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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
    They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

    My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.




  • Thank you for being uncertain. :) I mean that sincerely. Some people are too quick to dismiss doctors expertise, and some people are too eager to try to use medication to solve “boredom”. Trying to make sure you’re actually doing the right thing is great.

    Just remember: one of the effected things is executive function , or the ability to act deliberately and stay on task. You unfortunately see a trend of people who think “they don’t need medication, we just need to teach the better study skills/to focus/etc”, which is the one bit you can’t teach.
    And get them a bowl to put whatever that thing they keep misplacing in. They might not be able to remember where they put it, but they can learn to always put it in the bowl.


  • I got medicated as an adult, so I can’t directly share my experiences relating to your question.

    I wish I had been medicated at a younger age, since I can see so many problems I had in my life that were ultimately related to entirely unmanaged ADHD.
    I also turned out fine without it, things were just more difficult.

    Make sure you trust your pediatrician and that you’re on the same page as them. That’ll make it easier to feel confident that their advice is in line with your goals. They all have your kids best interest at heart, but there are different emphasis they can focus on which might not mesh with yours.

    Talk with your kid and see how they feel. They might not be old enough to fully articulate things, but you can try to get a feel for if they’re feeling volatile, struggling or things like that. Look at how they play alone and with others, and at how they engage with homework.

    Start slow, and work your way up.


  • It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

    The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
    The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

    Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
    We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

    Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

    As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.


  • … What?

    Your screenshot has the founder saying it’s reparable. It also has him telling someone with unreasonable expectations that they would be disappointed.

    If you literally take his comment out of context you can construe it as him saying they didn’t consider repairability or lifetime. But why wouldn’t you look at the context that’s right there?



  • Sure have!

    He told someone not to buy it if they expect more than five years without repairs. That person seemed to think spending more than $100 should get them a product that lasts a lifetime, and was irritated the founder said he thought it was pretty good that a piece of low cost consumer electronics made it five years before needing repairs.

    What part of that says to you that it’s not reparable or won’t last five years?




  • It reads to me like he’s saying that if you expect 5+ years without maintenance if it’s more than $100, you should look at a different product.
    The top comments are someone saying that after five years they needed to repair it due to battery failure, and the founder saying the repair process is the same.

    Five years is longer than the average lifespan of a liIon battery. Expecting to be able to skip repairs that long is unreasonable for a $150 product.

    It reads like the founder actually giving realistic expectations. A $150 product will likely need repairs to last longer than five years, and you’ll be disappointed if you expect otherwise.

    Can you point to a similar product that costs about as much that fits your criteria?



  • Yup. Violating IP licenses is a great reason to prevent it. According to current law, if they get Alice license for the book they should be able to use it how they want.
    I’m not permitted to pirate a book just because I only intend to read it and then give it back. AI shouldn’t be able to either if people can’t.

    Beyond that, we need to accept that might need to come up with new rules for new technology. There’s a lot of people, notably artists, who object to art they put on their website being used for training. Under current law if you make it publicly available, people can download it and use it on their computer as long as they don’t distribute it. That current law allows something we don’t want doesn’t mean we need to find a way to interpret current law as not allowing it, it just means we need new laws that say “fair use for people is not the same as fair use for AI training”.