owenversteeg

4 ms·

1.
by owenversteeg 26d ago
I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless. >So, what of the two cultures today? Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Th
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by owenversteeg 1mo ago
It's because we have open primaries in the US - registering as a Democrat or Republican is only important as far as voting in primaries. In other countries the selection of candidates is internal to the political parties themselves. Th
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by owenversteeg 2mo ago
Wow. I contributed to Reveal.js years ago… some features, some bug fixes, some broader browser support; nothing too crazy but it took time and energy and effort, and now Opus makes its own, just as a side item in a larger project… That’s a
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by owenversteeg 2mo ago
A counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture - and also a counterexample to “AI will never be smarter than humans.” Even the most dyed-in-the-wool AI hater at this point must acknowledge that it is more intelligent than any human. The other
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by owenversteeg 3mo ago
For those saying "disable all cellular radios", I don't recommend that; you would be in violation of European laws. To quote a previous comment of mine about a similar EU-mandated safety system: The EU-wide "911 eCall&qu
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by owenversteeg 3mo ago
This, like the linked article by the same author ("America Doesn't Have the Stomach for Growth") raises a few interesting points but doesn't have a strong central thesis. If I could summarize this article, the main thrus
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by owenversteeg 3mo ago
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo ) and here is OP's selected transcript: If I asked you about art
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by owenversteeg 3mo ago
I have made this comment on HN many times [0] now but: it's the goddamn sunlight. Sunlight has many pathways in the body, and increased vitamin D levels are just one of those pathways. Swallowing one element of a many-element pathway c
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by owenversteeg 4mo ago
I think the strongest example by far is nuclear power. We could have used it for everything from energy to warfare to transport to space exploration, and instead we limited our use because the societal costs were too high. Unlike the other
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by owenversteeg 4mo ago
The US isn't a monolith and neither is Europe. Overall, yes, the US uses more chlorine than Europe, but Spain and France both have _minimum_ water chlorination levels (about 0.2-0.3 mg/L depending on the regional situation) and Fr
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by owenversteeg 4mo ago
The US is a huge country. In general it has excellent water; the US averages better than the EU. The Environmental Performance Index is a report that measures many things, and they have a handy section where they measure DALYs lost from san
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by owenversteeg 4mo ago
I've accidentally made one of these; I broke X on an old thinkpad with Arch and never bothered to fix it. The problem for me is getting myself to actually use it. Most of the time, it sits there gathering dust. If anyone has tips for t
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by owenversteeg 5mo ago
Oh come on. Weed use and addiction has absolutely surged since legalization everywhere I'm aware of - US states, Canada, other countries etc. Use everywhere / anytime / as a part of daily life has been completely normalized,
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by owenversteeg 6mo ago
Hi Liz, I appreciate you coming here to comment, and the modifications to the article. I also appreciate the public documents. Looking at the differences between the M5 Macbook Pro vs E14 Gen 7 I still don't quite feel that the scoring
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by owenversteeg 6mo ago
Thank you for the interesting comment. I think that determining a leader is usually far more clear cut. The EU and its bureaucratic-media apparatus love to find abstractions and subjective ways to discuss and measure things, but in reality
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
The issue is very complex. First - broad generalization - Europe's surviving industry is mostly made of less critical industries. If you look at important things in the world, and the important things that make up or make those importa
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
I agree that the government should ensure low energy prices for industry, but Taiwan is a remarkably poor example. Taiwan's energy policy is, as far as I know, the most pants-on-head stupid of any country in the world. As anyone knows,
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
You’re welcome. It’s a real shame IMO. I used to be a huge Lenovo guy, until the quality of the products dropped off a cliff a decade and change ago. Disappointing to see that instead of making a better product they decided to pay iFixit to
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
Yikes. Has iFixit jumped the shark? An AI generated press release on behalf of Lenovo, who is (from my perspective) essentially paying them for good PR? And this paid relationship - Lenovo paying iFixit - isn’t disclosed until the very last
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
Of course, in that sketch, David is right!
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
I haven’t looked into this specific case, but most of the time the limiting factor is other traffic. You’re not traveling at full speed the whole time. If a lower speed adds 10 minutes to the average trip, but it reduces 9 minutes’ worth of
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
This is certainly a good thing, but for all the Americans self-flagellating in the comments, it is mostly because Helsinki is wealthy, tiny (600k people), and doesn’t drive that much - mostly because of its high population density. Compare
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
Huh, interesting. I started forcing myself to start and end the day without the internet, and the very first and last parts without computers/phones entirely. I can't emphasize the benefits enough - to sleep, mood, productivity et
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
That idea - using an audio recording of how you did the process/complex thing - is a great one. I have done it a few times in the past and it is perfect because it's very low effort and easy to get out a "stream of consciousn
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
Interesting. In New Hampshire and Vermont they seem to be mostly fine (if usually full of very bland romance books.) In the Netherlands there is a broader selection of books in my experience but they are more often vandalized / emptied
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
That sounds like murder to me. I couldn't believe that and thought you must have been misrepresenting the facts. Nope, your summary is correct; the full case is there, in black and white, on page 22 of the Ontario Solicitor General&#x2
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
>I have the opposite reaction to your historical energy figures - energy consumption is clearly not as important to technological progress as we imagine. If there's only a 4x difference between the Founding Fathers and B29s carrying
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by owenversteeg 7mo ago
>2x ultra-marathons >26 miles, or at least 5 marathons completed Yes, and it seems like it's really a 7.5x risk increase. Still pretty spectacular, though! I really wonder what could cause that. Randomly throwing out possible cau
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by owenversteeg 8mo ago
The land use issue is the main reason why we still need moonshot research into things like fusion. As a species we have always been limited by the cost of energy. I was shocked when I learned that world energy consumption was ~13 exajoules
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by owenversteeg 8mo ago
There are a few interesting points in the comments here. The pro case for getting rid of frameworks: they're bulky, complex, there are security holes, updates to keep up with, things keep changing. LLMs can write you something perfectl

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