weswilson

قبل 11 شهرًاdiscuss

It may be good for the individual, but is it good for Argentina or LATAM as a whole?

I'm no economist, but wouldn't shifting transactions from their currency to another (USD/stablecoin) inherently destabilize their economy even more?

weswilson

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Obligatory video on splines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

From what I've read, Apple rounded corners are using G^2 or G^3 geometric continuity to generate smoother curves.

It's hard to tell which smoothing function this library uses since it looks like it's based on PNG masking.

weswilson

قبل سنتينdiscuss

There was an internal whitepaper written by a Boeing engineer back in 2001 that warns against the dangers of excessive outsourcing.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...

It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:

"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Anecdotally, my dad lives in a rural area with no cable/DSL broadband available.

Cellular broadband only got him 10-15 Mbps. He was excited when Starlink was available. I think he was pretty early on the preorder list. Once he finally got access to Starlink (Feb 2022) the speeds were close to the advertised ~100 Mbps.

Now the price has increased and on average he's back to getting like 15-20 Mbps down.

Luckily, the EMC that services the area received some rural broadband grant money to roll out FTTH and that build out has been pretty quick. They have already run fiber down his road and said that service should be available in a couple of months. The EMC is offering 2 Gbps down / 1-2 Gbps up (!!!) for $100/mo.

So this money is actually being spent effectively when it goes to the right place. Starlink made a bunch of promises that they couldn't fulfill and the money is being redirected, as it should be.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

On the medical side, there are knowledgebases that offer clinical decision support like UpToDate (https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/solutions/uptodate) that are kept up to date (pun intended) by specialists in their field. Every year or so, the articles are reviewed and updated with new information that has integrated into practice. For a relatively small fee, a practitioner has pretty much all access to the latest evidence-based standard of care across any specialty. UpToDate is also a commercial product. With a claimed 2+ million subscribers at roughly $200-500/yr, there is clearly money out there for a well made product.

In regards to the article, parsing academic publications and spitting out a word cloud or k-nn graphs of topics isn't going to be useful to a professional. They've already built up a working model in their mind that they've honed over the years. They have years of filtering information and the ones contributing to these knowledgebases have the experience to curate that information to professionals which is what's lacking from these NLP experiments.

I do think that ML and tools like SemanticScholar can be used to identify new literature that may affect knowledgebase articles and flag them for review. I'd be surprised if that doesn't already exists to some extent.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

There is an ECU flash at the dealership that supposedly fixes the parasitic battery drain. I've replaced my battery a couple of times, but haven't had an issue since the ECU flash.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Most of us here probably think of LARPing as fantasy-genre LARPing, but I think this is more pointed toward Mil-Sim LARPing.

These are hardcore airsoft guys who go buy comms, night-vision, IR, with airsoft weapons that function like real weapons. There are multi-day events with NATO vs RUS forces. Look up "milsim west" on Youtube and you can get a sense of it.

There's a good amount of folks that just like to have fun, but there is a subset that use it as a type of militia-esque training.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

On Reddit, someone said that even Carrefour is doing this with their own labeled products.

Seems like just a negotiation tactic against their suppliers versus doing something pro-consumer.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

There is a nonprofit that is trying to address this called Ameelio (https://www.ameelio.org/). They were hiring in the HN Who is Hiring thread. I don't know much about them, but it seems like they have some traction in a few states. Their voice call product says that it offers free voice calling, with all the monitoring/security features built in.

I hope these types of nonprofit tech companies succeed as they are not profit seeking off of the misery of other people.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I'd say it's a pretty good analogy, the details aren't perfect, but it gets the point across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfEX6GUxfZM

Here's an example of an arguably good builder who had one team install a in-wall tank toilet, then another team drills right through the tank causing a leak. The repair work essentially meant ripping out everything and doing it over, even though there should have been mitigations in place to prevent it and having the plans/documentation available to everyone.

While construction has more standardization, planning, and inspections, it still relies on implementation and is going to have failures.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Vox had a good video on why dialog sounds terrible in movies/shows these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8

It boils down to a combination of:

- Actors speaking naturally instead of projecting toward a microphone

- Smaller microphones

- Dynamic range - big explosions have to sound loud, so dialog gets pushed quieter

- Downmixing from Atmos to 7.1, 5.1, stereo, mono

- TV speakers have gotten smaller and mounted on the back due to thinner TV's (and also poor quality speakers on devices)

I guess the solution is to buy a surround sound system and hope it's good enough.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Reminds me of the Sniper in Mahwaw (https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/) posts about HFT and microwave towers.

I think this is the first in the series: https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my-ba...

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I second the Etymotic's earplugs suggestion. They are really great to have and pretty inexpensive. For around $20 you can get hearing protection that is great for cutting the grass, going to concerts, or just getting some peace and quiet around the house. Plus they're not the cheap disposable kind, so it's not a recurring purchase. You can just toss them in the carrying case and take them where you need them.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I feel like this is a big reason for people wanting to using ChatGPT (LLM's in general) for search results.

Search engine quality has declined due to ads/sponsored results and the adversarial nature of SEO driving the signal-to-noise ratio into the ground. So now people are using ChatGPT to lookup the information they'd normally use a search engine for but don't want to wade through the tens of sponsored posts to get to something useful.

The idea of LLM's taking over search is pretty gloomy to me, because it destroys the discoverability of unique information. Sites that have expert information often leads you down the rabbit hole and introduces you to new information. With LLM's you will get 'mean reverted' results and won't be introduced to that information that sparks curiosity.

On the other hand, it's pretty hard to find those nuggets with search engines these days. Years ago, you'd be able to just Google for the answer. Now you have to go to specific sites to search those knowledge bases.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

If you refactor the GetSalesAndUseTaxForState function to an async function, you can optimize it further with this:

    ConcurrentDictionary<string, double> taxMap = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, double>();

    await Task.WhenAll(migrantList
        .SelectMany(m => m.StatesTraversed)
        .Distinct()
        .Select(async s => taxMap.TryAdd(s, await GetSalesAndUseTaxForStateAsync(s))));

    migrantList.ForEach(mti => Console.WriteLine($"Total Relocation Fee: {mti.StatesTraversed.Sum(s => taxMap[s]) + mti.TotalMilesTravelled * .15}"));

This gets pretty close to negligible overhead. The above ran in 0.519s, including the .5s await time of the "API" call.

I just wanted to show that there's an optimized solution that is also more concise in C#.

weswilson

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

One term I've heard from HR was "Released to the industry."

I always wondered if that was focus grouped or something. It was definitely the running joke for a while.

weswilson

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

The author does sell it as a poster here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/windytan/works/31262230-the...

I'm actually surprised the link, company, and poster are all still valid/working 10 years later.

weswilson

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

The sound of dial-up explained:

https://oona.windytan.com/posters/dialup-final.png

from https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-picture...

weswilson

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

There are still plenty of middle men in insurance. There are Carriers, MGA's, Agency Networks/Aggregators, and Brokers.

Large insurance carriers (think Geico, etc) with enough market share (and captive agents) have the vertical integration that eliminates the middle men, but there is a whole world of insurance that most people don't realize each taking their cut.

weswilson

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Another more traditional approach, similar to concierge medicine, is executive medicine.

I think a lot of the big medical universities offer something like this:

https://www.emoryhealthcare.org/centers-programs/executive-h...

They have the connections and services available to do it all in-house and thus can make diagnosis' quicker.

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