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oh_fiddlesticks

149 karma · joined July 6, 2024

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oh_fiddlesticks··on A 'Ludicrously Ugly' Bridge Is Exhibit a That Britain Has Lost Its Mojo
They had to down tools because they found roman ruins or something and consult archeology to proceed.

Whats interesting is that this bridge build effectively partitioned the city. You had to drive to the city limits to the ring road, drive around the edge to access that area. The local council found this agreeable, and they rolled out an entire traffic policy, which also reached international attention, that effectively splits the city into sectors, forcing drivers to drive around the crust to get into their destination slice.

oh_fiddlesticks··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
A bit of an unconstructive, unwarranted jab, if I may say so.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Bot vs human traffic
Gib probably has a handful of servers scraping, but the place is so small, it almost it eclipses normal traffic
oh_fiddlesticks··on Go: Support for Generic Methods
Go nad or go home
oh_fiddlesticks··on Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)
We've never seen randon mutation and selective pressure ever really build anything, only trigger and exploit existing adaptive rulesets... pushed to extremes mutations may often yield a benefit in a narrow situation but at some greater cost, like throwing the backseats out of your car helps you accelerate faster, but reduces the overall utility and flexibility of the use of the vehicle. Im sure if we started honestly looking at organic systems as the product of thought, it would yield a greater understanding of them that we would be able to leverage in industry.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms
If you're interested in poly phasic sleep, the book "Life Time" by Professor (of circadian neuroscience) Russell Foster goes further.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Original GrapheneOS responses to WIRED fact checker
It doesn't really matter, because their target audience does not care about that.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Mythos Falls into the Wrong Hands
"This is the one thing we didn't want to happen"
oh_fiddlesticks··on Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file
Its a nice start, but there is a certain irritation in that the popup text is directly over the puck. I felt like I was losing more because I couldn't see the puck under the combo counter than anything in the game.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
> Fortnite "Usage"

I like this choice of word, it seems fitting.

oh_fiddlesticks··on I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me
This is just advocating being lazy in communication. Which is entirely expected and in harmony with our time starved work environments.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Launch HN: RunAnywhere (YC W26) – Faster AI Inference on Apple Silicon
So a company decided to send cold outbound to a targeted audience from a dataset they gathered from a public social network... so what?

> "Scandalous behaviour" really? In the same year as the Epstein files?

Wishing a companies total demise over such a trivial matter? Honestly?

All this prissiness about some unwanted emails...

oh_fiddlesticks··on I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
My favourite was a search result based ai digest suggesting that during storms large cargo ships could survive for days until eventually 'disappearing'; Perplexed (intended), I followed the citation, the source actually said that the storms themselves would persist for days until disappearing.
oh_fiddlesticks··on The Mega-Rich Are Turning Their Mansions into Impenetrable Fortresses
Seems like Ecclesiastes 5:12 playing out, once again: "Sweet is the sleep of the one serving, whether he eats little or much, but the plenty belonging to the rich one does not permit him to sleep."
oh_fiddlesticks··on Giant Virus Discovered in Japanese Pond May Hint at Multicellular Life's Origins
After almost a decade of upheaval and change in the world around us, it's almost of comfort to see that the use of weasel words on OoL science headlines remains a reliable and permanent fixture.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Gourmand Syndrome
Reading this, it's exceptionally confusing as to how many family members you're talking about exactly; Your use of they, them, their is causing me to imagine some microbiome obsessed tribe has moved in and is holding conferences on it in your kitchen...
oh_fiddlesticks··on Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi
> 1. One is building the index, which is a lot harder without a google offering its own API to boot. If other tech companies really wanted to break this monopoly, why can't they just do it?

FTA:

> Context matters: Google built its index by crawling the open web before robots.txt was a widespread norm, often over publishers’ objections. Today, publishers “consent” to Google’s crawling because the alternative - being invisible on a platform with 90% market share - is economically unacceptable. Google now enforces ToS and robots.txt against others from a position of monopoly power it accumulated without those constraints. The rules Google enforces today are not the rules it played by when building its dominance.

oh_fiddlesticks··on Dead Internet Theory
https://roc.camera/

This was on hn this year, and it was, in classic HN fashion, dismissed as a problem in search of a solution. Well, perhaps people in this thread will think differently

oh_fiddlesticks··on Parental controls aren't for parents
In my case, as you said it may not have exacerbated it, but for me it certainly perpetuated it.

A retreat into the online world seems like a comfort in difficult times but it is a retreat, and the longer you stay retreated, the less likely it is you'll regain the ground again.

oh_fiddlesticks··on Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
Yeah but I'm glad you don't consider the ipad a toy. It's not a toy, i predict that we're going to look back at this time of 'ipad + headphone kids' and roll our eyes as much as we roll our eyes at bloodletting.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Sundays Are the New Mondays
> "liberation"

It's more like inviting the troops besieging your walls inside and celebrating because "we have less enemies outside the walls to deal with now!"

It's the thin end of the wedge, you give it an inch and it will take a mile. The productivity boost you gain will quickly become an expectation, and then you'll be finding "liberation" by working on Saturday to get ahead of Sunday.

oh_fiddlesticks··on Spotify says 'anti-copyright extremists' scraped its library
256 million rows, nice coincidence.
oh_fiddlesticks··on AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Yep
oh_fiddlesticks··on Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release
The government's where the offices of a software company are physically located exert control over them. To follow this logic to its end and apply it even handedly results in nation based NIH syndrome surely?
oh_fiddlesticks··on High-performance mice can be used as a microphone to spy on users
Really disappointed it's not the mammals being discussed here.
oh_fiddlesticks··on Starship's eleventh flight test
>technological advances are permanent that have long term impacts

That's not necessarily true, look at the clockwork cylinder fished up from the ancient Greeks that was apparently an Olympic oriented calendar.

And.... the pyramids. Built by humans, yet the method is not well understood now, so little so in fact that aliens seems more plausible.

I would say that technological advancement is often lost to time, those are just two examples and I imagine there are countless more we don't know.

oh_fiddlesticks··on How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
>The easiest way is to actively work to make a high-profile project successful.

Reminded me of Proverbs 22:29 "Have you seen a man skillful at his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before common men."

oh_fiddlesticks··on Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK
There is absolutely a disparity between private and state teaching quality.

I don't think thats an objectionable statement.

Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds. They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.

Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.

I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.

oh_fiddlesticks··on NASA finds Titan's lakes may be creating vesicles with primitive cell walls
Having read a fair amount of the literature, it's not that compelling.

I would encourage people to stake their life on it, let's put it that way.

oh_fiddlesticks··on NASA finds Titan's lakes may be creating vesicles with primitive cell walls
The source code of life is recorded and transmitted using physical matter.

Physics very much matters to matter.

For development of any information storage systems made of molecules, there must be a supportive development environment.

To even start the process of doing anything like what we see happening in a cell, homeostasis must be achieved first, and not inelegantly, its not good enough to have a complete cell wall if it has no ports for entry and exit of nutrients and waste product, thats also known as a coffin.

Both the walls and the gates and the information / physical systems to reliably exploit those features must be present at the same time to enable abiogenesis.

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