logifail

5,700 karmajoined vor 8 Jahren

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Making Claude a chemist (NMR spectroscopy)

4 pointsby logifailletzten Monat0 comments

Ask HN: Is Gemini disclosing the last part of its system prompt?

2 pointsby logifailvor 4 Monaten0 comments

NASA's Artemis II rocket experienced interrupted flow of helium

2 pointsby logifailvor 5 Monaten1 comments

comments

vor 20 Stundendiscuss

> The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions

It's two votes, not one; the President and the rest of the Commission are confirmed separately. In this case there was a four month gap between the two votes!

VDL was confirmed by the Parliament on 16 July 2019, by 383 votes to 327 against, with 22 abstentions[0].

Her Commission was approved by the Parliament on 27 November 2019 by 461 votes to 157 against, with 89 abstentions[1].

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190711IP...

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191121IP...

vorgesterndiscuss

All the European Council's negotiations were private.

No public hearings, no public votes, not even any public parliamentary debates(!) about different candidates for the Commission. This is indeed "the EU way", trying to find compromise via party-family bargaining ... in private.

> All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.

The Parliament didn't actually get to vote on any of the other candidates, did they?

vorgesterndiscuss

> no need to bleed political capital

I'm not sure the EU needs to worry about political capital in the way that many national and regional governments do. Power moves through negotiations between institutions, party groups, lobbyists, activists, and heads of government rather than through anything voters can trace. If one is being unkind, it's basically backroom deals all the way down. Naturally, the EU has more respectable terms for this sort of thing, like "trilogue".

Look at how the President of the European Commission got her job in 2019 - there was an election campaign in which major parties presented lead candidates for the post and she wasn't one of them, then post-election - ta da - she's nominiated for the post and there's a confirmatory vote in the Parliament on which the ballot paper had precisely one name listed - hers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48853746

https://www.alamy.com/16-july-2019-france-france-straburg-a-...

vor 4 Tagendiscuss

In Germany you're not allowed to mow your lawn with a motorised mower or to recycle glass bottles on Sundays either.

"Banned" feels like a slightly clumsy word to use to describe restrictions such as these.

vor 4 Tagendiscuss

Playboy was never in school libraries either, basically because children aren't adults.

Isn't this basic curation and child protection, not censorship?

vor 5 Tagendiscuss

> It would make moderation impossible otherwise.

Why would you need to moderate private messages between users?

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

> It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine.

An expert in the field would appear to disagree:

Dr F: "the best vaccination is to get infected"

https://www.c-span.org/clip/washington-journal/user-clip-pre...

(00:50)

> however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important

Our family doctor said the opposite: "your antibody count is so high [from recent infection] there is no point you having a vaccine/booster".

<shrug> I listened to Dr F (2004) and to our family doctor. YMMV.

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

> A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop

The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination.

YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not.

Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation.

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

> Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it [..]

"Citation needed"...

Covid vaccination did not reliably or durably block SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially after Omicron and as immunity waned.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39971395/

  The overall VE [Vaccine Effectiveness] of the complete primary series against infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant was 70.7%. VE was lower for Omicron, at 26.1%, than for pre-Omicron strains, at 77.0%. Over time, VE against infection by any variant decreased from 68.9% to 38.9% after 6 months.

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

> the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger

Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid.

I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid.

I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better...

"Daddy, he's not poorly, he's just got Covid".

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

> It's a trade off but it's one that must be made

At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.

To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.

What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.

Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.

vor 16 Tagendiscuss

Hence the executives/boardmembers-all-fly-to-some-island (Jersey is the one in my mind), have board meeting in the airport, sign the papers, and all fly home?

Company stays "in" Jersey, none of the humans need to live there?

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

> The US system is built to support entrepreneurship while the EU system broadly is to support the consumer and employee

I disagree: the EU system broadly is there to support _the incumbants_

"Regulatory capture" is the less kind way to put it.

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

> The 25,000 is there to make sure you can cover some liability

I would suggest that this idea of a GmbH does not actually work the way you think it does. Maybe it once did, but not any more. For instance:

  Wirecard Technologies GmbH
  Wirecard Sales International Holding GmbH
  Wirecard Acquiring & Issuing GmbH
  Wirecard Acceptance Technologies GmbH

Much of the regulatory structures in Europe work this way, they assume that both good and bad guys will play by the same rules.

Spoiler: the bad guys don't care about the rules!

vor 20 Tagendiscuss

> This is just how the web works, and there is no easy around it without losing features people care about [...]

Well, apart from using a separate email address for every single "provider"?

(Spoiler: there's no way I'm going to sign into your service with a shared email ... you get <youservice>@<me>.com)

vor 23 Tagendiscuss

[flagged]

vor 24 Tagendiscuss

> PS> (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion').DisplayVersion > 24H2

I got no response to that command on my W10 box, turns out for older (eg LTSC) versions it appears to need:

  (Get-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion').ReleaseId
  1809

vor 30 Tagendiscuss

> For example, we bought a company, and over the next year or so doubled wages in that company. Our "social responsibility" in that case was to spend shareholder money so that workers had a living wage. That doesn't seem to be the story I hear about say Amazon. Yes, we've also spent money outside of those 3 groups. We contribute to charity.

I would suggest that there is also some degree of (subconscious?) expectation of higher wages meaning: staff would be happier/performance would be higher/staff retention would be better/absence would be lower.

You weren't just giving (shareholder) money away. You were trying to optimise your team.

letzten Monatdiscuss

> Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what?

A colleague of mine circulated "minutes" from a meeting last week, there were only three of us in the meeting (one external service provider, my colleague + me).

There were several items on the "minutes" which I didn't recall being discussed, so I asked him if he'd had AI help, he said AI was filling in the gaps based on its knowledge of other discussions he'd had with it.

Glorious.

letzten Monatdiscuss

> Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?

We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time.

Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years.

Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)