saalweachter

6 ms·

31.
by saalweachter 3mo ago
I would also like to take a moment to evangelize against the notion that all politicians are crooks. Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned. "Everyone cheats" is somet
32.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
Also, even if you can't resist looking, not replying to every single person arguing against your position is a powerful tool on the internet. If you're right, or at least, not making a complete ass of yourself, chances are someo
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
What I find mildly interesting is how the older money (eg, the Koch brothers) spent decades creating the current environment (between deregulation on business, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and political ventures like the Federalist Society
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
If NYC lifts all its density restrictions, why do you need people commuting inward over a hundred mile radius?
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
You can sell scams -- LLMs may be dubious at many tasks, but they're probably good enough to use to write personalized email or texts convincing random people to send you money.
36.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
Is your suggestion "we should do the status quo, except the bridge and tunnel commuters should be confined to tiny high-rise enclaves clustered around train stations strung out over a hundred miles"?
37.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
I'm actually inclined to believe it was a typo for 10 mile radius.
38.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
Or, if you're scared of UBI: government work programs, like the good old Works Progress Administration. Tax, and hire millions of people for a good living wage to do things that either need to be done and aren't (infrastructure re
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
> Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. 100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget o
40.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
A professor I worked for in college was a big fan of how the US funding was fragmented, with some coming from the NSF, some from NIH, Energy Ag, each branch of the military... if one department had a loon in charge, the others would keep th
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
Eh, I think LLMs will stay a part of what comes next, it will just be used for language I/O instead of everything.
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
I don't even know that I would call it slowing down so much as constraining/focusing innovation. There's three basic paths for a company hit by this ruling to comply: 1. Stop showing users generated content. 2. Figure o
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
It's easy to look at a newly made garden, its flowers all freshly planted and its paths all neatly laid out, and think it finished, but once you see one that's been carefully maintained for decades and how its plants have matured
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
There's like three groups of developers you need: The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time; The architects, who take the prototypes and take the
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by saalweachter 4mo ago
My preferred fix is "corporations can't buy stock, their own or others".
46.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other
47.
by saalweachter 4mo ago
Fun fact! Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
Fun fact! During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared. NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
Eh, you're off by an order of magnitude or so on both ends. The iPhone 17 has like 8 gb, the Pixel 10 12. The original iPhone was 128mb, and the iPhone 6 from 2016-2018 was around 1gb; that puts the iPhone at around 8x RAM per decade,
50.
by saalweachter 5mo ago
So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?" For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property do
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt , the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you. Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and expe
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
It's just that in the US, there are 3.6 million babies born each year; even taking the low-end of a $500k one-time payment to one parent, you're already talking a $1.8 trillion / year program, slightly larger than Social Secu
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
I've dealt with two kinds of landlords. The good one(s) acted like their job was providing the service of housing. They had a budget and paid themselves a salary, and if there was money left in the repair budget at the end of the year
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
> If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't. Where does the money come from?
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
The primary feathers of a bird's wing are anchored to the bird's "hand bones". In modern birds these bones are kind of grown together into a big lump, but the outermost five primaries are attached to the five fingers, o
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
> Features are often defined by committee members who may not use modern C++ in their daily workflows, leaving it entirely up to the individual implementations to catch up. Eh, all of the committee members I've known are obsessed wi
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
For the US to institute a language standard, we'd first have to agree on an official language at the federal level.
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by saalweachter 5mo ago
There's a tier of quality that's just fine... as long as you don't move it much, either from home to home or just rearranging too much. If you do, then the unglued joints decay and it becomes wobblier and wobblier.

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