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technobabbler

939 karma · joined November 12, 2021

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technobabbler··on The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism (2014)
I guess for context, I just don't get the brouhaha. I am fairly active and tremendously enjoy several sports, even though I'm no good at them despite years of training and effort. A large part of it may be genetics. These are just hobbies and games.

Professionally, doing what I do for work, I'm also mediocre at best. There are people more intelligent than me, better communicators than me, more ambitious than me, more focused than me. Some of that is genetics too, though harder to tease apart.

So what? We don't know the upper limits of human potential, especially the environmental and epigenetic contributors that keep producing better and better athletes and thinkers. We're not static chess pieces with finite moves, but constantly evolving animals whose body plans keep adapting to new conditions as they arise and work to our advantage.

You can slice and dice a million humans into subgroups and there are always going to be statistical clumps, much of which is genetic. But so what? Why is that such a big deal for concern?

If the goal is to tease out the absolute best, only a no holds barred competition (with or without doping) can reveal that, and the competitors will likely get better over time. Anything else is just a handicap made for spectacle and entertainment, so why does it matter HOW you bracket? Why is the sex bracketing more important than race or weight or height or mental ability or leg strength or whatever other distinguisher? Humans never were equal to begin with.

technobabbler··on Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting (2020)
Reddit's business model only works because there are people willing to spend their time posting content for free. If they start charging for accounts, even a few cents, they're going to lose a lot of new users. The psychology alone would completely change the site dynamics. Humans are weird.
technobabbler··on Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting (2020)
It's almost like the browser was made by an advertising company.
technobabbler··on The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism (2014)
Isn't there always going to be someone better due to genetics? As a cis man, I know that even if I trained 24/7 with the world's best trainers, I'd never be as good a runner as some Kenyan dude or as good a basketball player as a tall and lanky dude. I have no chance due to genetics, even though I have a male body.

It's not like humans were made equally. Each body has genetic advantages and disadvantages, and your early childhood nutrition permanently changes your athletic potential too. You can't exactly level the playing field to begin with.

Why don't these sports have brackets instead of gender divides? Is a biological man/woman divide really the most useful distinguisher between athletes?

technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
This was a great read and much more detailed than this article. Thank you for sharing!
technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
Imagine being a pilot who also has to be a flight attendant for twenty passengers with different diets and allergies, five of whom are unreasonable to the extreme and two of whom are prone to violent outbursts, working 60 hour weeks on unpredictable shifts, being paid 1/2 to 2/3rd the salary, not having had a real vacation for three years, while your airline constantly tries to decrease your benefits, after your last four copilots left within weeks, while constantly speed walking around the plane and not having enough time for meals or breaks.

Then every time you try to adjust the flight controls, four warnings pop up, company policy is to ignore the first two and sometimes the third. You're always supposed to pay attention to the fourth alert because it's super important, but it looks exactly the same as the other 12 alerts you saw this hour, and the passenger in 12B is having an asthma attack and the one in 20C is vomiting and upsetting everyone around her. And your copilot just quit again and your planned vacation for next month got canceled and you're asked to work two doubles again.

You make a mistake, and a year later some lawyer asks you why you dismissed warning #4 nine months ago when SOP clearly says you need to pay attention. Don't you know how to do your job?!

technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
Was mostly talking about nurses and other hospital staff, not the doctors. Sorry for being unclear.
technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
Yeah, exactly. How did it get this bad? It can't just be this one nurse ignoring warnings. Reminds me of UAC on Windows, but with deadly consequences.
technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
The article said that after this incident the manufacturers modified the search to match at least 4 letters, not just 2. And matching the 2 required a special override mode to begin with, but apparently that was a common thing to do.

I don't know how these systems are designed and tested, and what regulatory hurdles they have to pass, but it sounds like there is a huge disconnect between how the manufacturer expects them to be used and how they are actually used, with frequent overrides, day to day. It must be a tough industry to work in, either in the patient facing side or the medical devices and software side. I'd hate to be the person who coded all the warnings in that software. "What do you mean they bypassed all 7 warnings? Even the one that said this was a paralyzing agent?!"

I wonder if some of this wasn't a procedural failure too. Like why doesn't a potentially life ending drug require at least two people to vouch? Even in retail a manager has to come and turn a key for some trivial refund, or in our field a reviewer has to approve changes first.

Is it that the hospital cheaped out on staffing so they didn't want two nurses double-checking each other? Was this use case never accounted for in software development? Are all drugs potentially life ending so there's no way for the software to reliably reduce false positives? So many questions...

technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
Yep. According to the article she accepted the blame and acknowledged her mistake.

But there were also a bunch of systematic factors contributing to the error. The UX stuff was actually buried very deep in the article, I just thought it was an interesting part of healthcare that's rarely discussed.

The medication she administered was in a different form, even (powder instead of liquid, like kool-aid). But that still didn't stop the mistake.

Everyone in healthcare right now is exhausted all the time, understaffed and overworked, and enough small errors can accumulate into major catastrophes. Didn't seem like there was a process in place to prevent this, either in software or training or day to day.

She's not trying to avoid responsibility, but also, should she get prison time for a mistake vs losing her license and job? And who else in the chain of command should be held responsible? How will this ripple across the healthcare industry?

We have a hard time filling nursing positions already, and the other nurses interviewed for the article all worried the same could've happened to them.

technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
In the US, our campaign finance is heavily corrupt. There is no public finance system so candidates beg for money anywhere they can. Our 2020 elections spent nearly 15 billion dollars between our president and our congress. Some of that money comes from candidates directly asking for money. Other times, supposedly independent organizations (superpac) working to further the cause of a candidate, but not directly working with them, will also try to fundraise and campaign on their behalf without direct coordination. There is no limit to the amount of money such an org can get or spend, because the conservative Supremes ruled it an expression of free speech. Other conservatives worked to mask the sources of funding for such organizations.

Political activity was specifically excluded from our already sad and almost never enforced spam laws. Further, individual campaign donations are considered a matter of public record. So individual donors get recorded in these databases, and then private companies like NGP will harvest those databases, cross reference / deduplicate people with other databases, figure out their email and text contacts and then sell that information to candidates and parties who will in turn use it to spam you nonstop across email and SMS for every subsequent or similar election.

Good times.

technobabbler··on Nurse faces prison for a deadly error. Her colleagues worry: Could I be next?
This was a tragic case of how an overworked nurse accidentally killed a patient by administering the wrong medication with a similar name. The HN angle is that part of the error resulted from user experience design choices in the hospital's electronic medication cabinet.

An overwhelming number of alerts were routinely displayed, leading to a form of banner blindness and frequent overrides. An overzealous autocomplete suggested the wrong drug with the same first two letters. There was apparently not a permission system in place that blocked her from administering the drug for this patient.

The patient died soon after administration, and the nurse is now facing criminal prosecution for reckless homicide. Other nurses across the country are concerned, especially given their overwhelming workloads during and after covid and the frequent room for error.

technobabbler··on Connecting a gaming PC to Apple Studio Display
...so, wait, DisplayPort is really more like DisplayProtocol, but there's also a physical port called DisplayPort? :(
technobabbler··on Connecting a gaming PC to Apple Studio Display
I don't think Apple really wants you to buy their monitor for use on a PC. It's just a support headache, between the cables and graphics cards and refresh rates and gamma and such.

Everything on the product page suggests it was only designed for Mac: https://www.apple.com/studio-display/

That it happens to work on a PC at all is, I guess, an unintentional side effect that they'd rather not even acknowledge. You can try it unsupported but it's not their problem...

They've never been good at supporting standards not invented there. Hell, ever tried to use a Magic Mouse with a PC? Everything about it feels completely off. Part of me wonders if subtle incompatibilities, where hardware works 80% of the way, is maybe even part of their deliberate strategy to introduce small headaches to the PC experience to frustrate you into switching.

(Of course OSX has its own share of frustrations too, but nothing like using PC hardware on a Mac or vice versa).

technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
It doesn't. It's just ironic. They end up in my spam box thanks to Gmail not thanks to the law.
technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
Mm, seems like the costs of that would way outweigh the benefits...

An email system with the speed of the USPS, the ease of use of the DMV, the security of the social security system, and the billing of the IRS. It already sounds like a digital gulag, lol

technobabbler··on Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes
It was really beautiful but the pacing was horrible for modern attention spams. I loved the movie, but only because I read way too many of the books and played all the games and watched every Dune before it. My partner had no idea what was going on and fell asleep 1/3 of the way through... even though she is normally a movie completionist.

That dude had a certain style, cinematic intellectualism with beautiful cinematography. It's definitely not for everyone. Dune is that unique blend of world building, political intrigue, religious exploration, coming of age, and a tiny bit of action. Hard to get all of that in one movie, and the trailers made it seem more Star Wars than Blade Runner.

It's the sort of movie to watch when you're seeking quiet contemplation, not popcorn pulp...

technobabbler··on Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes
A lot of theaters have awful mixes that make dialog harder to hear. Think there was an article about that recently.
technobabbler··on Study show that people think that data analysts and accountants are boring
Not you personally, sorry. It's just a saying. "Can anyone blame them" would've been a better choice of phrasing.
technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
Yeah but you don't ever really see Google or Amazon or Facebook or Netflix or Spotify on here, except employees commenting unofficially. Cloudflare is on here quite frequently and meaningfully. I'd rather companies communicate, even if (and especially when) they fuck up.

It helps that cloudflare isn't too big to fail yet and still trying to get better.

Hopefully they'll fix this email situation.

technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
I don't think the law really had much to do with it, vs reputation based blacklists and SPF and such that the email industry created to combat spam.

I'm not saying this because I'm anti government, I just don't remember any of the spam laws doing anything, historically, vs the technological defenses invented by the community.

Hell, almost all of the spam I get these days is FROM the government begging for campaign donations, because they so thoughtfully excluded political spam from the laws. Gee, thanks. Now I just globally block anything from NGP VAN.

technobabbler··on Study show that people think that data analysts and accountants are boring
Can you blame them? Social appeal has significant mating and survival consequences.

I think the whole lonely geek thing has gotten better in the last decade, but it used to be really bad. Like the Lone Gunmen in the X-Files (really dating myself now).

If you're in that stereotype, either you end up finding a lucky niche that appreciates your talent (easier these days) or you can easily end up ostracized and terribly lonely, with fewer friends, mates, opportunities, etc., which can in turn lead to severe depression and other mental health consequences.

"I'm smart, I'm nice, why doesn't anyone like me"... used to be a common complaint of the geeky types. Thankfully it's a bit better these days.

technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
Just make a custom filter and move on. The BBB is a scam and the government doesn't care and report spam is a black hole.

There's not enough humanpower to manually vet these things and do anything about them. Far easier to spam than to fight spam. Just block it.

technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
I can't be the only one who's noticed that most of these companies are above the law...? When was the last time someone even got a slap on the wrist? Some class action lawsuit that gave a coupon for 10% off your next purchase?

Spam got better because Gmail, not because the law did anything...

technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
They're on here quite a bit and regularly contribute.
technobabbler··on Cloudflare have made it impossible for me to unsubscribe from marketing emails
Well, they're better at it than anyone else so far. Especially compared to the captured US regulators that don't do anything at all. Can spam indeed.
technobabbler··on Study show that people think that data analysts and accountants are boring
And:

- even if I learned it, nobody in my social circle would care

technobabbler··on Study show that people think that data analysts and accountants are boring
Self-flagellation isn't boring. If you can do it on a unicycle, even better!
technobabbler··on Why America can’t build quickly anymore
I think it's just an acknowledgment and acceptance that the system is thoroughly fucked, and there's no public will to overthrow it or clean it up, so seeking incremental gains where possible is better than nothing.

If you do nothing, there corruption will still be there, but nothing will improve.

If you try to push things through, the corruption will still be there, but maybe small things will get built here and there.

What do you think is a better solution to corruption? Starve the state? We've been doing that for decades and that just further empowers private interests, the same people who've benefited from and furthered corruption in government. shrug No easy fix. Every country has corruption, but the highly functional governments tend to have less of it because they attract more well-intentioned career civil servants instead of powermongers.

technobabbler··on Sync for Thunderbird
Well, that doesn't help when you're trying to skim the front page headlines though. There are so many in a day that I don't have time to click into each one.

Many of them have very low information density, especially when they're just the name of some OSS project that's not famous.

"Sync for Thunderbird": My first thought was "that's still a thing?".

"Sync for Thunderbird: Open issue for 14 years" is more interesting and informative a title

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