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tomoyoirl

Re:Not Every User Owns an iPhone on Thursday January 09, 2025 @11:19AM (#42647109)
Eh. If one wanted to do charity for the less fortunate, it might be better to just work for or give to bona fide charitable causes - rather than operating a marginal, possibly unprofitable Android app.
Imagine $FOOTBALL_TEAM fans vs $OTHER_FOOTBALL_TEAM fans, except instead of their fervor being a minor factor setting the general mood in the arena, it’s the actual competition
I’m not sure how any program to recycle plastic bags (etc) is supposed to show 60% recycling-compliance without labeling instructing consumers to recycle the bags. Wouldn’t it just be simpler to ban the plastic?
Re:Alexa Is in Households–and Amazon Is Losing Billions on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @11:47PM (#41064532)
Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements.

It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)

Don’t be ridiculous. Plea deals were created by prosecutors so they could eliminate the right to a jury trial by overcharging and making it far too risky to exercise.
It’s also a pressure tactic to extract a guilty plea because there’s no negotiation and a one week deadline.
Re:Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @11:32AM (#40789883)
I don’t look forward to taking them and choose other drivers, mostly because the price and wait time dynamics are a little funny, but I am glad I did take a ride or two. They’re much better drivers in the sense of “not interested in pushing any limits.” They navigated around a parked truck effectively, queueing and waiting their turn to go into the opposing lane behind some other cars. The perception display of surrounding people and cars was very comforting. My only moment of fear was a sudden stop because a wrong-way bicyclist had lurched out into traffic — that’d happen with any driver, unless we hit the guy. Yeah, I guess you can cone them, they’re that conservative of drivers.

It’s clear that they’re not the cars for me to worry about out there on a bike / on foot / etc.

Re:The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets on Sunday June 23, 2024 @07:15PM (#40771432)
I assume all regular customers will be paying a fare of $3.25 or less per ride on the reusable Opus card (fare purchased in a 10-ride pack). Essentially you’re paying for the chip with the very-occasional-commuter one-ride convenience fee.
How big a trend is that, though? Most companies are all too happy to do a capitalism and move office expenses into OpEx, to improve their return on capital by being a pure-play widget company instead of a hybrid widgets / real estate development and holding corporation.

Sure, there are some big sprawling HQs of the gigacorps who just can’t find enough space to rent otherwise, but that seems to be a minority of office employment to me?

The pundits say the economy is fine, and that the labor market is still really tight (but slackening gradually). They do note that economic sentiment is really, really bad, and it seems to be for non-economic reasons (residual inflation shock, mostly). Avoiding further inflation is the key reason that policy is leaning on the labor market at all.
Re:The sun's magnetic field is about to flip on Friday June 14, 2024 @06:40PM (#40685821)
With respect, 2/3 of the carbon dioxide out there is purely natural such that “icky” isn’t an appropriate foundation for the relevant public policy
“Free coffee”?

Look, if you’re going to allege corruption and votes for sale here, I think it’s a little more potent when you suggest he’s gotten better compensation than some “free coffee”

An exception? Like how the CFPB was created independently such that it didn’t answer to the president?

(Actual exceptions like this would violate separation-of-powers principles and typically get struck down.)

Some particularly weird parts of that have come when the protection of the union actively conflicts with other employer mandates, like hostile working environments — e.g. from 2015-2017 the NLRB went after Cooper Tire for firing an employee who had used racist slurs on the picket line
Re:Can large language models reason? on Thursday May 30, 2024 @12:51PM (#40525868)
Maybe you could train it explicitly on modus ponens et alia.
There’s a lot to say about the structure of health care, but the classic “Now” lecture isn’t it. Most people make key decisions about provisioning and paying for their health insurance months before they actually need it, and likewise establish relationships with a primary care physician or dentist at a quite ordinary level of urgency.

The vaccines are also a particular bad example. (The typical Now-lecture example is of emergency room care).

The Romans also used the March-based year; that’s why February has fewer days and why October is literally the eighth month
Re:Students invent quieter leaf blower on Thursday May 16, 2024 @09:18AM (#40378059)
Decibels are logarithmic; a 1 dB reduction in sound is ~26%.
A key benefit is that it might be able to perform follow up screenings that make sense for that type of cancer, rather than expecting absolutely everyone to take all the tests ever at the same rate, at significant inconvenience and expense.
Look, the other elephants start out the stork delivery scene declaring they’re part of “a proud race” and end it gossiping about “what would Mr. Jumbo think?!?” and “Jumbo? More like dumbo…”

We also see what happens to certain black men in the world, during “Song of the Roustabouts” (“when other folks have gone to bed / we slave until we’re almost dead,” “boss man hounding / keep on pounding / ‘grab that rope you hairy ape’”)

Afterwards we see the cruel and arbitrary nature of those who mock the poor kid, contrasted to the universal experience of family (“Baby mine don’t you cry”). Eventually the kid ends up with a bunch of (black) crows, including one Mr. “Jim Crow,” who make fun of him, before his buddy from Brooklyn calls them out on how people make fun of them for being different too, and they feel real bad; after finding friendship there, he earns social acceptance for his athletic feats (flight) and later through participation in the armed forces (“Dum-bombers for victory!!” read the newspapers.)

You sayin’ that this isn’t about race at all, and the whole storyline is just a coinkydink? Ha! Tell me another one. Disney’s been at this stuff for longer than your parents have been alive.

Do me a favor. Go back and rewatch Dumbo (1941) and prepare a few thoughts regarding its treatment of hot-button issues like miscegenation (hint: what kind of elephant has big ears?). Then, comment again on Disney’s recent discovery of “politics.”
No. It’s only efficient when property rights are enforced, barriers to entry are low, and transaction costs are minimal.

Wheelchairs are regulated (barriers to entry), pollution is the nonexistence of property rights, and your take-it-or-leave-it noncompete agreement is a consequence of high transaction costs (job search, legal negotiations).

Re:To Save It, Eat It on Thursday May 02, 2024 @04:55PM (#40241263)
Okay, I’ll eat it. I am sure it will be all flavorful and delicious.

But how do I get it, to eat?

Re:You can't just assume UTF-8 on Monday April 29, 2024 @07:01PM (#40205183)
To say nothing of mod_gzip
Re:Nvidia to Acquire Run:AI on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @05:32PM (#40149959)
Infiniband is a network too…

But even if we set that aside you’ll get access to your data over a network connection because these are expensive nodes running batch jobs with finite disk space, not personal workstations.

Not sure if those are spectacularly crowdsourced like the others unless you count “crawlers”. (Is Waze somehow super crowdsourced? Idk much about it. Either way it’s just a top three.)
Re:Tinygrad: Hacked 4090 driver to enable P2P on Friday April 12, 2024 @09:01AM (#40012114)
> ... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed

One question for you. In this hypothetical where AGI is truly considered such a grave threat, do you believe the reaction to this threat will be similar to, or substantially gentler than, the reaction to threats we face today like “terrorism” and “drugs”? And, if similar: do you believe suspected drug labs get a court order before the state resorts to a police raid?

> I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal.

Well, as regards EliY and airstrikes, I’m more projecting my internal attitude that it is utterly unserious, rather than seriously engaging with whether or not it is odious. But in earnest: if you are proposing a policy that involves air strikes on data centers, you should understand what countries have data centers, and you should understand that this policy risks escalation into a much broader conflict. And if you’re proposing a policy in which conflict between nuclear superpowers is a very plausible outcome — potentially incurring the loss of billions of lives and degradation of the earth’s environment — you really should be able to reason about why people might reasonably think that your proposal is deranged, even if you happen to think it justified by an even greater threat. Failure to understand these concerns will not aid you in overcoming deep skepticism.

Re:I Lost Faith in Kagi on Friday April 12, 2024 @08:39AM (#40011901)
> What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts.

Spending a third of your round on t-shirt manufacturing equipment is possibly not the best sign of the focused leadership that will bring your company success in a difficult market.

Re:Tinygrad: Hacked 4090 driver to enable P2P on Friday April 12, 2024 @07:48AM (#40011489)
> In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed.

Good point. He was only (“only”) really calling for international cooperation and literal air strikes against big datacenters that weren’t cooperating. This would presumably be more of a no-knock raid, breaching your door with a battering ram and throwing tear gas at the wee hours of the morning ;) or maybe a small extraterritorial drone through your window

Re:Tinygrad: Hacked 4090 driver to enable P2P on Friday April 12, 2024 @07:04AM (#40011253)
Mere raids from the authorities? I thought EliY was out there proposing airstrikes.

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