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mc32

34,329 karma · joined September 22, 2010

Google fanatic.
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mc32··on Delhi Cut Electricity Loss from 50 to 5 Percent
True it should never have gotten so bad, but when there is no incentive to invest, this is the result you can expect. This happened in Venezuela and South Africa too - though SA also suffers from massive corruption (officials pocketing moneys and diverting from investment in infra).
mc32··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
That’s quite the achievement. Though a side note of comparison I can’t believe France and Belgium suffer power losses in the 5 to 6% range. Unless I’m misunderstanding what that means, it seems excessive for a modern economy.
mc32··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
That seems odd since the EU lowered tariffs on US ag products. They also took back some previous retaliatory tariffs that were in place.
mc32··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Before it was legalized people went down to the 7-11 to buy beer/wine all legal, maybe a bum to steer around.

They didn't want to get to know scuzzy dudes selling pot or driving to areas of town where at night they have street takeovers to score some pot.

Now those scaredy cats have legal dispensaries from which to obtain their MJ legally. So they might opt for pot these days.

mc32··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
Ok, but here we have people not from Brazil claiming that a private company is guilty of censorship but also was not guilty of censorship when government "embeds[1]" in the US would flag what they labeled disinformation and blocked discussion on Covid, Covid origins, laptops with evidence, suspended political accounts in the US, etc. So, it seems people want to have it both ways -essentially they want to censor things they disagree with and also don't want censorship of things they agree with.

[1] Of course, that was plainly censorship with a veneer of plausible deniability (it assumed those embeds could only be truthful and unbiased and in no way politically motivated).

mc32··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm/blob/main/home-mixer/...
mc32··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
Indeed it seems that they only have problems with censorship when their team gets censored but they secretly enjoy their opposition getting censored. As it is the Lula admin mandated that X suppress the speech of about 600 opposition candidates.

https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...

mc32··on What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
This happens more frequently then one imagines. Quite a few things fail to start from scratch and instead rely on compounded errors over time. Projections, budgets, etc., are sometimes based on stale information.
mc32··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
I mean, to get the Japanese take on immigration, you could go to 5chan and check out the temperature over there. Japanese don't frequent this board, so what you will get is mostly North American and Western European (not even eastern European)
mc32··on Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update
From what people say, if you want french door fridges, Bosch and Fisher Paykel are the ones to go for.
mc32··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
Do you think this is a consequence of the seemingly quarterly RIFs at Oracle? Is it that offshoring wasn’t such a good idea?
mc32··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
I think the student is making a mountain out of a molehill. They didn’t “transform him into a studentin” they just replaced him with a female student in the position he was in the original photo.

Sure, it’s stupid to be so lazy that you can’t use a new photo with whatever characteristics you want. It’s also stupid to slim down a chubby student without permission. I think she has more reason to be upset than he has. That said why does the university see the need to alter reality?

mc32··on Winning the visa lottery
It's interesting to see people castigate the host country while wholly absolving their actual home countries from any fault. Like they expect the host country to be better at treating a person who migrates than the actual country the migrant leaves. If anything, people should focus on the faults of the country of origin and get them to treat and accept their own people as their own that they are. And if there is a problem that's driving people from their home countries, fix that. Don't add fuel to the fire where the country is left with the worst of all people with little chance to recover.
mc32··on Winning the visa lottery
Japan and now China, have used automation rather than the importation of foreign workforces. China, according to many accounts, is doing quite well compared to other world economies, Japan is not too shabby either and moreover are not suffering from increased effects of importing foreign labor --China is noticing which path is more harmonious for its people.
mc32··on Winning the visa lottery
Japanese rice cultivation does not really make economic sense, yet they do it and create barriers effectively making foreign rice more expensive that it would be thus making locally produced rice "competitive". If the Japanese can do it, well, so can anyone else.
mc32··on Roboharm: Do frontier robot policies refuse unsafe instructions?
There are certain lines we can think of that an A.I. system should not cross. The staged set-up is not one of them.

Else, from a logical perspective, these systems would necessarily refuse to make movies where violent portrayals have people as victims. Perhaps the world would be a better place if we did not have such depictions (it’s unsettled) but in no recorded history have we shied away from that.

mc32··on Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees
And if we recursively say that about each and every species as this would reduce to, we can state that Venus and Mars are just fine.
mc32··on Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees
Adults were kids. Without kids there are no adults. Without adults there is no society. Without pets life is a bit duller but society goes on as it did before people adopted animals as pets.
mc32··on English: A vs. An
/heitsh/ vs /eitsh/. I think it's mostly Irish with the former.
mc32··on Waymo in Singapore
Another thing some do is assume wealth accumulation happens on a yearly cycle. Like if you take Musk’s ~trillion today you’ll have another trillion to confiscate next year and the year after that, etc.
mc32··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
Sounds like a plot for a Superhero movie ;)
mc32··on Waymo in Singapore
Problem is there are more people who are not wealthy than there are wealthy people by a couple of orders of magnitude so even if you taxed the wealthy folks at 99%, you would not have enough to go around, if there isn't anyone to tax but wealthy folks. That is unless you think the slice of wealthy folks grows in size.
mc32··on Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?
I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precedent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
mc32··on German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol
Also you do not want them to benefit from your smart design choices. You want them to suffer from their bad choices and not learn from your success. (Yes, of course you could have bad design choices that you don’t realize someone else has solved more intelligently.)
mc32··on Archiving pirate radio station Kool FM
Off topic but how were pirate radios able to operate while people with sets would have vans going around and fining people for not having a TV license?

In the US sometimes you’d have pirate radio off the coast so as to avoid “jurisdiction” though I’m not sure how effective that was.

mc32··on US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons
It’s like they’ll believe any rumors about the US doing things but then need concrete evidence irrefutable evidence when it comes to its adversaries.
mc32··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
It’s not a place for most visitors to go off-piste, unless you’re like MacAffee or that British lad Mike who does a hitch-hikers YT travel channel. They both were/are quite a-tuned to where they are think on their feet and are adept at escaping tough situations. Most people ate not like them.
mc32··on I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
mc32··on US coal 'biggest contributor by far' to rise in global emissions
The increased demand in coal was, uhum, fueled primarily by data center energy demands. Along with coal, there was also an uptick in solar installations to meet DC energy needs. Given solar is cheaper, it stands to reason more solar will be built to meet DC energy demand.
mc32··on New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
Ironically, if it's true that the jobs are being off-shored, rather than on-shored and filled by locals, this would be beneficial for the countries who currently find themselves in a brain-drain spiral (be it India, Ukraine, etc.). It would result in a more tech and economically balanced world rather than having two lobes (USA and China). People would say that it's a detriment to the US's future --but those are often the most critical of US hegemony.
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