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yxwvut

489 karma · joined September 27, 2013

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yxwvut··on Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait
More of a "Bitcoin-Backed Protection Racket", presumably?
yxwvut··on Eat Real Food
And from the study linked, that framing/suggestion would be incorrect (at least for the numbers given). "the 12% are not the same every day" is an accurate interpretation. They asked about what people ate _yesterday_...
yxwvut··on US labour watchdog halts Apple cases after group’s lawyer picked for top job
He’s right though - indifference to corruption or malfeasance begets corruption and malfeasance. Holding your government and companies to a higher standard of behavior is both possible and necessary for a functional, durable nation. Sure, you can enforce corporate morality via regulation or governmental morality via the courts or ethics committees, but that completely ignores the concept of soft power. Laws can be broken faster than they can be enforced.
yxwvut··on Researchers to retract landmark Alzheimer's paper containing doctored images
The world must be so tidy for you. Who needs actual science when we have your facile hunches?
yxwvut··on Big data is dead (2023)
Well put. Whoever asked this question is undoubtedly a nightmare to work with. Your data is the engine that drives your business and its margin improvements, so why hamstring yourself with a 'clever' cost saving but ultimately unwieldy solution that makes it harder to draw insight (or build models/pipelines) from?

Penny wise and pound foolish, plus a dash of NIH syndrome. When you're the only company doing something a particular way (and you're not Amazon-scale), you're probably not as clever as you think.

yxwvut··on North Korean animation outsourcing for Amazon, HBO Max series
I'd go further to say that rules without any verification aren't really rules. You don't make a rule without the suspicion that it'd be more efficient to break them, and if you're not verifying their adherence to those rules, your rule is meaningless.

This is the iterated game that morally bankrupt manufacturers (IE the vast majority) play to insulate themselves in these sort of scandals: - First, they get caught doing A,B,C, so they pass rules about A,B,C - Then they outsource to someone who is willing to do A,B,C, then they get caught outsourcing to violators - Then, they impose rules about A,B,C on these firms, but do no verification of the firms adherence to those rules. It insulates them of liability without ever increasing costs (because the firms still get to break the rules and the company gets to say "I'm Shocked! I told you not to do that!")

yxwvut··on The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music).

I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc

yxwvut··on The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.
yxwvut··on Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died
I think the broader point is that improving societal utility is rarely the north star of a startup, not that every business needs to last a century.
yxwvut··on Cummins Fined $1.6B for Diesel Defeat Devices in 630K RAM Trucks
You get the climate apocalypse you deserve
yxwvut··on FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'
The point to my post was that there's no dissent allowed from the party line of 'this is definitely kosher'. If you thought the agency was overreaching in its interpretation, you better keep that to yourself, because it was a near-heretical opinion that would be eyed with suspicion, and it's not like you, a lowly rank-and-file employee, were ever going to sway things on that front.
yxwvut··on FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'
Well, I left for exactly that reason. I imagine those who stayed took an 'ends justify the means' stance that I couldn't abide. The organizations themselves are insatiable - there's no way that, left to their own devices, any three-letter-agency would ever say "Oh, this is beyond our scope, we shouldn't be allowed to access this.", and that combined with rubber stamp 'checks' allowed this surveillance creep.
yxwvut··on FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'
When I worked at a certain three-letter-agency, much of the annual legal training amounted to "Here's our incredibly tortuous interpretation of every relevant term in the letter of the law. Don't like it? There's the door."
yxwvut··on Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
My point is that vouchers distort demand elasticity, just like unchecked student loans, employer-provided health insurance, low mortgage rates, etc distort their respective markets. The fact that costs (not even prices) may be low at present is not an indicator that prices will not balloon in the wake of a voucher system. The private education profiteers are counting on it.
yxwvut··on Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world? It's not exactly going well in secondary education.
yxwvut··on Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA
Why not make Reddit itself a paid service by that logic? This whole 'Oh we need to make strides toward profitability blah blah' corporate spiel is such bullshit when they could snap their fingers and become profitable overnight by switching from an ad model to a subscription model. Further, by doing so they wouldn't be forced to gradually ruin the site with more dilution into sponsored content.

This is the arc of American business, though. A steady money printer isn't enough. That money has to grow, and it grows by reducing the surplus utility held by the users.

yxwvut··on The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
This unassailable conviction that everything can always be chalked up to "more diagnosis" for every mental health trend is a thought terminating cliche. What can't be explained away by "oh, it's because diagnosis is easier and/or people are more open about their problems", regardless of whether that's the primary cause?
yxwvut··on AAA Reports That 68 Percent of Americans Are Now Afraid of Autonomous Cars
As they should be. I'm afraid of what Tesla's marketed as 'autonomous' and the precedent their ability to get away with it sets for the day we hand over a greater deal of trust to these systems.

Who needs regulation when you've got litigation? Surely that's the foundation of a reasonable government - let the bodies pile up and sort it all out in court.

yxwvut··on Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
I feel like this is particularly bad for python Q+A on SO. At least it's not as bad as Quora where the top answer is invariably a grandiose answer to a different question than was asked or an excuse for some bullshit 'heartwarming' anecdote that answers nothing.
yxwvut··on Intuit pouring money into lobbying amid push for free government-run tax filing
Buying senators is surprisingly cheap. This is why I think there's a huge untapped market for democratized/crowdfunded lobbying. I also think that democratization would expedite its demise, which is the end game that would benefit society the most.
yxwvut··on Buy hi-resolution satellite images of any place on earth
They're saying that your business practice of upfront list pricing should be the norm elsewhere. This series of comments is a critique of other businesses, comparing their 'contact us for pricing info' opacity unfavorably to your transparency.
yxwvut··on Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan
Existence and prevalence are not the same thing. Perhaps the title should replace “not eaten” with “not commonly eaten” for maximum accuracy but that doesn’t make it a myth. I’m sure I could find an American restaurant serving squirrel, but I’d still say squirrel is not normally eaten in America.
yxwvut··on The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you
Even in things like applied math, it's pretty arbitrary which assumptions and formulations become standardized when tackling similar problems (and it usually comes down to the effects of prestige on your network/ 'reach': the more prominent people you get your ideas in front of, the more likely your work is to become the 'state of the art' default approach, and the more prestigious your university (and the professors you collaborate with), the easier it is to get your ideas in front of important people.
yxwvut··on Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
Just wanted to comment in agreement and confirm that this exact scenario drives me insane. Adding more information that agrees with the existing top suggestion should never change that top suggestion.
yxwvut··on Nascar driver stuns to qualify for championship with GameCube move
I'm 99% sure that it originated in climbing - it's been a term since the 80s at least (short for ascend - to 'send' a climbing route is to climb it successfully without falling or weighting the rope). Outside climbing I first noticed its use in the mid/late '00s in mountain biking (which has a fair bit of overlapping user base), and then in other extreme sports. In the jump from climbing to other extreme sports it became a shorthand for 'commit and do something difficult/risky successfully' (similar in spirit to its meaning in climbing if not literally given the etymology).
yxwvut··on Markov chain Monte Carlo without the bullshit (2015)
Computational efficiency is a major consideration in sampling from a high dimensional distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_sampling#Drawbacks
yxwvut··on The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
The point is that it only takes an arbitrarily small probability for an infinite cost event to have an infinite Expected Value if you prevent it (and an infinite ROI if you even marginally improve the probability of prevention), so all of these outlandish far future hypotheses with catastrophic costs get priority from EA proponents over saving real lives today with certainty.
yxwvut··on Plant-based ‘beef’ reduces CO2 but threatens ag jobs
Anyone else exhausted by the hand wringing whenever obsolescence hits red states particularly hard? Nobody's writing op-eds when corporate realty staff or office front desk staff are laid off due to remote work.
yxwvut··on How Urban Legend Destroyed the Ball Pit
The article describes the lack of sanitation as a baseless part of the negative mythology, but a dearth of scientific studies (and questions of generalizability of the existing studies) does not mean that their reputation is without merit. When your kid finds turds in the ball pit you don't need a study to know there's a sanitation problem. Anecdotally, as a child I had a near 100% rate of coming down with an infection after visiting the local ball pit and witnessed the discovery of fecal matter by another child, which, combined with the repeated illness, led to a ban on further visits.
yxwvut··on The Swerve
Thank god we have the rich to care for us instead, they know what's best.
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