paultopia

6 ms·

31.
by paultopia 9mo ago
Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obvio
32.
by paultopia 10mo ago
As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions. Yes, lots of businesses have
33.
by paultopia 10mo ago
A justification for lying to poor people about the prices of things they're trying to buy? Do tell.
34.
by paultopia 10mo ago
At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.
35.
by paultopia 11mo ago
It’s been too long since something like this has happened. Kudos.
36.
by paultopia 11mo ago
Interesting—-just a couple of days ago, I actually figured out my new favorite prompt, which was “find me reviews for X by established publications as opposed to SEO-driven content farms”—-seems to work reasonably well to cut out the first
37.
by paultopia 1y ago
Hah I still have some Zip disks sitting in a drawer, completely unreadable
38.
by paultopia 1y ago
I have to shamelessly show off my personal webpage, which is designed to be a rough emulation of how I remember palm OS looking back in the day, at least when you load it on a phone. https://gowder.io --- took me way too long t
39.
by paultopia 1y ago
Now that Pebble is coming back why not bring Palm back too? I miss my circa 1999 PalmPilot so bad. I even had a gigantic ugly wireless modem for it that I used to check e-mail.
40.
by paultopia 1y ago
The differences in disk size and software needed to access the Hawking material is typical of the early floppy disk era. "There wasn't one system that dominated the market," Talboom explains. "It was a bit of a wild wes
41.
by paultopia 1y ago
... so does this mean that the rest of us will one day be able to buy the previous model for some price less than your firstborn??
42.
by paultopia 1y ago
I’m an academic—LLM-detectors can pry the em dashes from my cold dead hands.
43.
by paultopia 1y ago
I think this may already be happening in job applications---companies using AI to parse them, applicants surely by now using AI to spew them out at increasing volume...
44.
by paultopia 1y ago
Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your em
45.
by paultopia 1y ago
How about don't instead
46.
by paultopia 1y ago
“Why I still believe in HP”… why would anyone still believe in HP? How many decades has it been since they’ve produced a good product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP. I’ll be it’s bottom-of-the-market windows laptops
47.
by paultopia 2y ago
Cooking would suck a lot less if physicists who cared about clarity and precision wrote recipes.
48.
by paultopia 2y ago
This matches my experience perfectly. As someone who is technically skilled but has no particular security expertise, I've tried to gradually implement passkeys where available across the most important and frequently used of my accou
49.
by paultopia 2y ago
Yeah I've always thought that the point of much of the design was to have obvious places to put machine guns to mow down protesters.
50.
by paultopia 2y ago
The image generator in 18.2 is... honestly kinda pitiful. It doesn't seem to be able to achieve images that match two-sentence descriptions.
51.
by paultopia 2y ago
auto insurance definitely isn't a scam. it's not to protect the policyholder, it's to protect the people who the policyholder might run over.
52.
by paultopia 2y ago
This is the sort of thing that a decent corporate lawyer ought to be able to handle. Obviously not giving legal advice to anyone's specific situation here (and I don't have a current bar card, though I am a law professor), but ge
53.
by paultopia 2y ago
Can someone please explain why Apple doesn't just buy Masimo in a fight like this? Their market cap is like 5% of Apple's annual profit...
54.
by paultopia 2y ago
EXCITING! Can't wait to give it a spin! (Does `let` work? I remember that being a barrier for a while.)
55.
by paultopia 2y ago
WTF
56.
by paultopia 2y ago
I love me an overengineered resume. I've been hacking on my academic cv as part of my personal website for years and years, with unholy stuff like live TeX libraries downloaded in the midst of a netlify CI process. Still needs some w
57.
by paultopia 2y ago
This is a fantastic essay. As a professor, I routinely work with students on research and writing projects where they're suffering under the common misimpression that they need to know everything they intend to say before writing a si
58.
by paultopia 2y ago
Why does anyone ever give Google money for anything at this point?
59.
by paultopia 3y ago
It seems pretty clearly implied from his Starbucks example: these rates are negotiated (at least with big merchants). Presumably, for example, Starbucks is willing to pay higher interchange on the Chase sapphire series than on the Chase fre
60.
by paultopia 3y ago
This seems like a really good idea to me. Or at least cap overages at a specified amount, like 2x the free level (a $55 surprise bill is a totally different universe from a $100,000 surprise bill, obviously). Honestly, this terrifies me---

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