33MHz-i486 (u/33MHz-i486)

33MHz-i486 commented on Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors nytimes.com/2025/09/05/te... · Posted by u/acomjean

jimmaswell · 4 months ago

> It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation

And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on purpose, and started using tech that made them more accountable to these things as well as harder for them to racially profile passengers. (They would infamously pretend not to see you if they didn't want to give you service back when you had to hail them with an IRL gesture instead of an app..)

33MHz-i486 · 4 months ago

i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

33MHz-i486 commented on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups thriftytraveler.com/news/... · Posted by u/_tqr3

n8cpdx · 7 months ago

Traveling solo is already brutal because hotels and Airbnbs are priced on the assumption of two travelers.

Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging, and it kind of sucks there’s a double whammy with airfare where, unlike lodging, the penalty doesn’t actually make any sense.

I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?

33MHz-i486 · 7 months ago

kids dont make any income. a weekend trip for 4 in the same timezone costs us $3k to 5k. a cross country trip is 10-20k.

DINK > Solo >> anything else

33MHz-i486 commented on Buffett to step down following six-decade run atop Berkshire bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

photochemsyn · 8 months ago

If the US government really wanted to bring back industrial manufacturing, tax policy is one obvious route - eg a 2/3 tax on billionaire and corporate wealth, such as on the huge pile of cash Buffet-Berkshire is sitting on, but then offer a way out - invest that cash in domestic manufacturing and R & D and it won't be taxed.

This could motivate the private sector to go back to the Bell Labs model, too.

33MHz-i486 · 8 months ago

that doesnt really work if they have to compete on price with foreign producers that have lower labor costs, looser environmental regulations, deeper supply chains and better process knowledge. might as well eat the tax (waiting for monopolistic opportunities) or light the money on fire

33MHz-i486 commented on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed scientificamerican.com/po... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

DFHippie · a year ago

> a department within his purview

That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive branch department was created by the legislature, it is up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding how its resources are to be used, its employees treated, the executive is not free to disregard those laws.

The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not the executive. The irony is that the Republicans control the legislature as well. They could pass laws to achieve what Musk wants. It would be slow, but it would be legal.

A coup is seizing power outside the legal mechanism for doing so.

33MHz-i486 · a year ago

we were talking about operational access to the payment system. you are conflating the situation at USAID which may or may not by illegal, idk.

the legislative branch can form administrative departments and prescribe their function however the president has already defined powers to impound funds and remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove low-level staff. how these things intersect will be sorted be the courts.

executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation) have been increasing the last few decades. the various media companies plainly do make choices to portray some actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their political alignment with the party in power.

the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes. should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in themselves broadly.

33MHz-i486 commented on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed scientificamerican.com/po... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

33MHz-i486 · a year ago

[flagged]

33MHz-i486 commented on Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC timculpan.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/colinprince

mindwok · a year ago

How so? They also are extremely incentivised to make this happen. A war on your front door is not good for business.

33MHz-i486 · a year ago

the strength of the US defense commitment is likely proportional to the strategic value of the economic assets they still hold. the taiwanese have every incentive to do just well enough at the AZ plant for the $39 Billion checks to clear and no better

33MHz-i486 commented on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazo... · Posted by u/jbredeche

Twirrim · a year ago

> line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.

Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.

That said, that matches my general experience too (I left about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get touched.

Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than investigate why. No way it can backfire... wait what do you mean I had an outage and didn't know, because the alarm used to fire legitimately too?

That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a component that engineers had warned leadership about for at least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered data, written reports, written up remediation plans that weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully obvious before the incident that an incident was inevitable.

Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are constantly having to fight to get operations considered any kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing miracles keeping stuff running.

33MHz-i486 · a year ago

the really dumb thing about working at AWS is they pay so much lip service to Ops, literally you can spend a third of a week in meetings talking about Ops Issues, but not a single long term project to improve the deeper architectural problems that cause bad Ops ever get funded.

33MHz-i486 commented on Tesla Cybertruck payload capacity 29% less than promised cleanenergyrevolution.co/... · Posted by u/ronron4693

33MHz-i486 · 2 years ago

they should have focused on building light-duty utility vehicles based on the Model Y platform. A ModelY Truck could be like the Ford Maverick or a 90s Tacoma, the Van could be like Ford Transit Connect. It would be significantly faster to market, re-using the some of the production lines, and there's a huge market (landscaping, residential trades, short-haul delivery, etc). Elon was high off his own supply the year he launched CT, Semi, & Roadster

33MHz-i486 commented on Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his possible return bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/YetAnotherNick

33MHz-i486 · 2 years ago

feel like the board is too small and a handful of them kicked him out over personal agendas - which are incoherent and hence they cant explain it publicly

- Ilya for decel (but really tech fame jealously)

- Adam for a CoI with his startup (but really founder fame jealousy)

- Helen Toner for Sam disagreeing with her research in EA, safety and decel

33MHz-i486 commented on Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his possible return bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/YetAnotherNick

conradfr · 2 years ago

Twitter Elon or SpaceX Elon?

33MHz-i486 · 2 years ago

probably Tesla Elon right before the inflection point