Willish42 (u/Willish42)

Willish42 commented on Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth scienceclock.com/voyager-... · Posted by u/ashishgupta2209

Willish42 · 20 days ago

> Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.

I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"

TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.

Willish42 commented on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/... · Posted by u/smartmic

nverba · a month ago

As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?

Willish42 · a month ago

There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.

I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.

I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too

Willish42 commented on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon twitter.com/Free_Ross/sta... · Posted by u/Ozarkian

hinkley · a year ago

Something anyone with an addict in their life needs to know:

While substances can efficiently help someone destroy their life, keeping them away from drugs won’t stop them from destroying their lives. There’s something already broken in these people that they need to fix before it’s too late.

There are perfectly legal alternatives that can be just as effective with a little more effort. Putting heroin in your arm is just quicker than downing a fifth of vodka, or chasing dopamine at the dog track.

Willish42 · a year ago

I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.

Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.

Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.

Willish42 commented on Nobody cares grantslatton.com/nobody-c... · Posted by u/fzliu

Willish42 · a year ago

For all of the naysayers in the comments, I think the author has hit on a palpable societal trend, at least in the US.

My leading theory is that the pandemic supercharged a lot of folks' individualist tendencies and/or nihilism, and we're seeing the decline in real time. To claim that the author is simply missing the incentives, bureaucracy, or other structural mechanisms behind enshittification, is missing the point, and they even allude to these towards the bottom of TFA!

Poking holes in the examples is similarly missing the point, but I know we love correcting people on the internet. Cunningham's law and all that...

Willish42 commented on Willow, Our Quantum Chip blog.google/technology/re... · Posted by u/robflaherty

deanCommie · a year ago

What if we are? And by injecting entropy into it, we are actually hurrying (in small insignificant ways) the heat death of those universes? What if we keep going and scale out and in the future it causes a meaningful impact to that universe in a way that it's residents would be extremely unhappy with, and would want to take revenge?

What if it's already happening to our universe? And that is what black holes are? Or other cosmology concepts we don't understand?

Maybe a great filter is your inability to protect your universe from quantum technology from elsewhere in the multiverse ripping yours up?

Maybe the future of sentience isn't fighting for resources on a finite planet, or consuming the energy of stars, but fighting against other multiverses.

Maybe The Dark Forest Defence is a decision to isolate your universe from the multiverse - destroying it's ability to participate in quantum computation, but also extending it's lifespan.

(I don't believe ANY of this, but I'm just noting the fascinating science fiction storylines available)

Willish42 · a year ago

Thanks for throwing in references like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis even though this was a silly response to the science fiction implications.

I found it an interesting read and hadn't heard the term before, but it's exactly the kind of nerdy serendipity I come to this site for!

Willish42 commented on Facebook's Little Red Book map.cv/blog/redbook... · Posted by u/heshiebee

incog_nit0 · a year ago

As a jaded 40+ year old developer this got me choked up.

I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth.

For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?).

I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible.

Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most.

Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.

Willish42 · a year ago

> Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit

Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.

Willish42 commented on Notepad++ is 21 years old learnhub.top/celebrating-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

Willish42 · a year ago

Notepad++ was a life saver in my early days of needing to open and edit large files without having the tech literacy or familiarity required to use an actual IDE. I was a Windows "tinkerer" for a long time before learning programming and getting into engineering, and I suspect I'm not the only one on HN who got started that way. It's probably the first editor I used with line numbers, tabs / multiple view panes in one window, and customization options.

I can't say I use it as often these days, but it's still installed on my PC at home and it's a reliable tool that I think back on fondly. Without it, I might not have "leveled up" to more advanced tools later on.

Willish42 commented on Nintendo Files Suit for Infringement of Patent Rights Against Pocketpair, Inc nintendo.co.jp/corporate/... · Posted by u/monocasa

Willish42 · a year ago

For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries

As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?

Should be interesting regardless to see what happens

Willish42 commented on How do you find a good manager? nber.org/papers/w32699... · Posted by u/samuel246

AndrewKemendo · a year ago

Yet another perfect example of not even understanding that there are other ways to run an organization

All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism.

That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of financial instrument aka “investors.”

Then there’s a third group, and this third group is “management.” Management is hired by the investors - not the employees and is generally given more equity in order to convince the manager that they are actually closer to an investor than a worker.

The true job of management is to prevent labor from having more power and more control of the financial vehicle than the investors do - find me a manager that’s empowering their employees in a way that shifts power from investors to employees and I’ll find you a manager with no job.

This is why CEOs carry the weight of all of this bullshit because investors point to them as the scapegoat person for anything that goes bad on the labor side, and employees look to this person for direction and guidance for what to do on behalf of the investors - so they pull the “I’m paid only if the company does well” smuggling in this concept that the company doing well benefits everyone (hint: it doesn’t and if the options are homelessness or death you don’t actually have options)

In cases where “investors” create the org (EIR, VC spinout etc…) they are intentionally creating a demand signal for labor, and a process for which you can grovel to them for them running a max-min algorithm to ensure they don’t pay anything more than they legally have to - going so far as to now make it a religion where it’s unethical to do anything other than this

Alternatively if a group of engineers gets together to create something, the second that they have success on it, the capitalist investors will direct all their existing financial instrument companies to go and try to capture that new market away from the small group - typically via ruthless competition, but sometimes acquisition becomes the mutually minimum cost outcome. This is all with the idea that if you can acquire your way to market dominance in a monopoly type scheme this is the ideal for investors. It is a very predictable line of income and that’s all they care about.

As long as you live inside of this model, there is no possible world where you will ever have a manager who cares about the people underneath them or the customers for more than a very brief period while the rest of the organization figures out that this manager is a threat to the owners.

If you wanna be successful as a “manager” in a capitalist profit driven organization, there is no option other than to align yourself with investors and do everything you can to prevent your employees from becoming more independent (typically by granting unvested “options” that have zero value outside of the organization)

Willish42 · a year ago

That's a pretty grim outlook, but I honestly can't poke a "hole" in its logic.

Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)

I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.

The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.

Willish42 commented on Google Drive scans files for copyright infringement twitter.com/1littlecoder/... · Posted by u/amrrs

glitchc · a year ago

They block it outright, even when the purpose is innocent (sensitive documents). Tried with rar and 7-zip.

Willish42 · a year ago

anecdotal / N=1 here, but I've uploaded standard 7z encrypted backups to personal Drive without issue