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pibaker

2,766 karma · joined January 15, 2026

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pibaker··on ATProto spaces: A new extension to ATProto that enables non-public data
It's funny you said "node" because the first thing it reminds me of is NodeJS. I'll admit I don't know why they called it node. But I have never seen anyone bothered by it either.
pibaker··on The August 17 outage
If you use GitHub as just a software forge then sure you can find an alternative. But I suspect more people use GitHub for its social aspects and they will stick around despite the regressions because building an alternative to an established social network is incredibly difficult if not impossible.

You can get work done on any software forge. But potential employers will still ask for your GitHub. People will judge your personal project by its GitHub stars and be less reluctant to download a binary from GitHub than elsewhere. Potential contributors will leave a PR on GitHub but probably not if they have to make an account on a new platform and learn how it works.

And of course, let's not assume any competitor can just absorb even a fraction of the traffic GitHub receives without suffering similar reliability issues.

pibaker··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.

It is common for academic books to have publication runs in the low three digits.

You may argue these books are not important. But how do we know if we fail to preserve it?

pibaker··on Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
Designing for less than ideal screens is a part of accessibility.
pibaker··on Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone
"How do you know someone is pro nuclear?"

"Don't worry, they will tell you."

pibaker··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
How do you get an insurance for lost profits due to not making a meeting as an individual?
pibaker··on As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value
You sound like someone who never had the police tell you they won't bother looking into it after you present them with surveillance footage clearly showing the crime happening.
pibaker··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
How many racks do you think a niche, text only forum is going to take up?
pibaker··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
This is like saying gambling is a good way to get rich. The issue is that most people don't hit jackpot.
pibaker··on Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe
>read marx

>dreams of man made famine and desolation

Do you happen to wear glasses, mister Ciego? Me and my marx reading boys have some bourgeois liquidation quotas to fill.

pibaker··on Anthropic's 'watermark' text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
I think it's pretty dishonest of Anthropic to frame their watermark as EU regulation compliance. The EU regulation, from my understanding, requires AI content to be labeled for human viewers. In the meanwhile the Anthropic new release on the watermark says this.

> The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark

Which is to say, it does not actually meet the EU AI act requirements which require transparency to humans. Not to mention that if the detection requires access to the base models, it makes anthropic the only entity who gets the say on if a piece of text comes out of Claude. Anthropic is both the player and the referee here.

If there is one takeaway you should have from this fiasco it is that you should be wary of using tools that doesn't serve your needs and your needs only.

pibaker··on A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
I have been seeing this online since the 00s. No one likes it but I don't think there is a generational divide. Sometimes people just want to shout words at your face.
pibaker··on Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves
> >you can only control your own actions

>tries to control others' dietary habits

pibaker··on Study links coffee consumption to metabolic health and sex hormones
I don't know about the life shattering part. It's generally agreed that nicotine is extremely addictive. And yet I don't think you'll find many, if any, people homeless purely out of a nicotine addiction.

Maybe you can count people getting cancer or burning their houses down as the life shattering consequences. But I'd argue this has less to do with the addiction to nicotine and more to do how nicotine is usually consumed. Plus the younger generation seems to have abandoned smoking and are getting their nicotine from vaping or Zyn instead.

pibaker··on Study links coffee consumption to metabolic health and sex hormones
I don't think there needs to be a nefarious motive for results like this to come out of nutrition studies. If you have a pile of data and you analyze every possible correlation between every possible pair of variables, you will find something significant by pure chance. Green jelly beans and all that.

https://xkcd.com/882/

Whether or not the results are being taken seriously is another matter.

pibaker··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
The one conflating the two isn't the author, but the state. A fixation on the state sanctioned representation of someone's identity instead of the actual, living person himself is exactly what caused TFA's author troubles.
pibaker··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
> Why did it need to go to tattooed numbers

Many countries have laws about having to carry an ID on you all the time. Not as bad as a tattoo, but still not acceptable IMO.

> Also the implication that cultures and countries which have happily accepted id numbers are filled with non individualistic people is it?

Are we really gonna keep pretending there are no differences between cultures?

pibaker··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it

They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number.

Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a US request, but many other countries won't, and you are now back to square one.

pibaker··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.

Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?

Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.

pibaker··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
A government subsidized home improvement project is an easy political sale. It gets the homeowners on board, because they will see an immediate drop in energy costs, plus they also get to personally pocket the increased property values.

Versus spending money on utility scale buildouts, where the benefits will come at an undetermined later date, unceremoniously, when the utility company lowers prices. And even after that happens your political enemies will still wag finger at the price tag of your project and ask why don't you spend that somewhere else.

Inefficient and overly preferential towards homeowners? Sure. But better than a policy that will be dead by political reasons. It is what it is.

pibaker··on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s
Ok. What about a "Viewpoint Diversity" tab that lets you read the dumbest opinions from the other side of politics so that you stay in touch with what your fellow countrymen actually thinks. Not rage bait, I promise.
pibaker··on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s
> should no longer be a parent

Do you seriously think looking at websites, no matter what kind of websites, is more damaging than separating a children from his or her god damn parents and throwing them into the pit of neglect and abuse called the foster care system?

Get serious. This is not a suggestion on how to protect kids. The kids have everything to lose and nothing to earn under your system.

pibaker··on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s
> Engagement-maximizing algorithms that push increasingly extreme content to keep you on the app longer ain't speech

Who decides what makes an algorithm engagement maximizing instead of you know, user satisfaction maximizing (because satisfied users stay around for longer, right?)

And who decides what is extremist and what is acceptable? Was Rush Limbaugh reading the names of patients who died of AIDS on a hundred year old media more or less extreme than someone praising mao zedong for killing all landlords on social media?

pibaker··on Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf
But from a purely selfish and human centered perspective we can also demand preservation just so that future humans also get to enjoy what the previous generations had. I wish humans didn't kill off the dodos! I want my grandchildren to be able to eat ocean fish. And I'm willing to reduce my own fish consumption if that means the fisheries live on into my grandchildren's times.
pibaker··on Ordinary Abundance
Just want to notice that the author is a part of the effective altruist cult.

> I am an associate program officer in the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, where I lead our grantmaking on Innovation Policy. In this role, I aim to identify and support efforts to safely accelerate scientific progress and innovation. I am motivated by the broader goals of improving scientific research, funding, institutions, and incentive structures through creativity and experimentation, and I am always excited to connect with others who share those goals (feel free to reach out at jordan.dworkin@coefficientgiving.org).

https://jordandworkin.com/about/

pibaker··on Ordinary abundance
The tenderloin, famously a place where people can afford homes.
pibaker··on Ordinary Abundance
This is the issue with the naive narrative of progress isn't it? Today you can sit on your toilet and read a virtually unlimited amount of text, except some text has weird scrolling, some text is interrupted by self playing video ads, some text is AI marketing slop. It's jarring that despite the undoubtedly real technological progress, we still inflict these inconveniences on ourselves, not even out of necessity.

At least I never needed JavaScript to read text on a shampoo bottle.

pibaker··on License plate reader searches should require a warrant
Local Techie Famous For "DIY Flock" Dead With Bullet Holes On the Back Of His Head after Traffic Stop. Police Chief Deems It Suicide And Calls For Better Mental Health Resources.
pibaker··on Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta
In my area if you want to join any kind of amateur sports or outdoors group, you have to get on Facebook. If you want to know what musicians are coming to town, you have to get on instagram. Ironically it's usually the young, anti establishment types who tend to have only instagram presence.

Depending on your interests, getting off meta platform may very well result in a net loss of real life activity you can participate.

From what I have heard, Facebook is also the place to rent cheap apartments. The mom and pop landlords are Facebook only. The local Craigslist is dying and scam ridden. Big name rental websites tend to only have listing for pricier, corporate owned rentals.

pibaker··on New Orleans is using AI to triage 911 calls in case of backlog
I don't understand how we can keep giving the police shiny new toys and juicy overtime pays but can't find enough people to take 911 calls.
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