SilverBirch (u/SilverBirch)

SilverBirch commented on Most technical problems are people problems blog.joeschrag.com/2023/1... · Posted by u/mooreds

I couldn't disagree more with this description of why technical debt exists and it's a dangerous line of reasoning. Sure, maybe requirements weren't clarified. But often it's impossible to clarify them and you have to build something and even if the requirements were clear to begin with who is to say they'll still be the same by the time you've finished the project let alone 5 years later. Maybe the develop chose a stable and dependable technology because it's battle worn and proven? Maybe the sales person has to manage an impossible situation between an engineering team which can't commit to the time line needed to win the sale?

There are lots of good reasons tech debt exists, and it's worrying that this person seems to think that they all boil down to "I don't know how but someone, somewhere, fucked up"

SilverBirch commented on · Posted by u/isomorph

SilverBirch · 9 days ago

I think these sorts of criticisms boil down to "Why didn't you make a different movie". She's wondering how much he cares about uplifting marginalized voices. That's not what the movie is about! It's just not, there's a very clear idea he's exploring in the movie and it is not that. You could examine those topics. But you're basically just saying "Go make a different movie about my personal interests". Well how about you go make that movie.

I don't see how you could watch that movie and think that the film maker is endorsing the way that character is treated. It's fairly obvious that those stereotypes and "her" treatment is a direct indictment of the main character. I'm not sure I can help if you don't see that.

SilverBirch commented on Cars are steadily becoming longer, wider and heavier in the UK and across Europe bbc.com/news/articles/cy7... · Posted by u/1659447091

SilverBirch · 11 days ago

I think one of the underdiscussed things is how in the last couple of decades industries like car manufacturing have become steadily more state controlled.

Today, to be a successful car company you need to be producing cars whose safety features are incredibly tightly regulated by government bodies to the point of doing actively user hostile things (try and get a new car in the UK that won't actively beep at you for going faster than it thinks you should drive).

You need to be producing them at government mandated price levels (cars listed for more than £40k pay an additional £2.5 tax, except electric vehicles for whom the tax only kicks in at £50).

You need to be using a propulsion method approved by government, not only the Euro 6 emissions standards, but also the labyrinthine Benefit in Kind regulations that accidentally gave every small business owner massive incentives to buy a Porsche Taycan.

Oh and on top of that the UK government runs a charity that purchases 20% of all the new cars sold in the UK each year (with that number climbing to 50% in Northern Ireland).

SilverBirch commented on “Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill nber.org/papers/w34524... · Posted by u/mhb

hypeatei · 11 days ago

I think the solution is to pay them more, create very strict laws around insider trading, and enforce those laws vigorously.

I don't know if that's realistic or not as the electorate has already shown they don't care enough to vote their representatives out for doing it and it's unlikely that current members would restrict their earnings. I guess it's good that we know about it, at least.

SilverBirch · 11 days ago

You've just been presented evidence that your law makers are doing something immoral, something that should be illegal, and your idea is to pay them more. Do you also advocate putting a little pot of cash at the front of every walmart so the shop lifters can just take the cash and pay for the stuff they were going to steal?

SilverBirch commented on I made maps that show time instead of space [video] youtube.com/watch?v=rC2VQ... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

SilverBirch · 11 days ago

So the video starts by introducing an isochrone map, and then goes on to do a lot of work to do with warping based on spring between points. This is actually doing something subtly different than the original idea. The original isochrone has an important constraint, it is drawing the circles based on travel time to a single point. This is important because there is 1 solution to that. You can't generalize that because point B could be 5 minutes from points A and C, but A could be 3 minutes from point C. He gets around this by quantizing - the spring trick, but it does mean the map is meaningfully wrong. Cool looking maps though.

SilverBirch commented on Vsora Jotunn-8 5nm European inference chip vsora.com/products/jotunn... · Posted by u/rdg42

mg · 16 days ago

Six months of one developer tuning the kernel?

That seems like not much compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars US companies currently invest into their AI stack? OpenAI pays thousands of engineers and researchers full time.

SilverBirch · 16 days ago

It is. The problem is latency. All these fields are moving very fast, and so it doesn't sound bad spending 6 months tuning something, but in reality what is happening is that during those 6 months the guy who built the thing you're tuning has iterated 5 more times and what you started on 6 months ago is now much much better than what you got handed 6 months ago whilst simultaneously being much worse than what that person has in their hands today. If the field you're working in is relatively static, or your performance gap is large enough it makes sense. But in most fields the performance gap is large in absolutely terms but small in temporal terms. You could make something run 10x faster, but you can't build something that will run faster than what will be state of the art in 2 months.

SilverBirch commented on Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine express.co.uk/news/uk/211... · Posted by u/ANewbury

6LLvveMx2koXfwn · 2 months ago

I'm probably alone in thinking this is ok. According to the statement by the ICO reported by the BBC, this is because imgur has refused to implement some kind of technical verification of users being served pornography or suicide promotion.

Requiring this is not a bad thing

Governments/Regulation is the only tool at our disposal

How else should we approach this problem? Do we just throw our hands in the air? Or do we think that serving pornography and suicide promotion is not something that requires oversight?

SilverBirch · 2 months ago

If I don't want my child doing something, it's up to me to enforce that. I don't want my kid eating snacks before dinner, have I called upon the UK government to shut down the biscuit aisle at Tesco from 3pm-5pm?

The core of this issue is a kind of backwards notion that the internet needs to be a safe place, that the UK government says it can legislate that everyone on the internet has to verify who is accessing their site and then enforcing the UK's laws around it. It's nuts.

It's also not solving a problem. If you want to control what your kid sees on the internet there are already safeguards you can use, you can set up content restrictions on basically any device today. This law appears to be in place to be the mummy of children whose own mummies don't want to enforce certain restrictions on internet access.

I hear next month the M25 is going to be prosecuted for letting a child walk down the hard shoulder.

SilverBirch commented on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus cybersect.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/sixhobbits

SilverBirch · 3 months ago

>Who are you going to trust, these Washington insiders, “people who matter”, or an actual hacker like myself?

To be honest, with the contents of the post, probably neither. It's fine if you want to point at different sources and go "ooooh WEF" and make scare quotes with your hands, but that's not actually evidence it's just a description of your existing bias.

Frankly, the overstating of the threat in the original article is frankly about as bad as the overstating of the article being bogus. The feds shut down some sim farm. Is is a massive national security threat? Probably no, that's a bit of an overstatement. The NYTimes ran a clickbaity article, is it bogus? Probably no, that's a bit of an overstatement.

I don't understand why people like this get so wound up by the way places like the NYTimes write up articles. This is the way journalism is written, you don't write articles that say "X happened, but it's probably fine!". You write "X happened, and it could have Y impact!". People are smart enough to read the article and understand, we don't need you making baseless accusations about their sourcing.

SilverBirch commented on Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/clcaev

SilverBirch · 3 months ago

Tesla said the data recorded during the crash had been lost or deleted. The hacker produced the data. The data was used in court. The verification is the data. What's your suggestion? That they fabricated the data recovered from the car?

SilverBirch commented on I spent over $31k on Whiteout Survival old.reddit.com/r/whiteout... · Posted by u/Ralfp

progx · 4 months ago

Unbelievable, but such guys exist in nearly every game.

SilverBirch · 4 months ago

Not just such a guy exists. The business model of these games almost totally rely on these people to be profitable. When you spend any time thinking about this at all it's totally unethical. It would be trivial for them to put a simple spend cap in. Sorry, no matter how into this game you are you can't spend more than $1,000 in a year, or $100 in a day. That would make them tonnes of money and prevent most people making life changing mistakes. But they don't do that because their entire business plan relies on getting hundreds of thousands out of these players.