ericra

This is depressing, but of even more concern is the fact that this data (and other, perhaps more "important" data) is available to essentially anyone with enough money to pay for it. This obviously includes most governments. I'm fairly sure the data brokers are not too picky about how they get paid.

There has to be regulation at the federal level to stop such practices. Nothing else will do.

Curious to not see inheritance/estate taxes listed among the possible solutions here, but I guess that a "wealth tax" could indirectly address this by whittling away at large fortunes over time while people are still alive. This may help avoid the issue of people using trusts to sidestep estate taxes (although I'm sure they would find a way!).

More generally, I highly recommend any of Thomas Piketty's books for detailed discussion about the history, causes, and consequences of inequality. They are exceptionally well-researched. And while you may not agree with all proposed solutions, they are well-written (and well-translated into English) and provide a great historical overview.

Just wanted to say thank you for doing this. I was just looking for some replacements for Simple Mobile Tools replacements the other day.

I wish you the best and hope you get enough community financial support to continue the project indefinitely.

Really surprising stuff (to me). I'm coming from the prior that large amounts of protein ingestion in one sitting are "wasted" and do not contribute much above a certain moderate amount. This is obviously only a single study, but it at least opened me up more to the possibility that this is wrong.

Some important limitations as listed in the paper:

- Study only assessed a short-term assessment window (~12 hr), and the researchers speculate that metabolic changes over time might skew these results:

"it is possible that the metabolic response to protein ingestion is modified over time. For example, it could be speculated that amino acid oxidation may increase in response to frequent, prolonged epi- sodes of hyperaminoacidemia or that large postprandial protein gains are compensated for by upregulation of amino acid oxida- tion in a subsequent fasted state"

- Study was with healthy young men after a bout of whole-body resistance exercise. May not extrapolate to other populations or conditions (i.e. at rest).

- Other study "limitations" point out that they were conservative in their conclusions, and the results of eating large amounts of protein at one time may be even stronger than stated in the paper.

Still, very interesting stuff.

It's amazing how many cables there are routing through the Suez Canal, especially directly connecting Mumbai all the way through to Marseille.

I wonder how well protected they are specifically in the Suez Canal. Presumably the whole area is pretty well surveilled by the Egyptian government, but I have no clue. I just think it's really interesting how many cables are (understandably) routed this way and wonder whether there is full backup redundancy in the few cables running around south of Africa.

WSJ article on this issue being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38434450

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that Meta (and most other big tech companies) have long been in the business of hiring a large number of recent social science Ph.D. graduates from top U.S. universities. People with a lot of knowledge of statistics and some domain-specific knowledge in their fields that could possibly be applicable to their job. The whole purpose of doing this is to create teams of marketing people doing in-house research to figure out how to best manipulate others by maximizing "engagement" or whatever other metric.

Isn't this just how all big tech companies operate as a normal business practice? Certainly Youtube is no better when it comes to targeted content and advertisements to children to their detriment.

My main point is that I don't think it makes any difference whether Meta has some internal document proving that they specifically target children with these practices. The problem is so much bigger than a single policy or company, and legislatures need to figure out a better way to address the overarching problems. I don't have much faith that these one-off lawsuits will make that much of an impact given that they almost always lead to some fine or settlement that is an acceptable business loss for the company.

I'm all for Meta being decimated by a thousand cuts in the form of lawsuits from various levels of government, but at best it would just be replaced with something else unless more regulation exists at the top levels (US / EU / etc).

Neat project. I love it.

I read the "legality" section of your README, and I hope that someone can provide some advice. It would be nice to know where the lines are so you didn't have to constantly be concerned about 2K/Firaxis legal department coming for you.

Just commenting here for visibility in hopes someone more qualified can provide some help.

The majority of comments here are pedantic nitpicking about proper tool categorization, improper use of the term "periodic", etc. Why?

This is someone's art project, it's pretty cool. Enjoy the thing if you like it! It's not meant to be an encyclopedia.

Nice article!

And btw, thanks for all your work as a filter list maintainer. I know it's a lot to keep up with, and I appreciate it very much.

This bothered me as well. I opened an issue on the repo asking them to consider updating the license file to reflect these additional requirements.

The wording they currently use suggests that this additional license requirement applies not only to their pre-trained models.

The link[1] to the Firefox add-on page on your Github repo is dead. Has this just not been published yet?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yt-siphon/

Well, for one, the addon you linked has not been updated for over 2 years. This doesn't speak to the substance of your question really, but ad-blocking is a whack-a-mole game. Resources need to be constantly updated to keep up with companies' efforts to thwart them.

It's always nice to see new efforts in this space.

There's no word yet about whether there will be a release soon which includes these fixes. But there was some concern/suggestion here last week that the developer was not responsive to the proposed changes. That does not appear to be the case.

Just a short write-up I did while looking into this topic. The first place I looked for a solution to this was using Hacker News search, but I could only find options involving 3rd-party programs or browser extensions. Hopefully this is of interest and helpful to someone else.

I wonder how much damage printer manufacturers did to consumer trust in this space. Even among non-tech people, it's pretty common knowledge at this point that printers will do a variety of terrible things like completely lock down your hardware if you don't phone home to get updates, use a non-standard or recycled/refilled cartridge, etc. TV manufacturers are catching up here as well with their greedy practices, but the printer stuff has been around forever.

It's not a far jump to extend this mistrust to all appliances and be weary of connecting anything to your network that does not require it to function.

Very interesting project. Nice work!

I'm curious if you have copyright concerns since GPT-3 may presumably quote portions of the book back to you in some instances. I still don't know if that would be a problem, but I was just curious if you did any research regarding legal/copyright issues and what conclusions you came to.

In any case, I hope you keep going with it. Echoing others here, I also think more fiction works would be a great addition. Standard Ebooks would be an option for getting source material.

The license was added in a commit 18 hours ago. There was some concern about the lack of a license here, so hopefully this clears things up for those using the project.

A bit tangential but..

A couple of years ago, I researched and wrote up an article on the effects of drinking additional water and weight loss. I was just curious because I was dieting and consistently read advice to drink lots of water to help aid dieting.

tldr: "thermogenic" (calorie-burning) effects of additional water intake are mostly negligible and based on old, non-replicated research. There may be very modest benefits for obese people during dieting, but the research is unclear. No other clear benefits that have a solid backing of research (that I could find).

https://ericra.com/writing/water_energy.html

You can also add OS notifications and browser notifications to the list of things consumers never asked for. I'm sure there is some utility for some people. But for the most part, it's just further attempts to increase "engagement" at the cost of user experience.

This one is available on Standard Ebooks[1]. It's fairly common knowledge, but I would highly suggest this site as the definitive source for high-quality copies of public domain works. I've contributed to their project before, and their editorial work is top notch.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/jacobs-room

The primary reason for not enabling every list is that some additional % of sites will "break" (although frequently, this will only be cosmetic).

An example of this is that the lists can block very general class or id attribute such as #cookie-banner. While it's likely that you'll want this blocked in general, some small number of sites may have an element (unfortunately) named this that is functional and that you actually want to see.

Because some of the lists have tens of thousands of entries, these edge cases can add up to break more sites than is actually desired. So there is a give/take there.

Another point is that some of the lists are redundant but have different maintainers. So it may make sense to choose one of these, but you it would just be additional overhead to check them all.

In my experience, running the default lists along with the "Fanboy's Annoyance" list and a few custom entries in "My filters" provides a good experience for me.

Just to make people aware who may not be, you can block a lot of cookie banners and other annoyances that are not blocked in uBlock Origin by default by enabling more specific filter lists in the extension options.

In the "filter lists" tab, I would recommended enabling the "Fanboy's Annoyance" list. It's a huge list that focuses on removing various annoying, recurring website components, and it's created by the maintainer of Easylist (uBlock Origin's primary filter list).

The downside, of course, is that this may in theory break some additional % of websites, but this has not been an issue in my experience.

To disable javascript for specific site in uBlock Origin, click the extension icon, then click the "more" button in the menu several times until all options are displayed (you only have to do this step once total, not per site).

Once the 5 top menu icons are visible, click the one to the right that looks like </> to disable javascript for the site you're on.

Same for me.

Teddit (https://teddit.net/) is a reasonable alternative to old.reddit.com provided you don't care about being logged in. I'm not affiliated with them, but I have used their Reddit front-end quite a bit and like the style.

For those hitting the "monthly article limit" paywall, this can always be bypassed on The Atlantic by opening the link in a private window.

I have always used a Roku for TV streaming, but things like this are making it more difficult.

Something similar happened with Amazon and the Twitch app for Roku. Amazon obviously wants you to use a Fire product to access Twitch, and they completely removed support for the Twitch app for Roku. Even the unofficial Twitch app shut down shortly after this, leaving no reasonable way to access Twitch content from a Roku.

If the Youtube app and available alternatives get removed as well, I'll basically be forced into another device since Twitch and Youtube offer a large percentage of the content I watch.

I can only hope that some future legislation or anti-trust lawsuit makes it more difficult for these companies to force you into buying their specific hardware to access these services, but I am not hopeful.

I opened two tabs to relax tonight: Hacker News and Lichess. This was the top HN thread, and Lichess is having issues because of the fire.

I didn't know what OVH was before 10 minutes ago, but this seems really impactful. I hope everyone there is safe and that the immediate disaster gets resolved quickly.