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hwillis

6,522 karma · joined March 21, 2012

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hwillis··on Eggs US – Price – Chart
Bird flu has 95% lethality in chickens and takes ~48 hours to kill. It's not like they can get away with ignoring it. Testing happens when you wake up and half your birds are already dead.

That said OP is asserting local costs haven't changed without evidence. Even if that were true (and I don't think it is- local farms are also being hit hard eg duck farming in NY) it probably speaks far more to small operations having a harder time changing their prices. Or the cheap eggs are just places who haven't been hit yet.

hwillis··on He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along
> At 10:38 pm, SWAT entered the house and used a stun grenade to conceal their movements, but were driven back outside by gunshots (though criminalists would later establish that they were not fired upon). During the next 10.2 hours, a Lenco BearCat was driven through the front door, tear gas and 40 mm grenades were repeatedly launched inside, shots were fired upon the house, and explosives were detonated to destroy several exterior walls.

Whether or not police have any imperative to consider the impact of their actions, this situation was clear incompetence and reckless destruction. They're just as much doing their job by forcing drug tests on random people. The person may not have been on drugs, but all police would have to do is say they saw "erratic behavior".

> Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay?

This is just a different bad incentive; it incentivizes police to completely ignore situations or to find someone to hold accountable. Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.

Police should pay for all the drug tests they demand, and for all the damages incurred in the process of investigating or arresting a suspect. Those things are not related to the crime itself, like a fine is. They are part of the cost of investigation and operation.

hwillis··on He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along
> After being chased by police for stealing clothing from a Walmart, Seacat barricaded himself in a house at 4219 South Alton Street in Greenwood Village, Colorado. By the time Seacat was finally extracted from the premises, the house had been destroyed by law enforcement in their efforts to flush him out. The homeowner—Leo Lech—filed a lawsuit against the municipality for compensation, but was ruled against by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; he appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court declined to hear the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_of_Robert_Seacat

hwillis··on The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science
That's a tremendously expensive way to detect fraud. There's funding, but also the people replicating need to have at least near the expertise of the original authors, and the rate of false positives is clearly going to be high. Mistakes on the part of the replicator will look the same as scientific fraud. Maybe most worryingly, the negative impact of human studies would be doubled. More than doubled, probably- look at how many people claimed to successfully replicate LK-99. A paper may need to be replicated many time to identify unknown.

Maybe first we could just try specifically looking for fraud? Like recording data with 3rd parties (ensuring that falsified data will at least be recorded suspiciously), or a body that looks for fabricated data or photoshopped figures?

hwillis··on Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
All 3 of those countries have separate organizations employing the air traffic controllers. DFS is 100% owned by the government, NATS is formerly a public service and now half privately owned, and Nav Canada was established by the ANS act.

The FAA has a $5.20 tax per flight segment per passenger and a 7.5% ticket tax. The budget set by congress limits how much the FAA can spend on air traffic control, and the surplus (there is a surplus) goes into the AATF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_and_Airway_Trust_Fund

This is a direct cost of American austerity.

hwillis··on Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
There is a single failsafe which barely worked when the event was above 1000'. Under 1000' TCAS is automatically shut off. The flightpaths in the area of the airport are all significantly below 1000'. There are zero protections there except for the awareness of the pilots.
hwillis··on Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
It is a budget problem.

https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttig...

hwillis··on Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
It is a budget problem, not a hiring problem: https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttig...
hwillis··on Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
A couple years ago the transportation secretary tried to get funding to hire 2,000 more controllers. Congress said no

https://thehill.com/regulation/transportation/4617992-buttig...

hwillis··on Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows
A plane and helicopter over DC came within 500' of each other over DC barely 24 hours before the crash. They avoided collision because they were over 1000' and the TCAS was still active: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huVFZ__q2rI

During the day the only thing that was keeping those collisions from happening under 1000' was pilots seeing each other. At night the only thing keeping it from happening was luck.

The error is in allowing flightpaths to be so close to each other in distance and time.

hwillis··on Introducing ChatGPT Gov
This should be unsurprising- see also govcloud: https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us

The US government likes its employees and contractors to have their own separate version of cloud products. For instance you would not want OpenAI using prompts about controlled unclassified information as training data. Most of the things government contractors do is CUI- you don't want it spread around, but it's not actually a secret. The US goes out of its way to minimize how much CUI is exposed, and on top of that you have export controls like ITAR and then of course classified information.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
Then why are they serving 93% of their customers, especially when there is low overlap between those users? 90% of the american feed was american tiktoks.
hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
Yes. Whether or not they are "people" is irrelevant. They have the same rights to free speech. You are nitpicking.
hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
> But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.

Incorrect- federal powers do not override constitutional rights like free speech.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
It's less than 7% of their total users. The US is not that big compared to the whole world.
hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
> There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations.

The communications act did not ban already-existing networks, and it did not ban specific providers. The tiktok ban is targeted specifically against one social media that the government does not like[1], with a thin veneer of "security concern" that people might specifically choose to share their contact list and that one of those contacts may be in a sensitive position.

[1] I don't even really think it's about the government not liking it! They thought they could get cheap support by drumming up anti-chinese sentiment and they ran with it. It's the most pathetic kind of politicking.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
Limits on how you can speak are absolutely limits on speech. It's called burdening. The government must demonstrate a reason to burden a right. It is held to various levels of scrutiny depending on the ways it is burdening.

I think it is very obvious why removing the most-used social media from 170 million americans would be burdensome. SCOTUS disagrees.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
Totally beside the point. Verbatim from Citizens United:

> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

SCOTUS held that coorporations (and more broadly "associations of people") have the same rights to free speech that any individual does.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
1. source?

2. A core principle of the constitution is that those rights apply to noncitizens as well as citizens. They are human rights, not citizen rights. It's significantly more ridiculous for corporations to have free speech than a government. They don't have less of a right to free speech because we don't like them.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
It's not even about them:

> If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659. Access to such detailed information about U. S. users, the Government worries, may enable “China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

It seems farcically ridiculous to me to ban the app because it somehow could let china blackmail CEOs.

hwillis··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
> Does the US really want a (hostile?) foreign govt to have clear direct access to influence 170m americans, an entire generation - completely unfettered?

As the SCOTUS said itself:

“At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC

hwillis··on The Origins of Wokeness
Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.

African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.

> they’re not black, they’re Black

Somebody has never heard of proper nouns

> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color

Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.

> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC

The I stands for indigenous.

hwillis··on WebGL Fluid Simulation
It should look basically accurate, except that the edges absorb momentum. You're looking downward into a pool of water and dragging the mouse is like dragging a finger through the water. Not totally the same, because the mouse is directly imparting momentum into the fluid instead of displacing it- that's why twirling looks wrong. If you move the mouse in a circle it will constantly grab and pull back the fluid, which can't be done in real life.

The fluid has a set lifetime instead of actually mixing, which makes it look different- normally the edges would dissipate faster than the areas that are all ink but instead it just all fades at the same rate.

The simulation is kind of 3d- since it's incompressible, pressure at any point is proportional to the height of the fluid. Advection still happens on a single plane, but if the pressure-related height is relatively large compared to the average depth of the fluid it's not a bad approximation. The viscous losses are also kind of arbitrary, but it's not far from water.

hwillis··on Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
> The share gross electricity generation from coal in 2022 was 70.7%, (1.7 p.p. less than in 2021).

https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/poland-energ...

hwillis··on Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Control
If you have two 1000 mAh cells connected in series, they will provide 1 amp for 1 hour. The battery is still 1000 mAh even though it is made of two cells with 2000 mAh total.

You are equating amp-hours with watt-hours, which is not reasonable. Q is charge, and is only proportional to a number of electrons. E is the energy, or a number of electrons at a voltage.

> When having 13 batteries of 29000mAh, or 29Ah, you have 13 x 29 = 377Ah or 377000mAh

By this logic, with those cells in series the whole battery would be at 48 volts and 337 amp-hours, giving it a storage of 18.1 kWh. That's despite being made of 13 cells with only 107 watt-hours each.

hwillis··on Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Control
You misunderstand battery specs. It's a 13 string (more commonly, 13s) battery- a string is a number of cells wired in series. By convention that's a 48 volt battery, which matches with the 54 volt charger. In total that's a 421 watt-hour battery, for an average power of ~210 watts over 2 hours.

When you connect 2 9000 mAh cells in series, the resulting battery has 2x the voltage but the same mAh capacity. In parallel, the battery has the same voltage but 2x the mAh.

> My expectation on timescale is that genuinely general-purpose robots will need at least as much compute as a self-driving car (possibly more, that's a minimum), and have at most 1/10th the available power to do that (because they're physically smaller).

This seems logically flawed:

1. A car travels hundreds of miles from home. Why would a robot walk more than a while from a transport or home base? At short distances, if you truly need that power, it probably makes more sense to stream data/video over a direct low-latency connection. Long distance networking has a latency comparable to camera frame time, but even a normal wifi router can keep a lower latency than human nerve delay.

2. Humanoid robots will never be running at 85 mph past a bunch of people. They probably don't need to have the same compute throughput as a car, and definitely don't need to have the same reaction time.

hwillis··on Will even the most advanced subs have nowhere to hide?
Sound waves. Acoustic waves travel much farther and there are transmitting stations underwater.

Contrary to the other reply, ELF is not used and is impractical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine

For VLF you can drag a very long antenna behind you, but most submarines just launch a buoy with a normal antenna to the surface and a fiber connection to allow them to stay below the surface.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/04/communication-a...

hwillis··on Will even the most advanced subs have nowhere to hide?
> You presume it has to be incredibly long range?

EM waves fall off exponentially inside a conductor like saltwater. A 1 kHz wave has a skin depth of 8.75 meters, vs the Virginia class' 10m width. A signal from the front to the back of the submarine would be attenuated by 10 million times.

Note that this is in addition to the normal problems with antennas. Your home router transmits at <100 mW. Say you spent a ton of money and made a super sensitive receiver that could operate from 140m on the low SNR of your router. In order to receive the same power at 140m on 1 kHz, you would need a 1 megawatt transmitter. It would be dumping 60% of its power in the first 8.75 meters of water. Not quite enough to boil it, but not far off.

That's your first problem. The second problem is that the wavelength of a 1 kHz signal is 299.8 km. Antenna effectiveness also falls off exponentially with size, and the smallest antennas are maybe 10% of the wavelength. A 1 km antenna does not work well for 1 km, and even then you have to let out a buoy with a long cable- which is how current submarines do it.

The third problem is that if the drones are 10s of km or less away from the sub, there's no point. That means you know where the sub is. The problem is knowing where to aim active sonar or drop depth charges, not aiming.

hwillis··on Our muscles will atrophy as we climb the Kardashev Scale
Silly.

1. Myostatin inhibitors are already in development. We're already using a drug that stops us from getting fat, why would we not use a drug that prevents atrophy?

2. This is entirely focused on what would be efficient at a global scale, while decisions are made on individual's desires. People (in general) want to look muscular and fit; it's as hardcoded into our reproductive desires as anything else is. Given increasing resources, is it reasonable to assert that people will choose to totally forgo their biological body? Why is it impossible for them to have the same productive advantages while retaining a physical body for when they want it?

Human desire trumps production, even in the long term, or at least medium term. I could eat monkey chow every day and never have to do dishes or cook ever again, and save an extra 10 hours a day. I could wear the same thing every day so a machine can fold it. I can put my brain in a jar to avoid commuting. But no matter how much technology advances, if I still spend 8 hours working with my brain implant or whatever then I'm still doing at worst 24% as good as the guy working 24/7. Why would it ever be worth giving up such basic human pleasures as eating or sex just for 4x the salary?

hwillis··on Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
1: Previous conditions in fluids cannot be determined with any kind of accuracy except for really obvious cases like "did this wet ground come from a cloud?" or laminar flows (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p08_KlTKP50). Since weather is fluid mixing at high speeds with low viscosity, there is a huge amount of turbulence and entropy. Entropy means systems are not time-reversible.

2: Can we predict weather 2000 or 1M years ago based on estimates of temperature and geography? Yes, pretty reliably. Vegetation and albedo are some of the biggest variables- plant transpiration puts huge amounts of water into the air and changes surface temperatures. But we have a pretty good idea of the geography, and relatively small changes don't have a huge impact on general weather trends.

3: Can we predict the exact weather on a day 100 years ago, given available measurements? No, not really. Without satellites you need radar, and without radar you need weather balloons. Coal burning also had impacts on weather. Low pressures at the surface can tell you that the weather may get worse, but it doesn't tell you where its coming from or what the higher airflows are doing.

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