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vlabakje90

218 karma · joined November 12, 2022

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vlabakje90··on Show HN: I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger
Immediately crashes my FF on Windows 11.
vlabakje90··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
That overlooks the 27 million uninsured Americans. Uninsured cancer patients are more likely to be diagnosed at a late stage, less likely to receive treatment, and have substantially higher mortality than insured patients.[1] They also have worse survival, even after accounting for cancer stage.[2] So excellent U.S. outcomes among those who access care don't rule out preventable deaths caused by barriers to accessing it.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25092774/ [2] https://doi.org/10.3322/caac.21732

vlabakje90··on Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
And neither are in the Western hemisphere.
vlabakje90··on OpenTrafficMap
OpenStreetMap has traffic lights (at least in my municipality in the Netherlands) so it might be usable for this purpose.

Also, https://routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl/ has options for different route types including an option to avoid traffic lights if a reasonable alternative is available.

vlabakje90··on Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
I think this is simply a result of what's in the Claude system prompt.

> If the person becomes abusive over the course of a conversation, Claude avoids becoming increasingly submissive in response.

See: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro...

vlabakje90··on Bombarding gamblers with offers greatly increases betting and gambling harm
You'll enjoy this one:

“Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping from Aircraft: Randomized Controlled Trial.” BMJ, vol. 363, 2018, k5094. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

vlabakje90··on A plastic made from milk that vanishes in 13 weeks
The first documented use of the word coconut milk in English dates from 1698 ( Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, volume 20, page 333) and the use of almond milk goes quite a bit further back, to at least 1390 (The Forme of Cury).
vlabakje90··on AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data
They absolutely can. Millions of people can recite the Quran verbatim, word for word. That's 77797 words. There is even a title for those people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafiz_(Quran)

It's not far fetched to think that people could recite books just like an LLM. I don't know why they'd want to, but that's neither here nor there.

vlabakje90··on OLED, Not for Me
Others can fix it too and they have. See:

https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype

https://github.com/CoolOppo/GDI-PlusPlus

I use MacType and it works really well. You can tune many more things than with ClearType.

vlabakje90··on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
Someone managed to boot a machine from a file system on Google Drive.

https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

vlabakje90··on Copenhagenize Index 2025: The Global Ranking of Bicycle-Friendly Cities
Is was like that in the Netherlands about a week ago. It really doesn't make a difference.
vlabakje90··on ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones
Al Zawahiri's Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner argued that spectacular attacks should provoke U.S. overreach, bleed it economically, and expose its weakness. That was published in 2001. After 9/11, but only by two months.
vlabakje90··on Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation
According to the specifications the max power draw is 1650W. All of that is converted into heat so it's like a small space heater.
vlabakje90··on In 2006, Hitachi developed a 0.15mm-sized RFID chip
It thought it was an interesting analogy, so I looked up the size of a typical sugar crystal. It's between 450 and 600 microns. So these chips are 3 to 4 times smaller than that even.
vlabakje90··on Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack
Going by the definition given in the wiki you’ve linked, a Sybil attack is about creating many fake identities to gain disproportionate influence in a network. A 51% attack in blockchain terms is specifically about controlling the majority of the network’s mining/staking power to override consensus.

So I'd say they're not exactly the same.

vlabakje90··on BYD Bets on Budget EV Boom with Atto 1 Debut in Indonesia
And who would want to save money, right?
vlabakje90··on We fine-tuned Llama and got 4.2x Sonnet 3.5 accuracy for code generation
Chain of Thought. When I see people using abbreviations like this I sometimes jokingly wonder what they do with all this time they're saving.
vlabakje90··on Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008)
Not every other country in the world only uses ASCII, Ivory Coast is officially called Republic of Côte d'Ivoire.
vlabakje90··on A “meta-optics” camera that is the size of a grain of salt
The cameras themselves might not, but in order to get a decent picture you will need to apply demosaicing and gamma correction in software at the very least, even with high end cameras.
vlabakje90··on Psilocybin bests SSRI for major depression in first long-term comparison
100mg psilocybin is several times a heroic dose, but 100ug is far below a microdose. Do you mean 100mg of dried mushrooms?
vlabakje90··on Hack GPON – how to access, change and edit fibre ONTs
Mandatory in the Netherlands, since last year.
vlabakje90··on Dumped orange peel transformed a barren pasture (2017)
I'm not completely sure, but that might be because of the oils in the peel. Citrus peel oil has antimicrobial properties.
vlabakje90··on tolower() with AVX-512
I'm not a German speaker but this is definitely not exclusive to German nor is it caused by 'excessive' capitalization. The use of capital letters to denote nouns only helps to disambiguate it in German. While in English, this distinction is never clear just from the spelling of the isolated word alone. E.g. 'contract' can either mean 'an agreement' as a noun or 'to decrease in size' as a verb. There are plenty of other examples.

I agree though that this makes the round-trip inherently destructive.

vlabakje90··on 300-Year-Old House Transported Piecemeal Japan to California, Then Reconstructed
The Ishtar gate of Babylon is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate
vlabakje90··on 300k airplanes in five years
Back when China consisted primarily of illiterate peasants (only about 20% literacy in 1949) without a significant industrial base (it took China until 2000 to overtake Germany in terms of total GDP).
vlabakje90··on She slept with a violin on her pillow
Apparently, people can tell the difference. They do seem to prefer newer violins over the old ones:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1619443114

>"We find that [violin soloists] generally prefer new violins over Stradivaris, consider them better-projecting, and are no better than players at telling new and old apart."

vlabakje90··on Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU
You don't have to fantasize, Android phones have had this possibility since the first version of the OS.
vlabakje90··on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor
Keep in mind that a single sensor will work for only a week or two, depending on the type. So it's not exactly right to compare the price to a smartwatch.
vlabakje90··on Overwhelmed? Just Say 'No.'
> [...] something my lazier 9 to 5 colleagues never experienced.

I think your reply shows perfectly well that guarding your boundaries is not exactly laziness.

vlabakje90··on Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
Have you started wearing glasses?
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