userabchn

The website of an American company returned a blank page to me. I thought that they must have made a mistake and that it would be fixed soon. Several days later it was still returning a blank page, so I sent them an email in case they didn't know. It turns out that they don't want to deal with the laws of other countries (EU's GDPR, etc.) and so simply return a blank page for anyone visiting from outside America. A "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" or some other type of explanation would have been less confusing than the blank page.

I maintain a package that provides some PyTorch operators that are written in C/C++/CUDA. I have tried various approaches over the years (including the ones endorsed by PyTorch), but the only solution I have found that seems to work flawlessly for everyone who uses it is to have no Python or PyTorch dependence in the compiled code, and to load the compiled libraries using ctypes. I use an old version of nvcc to compile the CUDA, use manylinux2014 for the Linux builds, and ask users to install PyTorch themselves before installing my package.

HN doesn't have a strong enough protection against bots, so foreign influence campaign bots with the goal of spreading negative sentiment about American technology companies are, I believe, very common here.

As I have gotten older, I have come to believe that the current voting age is already too young. I thought I was right about things when I was 18, but with more experience I realise how naive I was.

I use a 20 year old Dell laptop. The only problem for me is that 32bit is starting to become limiting.

My ugly solution to this problem is to have a free Oracle Cloud VM in the other country that I use to run a VPN (Oracle provides instructions [1]). I then connect to this using OpenVPN on my phone, which allows me have a Google account that thinks I am in the other country and so allows me to install apps that are restricted to that country. I don't have the VPN connected all the time - only when I want to access the App Store using the Google account that I have for the other country.

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/launching-your-own-...

I used to listen to Digitally Imported's Eurodance station a lot 10-15 years ago, but eventually it felt like I just kept hearing the same songs, that they never added any new music to it.

During my PhD at MIT my girlfriend asked me how I thought I would feel about those years in the future. I said relieved that it was over, as, although I loved everything about the place, I felt constant pressure. She knew me better than I knew myself, it seems, as it was obvious to her that I would in fact long to be able to return to that time. I'm sure part of the longing is just due to the fact that I was in my 20s, living in my own nice on-campus apartment, and was hopeful that I had a bright future. Many people probably have a longing to be 23 again for similar reasons. However I think that what makes the feeling especially strong for me is that being at MIT added a feeling of privilege to every day. It created a sense of fulfilment, that I had done everything right and had succeeded.

I don't think I could bear to visit now. The smell of the Infinite Corridor, the tunnels, Vassar Street, the Eastman Court trees in Autumn, or a warm summer evening by the Charles, would bring back memories that would be overwhelming.

I think many people underestimate the mental anguish caused by being ostracized by your former coworkers, and by the realization that, even after a lifetime of working hard, your career prospects are now in tatters.

there's a very loud minority of performative extremists with an army of sock puppet accounts who want to hunt down the snitch

The people running the bot armies for foreign influence operations probably do not care about hunting down the snitch, they are simply following orders to spread that message.

My suspicion is that this murder was organised by Russia as an attempt to normalise and encourage further vigilante actions, thereby weakening society. They chose their target well for this one, but I imagine, even after the shift it has caused in what is considered acceptable, there will be less widespread approval of future killings.

I wonder whether the murder, and the immediate strong social media reaction supporting it, were part of a foreign influence operation. Normalising the idea that murdering a CEO makes you a hero and that a large percentage of the population would react to a murder with a laughing emoji will be effective means of furthering division.

Spirit was pulling it off reasonably well until Covid.

Have there been any recent developments in "lab-grown wood"? The last time I looked into it there had been some research on it (also at MIT), but there didn't seem to have been any updates for a few years.

free Healthcare

It is not free for all.

I installed it a year or two ago but was disappointed by its identification abilities. Then it changed to require providing an email address so I deleted it.

The dental office where I used to get my teeth cleaned every six months did X-rays every time and then no one ever looked at them. If you went there for a checkup they required you to get another set done. I am quite certain that they just assumed everyone had dental insurance and it was effectively insurance fraud.

what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served?

Is there a reason for choosing those rather than the simpler alternative of the corporate income tax rate increasing progressively with revenue (as it does for individuals)?

I'm disappointed that it wasn't a single occupant, three-wheeled, ultra-basic microcar limited to 50 km/h to gather and scatter people from public transport stops, solving the last-mile problem.

The fever might help to fight infection, but I think sleeping well helps even more and fever-reducing drugs are useful for that

and then revealed that GPT-5 will not be released in this year's Dev Day (which goes on until November)

Interview with Mark Zuckerberg released today: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-07-23/mark-zucker...

The mayors of Houston for the past few decades have been Democrats.

In Indonesia there are 35k+ year old cave "paintings" of hand imprints, and apparently it is still a custom for some in the area to put their hand imprint on their house. It's probably in the same area where just today they announced finding the oldest cave painting: https://www.reuters.com/science/worlds-oldest-cave-painting-....

DAB has also effectively been abandoned in Ireland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_in_the_Republic_...)

CUDA of 18 years ago is very different to CUDA of today.

I've been writing CUDA since 2008 and it doesn't seem that different to me. They even still use some of the same graphics in the user guide.

I am an associate editor of a journal and I have suggested that the journal strongly encourage authors to pass their papers through an LLM before submitting if they think it might need it. A large fraction of the submissions we receive have terrible grammar and unnatural phrasing. The only options for editors are to reject or send out for review. Rejecting because of the grammar seems overly harsh, but I know that it is a lot more laborious to review a paper with bad grammar. The easiest fix seems to be to try to ensure that the grammar is reasonable before papers are submitted.

I wonder what we are going to do with all of the car parking that will become as obsolete as horse stables.

According to Zuckerman's book, the Medallion fund has to be small because it would move the market too much with the types of trades it does if it was bigger. That is why they limited investment in it. The publicly available funds use different types of trades where this is less of a problem, and so the funds can be larger, but this reduces the return.

I don't think it is for the same level of service provided. I have read that there are three substantial differences between medical care in the USA and in other countries: 1. More single-patient rooms 2. More surgical procedures performed in the final year of life 3. More obesity and that the difference in the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare can at least partially be explained by these.