HN user

quirkot

958 karma

Experiments in humor are sometimes failures. I used to work at a snowflake library.

Posts6
Comments309
View on HN

Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves.

That's the horror buried underneath all the tech, policy, and gloss. The real, animal brain, desire that drives most of this is: I'd like a slave I don't have to feel bad about.

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

Europe has about 60,000 tons of nuclear waste storage[1], so lets say the global nuclear waste quantity is 2-3x or 120,000 to 180,000 tons. That sounds like a lot, however it's less than 2 weeks of coal deliveries to a coal plant (at 1 train of 115 cars each with 116 tons of coal = 13,340 tons delivered per day[2]). To take another approach, the average landfill size is 600 acres[3].

The "eh, just bury it" approach is really not a bad one. Its not even that much stuff to bury

[1] https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16651

[3] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-la...

If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence

Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.

Gotta keep in mind that "you control what you can destroy" was expressed as the crux of a single-planet guerrilla group's maximalist negotiation strategy with an interstellar government, where the destruction was of the ability to travel between the stars. It's not a coherent theory of control outside of the razor thin application of "I'm willing to accept pain as long it hurts you much more." It is not a control that builds stability and infrastructure, it is the control of base extortion

do children have personalities if we left them in a dark room with no interactions with other humans?

Short answer: yes. generally speaking, personality traits range between 30% to 60% heritable

regarding #2: how many serfs came home after re-digging the toilet hole to eat a meal of hand-milled grain bread and old vegetables with the members of the family that survived infancy and thought "life just doesn't get any better than this"? Probably almost all of them

Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.

Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow

Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic

the issue brought up in the article isn't that "the algorithm is biased" but that "the algorithm causes bias". A feed could perfectly alternate between position A and position B and show no bias at all, but still select more incendiary content on topic A and drive bias towards or away from it.

> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

Yes, absolutely. 29 separate overlapping settings likely match up precisely to arguments in various APIs that are used. On the other hand, what does local only even mean? No wifi? No hardwired connection? LAN only? Connection to the internet for system updates but not marketplace? Something else? All with a specified outcome that requires different implementation depending on hardware version and needs to be tweaked everytime dependencies change.