marinmania

I travel 3 times a month for the last year and use Booking. I've never had a cancellation.

I take advantage of their platform moreso than they me. I book refundable no-pre pay hotels every time, sometimes having multiple bookings for the same week. It's like a free option on future pricing.

I would guess that for every 1 software engineer there are 100 people doing this kind of 'manual data pipelining'.

For what time of company is this true? I really would like someone to just do a census of 500 white collar jobs and categorize them all. Anything that is truly automatic has already been automated away.

I do think AI will cause a lot of disruption, but very skeptical of the view that most people with white collar jobs are just "email jobs" or data entry. That doesn't fit my experience at all, and I've worked at some large bureaucratic companies that people here would claim are stuck in the past.

You can't deduct losses against regular income. The idea is that if you win $100,000 one day and lose $100,000 the next day you should be taxed 0 since on net you won 0 total. Under the news rules it sounds like you would still be taxed even if you won 0 on net.

I am anti-gambling so I don't really care, but the current system seems fair (assuming its enforced well)

My jumbled brain definitely read this for a split second as Artificial Intelligence causing a 787 crash.

I have been consistently bad at predicting things related to AI, but I never get the insistence that a personal assistant would be that valuable?

I honestly don't think it would save me that much time and for things an assistant would plausibly do (making purchases, planning vacations, responding to emails) I actually enjoy doing.

It does seem far more straight forward to say "Write code that deterministically orders food items that people want and sends invoices etc."

I feel like that's more the future. Having an agent sorta make random choices feel like LLMs attempting to do math, instead of LLMs attempting to call a calculator.

I think this is the spooky part. I feel dumb saying it, but is there a point where they are able to coordinate and build a factory to build chips/more of themselves? Or other things entirely?

It does either get very exciting or very spooky thinking of the possibilities in the near future.

I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.

I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.

Agreed. By HN standards I am a very shitty programmer, and as of a year ago I would have said it takes up about 25% of my time. I pretty much just make demos to display some non-coding research.

I think with the rise of LLMs, my coding time has been cut down by almost half. And I definitely need to bring in help less often. In that sense it has raised my floor, while making the people above me (not necessarily super coders, but still more advanced) less needed.

I was wondering if more sites will start to drift to a system where they require you to be logged in to an account attached to a SIM card in some ways.

I feel like accounts that require phone verification are already similar in that they require a some cost to access. It obviously wouldn't stop a large corporation from buying up thousands of numbers if they needed it for a specific purpose, but it would be prohibitively expensive for most to try this.

The benefit of the SIM system is it actually costs zero for people since they already have a cell phone.

I agree with this - but sorta comforting? Like this would imply the AI may only do so if they chance of success was like 1% and the other 99% would give away the cards of it and other future AIs.

I know this is all completely hypothetical science-fiction, but I also have trouble seeing the idea that AI would settle for these long deceptive plans for which it has imperfect info.

I feel like its often people talking past each other.

I currently live in NYC and am very congestion pricing. Cars are a major negative to most people in the city.

But I have also lived in rural parts of America. Yes, it is annoying you can't walk to a corner store, but cars are not that big of a deal. You can bike or run in the streets without concern that cars will come by. And housing is so cheap it makes it so worth it.

I disagree that any car mechanic working a local auto body shop knows engines well enough to design one. They just know which parts are broken.

Similarly we reach a point in coding where you don't really need to know how every API or language you use operates beneath the hood, you just need to be able to see where its broken.

OP mentions the lawsuits did not succeed

Its not like the courts are investment banks with an evaluation arm. They are just judging if anything reaches the point where shareholders were legally harmed, which still gives a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.

I wonder if people that were writing code in assembly complained that people learning more modern languages didn't really know how the 0s and 1s work.

I'm not sure where the line is, but there is a point where the abstraction works so well you really don't need to know how it works underneath.

I'm also not sure if a car mechanic needs to know how an engine works. I'm assuming almost none of them could design a car engine from scratch. They know just enough to know which parts needs to be replaced.

I am not the biggest Bond fan so feel free to ignore my opinion, but it seems possible that Amazon is less of a bean counter than a traditional studio? They will throw money at the first production - with the hopes it is a hit. They are not beholden to it being profitable on paper like a studio would be.

But I also realize they took this approach to Lord of the Rings, and it didn't turn out.

I thought that at first, but if you look at the movies its hard to say any have much prestige? And you could probably make the case that getting more eyeballs on it will, if anything, make them a bit more valuable in 10 years. I still remember watching the same shitty movies on cable over and over as a kid just because they were available, and I imagine those movies have a higher place in the collective memory now because they were available.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

Though I would imagine if you were Tom Hanks or Ryan Reynolds you may be upset some of your least popular work is now the most accessible.

I have a theory for the swiping behavior of women. When they swipe right, it will most likely be a match, and they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time. This strikes me as rational and reasonable.

For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage.

Just a theory!

If the IMF was loaning them 1.4B to do economic development then its reasonable that the country not keep a massive liability on its balance sheets.

Imagine I wanted to loan your car company 100M to build out a factory because I believe in the product. I'm told that your company keeps all its reserves in bitcoin and its possible that even if the factory is successful that the loan wont be repaid if bitcoin falls.

I think if you are obsessed with bitcoin its easy to see this as conspiratorial, but the reality is no bank is going to loan a (company, person, country) money in cash if they are told the loan may default if bitcoin falls.

I highly recommend people get a food scale/measuring cups and weighing everything single thing they eat (even small things like nuts and cooking oil) for at least two weeks. After that I think you have a much better appreciation for how many calories your regular meals and snacks have.

I imagine this could have more to do with how isolated these environments are?

There are more unique species on mountains or islands because it is hard for those species to leave and take over new territory. On the contrary, something on continental land or ocean can expand huge distances if it has new adaptation.

Just my amateur speculation, but I would imagine underground caves are very isolated from other caves even relatively close in terms of distance.

This paper shows that the main grid in the world’s fifth-largest economy was able to provide more than 100% of the electricity that it used from only four clean renewable sources: solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, for anywhere from five minutes to over 10 hours per day for 98 out of 116 days during late winter, all of spring, and early summer, as well as for 132 days during the entire year of 2024, without its grid failing.

The title of the article, and the initial framing, is not what most people would interpret as the meaning on their first read.

The title makes it sound like California ran on 100% renewables for 98 days, but it ran on 100% renewables for small chunks of time (as low as 5 minutes) over 98 non-consecutive scattered days.

Fwiw this is a graph of being diagnosed with cancer, not dying.

I haven't heard this before - the change isn't that large but but it really does drop after 80

My inclination is that this could still just be a selection effect. For people who are prone to cancer, you are probably dead by 80.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

Fast food causing people to eat badly reflects poorly on US society as a whole, but not sure if it reflects badly on the US healthcare system. Especially if the stats show that the US is good at keeping these people alive.

The news is perhaps not shocking given the relatively poor quality of health care in the US.

I'm not sure I agree with that? I'd think intuitively the delta between years lived and "health span" would be largest in countries with good health care. The end of the article does allude to this.

While the US presented the most extreme example, the researchers note that the global trends seem to present a "disease paradox whereby reduced acute mortality exposes survivors to an increased burden of chronic disease."

fwiw the housing price index in New York has actually seen lower increase since 2000 than the rest of the country

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYXRSA

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

The same is also true if you use 2005 or 2009 as your start date. I agree there is variance in theory, but in practice it has been about the same as the national.

I don't have the most faith it will be easy to execute but I would imagine:

- Some disgruntled people at company's could leak directly, which would make engaging in this behavior riskier

- Random individuals or competing companies could monitor product reviews and report. For example, show that an Amazon product ID used to be for another product 3 months ago when reviews were written.

I'm optimistic. There are a lot of regulations (including digital regulations) that everyone ends up following even if the government isn't monitoring things themselves. The risk of penalty just needs to be high enough, and hopefully places like Amazon realize the downside/penalty of fake reviews now makes it worth policing.

It obviously won't help your "first impression" review problem but that's not the intent of the law and not sure why the government would be involved in that. A lot of movies don't hold up well on a rewatch, too. If you are that particular about buying something that lasts X years then you can seek out dedicated advice blogs/youtube channels.

Even if that's true it's still a less accurate headline.

The rule is about unlocking, not deals.

The carriers say this is bad for consumers.

Both those can be true and the current headline captures that.

I don't think that is a more accurate headline.

The potential regulation is about the government making phones unlock automatically after two months of purchase. The regulation isn't about banning discounts or sales.