Hacker News Reader

twoWhlsGudon PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):

In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...

twoWhlsGudon There Goes the American Muscle Car

This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...

twoWhlsGudon 'Rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-...

I don't see what's funny about 4 inches just in the last three decades. 8 inches over the last hundred plus years at seattle

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....

seems very much in line then (given the lower rates before 1992). "Further investigation" was perhaps motivated by the search for something besides truth?

twoWhlsGudon Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S

Budget car buyers aren't driving the market - especially not the market for new cars. In the US income inequality has gotten to the point where most new cars are bought by upper income customers. And they want fancy SUVs. Budget car buyers purchase their cars in the used market. For them it would in fact make sense to purchase less expensive more efficient vehicles. But they don't get a vote (in theory a lower depreciation for such vehicles should flow up, but I don't think that signal really gets anywhere now.)

twoWhlsGudon Living with an Apple Lisa [video]

I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.

twoWhlsGudon iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

Which is one reason why I often still shoot with an actual camera and sometimes even with film. I have a lifetime of experience with common film emulsions and a couple of decades of shooting with digital sensors with limited post processing.

When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.

It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.

I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.

twoWhlsGudon NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

If you have a corpus of documents you are working with (say thousands of pages of related standards docs), Notebook can be handy for doing targeted summaries of aspects of the docs with pointers back into the actual docs to the relevant source material. That's something I end up needing a lot (I've never used the podcast feature) and so it feels very differentiated to me...

twoWhlsGudon RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015)

Pro tip look for an industry that works for big capable customers that can defend themselves. Helps to create a structure of accountability inside a company that you can connect to as someone trying to have a positive career. Doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it is easier than pushing against the stream in a company that "serves"[1] a disaggregated (and thus mostly defenseless) customer base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...

twoWhlsGudon Discworld Rules

Unfortunately, MAD likely requires that you can't let Putin have Ukraine. And if MAD fails, well then we're all screwed anyway.

twoWhlsGudon The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

Anti-lock brakes, if I remember correctly, had essentially no safety effect in the real world. Stability control, on the other hand, dropped single car accidents by something like a third. Perhaps you were thinking of that?

Regardless of that, the threat environment has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. I gave up my 2006 VW sedan for a new SUV this year because the IIHS numbers had started to look bad for lighter vehicles.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

Back in 2006 the previous gen VW Passat was basically as safe as anything you could buy (according to their dataset). Now you need something a lot bigger to be upper tier.

The new vehicle is a plug-in so in the first 4 months of driving I've more than doubled my fuel efficiency. So there's that, anyway.

twoWhlsGudon Apple Acquires Pixelmator

that is a very fun feature - reminds me of the excitement I used to have with new versions of software...

twoWhlsGudon Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

And especially if it generates bugs in ways different from humans - human review might be less effective at catching it...

twoWhlsGudon We Can Terraform the American West

And the internet has been taken over by bad actors (Meta, Xitter, TikTok etc) with the result that the public is swamped by lies and thus democracy and post Cold War peace is being replaced by global war and dictatorship. So refrigerators look pretty good right now...

twoWhlsGudon Collapse of key Atlantic current could have catastrophic impacts

That was written when the effect of big tech's attack on the information landscape hadn't been digested yet. Now it's much more clear. The current future is correspondingly much more grim.

twoWhlsGudon Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

I went to public schools in middle class neighborhoods in California from the late sixties to the early eighties. My teachers were largely excellent. I think that was due to cultural and economic factors - teaching was considered a profession for idealistic folks to go into at the time and the spread between rich and poor was less dramatic in the 50s and 60s (when my teachers were deciding their professions). So the culture made it attractive and economics made it possible. Another critical thing we seem to have lost.

twoWhlsGudon DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 [pdf]

Capitalism + ever more powerful cannabinoid drugs => problems. Many states (including the one I live in) are struggling to limit advertising, in particular.

twoWhlsGudon US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

My Audi doesn't advertise its predictive cruise control as Full Self Driving. So expectations are more controlled...

twoWhlsGudon Verizon experiencing widespread outage across the US

On my phone in Seattle Verizon Wi-Fi calling doesn't work but FaceTime audio does.

twoWhlsGudon Apple Announces the iPhone 16 Pro

Maybe. But it matters to me (and a lot of other folks given the continuing sales of boxes that run macOS, windows and Linux) that I didn't have put all my eggs on that ship (straining the metaphor a bit : )

twoWhlsGudon Tire-related chemical responsible for salmon deaths in urban streams (2020)

And it appears to have resulted in a set of responses:

https://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/6ppd-quinone

https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-develops-6ppd-q-water-t...

https://www.ustires.org/largest-global-tire-industry-consort...

so we're a long way from testing before widespread use or the like, but at least when something dramatic shows up it can sometimes lead to potential mitigations.

twoWhlsGudon AnandTech Farewell

Post News tried this and failed. Not sure why.

twoWhlsGudon Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

Three simple habits that have (anecdotally) cut down on colds for me:

* wear a mask in crowded environments where showing my face doesn't buy me anything (I don't wear one at work, but do at the grocery store or airport)

* wash hands before eating (or at least use hand sanitizer)

* grip the exit handle of the bathroom with a paper towel and dispose of it on exit

Not exactly double blind demonstrated but low cost and this year has been much better than last (which may also be due to my immune system having caught back up, too, so YMMV)

twoWhlsGudon Interview with Signal President Meredith Whittaker

I think that for folks living in the West, Putin and his gang of cyber criminals is much bigger day to day threat than the NSA. So the fact that Durov is still alive (a couple days in a French prison is the least he has to worry about) makes Signal look like a much better bet than Telegram.

twoWhlsGudon Ares Industries – Building low-cost cruise missiles

Try making that argument on the other side and come back and report how well it goes afterwards...

twoWhlsGudon A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar (2021)

We test drove a Model Y in May. There were a lot of UI nits that annoyed me, but the thing that really stood out was the blind spot warning placement. Every other vehicle I've ever driven puts the visual indicator on the mirror somewhere. After all, you're looking in the mirror (or in that vicinity) when you need to know whether someone is in your blind spot. Tesla sticks it in the center console - so you have to completely swivel your head to see it. Very strange.

twoWhlsGudon Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds

4th generation: wires are back so the car doesn't stop working every time it drives by a source of RF noise...

twoWhlsGudon A Philosophy Professor's Final Class (2023)

Thanks for posting that - great read. And reading it took me back when I was lucky enough to take Richard Rorty's class (entitled something like Philosopy from Kant to 1900) my freshman year at Princeton. I remember the impact of his lectures about James and pragmaticism - I was a bit of a smart alek - convinced that there was only one right way of looking at the world and I (of course! :) knew what it was. James' Pragmatism and his concept of the cash value of ideas - the idea that you could ask how thinking and believing about the world in some particular way might be valuable to someone (in particular) as a part of measuring its "objective" value (it was a long time ago and I may be not giving a fully accurate report here of what James/Rorty actually said) had a big impact on me.

Rorty left the Philosophy department (for Virginia, I think) pretty soon after that class - due to the kind of disagreement between the analytical philosophers and him rumored to be at the root of the Bernstein/Yale break (Rorty didn't believe that logic was the core of philosophy).

And Rorty was a gifted lecturer with an extremely dry sense of humor. I think I laughed more often in that class than in any other that was to follow.

twoWhlsGudon Apple Vision Pro U.S. Sales Are All but Dead, Market Analysts Say

I agree with the exception of you being surprised that folks will spend 5000E on a road bike. Of all my discretionary purchases my custom roadbike might well be my happiest. A well fitting allroad bike can take you to the grocery store or up a gravel road to a mountain pass and make both journeys joyful. I'm on mine most days to do something practical made fun and healthy and sustainable, too : )

twoWhlsGudon Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

Unfortunately, that seems to include data regarding Tesla's FSD function, which renders it useless for actual comparisons between human driving and responsible implementations of self driving technology.

twoWhlsGudon Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

This is the aspect that makes me most excited about Waymo and the like –the prospect of no longer having to tolerate terrible driving because removing someone's license is akin to an economic death sentence. Fully commercialized, self-driving should provide an economic alternative to humans driving themselves. And we should be able to leverage that to stop the worst drivers ever getting behind the wheel again.