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methehackon There's So Much Data Even Spies Are Struggling to Find Secrets

M-x spook https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

"The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people."

I guess the theory was solid.

methehackon Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

And a sound business decision until the copyright law works itself out.

methehackon 30% of All Rural Hospitals in the US Are at Risk of Closing [pdf]

France is #1 in care according to the world health organization for 1/2 the cost per capita. It is all private, well-regulated, and provides universal coverage (your company pays your premium; if you have no employer, the govn't does).

We are #37 according to the world health organization and we cost twice as much.

I'm sure people in France complain, but they have way less of a reason to.

Some reasons for the cost savings: universal, portable medical record, insurance companies have to remit with three business days, reference pricing, one system not medicare, VA, private. Private insurance companies don't make tons of money they are so well regulated...

Old source but still painfully relevant. I have seen these stats elsewhere as well: https://www.npr.org/2008/07/11/92419273/health-care-lessons-...

methehackon Egypt builds worlds largest man-made river

The Erie Canal (362.9 mi) is not as long as the California aqueduct nor the Grand Canal in China but it is also longer than the "man made river" of the article, and IT HAS A SONG, and a good one at that.

methehackon A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived

Maybe the idea is that from the first person perspective, neither pursuit (EDIT) felt like doing anything useful... and yet...

methehackon Apple Music Classical

Dude, the DAC is not the dongle.

methehackon Apple Music Classical

Check out roon + quboz and/or tidal -- that's the audiophile route.

Roon is just meta-data and presentation. Quboz/Tidal hold the content. Roon's content and interface is fantastic compared to spotify and apple music. It uses third party content (wikipedia, reviews from tivo, maybe others) seemlessly. And it elevates the use of the album art. Also, it allows for album-centric approach to viewing/organizing/listening which I vastly prefer. Roon also allows deep linking. Like every album/track has a list of the people on it and you can see everything each of them has done. Same for composers/etc. Also, from each track, you can get to all the other recordings across all artists. Using this for the last month has really pointed out to me how crap apple and spotify are for discovery/learning/investigation.

Technically, this route is also superior because, as I understand it, roon tells the streamer + DAC, which may be way higher quality than the DAC in any apple device, to stream directly from TIDAL or QUBOZ. This yields higher quality because you skip the apple DAC and airplay, both of which lessen quality compared to what's possible with the other route. I'm sure the apple DACs are fine for what they are, but I'm also sure they're full of compromises. You can spend like 5K on a DAC alone.

I know audiophiles can really overdo it, but I have been using this combination for a month or so now and I think it's sooo much better. Music is way more like I remember it. It was confusing to me because spotify/apple music have everything and yet I found them very frustrating to use. My instinct was right -- they're crap products compared to what's possible. Your mileage may vary.

methehackon Interactive Music Theory Cheat Sheet

Not free, but these books from "hook theory" are great and their tools are also amazing. Complementary to the tools at muted.io that the OP references...

https://www.hooktheory.com/books

methehackon Surveillance Footage of Tesla Crash on SF’s Bay Bridge

Given your description, I'm surprised you, or any responsible driver, would keep using the feature. It sounds really dangerous.

methehackon An Overview Of Upcoming Ruby on Rails 7.1 Features Part 1

Rails is really a gift. It's so productive and works so great on teams because of the heavy conventions I think. And the ruby library ecosystem is insanely good. Libraries generally do what they say they're going to do and there are libraries for everything. I've wondered a lot about why this is. Heavy air time? Is there something about ruby?

Every now and then I try some new web app framework that catches my eye in some new language and it always seems like its just getting started compared to rails -- and, it is. Worth noting -- rails works great API only as well. I bet Django is pretty good by now too of course, but Rails is really a fantastic tool well suited to task.

methehackon What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

Nonsense. No one is trying to establish a causal link here. Still, a concrete example of what's possible is useful and inspirational. If you do this, will you get this outcome? Probably not. Does it help me imagine a possible path? Yes, definitely.

methehackon Why we're sticking with Ruby on Rails

Rails + angular works well, might be a compromise for you. You could replace the backend endpoint by endpoint... e.g. (or similar to incrementalize it). I mean -- assuming the C# is not something you want to carry forward.

methehackon Tech CEOs Want Every Worker to Have a Permanent, Public Job Performance File

I think if you get a bad performance review, they should probably just send you to prison.

methehackon Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

Yes because it is still a hyper-effective and flexible way to build and iterate many products. And it's not just rails. The library breadth and quality of ruby libraries IME is off the hook great. Some kind of magic has happened.

methehackon Dall-E 2

What if you were inventing a language (or a programming language)... If you decided to prevent people from saying things you disagreed (assuming you could work out the technical details of doing so) with would it be moral to do so? [edited for clarity]

methehackon Deep learning on electronic medical records is doomed to fail

Replying to my own post, but to the OP's point -- we can't research very well on US healthcare data in aggregate because it is so error prone and inexact to aggregate it. Data scientists should imagine what we could do with 20 years of la carte vitale data...or better of data in a regulated medical record format that was designed to be researched in aggregate. That's the second order failure here.

methehackon Deep learning on electronic medical records is doomed to fail

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

France's system is universal and private (private docs, insurance, and reference pricing -- a service has a single fee across coherently regulated payers). They have had a standardized medical record for 20+ years. One system and one medical record for everyone. WHO ranked #1 healthcare in the world (to US ~40th) at 1/2 the cost per capita of US healthcare. This is catastrophic legislative failure for a problem largely solved by lots of other people around the world.

The legislative failure has created vast administrative overhead (10, or more, staff per doc at a hospital) and corrupt insurance companies. When an insurance company has to pay a claim, they call it a "medical loss" (they had the money and they lost it). They make their money on poor service and deceit -- charging wildly different prices for the same product where they can get away with it). In France, an insurance company, by law, has to pay a claim to a practice in a few days. Imagine the decreased capital needs for running a medical practice or a hospital.

The hospitals are not blameless in all this, but the heart of it is the payer system/s.

methehackon On Learning Smalltalk

Any persistent storage will exhibit the cruft problem over time for any system of even limited complexity. You're describing people, not Smalltalk. And Smalltalk has had version control for more than a decade.

Smalltalk always felt like it was from the future to me. Its vision and respect for human thought and creativity is so grand it makes me blush. It represents a real belief in technology and what people might do with it. It's full of hope and humanity. It's basically the Shire of programming environments -- if the Shire were part of the Standford campus.

If you haven't checked Smalltalk out, you should free your mind and give it a shot.

methehackon GitHub Copilot

The gap between concept and working product is still very much in the human's wheelhouse. This is an accelerator to snippets not yet turned into a library and, in fact, a lot like a library in terms of it's day to day utility. This will not end or even change programming that much. The value I provide as a programmer is not about copying and pasting snippets. It's something totally separate different in kind from what copilot does. If it's helpful to do what I already do, sure I'll use it. But it ain't me, babe.

methehackon Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely

Are you saying in your _better_ _society_ a-holes don't get money?! I'm in!

methehackon Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

I found this Emily Bazelon article from the nytimes really thoughtful. It's about free speech laws and disinformation campaigns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html

methehackon Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

Yes, humans are biased. Sigh/Yawn. Still, there is a world of difference between trying to be objective and not trying to be objective at all. I think, generally, the Times is trying a lot more than most organizations and I respect that. Just because humans are biased doesn't mean all journalism is equally biased.

And yes, story selection is editorializing. Sigh/Yawn. I think choosing to run this story is a legitimate editorial decision as I believe enough people care about it -- in fact, I care about it.

I think there's only a case of bad journalism here if you catch the Time in a misrepresentation. The existence of the story is not, in itself, a misrepresentation.

methehackon Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

Do you prefer "Ad Boycott of Facebook Kind of Growing"? Or "Ad Boycott of Facebook Growing Slowly"? Or "Ad Boycott of Facebook: The Details"

It is growing, the details are accurate in the article, and I can't think of a headline that has zero editorial information in it. If they don't run any story, then they risk the opposite criticism: why didn't you tell us?!

You should worry more about the media that philosophically rejects the notion of objective reality.

methehackon Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

I don't have to let trump stand on my front porch and scream lies at top volume, and twitter doesn't either. Twitter is protected by the first amendment here, not trump.

Twitter's platform is private, not public. Twitter should waste no more time in making that crystal clear.

If you own the printing press, you get to decide what you print. If it were otherwise -- if the government, or anyone else, could control what we said and didn't say with our private resources -- well, that's not anywhere any of us really wants to live.

methehackon Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

I think in state tuition at a public university is often still a very good deal w/o nearly the debt profile.

methehackon Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

It's back! The good old days of Micro$loth!

methehackon Have Aliens Found Us? (2019)

I think it may do the subject (the interviewee) a service to take a skeptical approach as the interviewer in a situation where many readers will bring a lot of skepticism. If the interviewer seems _too_ friendly, many readers will dismiss the responses and not listen as carefully as they might otherwise. It seems like a justifiable approach to me here.

methehackon I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

That seems like a good reason to me, as long as the debt load isn't severe. Plus, in my experience, education enriches the everyday profoundly.

methehackon 23andMe to share customer gene data with GlaxoSmithKline for $300M

What's preventing a health insurance company from buying 23andMe and doing what they want with the data? (i.e., reducing costs by denying coverage...)

methehackon Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

I remember this story from a few years ago: "the girl who gets gifts from birds"

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026

Searching for the story just now, I came across this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/lawsuit-...

Apparently they were sued by neighbors for encouraging wild life or something.

What an odd pair of stories. One so uplifting; the other a downer from the opposite perspective. Zeitgeisty!