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splitrocket

1,176 karma · joined May 21, 2009

Entrepreneur, nerd, tinkerer, philosopher and hacker. contact me: bill at cromie.org
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splitrocket··on Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General Smedley Butler

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

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower

Military Spending and Tax Cuts for the wealthy have some of the lowest economic multipliers of all government activities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)

* Education spending: 2.4 (Federal Reserve research) Source: Federal Reserve

* Medicaid/healthcare: 2.0 Source: Congressional Budget Office Cbpp

* Food stamps (SNAP): 1.73-1.74 Sources: Mark Zandi/Moody's Analytics, Americanprogress, Manhattan Institute

* Unemployment insurance: 1.61-2.1 Sources: Blinder & Zandi; Urban Institute, Americanprogress

* Infrastructure spending: 1.0-2.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress

* Military spending: 1.5 (average) Source: Federal Reserve

* Middle-class tax cuts: 0.6-1.5 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Feyrer & Sacerdote, Americanprogress

* Upper-income tax cuts: 0.2-0.6 Sources: CBO, Blinder & Zandi, Americanprogress

* Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source: Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp

Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.

$1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on defense (8,555). -Cigionline

In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic growth by 9% over 20 years.

Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of economic growth and job creation came from unemployment insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp

Jack Ma was completely correct: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-...

splitrocket··on Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
It will not be announced.

Fun fact: the current Republican administration was pushing a budget that substantially increased the federal deficit. The one that was finally approved is still a massive budget deficit increase.

Obama reduced the deficit by nearly half during his presidency, the current FY2025 budget has authorized a $1.9 trillion deficit (6.2% of GDP), with reconciliation instructions potentially allowing for a staggering $3.3-5.8 trillion in additional deficit increases over the next decade.

* Obama's final deficit (2017): $666 billion

* Current 2025 projected deficit: $1.9 trillion

This represents an increase of approximately $1.23 trillion, or about 185% higher than Obama's final deficit. The current deficit is nearly triple what it was at the end of the Obama administration.

Republicans have mastered the art of fiscal hypocrisy: campaigning against deficits to win elections, then ballooning them with tax cuts for the wealthy, only to leave Democrats with the thankless job of fiscal cleanup—for which voters reliably punish them at the polls.

splitrocket··on NASA Told to to Scrub Mentions of Indigenous People, Women from Its Websites
Tolerance is not suicide pact, nor is it a moral imperative.

Tolerance is a peace treaty, and only extends to those who participate.

Tolerance is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others.

The Paradox of Tolerance: Karl Popper

splitrocket··on NYPD records longest no-shooting streak in 30 Years
Isn't it supposed to be a "hell hole"?

Note: you and your children are more likely to be killed by a car in an American suburb than even be remotely harmed in any way by a stranger in NYC.

splitrocket··on Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is easy, simple, and wrong.

And then there's the Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (not sure it's a law), which states, simplified, that a simpler system cannot control a more complicated system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

splitrocket··on Show HN: FastGraphRAG – Better RAG using good old PageRank
is there any sense of tenancy?

From what I can tell, at least given the examples is that there is one global graph.

Thanks!

splitrocket··on Reticulum Is Unstoppable Networks for the People
Damn near kill'd em.
splitrocket··on H5N1 prevalence in milk suggest US bird flu outbreak in cows is widespread
Vaccine => Vaca => Cow

The OG Vaccine was rubbing pus from cowpox pustules into a scratch on your body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#History

splitrocket··on Building a fully local LLM voice assistant to control my smart home
100% this.

Also, microphones in the wrong room responding. I'm having an issue with that as well.

splitrocket··on Effortless AI: No-Code Automation Using N8n Cloud and OpenAI Vision API
So, this is interesting, but much more interesting is the langchain stuff N8N has added to their latest release. Makes it seamless to add in an army of interns to your workflow.

https://n8n.io/langchain/

splitrocket··on Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
As of right now, you can connect to hue devices directly with Zigbee.

The SkyConnect from HomeAssitant/Nabu Casa works quite well: https://www.home-assistant.io/skyconnect/

splitrocket··on China's ancient water pipe networks show no evidence of a centralized authority
Go read the Dawn of Everything: centralized authority was and is not a requirement for highly organized cooperation on a massive scale.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...

splitrocket··on AMD Expands AI Product Lineup with GPU-Only Instinct Mi300X with 192GB Memory
what names?
splitrocket··on EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
It's only Cancel Culture if it comes from the Cancél region of France.

Otherwise it's just sparkling consequences.

splitrocket··on EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
It's only Cancel Culture if it comes from the Cancél region of France.

Otherwise it's just sparkling consequences.

splitrocket··on Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk
First off, Thank you!

Wondering if you all are thinking about multiple remote microphones, and choosing which microphone will respond to the speaker?

Ideally, I'd love to have multiple microphones/speakers throughout the house, all of which can listen and answer, however, only the one that hears me the clearest/loudest/etc. actually answers.

Make sense?

splitrocket··on Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos
Who you are what you will allow.
splitrocket··on Cargo airships could be big
This, my friends, is why we should colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus, where you could chill outside with only a respirator, rather than the inhospitable, irradiated, mangnetosphere free mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud...

splitrocket··on Cal.com: Open Scheduling Infrastructure
Instructions aren't for the docker image, they are for the standard js installation.
splitrocket··on An Overview of Ruby on Rails 7.1 Features. Part III
Yes, but in that case, you can use only the complexity where you need it, instead of globally.
splitrocket··on Show HN: Retool Mobile
Well done team! Cant' wait for a map component!
splitrocket··on Mycroft – open source voice assistant
The key feature I haven't seen any of these opensource projects implement is microphone response coordination: If you have multiple microphones and speakers, which one responds?

My google home's are terrible at this: often one in another room responds, but at least it's only one. When I tried to run Genie (https://genie.stanford.edu/) I had multiple devices responding simultaneously. It was a disaster.

For me, this is the core feature that will enable me to swap out my corporate listening devices for an opensource, cloud-free alternative.

splitrocket··on Anti-Woke Bank GloriFi to Shut Down
Capitalism has a well known liberal bias.
splitrocket··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

The number of folks that confuse government censorship with people deciding that their private company shouldn't support abhorrent content is astonishing, especially for a forum with this level of sophistication.

splitrocket··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
Yup. And if your choice is pro-nazi, the rest of us can decide for ourselves what that means about you.

For what it's worth, you can't be just a little bit Nazi.

It's like poop in ice cream: if you have ten tons of ice cream and an ounce of poop, if you mix them together, you've just created ten tons of poop.

splitrocket··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
We will soon enough, now that cloudflare has published this.
splitrocket··on Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
100% concur.

Illinois has to allow the Nazis to march: they are the government.

You don't have to allow nazis into your private party, nor do you have to publish their books.

You, as an individual, and corporations as entities are emphatically not the government.

splitrocket··on Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)
Depreciation lower bound at current market value would do a lot here.
splitrocket··on I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message
If you spend a few minutes and get them on the phone and say "I want to wire you funds right now!", they will give you a bank account.
splitrocket··on Show HN: I built a self hosted recommendation feed to escape Google's algorithm
You can't be a little bit nazi. It's like ice cream and poop: if you add a gram of poop to ten tons of ice cream, you've just created ten tons of poop.

A society's level of tolerance can be measured by the least tolerant group it allows. If you allow nazis to remain at your private party, then you've joined the nazi party.

If gab, with its deep antisemitism, is tolerable to you, well...

I choose to not tolerate antisemitism, hence my comment.

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