somnic · HackerTrans

3 maanden geledendiscuss

I can understand the frustration with giving away this tool to companies with poorer security practices than their importance warrants, same as frustrations with bailouts. It means they don't really face the full consequences of underinvestment in security. Not to say it's a bad idea, but it does feel unjust.

somnic

8 maanden geledendiscuss

YouTube is not hosting and serving uncompressed video so the apt comparison is not "compression" to "no compression" rather than "fancy experimental compression" to "tried and true compression."

somnic

8 maanden geledendiscuss

I think I heard it was a bit more than that - you'd buy them online direct, blind, and be informed immediately after purchase what it was you'd actually bought, so bringing in the immediacy and "convenience" of online gambling/gacha/etc. too, compared to ordering a mystery box and opening it when it was delivered, or buying foil packs of trading cards where you need to actually be present at a particular location.

somnic

vorig jaardiscuss

Someone getting forced out of their home in exchange for a few million dollars isn't exactly the most tragic story out there, and increasing tax revenue to pay for better amenities is hardly a bad thing by my reckoning. The aforementioned rich people are a bit less richer, because now they're paying those rates.

Most plans to implement LVT at scale that I've seen include provisions to increase the rate slowly over years and decades, and allow deferred payments for the elderly upon sale or from their estate because yeah, a lot of people made plans to retire based on the present tax regime. Younger people saving for retirement can plan on putting retirement savings into productive assets rather than land speculation. I'm also not entirely clear on why a pension that pays for everything except housing is fine, but providing housing for the elderly is a problematic level of state intervention.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Yeah, USB-C is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to knowing what a given cable can actually do.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Or just any normal proctored exam?

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I've seen a few people use a soft inflatable or plush collar that's more flat, and doesn't go up around the face, instead of an actual cone. That way the cat's the whiskers aren't disturbed while still preventing the cat from worsening wounds by licking. At least some cats seem to be a lot more tolerant of that style.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

If you say "no, we're not pursuing this feature because it's impossible" and users have used other software that implements the feature to a reasonable degree of functionality, you're not doing yourself any favours in terms of shutting down demands. You'd be better off either not giving a reason at all, or giving reasons that are clearer to people who aren't as knowledgable.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

The choice not to implement it for architectural reasons is entirely up to the devs, is likely justified, and in most cases users acting entitled to support and feature additions from OSS developers who are volunteering their time is something I side against. But the devs also should be able to talk to people who aren't marinated in that same viewpoint, for their own sake if nothing else. The leap from "there exist cases where implementing this feature in a performant manner wouldn't be feasible" to "we shouldn't implement this feature even for the many cases that would support it" isn't going to be obvious to everyone.

VLC's poor performance in seeking backwards in general, not just by frame, is a big part of why it's no longer my media player of choice. Which is fine! As an OSS project there's no real reason to care about the number of users as long as enough people are involved to sustain the project, and making the developer experience pleasant is more important than making the user experience pleasant on that front. It just means it's not as good a tool for some users as others, like mpv.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Okay, how do moral hazard (as defined here), information asymmetry, and monopoly not apply to public health systems as well? Point 5 here is a little under-explained, how exactly does demand for healthcare reduce supply and why can public systems cope with that while private ones fail? And which aspects of medicine are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, aside from herd immunity? From what I can tell vaccines tend to be subsidized by the govt. in the US anyway, which doesn't require overhauling the entire healthcare system to rectify.

I'm quite pleased to live in a country with a decent public healthcare system. It does indeed have some significant benefits. It still has half the problems on your list, and more besides.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Prik nam pla is great. Thin garlic slices are a good addition.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

For the vast majority of files, whether those are executables, config files, or libraries, nix doesn't just put them in standard locations for Linux systems, but instead puts them in /nix/store/ with a directory derived from a hash of all its inputs and dependencies. For example, I have mpv in the nix store at /nix/store/08a907bw4csdc44408a992lnc9v2802c-mpv-0.38.0 and this has the default config, the binaries, completions, libraries, etc.

Since the directory is titled based on the hash of the various inputs that go into building the package, when I run an upgrade it's not going to overwrite the old version of mpv, but instead it's going to put the new version in the nix store as well, at a different directory. Until you collect garbage, to clear out the old versions of things you're not using any more, nothing is deleted.

So while you can add and delete entries to the nix store, each entry itself is read-only once it's been built, and thus immutable.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

For managing your configuration.nix file itself you can just use whichever VCS you want, it's a text file that describes one system configuration and managing multiple versions and snapshots within that configuration file is out of scope.

For the system itself, each time you run "nixos-rebuild switch" it builds a system out of your configuration.nix, including an activation script which sets environment variables and symlinks and stops and starts services and so on, adds this new system to the grub menu, and runs the activation script. It specifically doesn't delete any of your old stuff from the nix store or grub menu, including all your older versions of packages, and your old activation scripts. So if your new system is borked you can just boot into a previous one.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

As I understand it, large studies of couples where one partner has HIV with an undetectable viral load and the other does not have HIV have not recorded any cases of transmission through sexual activity. The question of whether it's "impossible" or "extremely unlikely" comes down more to philosophy than anything pragmatic at this point.

Transmission through sharing needles we have less confidence around, because illegal drug use is harder to study.

IIRC not everyone reaches an undetectable viral load through antiretroviral medication, so you do need to make sure that's the case. Pre-exposure prophylaxis and general safe sex practices like condoms can mitigate the risk for people with low-but-detectable viral load and their partners.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I'm curious how you're using the word "eusocial" here, because I've only heard it used to describe the structure of bee or ant (or naked mole rat) colonies.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

If I recall correctly, what's happening here is that a property is valued at a particular level based on the rent, and the owner can borrow against that to make other investments. Demand drops, and lower rents would affect the valuation of the property, the owner wouldn't be eligible to borrow as much against it any more and may not have the liquidity to readjust things. So it's more profitable and secure to keep the rents at a higher, but vacant, level. It kind of suggests the solution here is more regular and rigorous revaluations of property, or limits on how much it can be leveraged.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I think coordinating the norms of a foraging troupe all with a similar understanding of their environment and society through individual action is a little more tractable than coordinating the norms of an economy consisting of millions of people with wildly varying levels specialization and knowledge.

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I admit I'm a bit confused by the reward function, as given it seems to provide the same score independent of correctness due to the squaring? And I think even if that's a mistake and it's supposed to be negative for incorrect answers, a policy that optimizes for that reward is to output 1 for anything with less than a 50% chance of being true and 10 for anything over 50%. Is that how RL is typically done?

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

[flagged]

somnic

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I have to assume that someone has run a trial on training these models to output answers to factual questions along with numerical probabilities, using a loss function based on a proper scoring rule of the output probabilities, and it didn't work well. That's an obvious starting point, right? All the "safety" stuff uses methods other than next-token prediction.

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