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pahkah

Re:Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @10:13AM (#50088083)
What's the downside to the ban as described, when compared to the status quo?

If there's no profile already, then they can serve the ad, since it's not a profiling-based ad and they don't need to know if the viewer is a minor.

If there is a profile then they have the knowledge to avoid advertising based on that if it's a minor.

I don't see why ID verification needs to come into play?

I would love to see a ban on _all_ profiling-based ads, but this seems like a step in the right direction to me.

Re:Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory on Thursday September 03, 2026 @12:32PM (#49552769)
One tragedy of this is that I stop reading when things don't make sense. There are a few connections in the article that seem tenuous. In the past I might have thought through it, considered the situation, and realized that the author had a different perspective and, if I shifted my mindset, there was a real insight there.

Now I just assume that it's AI-slop and there's no other "way of thinking" that I can adopt to make it sensible. I'm surely missing out on learning through some human-written articles, but the volume of slop means that I can't spend all my time digging through nonsense in the hope that there's a gem of insight.

Re:Let's Buy Spirit Air on Monday May 04, 2026 @11:40AM (#48010120)
Oh I don't know — I travel the Boston-DC route a lot and fly only because it's significantly cheaper than taking the train. If prices were comparable I would take the train even without it being "high speed", I think there's a market for high speed rail if the prices were as low as flights!
I think there are two different definitions of "significant information" at play here. I interpreted the GP comment to mean "information about the thing being advertised".

The point of the flyer is that you need to get the person to process one bit of information in the first 200ms: scroll or stay. GP's point is that that has little, if anything, to do with the ostensible purpose of advertising, informing people about a product.

As someone who's interested in all this, I agree it would be nice to have more precision around capacity. Especially as it relates to longer term storage. But! In this context, output is more salient than capacity. You'll see a lot of stories about grid-scale storage that use output. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/854999 offers a fuller explanation than what I'll give here.)

This is because grid operators are most concerned with immediate power output. They need to keep the grid balanced, and if they need a gigawatt to do it, it doesn't matter if the batteries have 100 GWh if they can only discharge at 1 MW.

Since the batteries described here are used primarily to handle the peak of the duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve) it seems like 4 hours of capacity (the article mentions that the lithium-ion batteries have 4-6 hours of capacity) is sufficient to get over that difficult hump.

Anyway, to get back to your question of how many GWh, if we assume that the batteries have 4 hours of storage, then we're looking at around 4h * 15.7 GW = 63 GWh of battery capacity. (4 hours is what I've seen as standard for lithium-ion, conservative if the article's claim of "four to six hours" is true.)

Hope this helps ease the peeve!

Re:FTC Secures Historic $2.5B Settlement Against Amazon on Thursday September 25, 2025 @12:50PM (#45375304)
And as you're implying, this action began under the "Biden-Harris FTC": https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
This seems like a case of tunnel vision and confirmation bias, the nasty combo that sycophantic LLMs make easy to fall prey to. Someone gets an idea, asks about it, and the LLM doesn’t ask about the context or say that doesn’t make sense, it just plays along, “confirming” that that the idea was correct.

I’ve caught myself with this a few times when I sort of suggest a technical solution that, in hindsight, was the wrong way to approach a problem. The LLM will try to find a way to make that work without taking a step back and suggesting that I didn’t understand the problem I was looking at.

Re:EPA Moves to Cancel $7B in Grants for Solar Energy on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @12:57PM (#44800689)
This particular bribe was reported on over a year ago, when Trump was raising money from oil execs for his campaign. It seems likely that the overall push against clean energy (pushing for dispatchable generation, canceling tax credits for green energy projects) is related. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
Re:Apple's AirPods Pro hearing health features on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:15PM (#41910524)
Yep, the path for this official recognition was cleared by the executive order two years ago that allowed for hearing aids to be sold over the counter!
At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business.

I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.

I appreciate the point, but the numbers there are the proportion of revenue, not the percentage of revenue, so they're off by a factor of 100.
> Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns.

That's the problem! The issue is that Amazon forces sellers to raise their prices elsewhere, so that Amazon is the best deal for a shopper. But if Amazon didn't have the power to do that (if it didn't have a monopoly as the gateway to online shopping) then other retailers would be able to lower their prices.

That's the "tax" referred to in the article. By inflating prices across the board, but still ensuring that they're the least expensive option, Amazon retains customers and increases profits. Individual consumers choose it because it's the best deal, but the system as a whole loses out because prices are higher than they "should" be.

Re:Aurora I/O optimized config saved 90% DB cost on Thursday August 10, 2023 @05:29PM (#37082036)
> No surprises here. Come what may, Amazon has always strived to lower costs

Maybe it's just a goal to reduce costs, but it seems likely that this is a response to Google's introduction of AlloyDB, a Postgres-compatible database competing with Aurora that is advertised as having "no...opaque I/O charges". I doubt Amazon was feeling generous.

Re:Look at median, and not mean GDP per capita on Sunday August 07, 2022 @10:12PM (#32381813)
I think you missed why I am failing to understand this one. The full context there is:

> If I earn a dollar and don't spend it, it results in a lower GDP than if I spent it. Thus income can not be treated as equivalent to GDP.

It's the second part that I don't understand. Those two sentences read to me like: "Spending decisions impact GDP, therefore income is not equivalent to GDP."

I don't think anyone is claiming that spending would fail to increase GDP. But I still don't see how income is disconnected from GDP, since that spending would be someone else's income.

Re:A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers on Sunday May 26, 2019 @07:07PM (#20018143)
At first I read

> The similar sequence that chooses the largest instead of smallest prime that divides 1 plus the product of the previous terms avoids an infinite number of primes.

as saying that it avoids having an infinite number of primes in the sequence (i.e. that the sequence itself contained a finite number of distinct primes), but it's actually that there's an infinite number of primes not present in the sequence.

Fascinating sequence, good article, thanks!

Re:The Repeal of Net Neutrality Is Official on Monday June 11, 2018 @11:00AM (#17284795)
I think that timeline is backwards -- before 2015 there were net neutrality rules in place but then were struck down in the courts because ISPs were not subject to Title 2. So in 2015 they were reclassified as Title 2 in order to make net neutrality rules enforceable.
Re:The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy on Monday May 28, 2018 @04:50PM (#17174776)
Thanks for the link!

I don't think the rebuttal makes a fair characterization of Stewart's article. Slate's argument comes down to "Stewart is taking his eyes off the prize, asking us to focus on the 9.9% when the 1% are really the problem" but I didn't interpret the Atlantic piece as implying that those at the very top are innocent in all this. It was more saying that the upper class (9.9%) have been complicit as the top 0.1% have garnered an increasingly vast portion of wealth.

Stewart is asking those in the 9.9% to be more cognizant of those below them, to stop looking up at the 0.1% and realize that the actions they take to improve the outcomes for their children are reducing income mobility.