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arjie

8,708 karmajoined 13 वर्ष पहले
Roshan George

[email protected]

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/roshangeorge; my proof: https://keybase.io/roshangeorge/sigs/6EQyu7jh7oa-KjkTAQBoJJ61fE2RBiZ546abgZc6zsM ]

Blog: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog

I use https://overmod.org to manage highlight/block

comments

arjie
·4 घंटे पहले·discuss
Impressive photographs, especially the ones on the ground. It is no wonder that they capitulated soon after the second one. The statistical reality of the war must have been frightening but the visual impact must have been overwhelming. To stare up at a pillar of cloud representing an unprecedented form of destruction that ends cities in a single bomb. Terrifying.
arjie
·4 घंटे पहले·discuss
What a pity. Mostly I just want personal archives of things so that I can search them much faster than commercial solutions and the like.
arjie
·4 घंटे पहले·discuss
Boy it's going to be exciting when we can get Internet access literally everywhere. Excited for humanity's return to space infrastructure!
arjie
·6 घंटे पहले·discuss
It's just local NYC news. Thinks are landmark to them that are often commonplace elsewhere which makes sense since millions call that place home that are not acquainted with other places. It is truly America's one megacity so that sort of puffery is expected.

The advent of dumpsters was similarly hailed there, though almost no other cities in the US throw their trash on the sidewalk.
arjie
·8 घंटे पहले·discuss
> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.

Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.

"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
arjie
·कल·discuss
You’re right. The cost of the service not matching the direct cost is something we’re familiar with - that’s just fixed cost and entirely normal (happens with books, movies, etc).

This just happens to be the case where you must transport people but most people are net losses. In this scenario, the only surviving companies would be those who charge the remainder sufficient enough that the blended population of clients causes a net pay-in. Everyone who doesn’t account for that will just go out of business.

Being available constantly could be helped with a retainer, it’s true, but even with that we should expect that some patients pay a lot if they’re rarer than the loss-makers.
arjie
·कल·discuss
When we named our daughter, we decided to ensure that she’d have a simple FirstName LastName with no middle name. My wife’s middle name is frequently stapled onto her first and it causes no end of pain.

There is some affordance available for representing various family members: her Chinese name can easily have different characters for them that have nothing to do with her actual name.
arjie
·कल·discuss
The ambulance that billed me in San Francisco after my accident was run by San Francisco Fire Department.
arjie
·कल·discuss
You don't have to pay them unless they're specific. I got a bill 3 years after being in an accident and I asked them for the documentation they legally have to provide me (itemization, the legal basis, detailed incident record, attempts on their part to contact insurance) of how they arrived at the sum. It's been a year since and they haven't given me anything.

Besides this kind of billing is banned in California now https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billHistoryClient.x...

The insurers just pay the in-network fee and you call it a day.
arjie
·कल·discuss
That's true, but it's bipartisan policy. The Trump admin obviously is fighting wind, though solar is just too useful to be able to be stopped even by them. But it's also popular among environmentalists to fight solar projects https://v2.courthousenews.com/greens-fight-mojave-desert-sol...

And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...

So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.
arjie
·कल·discuss
I think Elon Musk would have happily built gas turbines on high-rises if we let him build them in the middle of the city to power those electric cars. I don't think that's a good idea, though.
arjie
·कल·discuss
Oh wow, I didn't know engines provided that much functionality. Thank you.
arjie
·कल·discuss
This is a 1 person job?! It looks practically photorealistic. That's absolutely wild.
arjie
·कल·discuss
As in, "what makes you think you were audited?". They sent me paperwork saying they were reviewing my return and that they found a discrepancy (the disability thing) and it took many months after the usual time for it to process.

If you mean "for what reason could you have been audited?" it was because a client I had previously worked for accidentally reported paying me as an individual instead of my LLC.
arjie
·कल·discuss
I just have a folder on my computer where I keep things in beancount. Then I have mercury CLI access with a read token to my business bank account, and I have my emails fully synced in there as well via IMAP. Claude Code with Opus just seamlessly hooks everything up so my accounts are up to date. At the end of the year, I used that information to prepare my tax returns for the business and then later the part that flowed to me as the owner.

I had a fairly complicated tax return in 2025 involving a couple of change of business tax consideration and some money that was accidentally sent to me as a 1099 instead of to the business and I did everything with tax software with Claude Code advising.

The end result was pretty damned good. I was unsurprisingly audited (or at least carefully reviewed) and the only error was in some way where I allocated a small amount of my wife's tax-free disability payments (disability is the mechanism that California uses to provide maternal benefits pay protection; she's not actually disabled). The IRS told me about it, I paid that bit (it was meant to be claimed back from the employer, not the US government) and everything was hunky dory. To be honest, the sum was so small I did not investigate (and haven't yet followed up with getting reimbursed by her employer).

Honestly, almost all of it could have been avoided if I'd paid an accountant and a tax lawyer and they'd told me things and I'd done as they did, but in the end the combination of the fact that the IRS is very reasonable when you explain things and a modern agent means that the entire process was quite simple. In the end, I preferred the interactive mechanism of working with software because most accountants and lawyers will prefer to get all of your documentation all at once and then work on it rather than do it incrementally. In my case, I was able to work on the return incrementally and then have everything plugged in. I could ask a bunch of questions and get clarification.

I think I will probably do all this the same way this year (though of course my taxes will be simpler).
arjie
·कल·discuss
Yeah it’s like shoving the top of a double pendulum. You will get some movement in one direction, but where it will precisely land is hard to predict. The water-use argument is already earning refinement by differentiating “AI datacenters” from “normal datacenters” in an effort to control the movement.

I imagine any populism movement will require rampant fearmongering to get a result. Considering the rough present alignments, presumably blue tribe focused propaganda will involve climate and inequality focused fear and red tribe focused propaganda will involve job loss. Grey tribe positioning is the P(doom) meme where everyone is rewarded for a high-P(doom) estimate.
arjie
·कल·discuss
They do, and I want to encourage them to do so because they think through talking. What I don’t want to do is spend time reading all that.

We will probably just get reader-side affordances for this like auto-folded justification and introduction sections and so on.

Doubtless some chat interface will add this the way they’ve added reasoning folding.
arjie
·कल·discuss
If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do.

As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a distributed coordinated way) is the populist misinformer. Fascinating.
arjie
·परसों·discuss
Wikipedia is just some kind of tertiary aggregator of source information. It's true that it's got a blue tribe slant to many articles where it's not relevant, but that's sort of regional. Indian articles have their own very-different flavour and all that. Anyway, here's the WP that canvassing for got him banned for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...

I don't see it now but I could have sworn he said that the climate change article should have more information on how it is contested. Personally, I don't think that's reasonable because it wouldn't accurately summarize the state of knowledge and reputable sources around the subject.

I chafe as much as anyone about overly propagandist texts in Wikipedia (and I've deleted or edited a fair few) but the climate change article seems overall fine. It's not slanted or anything. I'm sure one could interpret "intellectual diversity" to include outright nonsense but I don't think there's much point to it. In any case, considering he has the Citizendium project and has only sporadically contributed to Wikipedia over the last two decades, I don't get why he's back here.

For some reason, back in 2025 he decided to archive his previous user page describing his resignation in 2002[1] and start this Wikiproject and do not much else.

I don't know, man. At some point, one no longer retains any authority as founder. The whole thing just seems like some kind of culture war nonsense.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Larry_Sanger...
arjie
·परसों·discuss
Well known Internet group phenomenon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy