BeautifulMind

BeautifulMind , 1 month ago

While on the one hand I can agree there's a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it's so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on 'control them' as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong?
Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn't a trivial ask, and it shouldn't be undertaken lightly.

BeautifulMind , 2 months ago

It's not so bad once you've got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

BeautifulMind , 3 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

...sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

...all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors 'fiscal discipline' leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

BeautifulMind , 3 months ago

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

BeautifulMind , 3 months ago

...you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you're claiming that "the production processes" (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that's plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren't equivalent inputs, and you don't need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified "production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products" and that's not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

Welp. It's time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

Is there a possible way that both the NYT and OpenAI could lose?

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

"We're tracking you for your privacy 🙄

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

For those of you who haven't been in a school bus in years, do you remember how loud they are?
Reducing diesel pollution is a win, but being in a less-noisy environment for however long each day is also a win.

As a cyclist and occasional user of public transit, I really like the idea of most buses eventually being at least plug-in hybrid-electric if not entirely battery electric. I'm curious about the mass difference between a diesel, diesel-electric, and battery-electric bus (after all, the heavier the vehicle, the harder it is on the road). I expect some of the fuel-and-maintenance-cost-savings from the bus fleet will have to go to road maintenance in the end, but I'd rather spend money that way (locally) than spend it on pumping fresh hot carbon out of foreign wellheads

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

I grew up and rode the bus to school in Iowa.

I rode the bus in Alaska. The buses ran well below -50f. It turns out that it's not that hard to keep your batteries and oilpans heated if you bother putting plug-in heaters (literally, electric blankets for the purpose) in your fleet vehicles, winterize your vehicles, and plug them in when it's cold.

I get that it's uncommon to be that cold-prepared in places that don't expect to see temperatures below -20 for more than a few days in a given calendar year- at some point, it makes sense to just call it off when it's that cold. After all, do all (or even most of) the kids have proper clothes to deal with real cold?

Really cold weather can be adapted to, it's just that when you don't need it that often it makes sense not to spend the resources doing it.

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

The main thing is that electric is the same way,

No, the larger point is that it's a struggle to make diesel work at +20F if you don't do the things to make it work, and yet these things can be made to work reliably at -50F. The obstacle isn't the limitations of the technology, it's whether or not the cost curve makes sense. Electric can be made to work cheaply, if it's important to you that it work- just like it's possible to make that diesel turn over at -50F

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

Ok, that's fair.
The point I wanted to make upthread was that these sorts of impossible things are regularly made to work when making it work is worthwhile. Most of the 'but this is a limitation of the technology' talk here (about how EVs can't work in the cold, etc) is defeatist bullshit that ignores that really if you want it to work it can be made to work

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago

What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren't based on large LLMs like ChatGPT.
My read: they're thinking it's time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack