memen

Micro plastics pollution is a relatively new problem and thus many direct and indirect effects are not yet fully understood. Moving emissions from CO2 (gas) to micro particles (solid), means emissions will be deposited more local to roads. Moving emissions from 'big oil' installations to the road, means more local emissions/deposits nearer to your home and backyard.

Additionally, due to the fourth power law [0], you only need 20% weight increase to obtain a 2x road wear. Asphalt/concrete production is also accompanied with substantial emission, although progress is made to reduce it [1].

Is there a break-even for weight vs emission reduction? And if so, is it somewhere between personal and cargo vehicles or is it 'EV always better'?

Are we trading 'well-known and bad for global environment'-emission for 'poorly-understood and possibly very bad for local environment on a global scale'-emission?

Of course, with the available information EVs seem to be the better solution, but it should not prevent us from researching/solving unknown effects or being careful choosing a single solution on such a large scale.

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

[1] https://www.pbl.nl/uploads/default/downloads/pbl-2022-decarb...

Is that true? EV have much higher emissions of micro plastics and pfas (or variations thereof) due to increased tier degradation. EVs are typically way heavier than similar ICE due to the batteries and combined with the higher torques, tires wear faster.

Modern ICE cars have auto start/stop systems, so on a traffic light it has as much exhaust as an EV.

I think finding and transporting 170 million migrants in 2 weeks to replace the bottom 50% would be quite the engineering challenge if at all possible.

0% productivity improvement.

Rephrasing the question: By what percentage has AI changed your input quality?

Answer would be around -50%. This is attributed mostly to the vast amount of search results that are AI generated and provide very low density information and miss conveying actual key learning points. This means you have to scan through 100% more text to finally get the information you need to solve the issue. I think this is a low estimate actually.

The chemical dependence is quite a factor in the psychological process you refer to. It nudges and reinforces this psychological behaviour. You can broaden the definition to include addiction without chemical dependence, but it does not mean you can omit the chemical dependence factor from the equation.

This chemical dependence is often the number one reason people cannot physically stop their psychological process. Potential effects from quitting include simply dying, or with less strong chemical dependence, feeling anxiety or generally ill.

why use a SQLite abstraction library when I can use LLMs to interact directly with the C source code?

Because of the accumulated knowledge in these abstraction layers and because of the abstraction itself resulting in readable and maintainable code.

Yes you can move the abstraction one level up, but you don't control it if you nor the LLM meet the level of accumulated knowledge that is embedded in this abstraction. Let alone future contributors to your codebase.

Of course it is all depending on context and there is no one-fits-all strategy here.

This implies that you need to have a lot in common in order to be friends. Maybe alcohol shows that you actually do not need to have a lot in common, just having fun together is the common. You might need alcohol once in your life to realize it, but alcohol is definitely not required to experience it.

(b) HN commenters who consistently dismiss any and all criticism of "AI"

I do not really get the same vibe from 'HN commenters'. The way I repeatedly see it presented is, it is a language model (very good at that) and nothing more than that. If with AI we are talking about ChatGPT and alike. Other AI is often cracked as 'just' very advanced machine learning, reinforced learning etc. In general, HN commenters' seem to be very sceptical or realistic about 'AI' at least in my perception. Of course there may be exceptions (in both commenters and threads).

There are problems where understanding one level below the abstractions indeed leads to better solutions. However, I would argue that for a large set of problems, this is not the case. I think being aware of the abstraction (at multiple levels) would lead you to choose the right abstraction level for solving the problem. Of course, apart from school assignments, these abstraction levels are never given with a certain problem, so the more you know, the better you'll be able to see it.

I'd rather cross at a roundabout than at a crosswalk somewhere along a straight road. Actually, last week I got almost run over in such a situation. A bus stopped for the crosswalk, blinked lights to indicate he'd seen me. I start to cross, and at the same time a van overtakes the bus at 'normal' speed and almost running me over as I could not see the van behind the bus, and the van could not see me. This would not have been possible at a roundabout as all traffic is slow and overtaking is not possible.

In the Netherlands it is very common to have both crosswalks and bike priority lanes on the roundabout, especially in busy city environments. This actually improves safety, as the 'vulnerable' road users cross when drivers are driving slow and alert. Also, the access to the roundabout is slowed down by the crosswalks and bike lane, which improves safety for the drivers as well.

It's funny how the Run Coaching is placed in the middle of the roundabout!

Avoidant behaviour does not solve the actual problem. To each their own, but I think trying to address the issue and learn from it to better deal with these situations in the future is much more constructive than to abandon or limit all future coworker interaction. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Very nice!

Note for the creator: 2nd and 3rd Guides result in 404 [0,1].

[0] https://hi.events/docs/guides/customizing-event-homepages

[1] https://hi.events/docs/guides/registering-an-account

It's precisely the other way around. Cost of bureaucracy is easy to measure, abuse is not measurable (only caught abuse). Nevertheless, the point is that it is difficult to compare a known cost to an unknown cost, so that still stands.

People are risk averse, so a known cost is preferable, even if expectedly higher than dealing with abuse. This is in part why insurance is so profitable.

Interesting! Do you have sources/studies that show this?

It may differ in your country, but here in the Netherlands there is just a shortage of supply, not a shortage of demand. All these services have massive waiting lists, so there will be ten others for each person 'leaving the system'.

I think it is just a risk calculation. How much does a lawsuit for 'wrongful termination of a life' cost vs how much does it cost to have a 'wrongful continuation of a life' and how often is it expected to occur within a given time period and given a set of safeguards. Then you choose the safeguards such that your expected cost is as low as possible. Doctors are only there to fill in the checklist.

Misleading title. Original title:

"The rise in reported maternal mortality rates in the US is largely due to a change in measurement"

The original title may be too long, but it is very misleading to leave the "reported" and "maternal" Keywords out of it. A better title would be:

"A tickbox doubled the reported US maternal mortality rates"

But why not simply shorten the original title:

"Reported US maternal mortality rates rise due to measurement change"

Yes, that was what I understood as their point. My point is that it isn't that big of an effect, and also partially discrediting the people involved by saying they only think about money.

You say none of your activities got you a job offer, but did you get anyone else a job offer or did you create/pointed out opportunities for others? Maybe trying to do that helps in finding ways to be on the receiving end of such opportunities.

There's of course money involved too: the elder care home she's in gets a hefty rent each month. And so does the doctor.

Leaving this out might make your argument stronger. At least in Europe, there is no shortage of elder people that can be cared for. Most of these elder care homes have long waiting lists, and normal doctors have waiting lists as well. I think it would be more fair to say that it is an incredibly difficult decision to make as an 'outsider', and combined with how the law works with respect to death and liability, procedures and strictness with regards to euthanasia are not that strange.

There is no guarantee the cure will be cheap or even cheaper compared to the current situation. Not to mention the increase in other medical conditions that are bound to occur in the added years of life and add to the total medical bill.

Also, note that this investment money is directly related to the number of working hours. All those people working on a cure in labs etc. will have a very different experience in life compared to those same people earning the same money for caring for their fellow humans. It is not a purely financial weighing.

Is there older data somewhere too? Would be interesting to see from 1950s upwards!

I never really understood this line of thought. Corporate interests _are_ citizen interests right? Those corporations are made up of (a lot) of people, and if those corporate systems thrive in a certain condition, then the people within these corporate systems will largely want to maintain or create those conditions. Those citizens do vote as well, and from personal experience, a lot of people vote in their own interest rather than national or moral interest. From research, I could not find conclusive numbers regarding altruistic [0] vs self-interested voting rates.

The more people are working for these corporations, the more we create and sustain the conditions that hold these systems in place. Whether that is 'good' is another debate.

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

Warranty is not the same as reasonable expected lifetime. Under warranty, the burden of proof is at the manufacturers side. The 2 years is typical for electric appliances, but it is from jurisprudence only. The law actually states that it should last as long as can reasonably expected. Intentionally vague, but yes, I would expect an oven to last longer than 2 years!

In fact, we should be able to build ovens that last a lifetime. And not only ovens, there are many appliances and gear that can easily be made to last a lifetime, except for some wearing parts. However, many companies that did this were competed to bankruptcy by cheap low quality competing products.

With the abundance of low(er) quality products, we tend to expect a shorter lifetime.

Proof that it does not work is still an interesting result! However, I think you meant to say that if you failed to show that it works, it often also means you cannot proof that it doesn't work. And then you indeed have nothing worth publishing.

Have you run a model on how many mutations are required for sustained transfer? (I have).

Interesting! Can you share some reads on that?

I think it is the same as with cars. Introducing cars improves the access times of a lot of things, but as a result, supermarkets, hospitals etc. are now more sparsely distributed than ever. Everyone has a car anyways, so it makes sense to increase the actual distance.

Same goes for internet access. Every bank used to have offices with customer service in every small village. Now only some of the larger cities have an office if you're lucky. We make things as accessible as we need it to be, so reducing time to access does not necessarily improve the situation in all perspectives.

I see you do woodworking as well, ever tried to make cases for electronics from (ply)wood?