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chockablock

Re:Who's Afraid of Chinese Models? on Monday July 20, 2026 @10:19PM (#48987314)
> Any Tokens-as-a-Service provider will refuse to serve those tokens to customers in the US.

So under a ban rest-of-world gets to use cheap open-weight models but American companies/individuals must only use only ‘approved models from US for-profits’? Doesn’t seem like that kind of protectionism will be popular or politically tenable. Not so long ago US chose cheap TVs over maintaining the country’s manufacturing base.

(Despite what you wrote it’s also really hard to imagine that enforcement wouldn’t leak like a sieve. Unser sufficient economic incentives [which are the predicate for the ban], loopholes will be found.)

Re:Company as Code on Thursday February 05, 2026 @12:24PM (#46902044)
Are you a bot or bot-assisted? Repeating back the content of a comment and then asking a generic follow-up is a strange pattern.
Re:NYC Congestion Pricing on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @12:50PM (#42625188)
Alternatively, day parking rates drop enough (due to market forces) to compensate for the cost of the toll.
Re:NYC Congestion Pricing on Tuesday January 07, 2025 @12:44PM (#42625117)
> even if you're not driving in downtown Manhattan, you will still pay the cost to enter the city through the normal entrances

Incorrect--if you take one of those bridges/tunnels below 60th street, then stay on FDR or West Side Highway to travel to a different part of NYC (i.e. you never enter the interior surface streets below 60th), then you don't pay the congestion fee.

"The Congestion Relief Zone includes local streets and avenues in Manhattan south of and including 60 Street, excluding the FDR Drive, West Side Highway/Route 9A, and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections to West Street."

https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info/tolling

Re:A brief interview with Awk creator Dr. Brian Kernighan on Thursday July 18, 2024 @05:08AM (#40993821)
It’s a pointless affectation that distracts from your technical content.

The evidence for your behavior being distracting/provocative is right here in this thread.

Re:Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @09:08AM (#40645794)
> in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer.

Maybe, but this class of jokes/riffs is going to get old, fast.

> Agreed, but that noise can be contained with an effective Faraday screening.

I don’t think car manufacturers are saying they don’t know how to shield, they’re saying it would come at a cost:

"Requiring the installation of analog AM radios in automobiles is an unnecessary action that would impact EV range, efficiency and affordability at a critical moment of accelerating adoption," -the fine article

Got a pointer (or search terms) for this? I’d like to learn more
Re:What are the "worst" spelling bee pangrams? on Sunday March 17, 2024 @11:54AM (#39735304)
Official rules say otherwise: "Each puzzle includes at least one “pangram,” which uses every letter."

https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee -> click on 'How to Play'

Those terms are synonyms (at least in US academic parlance)
This fantasy of the line workers getting rich at cushy jobs does not seem to be related to reality?
Sorry 1 does not make sense. It's not like I bid on a house based on its square footage, and then only find out the address when I win.

Even in the US, walkability scores, satellite photos, maps of transit and bike lanes, commute estimates, are all common enough on real estate sites. I think you just be seeing may be observing people's expressed preferences.

Re:First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @04:35PM (#38787037)
You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address risk of any freak long-tail events.)

https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

Re:The Apple Macintosh Primer (1984) [pdf] on Sunday October 15, 2023 @12:01PM (#37890873)
40 years later and MacOS app menus are barely changed:

Apple - (Current App Name) - File - Edit - View - [App-specific items] - Window - Help

For Finder, there's still only one app-specific menu item, now called 'Go' instead of 'Special'.

The linked article says the 2 bits are stored on Apple’s servers.

I.e. they could persist even if the device were bit-for-bit reset to factory state.

The narrative that most homeless people in SF come there from other places is contradicted by data. In annual surveys, ~70+% of people who are homeless in SF lived in SF when they became homeless.

https://sfstandard.com/public-health/latino-homelessness-sur...

Re:Ask HN: How do you choose your usernames? on Sunday January 15, 2023 @01:06PM (#34391470)
+1. You can still use the PW generator to achieve this but it’s a bit clunky.
Re:FTC to crack down on companies taking advantage of gig workers on Saturday September 17, 2022 @03:04PM (#32880374)
In the US most states (37/50) don’t have sales tax on groceries. Also food bought with SNAP benefits (food stamps) is exempt from sales tax in all states.
Re:San Francisco's Postwar Sex District (2006) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @04:42PM (#32803097)
As it says at the top of the page, this article is basically a precis of a journal article, which--hurrah! is on Sci-hub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144205282713 . As you'd expect that article seems to be better sourced and has citations.

Your critique of the posted article as being part of an ideological battle advancing class oppression dynamics seems overblown to me. This particular article reads like museum-pamphlet history to me.

Re:San Francisco's Postwar Sex District (2006) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @04:12PM (#32802862)
> It then claims, without reference, that the VCR was a market replacement for physical sexual encounters. It goes on to ignore that AIDS was a health epidemic related to these sexual encounters, and that when the seedy operators are finally taken out of an area the real estate values increase.

I don't think you read the article very carefully. The sentence immediately after the mention of the VCR is about how AIDS led to the closing of many venues. The one after that is about the role of property values (though it claims causality in the other direction--that sex clubs were priced out as neighborhoods got richer).

> What value is this essay supposed to have to this particular forum?

Overall the essay reads to me as being very light on editorializing, and much more of a straight-ahead narration of an important facet of the city's history. I learned a lot from reading it, despite having lived in SF for many years.

The same AGI phase-out applies in the year that you do the rollover.

So this doesn’t allow you to avoid the income phase-out, it just lets you time-shift the educational spending to an earlier year (in which your income may be below the threshold).

If your family income is above the threshold in every year until you need the money for tuition, then there will not be an opportunity to get the tax benefit.

From your link, emphasis mine:

> Taxpayers can bypass the income phase-outs on savings bonds by rolling them over into a 529 college savings plan before their income increases beyond the income phase-outs.

Unlike a 529 plan, the tax benefit of using I-Bonds for tuition is only available if your AGI is under a certain amount in the year you cash them in (currently $154k for a married couple). https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111414/what-educati...
Interesting. Someone I know well with bipolar has very predictable manic episodes around the same date each springtime, but they aren't tied directly to the time change I.e. they happen +/- a week or so each year.
I run around the house updating every clock I can find early on the Sunday morning. I update the clocks on rental cars if they're wrong. I'm not otherwise a super detail-oriented person. Clearly this is some kind of personality test.
Re:That wild Ask a Manager story on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:47AM (#30345289)
Also, in NYC, your nearest option might be in another state (NJ or CT). I don’t get this.
Re:A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar on Sunday January 30, 2022 @07:45PM (#30143006)
Hitting that button on any modern car (like say my 2018 Volvo) will turn the fan on max heat, directed at the windshield and side windows. and also enable the AC. IIRC a 1998 Camry I drove had the same functionality.

Confirmed in the ‘98 Camry manual: “Turning the air flow control knob to wind- shield position turns on the defroster− linked air conditioning. At this time, the ”A/C” button indicator comes on regard- less of whether or not the ”A/C” button is pressed in. This is to clean up the front view more quickly.”

Like the manual, I have always just called that functionality ‘defrost’, never defog.

Re:Many clothing donations end up in African landfills on Sunday January 23, 2022 @06:58AM (#30045534)
In a Bloomberg businessweek article this week on Rent The Runway the figure they give is that they rent the articles an average of 20 times before retiring them.
The game does not accept leading zeros (00017: "Not a 5 digit prime")
How could you break it without destroying its value?

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