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xvedejas

2,527 karma · joined August 29, 2013

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xvedejas··on Lula wins election after final votes tallied
Depends on which ranked system. IRV has a lot of issues that other systems (like STAR, my personal preference in voting system, or Condorcet methods for instance) address much better. Non-monotonicity in particular seems like a bad property of a voting system, so I'm confused that IRV is so popular recently.
xvedejas··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Empirically, according to Doucet, a land value tax would only raise average tax rates if you're living on a parking lot, or vacant lot. Aging homeowners would mostly see a slight decline in their property taxes ( California excluded ).
xvedejas··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
Neither. The US has a problem with incompetency in policing. Part of that stems from the prevalence of far-right ideology that is common among US police but not common in peer developed countries. Far-right officers are ideologically disposed to not being effective, either because they prefer punishment to procedure, or because it's in their interest to keep crime high.

Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.

xvedejas··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.
xvedejas··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Is the point really to be profitable? Or could perhaps its owners be willing to risk losing money for more power over the information landscape?
xvedejas··on I resigned from Anthropic today
It has been interesting to me how AI has for many years given people a way to justify any worst case scenario. Nothing is too far-fetched if at any step you tell yourself the AI will be smarter than you, and thus be able to solve any conceivable obstacle. Oh, if only intelligence were the only bottleneck to power.
xvedejas··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
Montenegro unilaterally uses the euro and it doesn't seem to otherwise be a failed state. Besides this being a "marker", what do you think are the actual problems caused? Like why does a small country need its own capital controls when there is a very stable currency available nearby?
xvedejas··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
Where would one ever read that Go is not memory safe? That's just a false claim, and anyone believing it would have probably gone out of business regardless of choice of programming language.
xvedejas··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
And how would you control for the causal possibility that those who will eventually develop Alzheimer's early on might tend to have undetectable memory issues that prevent them from becoming taxi drivers in the first place? You can't control for profession, since that's behind the very claim itself.
xvedejas··on Modernizing Property Tax Assessments in Allegheny County
Property taxes have a component that redistributes wealth from landlords to the working people, but it also has a component that penalizes making better use of the land. The former is usually called "land value tax" and the latter is the part of the tax that is proportional to the improved value of the land. The latter part incentivizes some uncertain amount more towards mcmansions and away from multi-unit buildings.
xvedejas··on The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
Reading between the lines, it sounds like it was probably one of "tip"/"point"/"head" and "shaft", or similar
xvedejas··on Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here". I know lots of people optimistic that remote work would upend this, but even the few still-fully-remote workers I know need to live in areas where they or their family can find non-remote jobs if ever necessary.
xvedejas··on The "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit at the Sam Noble museum
I thought we were moving toward depicting dinosaurs as having feathers? Or is there just too little evidence around what exactly that would look like to add it to visualizations?
xvedejas··on Data centers trigger voter backlash
Sounds like a slam-dunk case for SELC?
xvedejas··on Data centers trigger voter backlash
Isn't most new capacity solar these days?
xvedejas··on Data centers trigger voter backlash
In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers. I'm sure there are market failures going on here in many places but it's not necessarily the case that you and the companies be on opposing sides. There are positive-sum solutions to a lot of these problems, if people are willing to consider them.
xvedejas··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
moto g 2026; yes it's Android. Main downside is the relative lack of RAM honestly.
xvedejas··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
I've gone through about 5 USB-C adapters which eventually broke inexplicably. They also have extra noise in the audio when the volume is low for some reason.
xvedejas··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
Waymo, Philz coffee, Partiful
xvedejas··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
I just moved away from GrapheneOS to Motorola because I decided I needed an audio jack again. There's definitely some annoying things about leaving, but at least now I can use again the three apps that didn't work for me on GrapheneOS...
xvedejas··on Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
I do wonder how much to trust averages on these statistics. I observe that I am much more risk averse than the average cyclist in my city. Perhaps my risk is really much lower, conditional on that knowledge?
xvedejas··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
Safety margins still will require some level of delay between cars that aren't mechanically linked. Even with perfect reaction times, the physics of driving (maximum acceleration rates, possible loss of traction) dictate this, it's a non-trivial control theory problem. Besides, it doesn't seem to be a goal of Waymo; I've seen lines of their vehicles before and they all behave the same way as in mixed traffic.
xvedejas··on Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study
What do you mean by detrimental?
xvedejas··on Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study
My initial charitable reading -- as someone who sometimes dabbles in decaf -- is that decaffeination has the bad side effect of stripping flavors, and likely many of the other biologically active chemicals. I can see from their further posts that they were more interested in unscientific fear mongering instead.

That said, I do think there is some truth that decaf is lacking (including via supercritical CO2) and I wonder how long until we could have a product like genetically engineered coffee plants that produce everything except caffeine. I'd like that, though I can immediately see an issue with growing a plant without its natural pesticide.

xvedejas··on AI uses less water than the public thinks
It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
xvedejas··on Zed 1.0
Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.
xvedejas··on Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API
Yes, you're correct about that
xvedejas··on Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API
If 90% is one nine and 99% is two nines, we can use the logarithm to compute how many fractional nines we have at 98.59%: about 1.9788 nines (almost two!)
xvedejas··on Waymo in Portland
> you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those

If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes, the economic effect is the same. Who actually bears the burden of the tax ends up determined by the price elasticity of supply/demand in that labor market, and is not determined by who is on the hook for the literal payment.

xvedejas··on Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign
Does this take into account feature flags when summing LOC? It's common practice in Rust to really only use a subset of a dependency, controlled by compile-time flags.
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