dlcarrier · HackerLangs

vor 29 Minutendiscuss

Hacker News is the one page that hasn't assumed I'm a bot, yet.

At this rate, we'll need to use bots to browse the web for us, because they're the only way to get through the anti-bot filters.

dlcarrier

vor 31 Minutendiscuss

There's a farmers market near me (about an hour and a half east of San Francisco) that used to take EBT but compliance was too difficult, so now they don't. It's not one of those preppy organic-only farmers market, but actually sells whatever produce is currently in season and in surplus, so it's half the price of even discount grocery stores.

EBT could go a lot further there, but the regulations weren't really written to work with dozens of short-term vendors, instead of a corporate contact.

dlcarrier

vor 3 Stundendiscuss

The entire media industry uses tactics like that, and has for ages. They probably only notice it with social media, because social media itself is new and different. More at 10:00, but really 10:50, because I'm going to make you stay up late watching a bunch of ads, before I tell you what'll be in tomorrows newspaper, anyway.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

Many fire departments in the US send bills, whether responding to medical emergencies or fires.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

    But when the judge asked him if he was pleading guilty, he responded: “I feel like I’m guilty.”

    Marrero told him it was not a question of what he felt, but whether he was guilty.

    “I’m guilty,” Guan responded.

That reads a lot like someone innocent taking a plea bargain, because it's cheaper and lower risk than pleading innocent.

In this case, it looks like the court wasn't questioning whether or not the funds he was handling were fraudulent, but whether or not he knew they were fraudulent, and that's much more subjective.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

They started early, publishing the paper that led to the LLM craze (https://research.google/pubs/attention-is-all-you-need/), and internally testing a model code named LaMDA (remember this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...?) but by the time they released it as Gemini, it was significantly under performing competitors, and became a bit of a laghing stock. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o)

That was probably their low, and they've been catching up especially as the field has plateaued. They're making contracts to host LLM services, so they don't seem to be giving up, and the longer the plateau lasts, the less they'll be behind, unless they are slow to migrate to whatever the next step is.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

I don't know why their ingredients are classified as Nova 4, or why the processing level is defined by ingredients, in the first place. Lasagna contains ricotta which is made from whey, and whey automatically makes something Nova 4. Many ancient Mayan dishes contain achiote seeds, also known as annatto, which also automatically makes something Nova 4.

Achiote seeds add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. This puts it in the Nova 4 ultra-processed foods category, ostensibly because the color can make food more attractive. This is as opposed saffron stigmas, used in some traditional European dishes, which add a bright red to yellow color, depending on the concentration, and add a mild earthy flavor. Why adding achiote makes something ultraprocessed and adding saffron doesn't isn't explained, but I wonder if there's a predilection toward traditional European foods.

The Nova classification only counts fresh fruits and vegetables as unprocessed, which is Nova 1, so almost all foods are processed foods, Nova 3, or processed ingredients, Nova 2.

I eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food, but the Nova classification system is so poorly done that it is meaningless. Even going off of actual levels of processing, instead of the ingredients, doesn't help much. One of the earliest processed foods, hominy, is much healthier than the unprocessed counterpart, and when Italians relied on polenta made from unprocessed corn, they became malnourished and suffered from pellagra, while those in America relying on the otherwise identical grits, made from hominy, weren't malnourished.

That's why I go off of actual research proving which ingredients are healthy based on the effects of adding them to or removing them from a diet that otherwise stays consistent in volume and calories, instead of the vibes-based categories the Nova classifications use, and the vague research showing that rich healthy people who exercise eat some things and poor unhealthy people who don't exercise eat other things, but never showing that eating some things actually makes you more healthy and eating other things actually makes you less healthy.

If similar levels of research into ultra-processed foods were applied to other statistics, they'd find that ice cream sales lead to drowning and owning a Ferrari makes you rich.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

    The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor's degree.

I've always found that especially interesting. My neighborhood is over 80 years old, never had a single developer build more than a dozen or two houses at a time, and still isn't fully built out, so there's a huge range of house sizes and incomes.

Bachelor's and master's degrees are significantly underrepresented in my neighborhood, but most of the big houses are owned by contractors and small business owners that never earned a bachelor's degree. They're also often immigrants or children of immigrants, usually from poor countries in Eastern Europe or Latin America. The smaller houses, on the other hand, are mostly owned by multi-generation American citizens with doctorate degrees who spent their whole career in comfortable 9-to-5 jobs that were never challenging but never offered much advancement and payed accordingly.

Spending a bunch of time in academia seems to be the low-risk low-reward path to a career, and it also seems to be the group of people complaining the most that a career path is never guaranteed.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

I worked with a Canadian who moved to the US. Her sister still lived in Canada, and they had the same congenital defect that could lead to a condition that required immediate back surgery.

They both ended up needing the surgery. When the sister in the US visited her doctor, and he noticed the condition, the first thing he asked was if she had eaten breakfast. If she hadn't, he could schedule the surgery for that day, otherwise he'd have to schedule it for the next morning.

When the sister in Canada had the same condition, her doctor scheduled the next available surgery, and prescribed bed rest until then. She could get out of bed to use the bathroom and bathe, but otherwise should be laying down until she had the surgery, because a small mishap could damage her spine and cause permanent paralysis. Despite the severe risk of injury and the extreme side effects of prolonged bed rest, it took six months to get the surgery. If she didn't have support of her family, she wouldn't have been able to afford waiting that long.

When a medical condition impacts your ability to work, traveling to the US to pay cash for the surgery may be cheaper than waiting. There's even an official Canadian web page with advice for traveling outside of Canada to get medical care (https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/health-safety/medical-care-o...) and it expressly lists bullet points of the benefits of doing so.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

Modern web browsers need modal overlay blockers. When advertisers started using pop-up windows, web browser quickly responded with pop-up window blockers. Advertisers switched to modal windows, which are even worse because you con't just switch back to the original window, and by that point Google dominated the web browser, and subsidized Firefox, its main competitor, so there was no incentive to do anything that could hurt advertisers.

I just want a warning that there's an overlay, with a button to show it anyway and another to automatically open each layer in separate tabs or windows, so I can turn them back into pop-up windows and deal with them accordingly.

Also, I love the "Nordstjernen Now!" badge. Is there going to be an animated GIF version?

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

It's been proven (https://ics.uci.edu/2023/08/10/new-scientist-bots-are-better...). At this point, we should only respond to queries from users who have failed the captcha.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

    Do not use email for long back and forth…

I'd much rather something be a few email messages than a phone meeting.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

Go with "omege mega" it has a nice reduplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication) going on, like the Wiki Wiki Shuttle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Wiki_Shuttle) that Wikipedia was named after.

dlcarrier

gesterndiscuss

XFCE's Thunar doesn't natively handle compressed files, but I much prefer it to the bloat that is Dolphin. I'm surprised someone found a way to complain about Windows not being bloated enough.

dlcarrier

vorgesterndiscuss

It's worse than that.

It wouldn't take much time for her to publish it then move on to something that looks good on a resumé, but it could actively work against her if she published something that doesn't substantiate the status quo. If you get labeled a science denier, because you published a negative result for a politically-charged subject, even when you agree with the overall cause, it'll be nearly impossible to get a job in the field, even with a flawless resumé.

dlcarrier

vorgesterndiscuss

The late 1800's health craze centered around Battle Creek, Michigan has had long lasting cultural and dietary impact, but I think most people would still call it a fad, because the core tenants were only popular for a short time.

Besides, the breakfast cereal movement it created quickly devolved from the Kellogg's and Post's original healthy cereals, Corn Flakes and Grape Nuts respectively, into the sugar-laden craze of 1950's cereals. Even Graham crackers were healthy and bland at the time, but we now associate them with cinnamon and sugar.

dlcarrier

vorgesterndiscuss

Please tell me you give it an awesome pronunciation like "ohm, mega" or even better "omega mega", and not a boring pronunciation like "omega".

dlcarrier

vorgesterndiscuss

If someone comes out with a study that shows, all other things being equal, decreasing or increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods causes a respective increase or decrease in health, then I will rethink my stance.

Until then, I'll keep eating foods consisting of proven healthy ingredients, even if they are classified as Nova 4 ultra-processed, such as lasagna made using my great grandmother's recipe or ancient Mayan dishes like pavo con achiote and also cochinita pibil, while avoiding foods that are proven unhealthy despite the not-ultra-processed Nova 3 and lower status, like Cronuts, potato chips, and bacon cheeseburgers.

dlcarrier

vorgesterndiscuss

Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.

Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, because we wouldn't waste any time on entertainment.

dlcarrier

vor 3 Tagendiscuss

This would be even better if it used reserved characters instead of brackets, so you could also use it as a normal font. You could even use different characters to start different QR code sizes. E.g. type 'ctrl+shift+u 11 enter' to start the QR code and 'ctrl+shift+u 14 enter' to end it, but for larger QR codes enter 12 or 13, instead of 11. (Or maybe you'd need to change the end character, to select the QR code size.)

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