, I'm starting to wonder if they are modifying engine settings when switching it on and off. There's clearly some amount of accumulation it has to do and its impossible to frame-by-frame a video of a monitor, but in [1] the first frame snaps from a dynamic shadow of the steeple to a generic small blob shadow, then gets entirely eliminated on the next frame.

[1] https://youtu.be/4ZlwTtgbgVA?t=435, [2] https://youtu.be/4ZlwTtgbgVA?t=326, [3] Cyberpunk hyper-realism mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_toA8lErAHg

enragedcacti··on MacBook Neo
I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.

edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port

enragedcacti··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.

Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.

enragedcacti··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
Sections of lines that already have meaningful congestion at adjacent stops wouldn't be a good target for balancing. WMATA in D.C. recently eliminated about 5% of bus stops as part of their overhauled bus network, this is how they described their strategy[1]: "We thought carefully about each stop, looking at things like how many people use it, how far away it is from the next stops, and whether it's safe to walk there. We also listened to feedback from thousands of bus riders."

Additionally, many stops with a lot of people loading and unloading are hubs which would never be balanced away, and often are designated timing points where the bus will wait to get back on schedule, so loading/unloading time is often irrelevant because predictability is being prioritized over speed. Improving speed and consistency with techniques like removing unnecessary stops increases predictability and allows for tightening up timetables and minimizing average hold times.

[1] https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/plans/Better-Bus/frequentl...

enragedcacti··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
Demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments and pretty much never lives up to the promise. Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead, which in the past has been essential to DRT routing.

Autonomy could improve responsiveness to demand but you still run into other issues. DRT usually won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent (bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals). Futher, consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability in trip time as the route adjusts to add new passengers or make out of the way drop-offs.

enragedcacti··on Pebble Production: February Update
On top of what others have said, the Watchface/App dev experience is pretty great. The OS provides a lot of compositing and animation features that encourage really lively and cute designs, and the Pebble app has a JS runtime that allows apps to do whatever phone-side stuff you need without having to build separate Android and iOS apps (or, as a user, install a ton of companion apps). Spin-up and iteration is really easy because pebble-tool manages building, deploying to QEMU, and running the phone-side code in Node.js so that you can launch and test your app end-to-end with one command.

Having to write C on the watch-side isn't everyone's cup of tea but they are actively working on a replacement for rocky.js so that you can write everything in JS.

enragedcacti··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
> They are putting their money behind their words, unless there is some backroom deal we don't know about.

Their product is dynamically priced and individualized, and there is no guarantee of what the base rate will be. I don't see any reason they can't keep offering the 50% discount and then adjust the base rates to reverse engineer a sustainable price regardless of FSDs real safety.

> Considering how human operators behave with these systems, I'd also wager having the human operator (many don't even look at the road!) makes only a small difference.

Lemonade will likely be getting driver monitoring telemetry and calculating rates accordingly, but in either case I'm convinced that we are still on the left hand side of the Valley of Degraded Supervision [0]. Operators may not pay full attention at all times but they likely still have pretty good heuristics for what situations are difficult for FSD and adjust their monitoring behavior accordingly.

Tesla could of course release detailed crash and disengagement data to prove FSD safety. That they do not is itself a form of evidence, and in lieu of that we have to rely on crowdsourced data which says FSD 14.x still has a very long way to go to be safer than the average driver [1].

[0] https://www.eetimes.com/disengagements-wrong-metric-for-av-t...

[1] https://teslafsdtracker.com/Main

enragedcacti··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
Lemonade doesn't support your claim that FSD is a safer driver than you are. It just says that, most charitably, they believe FSD and a human operator are safer than just a human operator (The co-founder said exactly this to Reuters [0]). Further, the program has only been around for a week and their marketing copy specifically cites "Tesla's data" as the source for the 50% reduction rather than any sort of independent analysis.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lemona...

enragedcacti··on Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee
2026 CR-V and Civic both have trims with ADAS but no modem: https://mygarage.honda.com/s/hondalink-product-compatibility
enragedcacti··on Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee
It is in the EU but in the US ADAS won't be mandated until 2029. It would tank your IIHS rating though and all major mfgs have met a voluntary pledge to have >95% light duty vehicles ship with autobraking by 2023: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/automakers-fulfill-autobrak...
enragedcacti··on Ireland fast tracks Bill to criminalise harmful voice or image misuse
Any time you are reading a law, especially one from another jurisdiction, you have to be very careful to consider that there may be terms with a legal or common law definition that you don't understand. In this case, "reckless" seems to be a well defined term with a fair amount of case law behind it. To my untrained eye it seems like a newspaper would be well within their rights to publish harmful information as long as they avoid "a conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk".

https://www.studocu.com/en-ie/document/university-college-du...

enragedcacti··on The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine
Free rider problems/tragedy of the anticommons - research that isn't directly patent-able would result in a dearth of private investment because there isn't a comparative advantage in researching it

Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies

Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company

Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)

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