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toss1

8,084 karmajoined 11 năm trước
jim dot plunkett dot 321 gmail

Submissions

The inventor of the outside white stripes on roads

iflscience.com
1 points·by toss1·11 giờ trước·0 comments

China claims to have developed AI 'cyber nuclear weapon', matching Mythos

telegraph.co.uk
4 points·by toss1·16 ngày trước·2 comments

Self-destructing $2k Nvidia chips for distributed solar data ctrs in lampposts

techradar.com
3 points·by toss1·2 tháng trước·0 comments

Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage

sfist.com
88 points·by toss1·2 tháng trước·70 comments

[untitled]

1 points·by toss1·3 tháng trước·0 comments

Mercedes' Plan to Screw Car Headlights and More to Solve Repairability

carbuzz.com
1 points·by toss1·3 tháng trước·0 comments

YouTuber Turns $2k Wrecked Tesla into Wild Go-Kart – Then Tesla Shuts It Down

guessingheadlights.com
5 points·by toss1·3 tháng trước·2 comments

When the cost of verification exceeds the cost of trust

twitter.com
2 points·by toss1·3 tháng trước·0 comments

[untitled]

1 points·by toss1·4 tháng trước·0 comments

Source code of Swedish e-govt services from CGI's "E-plattform" has been leaked

twitter.com
3 points·by toss1·4 tháng trước·1 comments

Iran war sparks helium supply concerns for South Korea chip sector

asia.nikkei.com
10 points·by toss1·4 tháng trước·0 comments

Tesla FSD deteriorating "city miles to critical disengagement" 4,109 down to 809

twitter.com
6 points·by toss1·4 tháng trước·0 comments

A blog post by Anthropic about COBOL wiped $30B off IBM's market cap

heraldsun.com
2 points·by toss1·4 tháng trước·1 comments

Moderna Won't Run Any Phase III Vaccine Trials as Skepticism Grows in US

biospace.com
12 points·by toss1·5 tháng trước·4 comments

'The most anti-biking bill in history' – Iowa's near-total bike ban proposal

cyclingweekly.com
6 points·by toss1·5 tháng trước·0 comments

[untitled]

1 points·by toss1·5 tháng trước·0 comments

Was Vibe Coding a Ruse?

inc.com
22 points·by toss1·5 tháng trước·2 comments

Dutch rental fleet Mistergreen goes bankrupt after betting on Tesla self-driving

guessingheadlights.com
54 points·by toss1·7 tháng trước·19 comments

Ireland plans to make a $1,500 a month basic income for artists permanent

aol.com
10 points·by toss1·7 tháng trước·4 comments

Space debris, probably not coming to a backyard near you

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
3 points·by toss1·7 tháng trước·1 comments

comments

toss1
·Hôm kia·discuss
>>Driving alone kills far more people every year than disease spread by anti-vaxxers

That is a seriously dubious claim. Just for COVID, or Influenza, deaths from nonvaccination are well into six figures per year in heavy years. While most of those can be attributed to the non-vaxxed person themselves dying of their own ignorance or obstinance, they also more widely spread the disease and many of those deaths are innocent bustanders, either those who can not get vaccinations for actual medical reasons, or for whom it doesn't provide full immunity. Even at the 10% level, the deaths from each are comparable.

The solution for non-vaccination is also a LOT easier than the solution for not driving — implementing full vaccination protocol is a LOT easier and faster to do than building full public transport system covering the entire continent.

Moreover, even if it existing stats show driving with higher deaths, it is irrelevant — two things can be bad and we should fix both, not just dismiss one because there is another evil. Most critically, that is also PAST data, so using it is driving in the rear-view mirror. The effects of growing non-vaccination compound and grow exponentially. When the numbers cross, it is already too late.
toss1
·Hôm kia·discuss
No, those three things are NOT the same.

Exactly zero of those things you list also spread disease throughout the population, and are aggressively anti-science. They only arguably affect the person themselves and the overall HC costs.

Moreover, for the active items you listed: driving, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc., nearly everyone doing them takes real precautions to minimize the health risks — their motivation is to continue doing the event, not to get injuries which would prevent them enjoying their activity.

In the passive harms you mentioned, the people are passive, not active. No one intentionally becomes obese or sedentary or ruins their diet; they simply fail to have the motivation or to learn the knowledge required to do better (or they have actual conditions that prevent them from doing so). There is nothing intentional about it.

In contrast, the anti-science anti-vaxxers willfully maintain and aggressively spread their ignorance and impose their ignorant bad decisions as costs on society and increased health risks for everyone.

The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of taking safety-measures to improve health and safety of their activities — instead, they actively evade free, safe, and effective health and public health measures.

The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of passively failing to maintain their health — instead they actively deny science, medicine, and public health issues, and actively evade recommendations or mandates.

As the study illustrated, they are literally more stupid and anti-society than ants. They freeload off the health care system and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter peers.
toss1
·3 ngày trước·discuss
Exactly THIS!

I found an excellent way to avoid premature abstraction and optimization and to write better software in general was to explicitly consider v1.x a throw-away.

Build something expedient that works well enough to deploy in the field, get actual user feedback and system metrics (e.g., where are the actual bottlenecks). Do a few iterations on user feedback and system metrics. NOW, you are much further down the road to a true final spec, and you can use that real information to design the real system to scale up on.

One Test Is Worth A Thousand Opinions.

This plan first tests your ideas against the real world of users, hardware, and data flows, and keeps a lot of technical debt out of the scaling system.

I discovered it a bit by accident, having previously been really big on early abstraction and planning, but sort of having to do this in one startup, and it was a real eye-opener how well it worked.
toss1
·3 ngày trước·discuss
[flagged]
toss1
·4 ngày trước·discuss
Yup, did some digging on Tylenol/acetaminophen before I had some surgery, and it's a real danger. Oddly enough, it seems downing a whole bottle won't (usually) end your life as it gets mostly directly eliminated rather than metabolized, but taking just around 2-3X the high-strength dose sustained over 3-4 days can destroy your liver — at that point, you have about six weeks unless they find a new liver for you (obviously, there's wide variance in actual dosages and reactions, but that was the general median). For someone with serious acute pain, who doesn't know this hazard, it'd be pretty easy to self-medicate and load up and lose track...

OTOH Ibuprofein, doesn't have anything like that deadly profile, but enough gut and other issues.
toss1
·6 ngày trước·discuss
>>Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?

Hell NO!!

Ubiquitous on-the-ground lighting is already disrupting plant, animal, and insect life cycles.

Adding a blanketing sun reflector illuminating five-plus square kilometers at a time will obliterate critical signals to everything living there, and won't do any good for the humans.

And nevrermind the astronomy.

It is an abomination and nothing but a scheme by amoral people to separate other fools from their money.
toss1
·8 ngày trước·discuss
Same here; it's expensive to not be a crook at heart (at least short-run expensive. I think it is far better long-run) .
toss1
·8 ngày trước·discuss
Yup. All it will take is one juror who understands Jury Nullification [0,1], and they've got at best a hung jury mistrial...

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/jury_nullification

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
toss1
·8 ngày trước·discuss
Hence, the alleged action of Luigi Mangione.

If the law of the government doesn't catch up, eventually the law of the jungle will. But maybe not in their lifetimes.

As President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
toss1
·9 ngày trước·discuss
I used to make similar arguments.

But I also now look at actual results, and they are not merely late, they are far less than promised.

Globally competitive EV? Not against the Chinese competitors (Hint: it's why he plans to merge Tesla into SpaceX). Self-driving so good cars would be assets you could run your own self-driving Uber-like service (and customers paid a $10K upcharge for the ticket to do it next year)? NOPE, Tesla can't even do their own self-driving reliably. And whatever happened to the Tesla solar roofs? Can't get one.

Making a car company profitable enough to justify the insane multiples? NOPE, will never happen. But he's selling Tesla now on the Humanoid Robot "vision".

SpaceX did better on self-landing boosters, but they still have serious issues with scaling it up, and competitors are catching up.

But the physics of orbiting data centers make them not absolutely impossible, but very uneconomical. Every problem supposedly solved in space is easier and orders of magnitude cheaper to solve on the ground.

If you haven't yet noticed the pattern, Elon is always selling the next big hype wave. It is always the NEXT thing that will justify the insane multiples. If you want to buy and hype meme stocks on the next-greater-fool theory, good luck; you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.
toss1
·9 ngày trước·discuss
>>money and venture capital

Yes, this.

I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.

Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...

I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.

I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
toss1
·13 ngày trước·discuss
All true, but anyone putting up a site would need the bankroll to handle such a lawsuit through to winning, and then be able to collect on the SLAPP judgement (which the non-paying employer would likely have put up obstacles to collection). That's the big problem with lawsuits — you start out in a losing position just because of the cost to defend.

So a random individual without the bankroll to defend is likely vulnerable, and this is a libel suit, so unlike a copyright suit, you can't solve it just by taking it down. You posted the allegation, now you must defend it. Yes, the truth is an absolute defense against libel, but you still need to defend it that far (through pretrial motions, discovery, etc.). Even getting to file for a dismissal is likely to be $five-figures with a good attorney, and you NEED a good attny. OFC, if you have a good case, a good firm may take it on spec, but....

And of course, how do you know all the postings on your site are actually fully factual and not exaggerated in any way?

Because, any honest employer falsely accused would be rightly very pissed off.

Tough problem.
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market — precisely because it sells things at below market rates.

Free markets are where players compete on quality, efficiency, and supply. Prices are a result of cost and supply and provide real information on these factors. Competition for customers selects the most effective and efficient producer.

Sustained efforts of selling at a loss to gain market share is the exact opposite. The entire purpose is to corrupt the free market by sending false price signals which SUPPRESS free market competition and push market share to whoever can burn the most capital (whilst providing an actual service/product), not whoever is most efficient or highest quality or lowest actual price provider.

Uber and AirBnB are better examples of your "selling at a loss to gain market share", where they burned capital to undercut prices for close to a decade on falsely low pricing to destroy incumbents.

Spending on R&D while developing expensive technology is different and arguably very much a part of a free market, and is not what I was talking about.

Spending capital to steal your competitors' technology, and then spending more of it to make it available at below-market rates, is absolutely not a free-market activity.

Just because it is not stopped by someone enforcing a free market, does not make it a free market.
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market.
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
Nevermind government edicts & bans -- this seems like reason enough for them to require Know Their Customers, require ID, and shut of certain nations.

Failing to have done so seems to have allowed 25000 fake Chinese accounts to walk off with their product...

OFC I wouldn't trust the Chinese enough to ack their models the time of day, but Anthropic seems to have allowed far more ... yikes
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
Thanks for checking in, Captain Obvious! OF COURSE there are other sources of funding.

The point is if you have access to far greater scales of VC funds than most of us do, then build hard tech companies, not software, so you build a moat. You might note his company is named "Gigascale Capital"

So, sure, if YOU or I can access that capital, fine — availability is still scarce compared to access to AI to develop software, and you should build hard tech not software.
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
Yup, seems to be exactly the point.

Hard tech requires a lot of capital — money. He has the money. You and I don't have the money. So he won't find you or I competing with him. There's his moat.

If it just required clever use of AI to make a great company, that'd work. But you or I can also access the AI. And, just maybe, one of us finds a way to be a bit more clever than he is. Oops, there goes his moat...
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
The Stack Exchange poster seems to be confusing "State Of The Art" with "Best Practices".

Meanwhile, Wikipedia specifically calls out "Cutting Edge" as specifically synonymous with "SOTA" [0], Cambridge defines it as "the best and most modern of its type" with zero reference to general vs limited availability in the definition or any of it's numerous examples [1], and the same from Merriam-Webster [2].

Having studied and worked in multiple technology fields ranging from software to mechanical & aero engineering for four+ decades, your post is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone even try to make such a distinction between SOTA vs CE. I think it could be a very useful distinction if it were to get into common usage, but IME it is far closer to unique than common. The sibling comments to your assertions show pretty much the same thing - it would be useful, but it isn't common.

Promote it as common and you'll find pushback. Promote it as novel and useful, and it'll likely spread.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_art

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/state-of...

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/state%20of%20the%...
toss1
·16 ngày trước·discuss
A fine example of Goodhart's law: "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement."

Measuring open source contributions as a way to judge prospective employees used to be a good measurement.

Of course, prospective employees started to not only contribute to OS projects because it was good, but to make sure their contributions were high and noticeable — contributing not for the good of the project but for their own good, and now with amplification of AI 'contributions'.

So, measuring contributions to open source projects is now approximately worthless for evaluating prospective employees.
toss1
·17 ngày trước·discuss
It is not merely showing proof of age

It is using the proof of age requirement to require a much larger ask -- full proof of identity

Age verification could be done with any of a variety of mathematical systems showing you have a proven age-valid ID but not revealing your identity. But no one is suggesting they build and use such a system.