Retric (u/Retric) - Readit News

Retric commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

BlandDuck · 3 hours ago

Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.

For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.

XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

Retric · 3 hours ago

The breakeven rate on developer hardware is based on the value a company extracts not their salary. Someone making X$/year directly has a great deal of overhead in terms of office space and managers etc, and above that the company only employees them because the company gains even more value.

Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.

Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.

Retric commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

throwaway0123_5 · 2 days ago

Doubtless some would ignore it, but you can go to jail for driving on a suspended license. I suspect there are a lot more people willing to risk a traffic ticket and a few $100 in fines for speeding, bad lane changes, etc. than there are people willing to risk jail for driving on a suspended license.

Retric · a day ago

Obviously it’s not 100% meaningless, but the kind of people losing their licenses here correlate with the kinds of people who will take these risks.

Thus for many it’s a symbolic gesture until the next time something happens which is little different than simply doing nothing until the next incident like say 3 strike laws.

Retric commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

throwaway0123_5 · 2 days ago

> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.

I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.

The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.

The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.

Retric · 2 days ago

Currently people will just ignore a revoked license the same way they ignore other traffic laws.

So I think ~level 5 self driving cars becoming common + a modification to prevent people using their cars just like we install breathalyzers for habitual DUI drivers is needed before revoking people’s licenses is really a meaningful punishment.

Retric commented on Croatian freediver held breath for 29 minutes divernet.com/scuba-news/f... · Posted by u/toomanyrichies

mdaniel · 6 days ago

I somehow thought that pure oxygen was poisonous[1], and it needed to be a nitrogen mix. I mean, I guess this stunt demonstrates that I'm clearly mistaken, or that the nuance is in the pressures involed?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity

Retric · 6 days ago

It’s really several factors. Supplemental oxygen is common for people with diminished lung capacity, carbon monoxide exposure etc. However long term it’s not a good idea for healthy people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_therapy

At low pressure pure oxygen can similarly be beneficial, mountain climbers eventually need supplemental oxygen for Mount Everest though a few have made the trip without it they can’t stay at that altitude indefinitely. It can even help on airplane flights as commercial airlines don’t set things to sea level.

Where healthy people run into issues is when partial pressures get well over 100% at sea level. Part of the issue is people adjust their breathing based on carbon dioxide not oxygen levels. So at say 10 atmospheres at normal atmospheric mixtures your breathing the equivalent of 210%, but you don’t slow down enough to compensate. Thus why divers care so much about gas mixtures, however people with diminished lung capacity are going to encounter issues at different levels than normal divers.

Retric commented on IQ tests results for AI trackingai.org/home... · Posted by u/stared

technothrasher · 7 days ago

> The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others

My son took an IQ test and it wouldn't score him because he breaks this assumption. He was getting 98% in some tasks and 2% in others. The psychologist giving him the test said it was unlikely enough pattern that they couldn't get an IQ result for him. He's been diagnosed with non-verbal learning disability, and this is apparently common for nvld folks.

Retric · 7 days ago

IMO g is purely an abstraction. As long as the rate you learn most things is within a reasonable bound spending more or less time learning/perfecting X impacts the time you spend on Y, resulting in people being generally more or less proficient in a huge range of common cognitive skills. Thus, testing those general skills is normally a proxy for a wide range of things.

LD breaks IQ because it results in noticeably uneven skill acquisition in even foundational skills. Meanwhile increasing levels of specialization reward being abnormally good at a very narrow sets of skills making IQ less significant. The #1 rock climber in the world gets sponsors, the 100th gets a hobby.

Retric commented on Airbrush art of the 80s (2015) coolandcollected.com/airb... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

justsomehnguy · 10 days ago

> because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections

This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.

It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.

Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.

Some anecdata:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911383

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488958

Retric · 10 days ago

There’s a lot of CGI that blends in invisibly in most movies made in the last 20 years. Sure we notice the bottom 20% of terrible CGI + stuff that’s blatantly unrealistic, but all the stuff you miss is just quietly worked.

Poor makeup, anachronistic aircraft contrails, unsightly construction cranes, etc get quietly adjusted to make everything look clean in ways that don’t stand out until you start analyzing individual frames. On top of this some kinds of CGI have gotten so common that it’s less obvious how few physical cars are used in car commercials.

Retric commented on Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants forbes.com/sites/michaelt... · Posted by u/hhs

s1artibartfast · 11 days ago

yeah, I understand decimals.

If its 200/100,000,000, that would be 99.9998 or 2 more digits.

Retric · 11 days ago

IMO, it’s going to be in the thousands to 10’s of thousands. Depending on what organizations you exclude and if you’re considering total assets vs net assets vs liquid assets etc.

There’s a surprising number of individual buildings worth 1+ billion each of which are going to be their own org. Add pensions, trusts, nuclear reactors, large dams, government organizations, etc.

Here’s 30 US charitable foundations over 1B which isn’t an exhaustive list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...

Retric commented on Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants forbes.com/sites/michaelt... · Posted by u/hhs

s1artibartfast · 14 days ago

Maybe 1 in 10 million? What do you think the numerator in denominator are here? I'm guessing less than a hundred organizations with a billion dollars in reserve.

There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.

I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?

Retric · 13 days ago

Above 90% = 1/10, 99% = 1/100, 99.9% =1/1,000… the pattern is 1 then a zero for each 9.

So 8 9’s = 100,000,000