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mtmickush

75 karma · joined January 17, 2017

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mtmickush··on A graph that should be front-page news
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families

There's no need to caveat benefits like this by income - the most popular social programs are almost always universal. Also the added bureaucracy of validating that someone lands in a category isn't worth the overhead. Why wouldn't we want everyone to install more solar panels and two way heat pumps?

mtmickush··on Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026
This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.

Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)

mtmickush··on Don't just paste the AI at me
I generally think this is a poor take although it mostly hinges in my opinion on whether the answer you're giving them is correct or not.

There's plenty of people who probably remember the "Let me Google That For You". This is a combination of people being rude about giving others answers mixed with some people not spending enough time figuring out the answer themselves (sometimes with just a simple google search).

I've seen plenty of people ask questions that LLMs when given the right context and prompting are able to answer. Providing them the correct answer in any way (via search, via an LLM, or via your own human expertise) is valid. Its certainly annoying if a person is giving you poor answers because the answers come from an AI. And I'd definitely take that to heart and likely ask them fewer questions in the future. But similarly if someone kept coming to me with questions that can be easily answered by AI I'd tell them to spend some more time investigating on their own.

mtmickush··on Tesla registrations crash 17% in Europe as BEV market surges 14%
2.25% so far today. How does this seem to always happen?
mtmickush··on Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]
I think there's a difference between a single individual causing another harm and a product which also provides massive benefits causing harm.

It seems similar to Waymo which has a fairly consistent track record of improved safety over human drivers. If it ever causes a fatality in the future I'm not sure it would be a fair comparison to say we should ban it even though I'd want to be fairly harsh for a single individual causing a fatality.

We should work to improve these products to minimize harm along with investigating to understand how widespread the harm is, but immediately jumping to banning might also be causing more harm than good.

mtmickush··on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
mtmickush··on The language brain matters more for learning programming than the math brain
I don't find this too surprising. The study itself was primarily just testing a students ability to identify syntax and remember what various functions do. I wouldn't expect math proficiency to help much in this area vs I would very much expect language to.

It'd be interesting to see correlations (language brain vs math brain) for how easy or hard it is for people to solve new problems with language after they already know the basics.

mtmickush··on TikTok is back in the App Store
Congress and the Supreme Court already decided they wanted the law enforced. It's up to the executive branch to enforce it and if they decide not to there isn't much the others can do.
mtmickush··on OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames
Other advanced tactics involve giving a broad clue that matches 3-4 of your own and just one other (either your opponents or a civilian). Your team can pick up all the matches across several turns and the one off doesn't hurt as much as the plus four helps
mtmickush··on Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests
Glad to hear you were able to find a mechanism that clicked and stuck with it after that! The concept of learning styles for individuals though is a common myth

https://onlineteaching.umich.edu/articles/the-myth-of-learni... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA&t=2s

There isn't any evidence that individuals learn best to a single style and generally approaching learning from multiple facets is the best way for everyone to learn!

mtmickush··on China promised climate action. Its emissions topped US, EU, India combined
This is true but largely it is India that is pulling down the EU and an even larger extent the US per capital pollution rate
mtmickush··on EU’s plan to digitising travel documents might affect you
"Travellers who don’t use digital travel credentials must not be discriminated against. This condition includes that border controls for travellers with physical documents must be equally accessible and sufficiently staffed to enable travel checks in a reasonable amount of time."

Is it a reasonable amount of time today? If digital documents allows someone else to go faster is that discrimination?

mtmickush··on Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports
"will have" infers a future present though. 40% will have at some point in their life is substantively different than 50% having at a single moment in time
mtmickush··on Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF
$5.2 million/year * 10,000 = $52 Billion / year if I'm understanding you correctly. That seems on the high side to me?
mtmickush··on It's A(door)able
There's just barely enough time on the middle and last levels to double back even with the faster clock movement for going the wrong direction. Fun little challenge
mtmickush··on A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
If the information is truly retrocausal you won't be able to leverage it to alter the future :'(.
mtmickush··on Chess, but moves are simultaneous
A clever way to escape checkmate is to move your king towards or away from the piece that placed the king in check (as long as your new square doesn't also place you in check by a different piece you should be able to avoid the initial capture and still be safe since they won't be able to move this same piece right away).
mtmickush··on Glassdoor salaries but based on real W-2s
Try clearing the field and not putting anything in for the location. Mine defaults to United States as the region (although this might just be because my current location is the United States)
mtmickush··on Protein tweak makes CRISPR gene editing 4k times less error-prone
My understanding is that the main benefit here is speed. Other techniques can help guarantee accuracy already, but they currently can only do this by slowing down the rate the DNA is modified
mtmickush··on Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories
It is a very valid point that dieting / food intake converts to calories way more drastically than exercise.

The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.

The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.

mtmickush··on Why are there so many people in prison in America? (2017)
I'm not sure the author is unaware of that. The last paragraph explicitly calls this out.

>> Secondly, the rate of homicides in the US has been going up quite a bit for the past two years. This is supposedly a localized effect of a few high crime cities, but even in South Carolina the number of people in prison for murder has gone up by about 10% in just the last four years. This is concerning.

mtmickush··on Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure
We do know though that the curve for number of infections is a logistic curve. And since we haven't hit the inflection point yet we know at a minimum (regardless of how many hidden/untested cases exist) we'll have twice the number of hospital cases than today (assuming action isn't taken to prevent it the current trajectory). Also the current strain is already a "massive wave" in locations hit by the virus longer. It's just that that massive wave is going to get worse https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-...
mtmickush··on 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
Clearcut is something that is easily / sharply defined. If you only know something when you see it then that thing is by its very nature not easily defined / loosely defined. These are opposite things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
mtmickush··on People Hacks for Technical Leads
Are learning styles for various individuals still a thing? I thought that was a well debunked claim a while ago