Tangurena2 (u/Tangurena2)

Tangurena2 commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece

IAmBroom · 4 days ago

"Why doesn't the state protect everyone from ___?" is a naive question.

Almost anything can be a significant security issue for the state. They have to carefully choose where they are going to spend effort & money.

And they pick whatever will keep them safely in power... which never ever includes "strict regulation of vacuum cleaners".

Tangurena2 · 3 days ago

We don't regulate/protect the SCADA systems that run utilities like water treatment plants and the power transmission system.

Tangurena2 commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece

mkagenius · 4 days ago

Since this can be a significant security issue for the state, why doesn't the government sponsor a security audit of the software. Does it upload the data or everything is done on the device? (Also, will have to keep up with the updates)

Tangurena2 · 4 days ago

The NSA has a bad historical reputation for this sort of thing - intentionally weakening crypto standards to make things easier for themselves to break, while keeping them "strong enough" that other agencies outside of NSA/GCHQ/GRU can't. The Crypto AG scandal [0] was pretty bad, with Clipper/Skipjack & Dual_EC_DRBG [1] being more recent ones. The NSA could do what you are asking to do, but they probably won't let us know what the really bad holes are because they want to keep using them.

Notes:

0 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

1 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nsa-nist-encrypti..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

Tangurena2 commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece

starryex · 4 days ago

Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders.

You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.

Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.

So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.

You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.

I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.

Tangurena2 · 4 days ago

> So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.

Or - turn it into a subscription.

Tangurena2 commented on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

ceejayoz · 4 days ago

> But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems".

Sure we can. Peter Thiel managed to put $5 billion in his Roth IRA.

https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...

"Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall... What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions."

Tangurena2 · 4 days ago

When Romney was running for President, much was made about his $100M holdings in his IRA accounts. At that time, I was working for a company who sold software to report pension (and pension-like) benefits. So we all had to become pretty familiar with ERISA and EFAST and the retirement laws every time they changed. We even had more than one attorney and several CPAs working on our staff. When the attorney tried explaining how Romney moved $100M from Bain into his IRA accounts, we all saying things that were like "that can't be legal".

Tangurena2 commented on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

n1b0m · 4 days ago

Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by:

Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years).

Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually.

Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometimes be used as a deduction.

Tangurena2 · 4 days ago

> Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometimes be used as a deduction.

A loan should definitely be a taxable event and capital gains taxes should apply to rebase the value of the stock to the market value at the time the loan is taken out. Currently, very wealthy people use the loan dodge to avoid selling stocks and since the loan isn't paid off until death (usually), estate taxes wave their hands and any gains in the stock price go away, so that the next nepo generation gets to repeat the same dodge.

Tangurena2 commented on The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold theautopian.com/how-the-o... · Posted by u/zdw

potato3732842 · 25 days ago

Impound/tow/lien -> title has always been the easy button for getting legit title to a vehicle that was never supposed to be sold (UPS vans, Uhaul trailers, etc), so long as it was never reported stolen.

Absolutely hilarious that he managed to work the "doesn't work it if pops up as stolen" angle in the opposite direction to make the car impossible to really do anything with (i.e. no junkyard can take it whole, no subsequent changes of title can happen) and live in various sorts of limbo for 20yr.

Tangurena2 · 25 days ago

Something similar happened to one of the Dominos delivery vehicles (a DXP [0]). The purchaser got sued for trademark violations [1]. In this case, the car was totaled in an accident and the insurance company sold it.

[0] - https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN-yLTDkAS4

Tangurena2 commented on Private Equity's New Venture: Youth Sports jacobin.com/2025/11/youth... · Posted by u/wahnfrieden

plorg · a month ago

Youth sports have been moving in this direction since long before sports gambling was a meaningful economic force in the US at least. I attended both a high school and a college that started football programs while I was a student because the leadership thought it was necessary to maintain enrollment.

Tangurena2 · a month ago

We were discussing cheerleading at a break in one of the office meetings this morning. Varsity Brands, owned by Bain Capital, controls the "sport" of cheerleading in the US. If you want to compete, you must purchase current year's uniforms, pay to enter contests run by VB, stay at hotels that VB decides. A teenager involved in competition cheerleading can easily spend $5k-25k/year. This "sport" injures more teens each year than football does - and that's a high-contact sport with significant protective gear.

>I traced Varsity’s market power to three basic maneuvers. The first was buying up most of the cheerleading competitions in the country, so that entering a competition meant dealing with Varsity. The second was secretly creating and running the nonprofits that govern the sport, such as the U.S. All Star Federation, which gave Varsity the power to write rules for and organize competitions, scheduling, camps, and ancillary services like insurance. And the third was cutting deals with gyms to block rivals. Gyms are where teams of cheerleaders train, and gym coaches tend to have control over what uniforms athletes must buy. The company gave gyms who bought their uniforms from Varsity preferential treatment and special rebates.

>One key result of Varsity’s scheme is inflated prices to the end consumer, which is why Bain bought the corporation in the first place. If there was cash to grab, Varsity tried to grab it. For instance, Varsity makes it very hard for parents to watch videos of cheerleading competition except through the firm’s specific expensive streaming service. There was the practice of 'Stay-to-Play,’ where Varsity would force athletes to stay in a specific hotel if they wanted to enter a competition, with Varsity likely getting rebates from that hotel in the process. The net result is that today it can cost up to $10-20k a year to be an All-Star cheerleader.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-and-the-fall-of...

>I missed out on two anti-competitive practices in the industry. The first is called “Stay to Play.” For many cheerleading competitions, though not all, out-of-town contestants are required to stay at a specific area hotel or set of hotels, or they cannot enter the contest. This is yet another way to raise prices on cheerleaders, and parents hate it. The second is that Varsity tends to be very aggressive about takedown notices for cheer contest video. If you film your kid at an event and put it up on Facebook or YouTube, Varsity is likely to ask you to take it down because it’s competitive with their VarsityTV streaming app. As one parent told me, it’s basically Varsity preventing you from sharing your memories publicly with your family or friends.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/what-a-cheerleading-monop...

Tangurena2 commented on Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs kyutai.org/next/codec-exp... · Posted by u/karimf

PaulDavisThe1st · 2 months ago

Humans that read (at least) Indo-European languages can read texts in their native language with all the vowels removed. Does that suggest that it would be a good idea to remove the vowels from text before using it for training text-based LLMs ?

Presumably you want to train on as rich a set of data as possible, even if some of that data is redundant or irrelevant when it comes to human perception.

Tangurena2 · 2 months ago

Generally, the difference between regional dialects is almost all in vowels (sample: 0). This is why SOUNDEX [1] eliminated vowels.

0 - https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

Tangurena2 commented on Amazon hopes to replace 600k US workers with robots theverge.com/news/803257/... · Posted by u/pwthornton

pjc50 · 2 months ago

Normally I'd be against this kind of thing, but Amazon warehouse work is notoriously abusive and people would be better off out of it .. if they had alternatives.

Tangurena2 · 2 months ago

There were some bad weather incidents where warehouse workers were not permitted to seek shelter from tornados = from which they died [0].

Additionally, the warehouses are staffed by contractors, who once laid off from the subcontracting company are permabanned from ever working for any other contracting company that Amazon will use. Amazon is literally running out of humans that they can hire. If they are unwilling to address their "one and done" policy, Amazon will have to use robots in order to stay in business.

0 - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/amazon-warehouse-in-illinois...

Tangurena2 commented on TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019) propublica.org/article/in... · Posted by u/lelandfe

niwtsol · 2 months ago

This is a really interesting take I had not heard before. Any further reading or additional concepts you mind sharing on this idea?

Tangurena2 · 2 months ago

Which one?

During the Cold War, one criticism of socialists/communists was that they were taking orders from Moscow. Likewise, Catholics were presumed to be taking orders from Rome.

> Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing

During the later 1800s, many "charity hospitals" would abduct children of Catholic women and then sell them as orphans that other people could adopt. The Klu Klux Klan would also attack Catholics - not just burning crosses and lynching black people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train https://orphantraindepot.org/history/opposition-to-the-orpha...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...

> Not only were Irish immigrants viewed as interlopers by many white Americans (an irony, considering the historical treatment of Native Americans), but these immigrants were Catholics in a primarily Protestant land. It was a religious difference that widened the divide, as did the fact that many Irish immigrants didn't speak English. As strange as may it may sound today, Irish immigrants were not considered "white" and were sometimes referred to "negroes turned inside out."

https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/when-iri...

The history site covers how people perceive the value of work has changed over the centuries.

Index of the history of the ethics of work/labor: http://workethic.coe.uga.edu/history.htm

Home page of this mini-site: http://workethic.coe.uga.edu/index.html

The Wikipedia page has lots of links and references about PWE.

> In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed this work as the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century, after Weber's Economy and Society, C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination, and Robert K. Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure.[3] It is the eighth most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...