throwaway2037

Can you give an example of a pharma textbook that has gotten worse during the AI-slopp-ocalypse? Bonus Internet points for sharing any especially egregious passages!

    > Tucked away neatly in Australian law is the concept that a phone that is not iPhone or Android is a criminal device, similar to owning lockpicks. Something like GrapheneOS.

This is untrue. It only took me one simple Google search to find the answer.

My query:

    > "is it illegal in australia to have a mobile phone that does not use iphone or android?"

Top result: https://privacydevices.net/encrypted-phones-legal-australia/

    > Owning, buying, and using an encrypted phone is legal in Australia, and so is installing a different operating system on a device you own.

EDIT

Also, dumb phones are certainly not illegal. Plenty of old folks still use them.

"Rare Data Hunters"[1]? Man, the production quality went through the roof on his newest stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

I just Googled about this. In Germany, long term holdings of crypto (> 1 year) are tax free regarding capital gains. However, this ends for any new purchases on/after Jan 1 2027.

    > capital gains on stocks are high-to-ridiculous

Google tells me it is about 28%. Is this considered high? It is about one half regular income tax rates. That seems like a pretty good discount to me.

Hot take: Given the state of wealth inequality and that the vast majority of capital gains go to a tiny fraction of people, why do we still have lower taxes for capital gains? Maybe it has out-lived its usefulness/purpose.

That is wild. What if there is a huge break-through in LLM models where they can reduce compute by 90%? All of those data centers would suddenly crater (many customers cancel) and go bankrupt. I feel it could go either way.

This feels like the same argument all over again. Think about the open source projects who are posting new rules like: "No AI/LLM usage is allowed!" Yet, there are many cases where you cannot tell if AI/LLM was used. For the Nick Hustles track that I shared, you cannot tell.

I recall in the 1990s a big argument about using vocoders in the production of pop music to adjust the tone of a singers voice. Many critics were quick and loud to say the users were no longer "real artists". Really, those critics have been left in the dust. In modern music production, vocoders are now commonplace.

How do you feel about AI generated music? There is an artists who calls themself "Nick Hustles" that makes a lot of funny soul/funk tracks. You can listen on YouTube or Spotify. It feels like a different type of Weird Al Yankovic -- the humor is a bit more adult. Honestly, I'm fine with it, but I can I understand if you feel different.

Here is a good tune ("Minding My Goddamn Business"), and the lyrics really make me laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhvUJi01ng

The New Yorker also wrote about him here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/that-new-h...

    > now that attention spans are so short

Oh please, this is Internet nonsense. Google tells me:

    > Psychologists and neuroscientists find no structural decline in the human brain's ability to focus. Sustained attention limits remain largely unchanged.

For those unaware, TV and film unions in Los Angeles are incredibly powerful. As a result, people who work in TV and film jobs are paid far above median wages in Los Angeles. Also, I doubt that overseas staff working on TV and film sets are paid the same level as Los Angeles. If anything, LA studios are repeating the same story that we saw in the 1990s and 2000s with US manufacturing: Move it somewhere else where wages are very low, e.g., China or Mexico.

Also, I see this anti-union sentiment a lot on HackerNews: Whenever unions strike, there is near universal rejection as a strategy. The anti-union sentiment on HN is tiring, especially from the US and UK. Those big strikes in Los Angeles resulted in large pay increases and/or expansion of territory (better payouts for streaming, etc.) for those union members. In short, it worked.

You raise a good point, but I would like to add more nuance. Traditional TV is largely displaced by YouTube (small content creators) and streaming (Netflix, etc.) Traditional film has moved nearly entirely to streaming, but there is more of it now than ever before. TikTok is something truly generational to me. Just like Instagram largely killed the blog because it allowed normies to watch the amazing lives of the top 5%. TikTok allows young people (mostly women) to gossip faster than ever before.

They didn't kill the golden goose. Other places implemented tax benefits to encourage film making. That is why so much filming is done in Canada, New Zealand, and various Central European nations. If anything, the golden goose flew away. As a counterpoint: What do you think California and LA area local gov'ts should have done differently?

Real question: Why are you using a VPN?

Can someone copy/pasta the article here? The reCAPTCHA is too annoying. It's not worth my effort. The Cloudflare one is better -- it never asks you to select photos. Just one button click.

    > 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.

The correct quote should be:

    > According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City

The key term here is "rent-stabilized". And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out". That is simply one category of rent-stabilized apartments that are vacant.

Jesus, I just tried to confirm my organ donation wishes at a national org website, and the front page of the website says (roughly): "We are currently down due to a PHP security vulnerability." Truly, this has hit the normies!

"technically": For once, somebody used it correctly!

    > Bus factor of 1

Is this a joke about hit by a bus?

They claim 31% of the Fortune 500 are customers: https://railway.com/customers

You left out the best part: It was called the "USB Cart of Death"!

    > People don't talk about it because it's often illegal and definitely something you will be shamed for. And in many contexts it's "cheating".

That is exactly the point I made in my previous post. I wonder what made body builders become more open? All of your conditions are broadly true for body builders until the most recent cultural change. It is still illegal today, yet many body builders are now openly talking about buying and using illegal performance enhancing drugs.

    > the one weird trick to hustling more is just benzos.

No trolling: This is pure LinkedIn poetry!

Also: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19962288/

    > A multi-center, double-blind, randomised study of the Lavender oil preparation Silexan in comparison to Lorazepam for generalized anxiety disorder

FYI: CalmAid a brand name for Silexan, and Ativan is a brand name for Lorazepam.

Thanks for the share. I really like these first hand accounts on HN.

Can you theorise on why you are not (less?) affected by the addictive elements of benzos? I'm not here to doubt, rather to ask: What are you doing differently? Are you someone with (insanely) high self-control... so you can back off if you feel the pressure of addiction?

Why don't more people talk/blog about their drug (ab)use? As a parallel, there has been a generational change in body building where performance enhancing drug users are now much more open about it. Even a few years ago, it was a widely known secret, but almost no one talked about it publicly. For the most part, the stars in the industry have been responsible about how they share the info. They spend plenty of time telling you horror stories and negative side effects. And they stress that you need to build a plan with your doctor, even if you are using drugs that are not prescribable.

    > This is so wild to me because output and work quality rapidly decline at (or well before) 40 hours a week.

I see this comment regularly here. There are lots of people who can and do work for much more than 40 hours a week, and these are productive hours. Also, it is a sliding scale of productivity. It's not like hour 41 is 100% unproductive. However, I do appreciate that most normies are probably more productive if they work less than 40 hours a week, but make those hours very focused.

I found an even better video about the rescue here: https://hromadske.ua/en/viyskovi/272791-ukrainian-troops-res...

The soldier self amputated his left leg using a knife. He also survived 491 days on the front line. Brutal. This guy is a real-life Rambo.

    > "I had a blunt knife that I'd previously used to open canned meat."

More info about soldier's experience here: https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/surrounded-by-russi...

On a personal level, I am also a bit defensive of Germany. A lot of low quality Internet discourse likes to shit on Germany, and I don't like it. Sometimes it is dumb stuff like "Hilter this/that" or trafficking in stereotypes. Part of what fascinates me about Germany is that they were able to completely reboot their society after an awful, destructive war. Plus, they survived the Cold War, and managed to merge again. For my generation, it still feels like a miracle when I say it out loud.

    > In Germany they have a system where the government will bulldoze a completed skyscraper if you did the paperwork wrong.

Hmm, this sounds like hyperbole. Do you have any examples?

Those highways were mostly built through neighborhoods filled with poor, marginalized people. Most of the NIMBYism that you see in the US is suburbs that don't want to upzone for more density that is badly needed.

Yes, but the rule only came into effect this summer. I think we should start to see some traction in the next year or two when developers begin to challenge NIMBYs.

And they only had to trade away plenty of civil rights for it. What an amazing deal.