He’s very good.

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  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Your scenario 1 is the actual danger. It’s not that AI will outsmart us and kill us. It’s that AI will trick us into trusting them with more responsibility than the AI can responsibly handle, to disastrous results.

    It could be small scale, low stakes stuff, like an AI designing a menu that humans blindly cook. Or it could be higher stakes stuff that actually does things like affect election results, crashes financial markets, causes a military to target the wrong house, etc. The danger has always been that humans will act on the information provided by a malfunctioning AI, not that AI and technology will be a closed loop with no humans involved.


  • to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode

    The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.

    an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance

    I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.


  • It makes them look weak and pitiful

    To whom? Are we even the intended audience here?

    Reporting over the last 10 years has shown that Xi Jinping has been obsessed with the idea of “color revolutions,” whereby popular movements from within a nation’s population overthrow the ruling apparatus. Rightly or wrongly, the current CCP sees revolution from within being the most dangerous threat on their power, so much of what they do is best understood as being aimed at stifling that kind of movement.




  • After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.

    The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.

    I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.

    A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.


  • Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.

    But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don’t think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn’t quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he’d been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.

    So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.




  • If construction is delayed by an injunction

    Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).

    And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.

    The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.

    Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.




  • And the comment-section on those type of post isn’t the right place for a “philosophical” discussions that would otherwise be on topic for that sub/community, but exactly align with topic of that post or news article.

    Can you explain why you believe this? I’ve always understood deep dives into the topic or context or general issues raised by an article to be fair game, whether we’re talking the comments on the news article itself, a link on Reddit, a link on Hacker News, a link on a vBulletin/phpBB forum, or even old newsgroup/listserv discussions.

    Reddit’s decision to start allowing “self” posts that were only links back to the comments thread itself (showing just how link-centered the design of reddit originally was, that every post had to have a link to something) came after the discussions around links became robust enough to support comments-first threads.



  • Where I am, electricity is pretty cheap, but natural gas is tremendously cheaper per jule… so we can actually pay less by using the “inefficient” fuel for our home.

    Most of the push towards rapid adoption of heat pumps is happening in Europe, where geopolitical developments (to put it mildly) caused gas prices to spike last winter. The nature of the natural gas logistics means that different continents can have wildly different prices (unlike petroleum, where you can always throw it on a ship and send it from where it’s cheap to where it’s expensive), so a lot of European countries are seeing these debates play out against the backdrop of their own energy markets. Germany passed a law this year that would phase out new gas furnace installations, so that’s why a lot of the debate is happening with a focus on German markets.

    Whether (or how quickly) a transition to heat pumps pays for itself in euros will depend a lot on what happens in the future to gas and electricity prices.


  • Bundling things together is good when it reduces friction for the consumer, but bad when it reduces choice for the consumer. Every decision about bundling needs to be understood from that perspective, and evaluated on a case by case basis against that tradeoff.

    That loss of choice is especially anti-consumer when a provider leverages a dominant market position in one product to push their own inferior version of a totally different product. For example, right now there’s a competition for consumer cloud storage. But none of the providers are actually competing on cloud storage features or pricing. All of them are competing based on bundling with the other totally unrelated products provided by that competitor:

    • Apple pushes iCloud by giving it first party advantage on all Apple devices, with system and OS integration that the other cloud providers aren’t allowed to match.
    • Google pushes Google Drive by using that storage space as part of the quota for Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Workspace.
    • Microsoft pushes OneDrive as an add-on to its dominant position in Microsoft Office and Exchange, and gives it first party integration into Windows.
    • Adobe pushes Adobe Cloud as an add-on to its dominant position in its suite of apps
    • Amazon gives cloud storage to people who subscribe to, like, 2-day shipping and a TV streaming service and discounts at Whole Foods, in what is probably the most absurd bundle of them all.

    And you see it everywhere. YouTube tries to protect its inferior Music service by bundling it with ad-free videos, Samsung put the inferior Bixby assistant on its phones, Google uses its dominance in browser, search, and maps to protect its advertising business, Apple gives its credit card preferential treatment in its payment app, etc.

    So when a service protects its own affiliated service through unfair/preferential treatment, it harms the consumer by making the entire bundle less useful than a bunch of independent services, each competing to be the best at that one specific thing.