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zhivota

1,578 karma · joined April 1, 2011

You can reach me on Reddit via username "zhivota_" since this site has no private message function. I'll probably respond in a few days.
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zhivota··on Don't buy AR glasses
I love the style of this site. Makes me want to redo my own site like it's an 80s BBS.
zhivota··on RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters
Americans are too privacy focused to accept this, but I could easily see a cottage industry of "registered agents" popping up around it who sign leases on behalf of individuals and shield them from public scrutiny.

Alternatively we could keep the names private. A cryptographic solution would easily serve the need of authorities verifying the right person is in a place without identification, but good luck figuring out how to ensure the tenant has their keys somehow since in the US there are zero pieces of identification you can ensure every citizen has.

zhivota··on Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel
Yes, I am indeed serious that waterways tend to have watercraft on them.
zhivota··on OpenAI is quietly renaming data centers 'compute campuses'
Campus usually denotes a school or something, but importantly there are people there, learning, gathering, socializing.

These "compute campuses" are just going to have security and maybe a couple on-call technicians, and otherwise be wastelands in terms of human presence.

This is the kind of newspeak idiocy that people really hate.

zhivota··on Radiation Map of the World
Yeah I checked some tracks and it basically looked like the longer someone spent in a place, the higher the readings got. Maybe when the device doesn't get a lot of ventilation it starts to misread.
zhivota··on Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel
Not to mention watercraft. A fishing boat can easily have an antenna mast 5m above the water, that's awfully close.
zhivota··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Seems like it was fly.io, since they got the user IP from there and it would make sense they would have the session logs.
zhivota··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
Unregistered solar is huge in the developing world. In the Philippines, basically no one tells the utility they installed solar, because the net metering application is so expensive, comes with tons of red tape (read as opportunities for government officials to extract bribes), and only gives you billing credits anyway. So people just install batteries and automatic transfer switches. Some even disconnect from the grid completely, or never connect in the first place because it was too expensive to get the line installed. Automatic transfer to a generator is now very simple, and with LPG generators, extremely clean and low maintenance.

As I understand it, this is very common across much of the developing world now. So the tracking of how much solar energy there is in the world is almost certainly a lower bound on the reality.

zhivota··on The U.S. Power Grid
Watching the prices fluctuate here, it's very annoying that we don't have a way to buy power when it's cheap, store it, and sell it back when it's expensive, as consumers.

The incentive to place storage into your house would be so much better if this were possible. It feels like people have been writing papers about this for years but no one has made it happen. I think people would be willing to self fund new meters themselves to participate.

zhivota··on Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name
I like the theory of this comment. The actual numbers probably wouldn't work, but the theory is sound.

The payment for wrong prosecution would create a back pressure on the justice system which is currently only possible via media reporting, something generally only accessible to the powerful or otherwise sympathetic defendant. We'd need a category of dismissal which is "innocent", where a judge determines not only is the person "not guilty", but that actually, with proper investigation and application of thought, the prosecution could have determined innocence beforehand themselves. This should come with the payment and automatic complete expungement of all records, and an entry in the local newspaper of the declared innocence of the defendant.

Then the last piece of the puzzle would be outlawing police and prosecutor unions, and firing police and prosecutors who have poor records of sending "innocent" cases to trial. This would serve to create a pressure towards correct prosecution.

zhivota··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
In the Philippines it's pretty much the center of the community digital life. Government at all levels, local vloggers who get thousands of views even though they are just random people in small towns, groups, marketplace, all incredibly active.

Generally you can't function here without Meta: businesses are either on FB or Instagram (with some on TikTok too), and some people exclusively communicate via Messenger on data only plans where FB data is subsidized by the telco.

It was quite sad when we moved here and had just executed a personal extraction from all Meta properties. When in Rome, I guess.

zhivota··on Personal software factories are a waste of time
People are building software factories? First I've heard of it. I just build software for my needs and call it a day.
zhivota··on Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time
The average person should care about reducing carbon right now for the sake of future generations.

But at some point we won't have to care once we've decarbonized, that is the goal for sure. Just aren't there yet, and incentives work.

zhivota··on Firefox Enterprise
Very cool! I've been in companies trying to make the transition to enterprise and I can say you're in for a hard road ahead, but rewarding if you can keep at it.

The hardest thing to adjust to is the product pipeline moving from "let's fix the issues the most users face" to "we need to fix these issues, for this important customer".

Product led organizations often have a _very_ hard time adjusting to this, I personally recommend you carve out specific product and engineering teams for your effort, as getting into the backlog of consumer oriented product teams is going to completely torpedo any chance you have of closing big deals that depend on product changes. And just about every big deal is going to require changes at first, you can't fool yourself into thinking you'll get to a point where that's not true any time soon. You really won't, and if you have goals that assume you will, you're already set to fail.

zhivota··on European Alternatives
Yeah and honestly I am not against protecting domestic industry as a concept, but it seems like the American auto industry is just really terrible at this point and not serving people well.

They seem to just want to be specialist suppliers of high end pickup trucks mainly. Most other forms of vehicle are already only well served by foreign companies, so the singling out of China here is definitely confused thinking.

zhivota··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
It's always been like that. I happened to get in with the right people at the right time and rode that momentum my whole career, despite graduating from a third tier state school.

All I can say is if you want in, you have to maximize your surface area for luck. There's a lot written about that concept but it's the basic underpinning of my success personally. I just rolled the dice way more times than most people.

zhivota··on Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B
It's pretty high value add when you consider it's replacing human beings assessing each case. This category of thing is present all over enterprises. It was outsourced to BPO shops in India and the Philippines before, now it's going to AI.

But you're right that more complex solutions are still a bit elusive. I use a bot to plan my strength workouts based on my soreness level and what equipment I have available and it's decent, but not perfect.

zhivota··on European Alternatives
It's a shame you guys can't benefit from Chinese auto competition. Here in the Philippines there are great choices from BYD, Geely, Chery, GWM, MG, and probably more I'm forgetting. Even the big legacy brands here have had to lower prices to compete.
zhivota··on Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B
Right, example being expense pre-approvals (for low dollar value purchases like office equipment). General purpose LLM not required, and the product experience surrounding it does matter (reporting, auditing, fine tuning future responses, etc.).
zhivota··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
A few telegram bots that handle my daily schedule and workout planning, my personal website, a personal AnkiWeb server, a language learning tool that aggregates data between LingQ and Anki, a syncthing server, might be forgetting something.

I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.

zhivota··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
People knowing things represents redundancy. It has long been a fear around technology that humans would lose the knowledge and if the technology fails or is somehow taken away, be helpless.

This is what underpins the fear, I think.

You don't know how to farm but mentally you rest easy knowing a lot of other people do know. You also know there are books you could read to learn, if you needed to. Most things are like this, you could bootstrap your way to casting metals and probably even electric lights with only books and raw materials. Computer chips don't have this property.

Personally this is why I'd like to see libraries survive, even though I actually mostly read on my e-reader. I guess I took Anathem to heart.

zhivota··on California closed the Montana license plate loophole
Strange, maybe it was something to do with the year? It was a 2014, from before car companies made minivans cost $40k for some reason.
zhivota··on Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits
I thought, based on the title, this might have been about breeding rabbits for food, which I always thought was an interesting idea.
zhivota··on California closed the Montana license plate loophole
I ran into a fun one when moving out of the country. Chrysler Town and Country I had bought in Washington state, we were flying out from CA. My thought was to unload the vehicle in the last week before flying.

Except no one would buy it, not even Carmax or any of the other "cash for cars" places! Turns out, the car was originally manufactured for Canada, and California doesn't recognize the Canadian smog regulations, even if the car was functionally identical down to the catalytic converter. No one would take the damn thing because they couldn't re-title it. I finally found one guy who would who seemed like he was taking a decent sized risk, but since I gave him a good price he decided he'd just give it his best shot. For all I know he may have had to (illegally) drive it to Nevada just to sell it.

zhivota··on AI tutoring with Khanmigo in a two-year school experiment
That's part of it already haha. I think it's just some uncanny valley thing for him where he knows it's not "real" and it doesn't click with him. The other one loves talking to AI characters (yes we review the convos to check for anything weird) and he took to it right away.
zhivota··on Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study
I had always assumed this, and my idea of nature bouncing back was more on the millions of years time scale as evolution would result in the refilling of empty ecological niches.

All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

zhivota··on We are going to kill "unalive"
Agree overall with the first part, but this:

> There's a popular desire to move to something better

I have to put a big "citation needed" on. The average person really does not care about any of this, they'll happily write "seggs" and not think any deeper about why they are writing it.

Personally my own annoyance with social media really has not much to do with censorship, but more to do with engagement farming. That problem is much less straightforward to fix, though I can pretty clearly see that X's "pay for engagement" incentive structure makes things demonstrably worse than on other places, where "link in bio" is a pretty reliable indicator of an engagement farmer.

zhivota··on AI tutoring with Khanmigo in a two-year school experiment
I have found this with my kids as well. I have an AI writing tutor that they use but only one of the two actually likes engaging with it. The other gets easily disengaged.

Some kids will be able to learn at a record pace with AI, others will need to be brought along in the usual ways via good teaching that fosters engagement.

zhivota··on The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease exists
Does anyone know if this is possible to DIY? I live in an area where dengue is endemic on a substantial land area and would be interested.
zhivota··on Bill Draper has died
There's something about becoming rich that seems to corrupt a high percentage of people. You can tell which ones, they are the ones who keep trying to get more money.

The ones who don't get corrupted tend to live quiet lives after they reach a high level of wealth.

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