Symmetry

36 ms·

541.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Malaria was endemic in the US south of the Mason Dixon Line until the middle of the 20th century and it's had a huge effect on our history - from playing a part in the decimation of native populations to why slavery only took hold in s
542.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Yes. The word "contract" would be ambiguous between the people being infected with malaria in the US or them developing symptoms in the US after having been first infected while abroad. Using "acquire" doesn't pre
543.
by Symmetry 3y ago
I'd hope that services are mostly paid for by taxes or user fees rather than fines.
544.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Images are subject to copyright, which makes them different from facts about the world which aren't.
545.
by Symmetry 3y ago
I can imagine it, but not if there are intrusive adds.
546.
by Symmetry 3y ago
The current cost-plus model actually worked pretty well for a time. When it was first introduced defense contractors hadn't figured out how to use the rules to their advantage and really it's pretty counter intuitive for a busine
547.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Oh, yes. In terms of societal impact its far worse to pay people with valuable talents to not be productive than it would have been for the defense contractor to just pocket the money and pay it out as bonuses and dividends. But the syste
548.
by Symmetry 3y ago
A quote: >No one wants to be in the video clip as a stone-faced bureaucrat with no good answers, being yelled at by a righteous—or self-righteous—politician fighting the good fight on behalf of the aggrieved public. In front of the camer
549.
Culture eats policy(niskanencenter.org)
183 points by Symmetry 3y ago|61 comments
550.
by Symmetry 3y ago
See my first reply to the topic for more details, but over a decade ago I worked for Group 33 at Lincoln Labs and we considered trying to keep Boeing from overcharging the government too much to be an unwritten part of our mission. But the
551.
by Symmetry 3y ago
No. My understanding is that if its something the agency is buying from an external contractor that's too easy to get flagged in an audit and they use other sorts of expenses for shifting money to black projects. At least that's
552.
by Symmetry 3y ago
They see that it's stupid and they have all the same reason and common sense as anyone else. They just worry that if they don't follow the rules they'll go to jail.
553.
by Symmetry 3y ago
A few reasons. The US was very corrupt back before the Progressive Era and to clean that up in a hurry we got a bunch of very prescriptive rules around procurement that prevent the use of common sense and make bidding for government contra
554.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Most of it, probably. These sort of contracts operate on a cost plus basis where the profit margin that Boeing takes home is fixed ahead of time. I hear from people doing software for defense contractors that they spend a lot of time bein
555.
by Symmetry 3y ago
If you're not already in the business then hiring the talent to submit a conforming bid for the contract to deliver the trashcan will run you more than $40k.
556.
by Symmetry 3y ago
If you haven't worked in the government it can be hard to appreciate how many rules there are around procurement and how complex and sometimes crazy they are. At one project I worked on we used Red Hat enterprise Linux because the rul
557.
by Symmetry 3y ago
The lack of diff mode has been my biggest hangup in terms to trying helix out seriously. I'll keep an eye out for it to land.
558.
by Symmetry 3y ago
That was found to be black market vape cartridges using vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
559.
by Symmetry 3y ago
This is absolutely true for any subreddit that shows up on the front page but many subreddits with smaller user bases or draconian moderation policies (like /r/askhistorians) can have excellent quality.
560.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Perhaps GP meant that since desire is the root of suffering, that rather than desire that your server work and suffer and strive to return it to functionality, you could go outside and mediate on the grass until you relinquished your desire
561.
by Symmetry 3y ago
What excites me most about RISC-V is the ability to potentially experiment at a systems level. I love the Mill project and they have a ton of interesting and clever ideas but they're trying to innovate along so many dimensions at once
562.
by Symmetry 3y ago
I certainly wouldn't say that a traditional LLM is conscious. Once an input falls off of a LLM's input buffer it ceases to have any effect on its output, the exact same way that a subliminal stimuli's effects are limited in
563.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Scientific study of consciousness comes from ignoring our subjective impressions of our own consciousnesses, which might be illusory, and going only by what can be seen by other people. So you have experiments doing things like showing sub
564.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Ayn Rand was very down on charity. Someone giving money to a soup kitchen to make the lives of poor people better would be a "second hander" who let their self esteem get wrapped up in the lives of others. By contrast, it's
565.
AMD MI300 – Taming the Hype(semianalysis.com)
2 points by Symmetry 3y ago|0 comments
566.
by Symmetry 3y ago
How is that easier for law enforcement than just hacking the targets anyways? It's way more steps that can go wrong and way more people who could blab about your operation.
567.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Matthew Yglesias wrote a whole thing on how the idea initially became politicized in the US. The short of it was that when Trump was downplaying the danger of human-to-human transmission early on because his friend Xi told him that wasn&#x
568.
by Symmetry 3y ago
It really is very simple from a hardware standpoint. You have a little box in the execution unit with two regular inputs and one single bit input and one regular output. Once you have adds with carry you already have to have that structure
569.
by Symmetry 3y ago
It's obviously possible and people have done far more complicated things. It's all a question of much much you're willing to spend on the front end in terms of transistors and engineer-hours.
570.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Arguably the two most important features of RISC, for the modern era, were having regular instruction sizes leading to easier parallel decode and having at most one memory access per instruction making the combination of pipelining and prec

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