Overly expensive candy stores that only accept cash and have an excess of staff...
Is that laundering or just retail drug sales?
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alwa commented on How well does the money laundering control system work? journals.uchicago.edu/doi... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
alwa commented on Who does your assistant serve? xeiaso.net/blog/2025/who-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I'm curious---if you have seriously studied psychology, what is the LLM telling you that you don't already know?
Psychologists seek therapy too, sometimes. Much as barbers go to others to cut their own hair.
That said I can’t imagine psychology as a discipline has had time to develop a particularly full understanding of LLMs in a clinical context.
alwa commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki
> I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business.
The moat is the land. It doesn't even matter if it self-owned or a lease.
The vet just can't walk away and open a new practice nearby.
Why not?
It’s loosely regulated and people will follow their vet just as they’d follow their hairdresser, no?
> so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up
Even without any of the reasons you mentioned I shouldn’t have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, the flight attendant should.
I’d pay 50% more for any flight where it’s the flight attendant’s job to make people and their kids shut the hell up.
Wouldn’t you?
In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly mortified herself—and, generally being closer to the screamer than anyone else is, would certainly make it stop if she could.
Screaming children test my patience too, but I’m really not sure screaming adults do much to resolve that. It’s always seemed to me that grace is the better part of maturity.
Sometimes you can get earplugs if you ask nicely.
alwa commented on Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient sky.dlazaro.ca... · Posted by u/dlazaro
It sounds like the developer spent a lot of time implementing something that nobody wanted. Drawing the sky accurately may be cool, but it wasn't required in this case. It's also not innovation. It's been done before.
This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum they're bitching about how "all clients are stupid" or something.
And, from the sound of it, the developer confused truth with beauty. Sometimes we’d prefer to see the sky the way we wish it were rather than the way it is.
That’s an aesthetic call, not a “who can do the math” call.
“Good news, I accurately simulated the particulate load in the local atmosphere—so now you authentically can’t read the text on a given smoggy winter morning!”
(FWIW, grace for management decisions notwithstanding, I think what gp did is awesome, and would switch on full realism mode every time :)
I don't agree with this kind of thinking. You have to determine what exactly what you want, anything else is just "nice to have". If you want an air monitor and don't care about screen, having screen is just a "nice to have" and should not affect your experience. And if you do care about the screen, you should also remove all no-screen air monitors from the list.
The screen is the “how,” not the “what.” An item is designed to function with the parts it has. A unit designed without a screen is doing the job another way—say, with a row of LEDs or something. I care whether I can find out what the air quality is, I don’t care whether or not I do that using a screen. It seems to me like relying on a finicky screen was a poor design decision.
It also raises my eyebrows that they see “repairability [as] one of our core differentiators.” It’s cool to make that possible quietly for people who are into it, but would you want a “repairable” smoke detector? Or one that just works? If it broke, would you want them to send you one that’s not broken, or parts and a booklet of repair instructions?
> There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly.
I don’t have a full bio lab but I do have a lot of various lab equipment and do things at home that aren’t typical hobbyist projects. I haven’t found this to be a problem at all.
I also don’t mentally segregate the world into “normies”, which honestly helps a lot. In my experience people who develop a chip on their shoulder about their geek hobbies and start describing other people as “normies” bring a lot of these problems upon themselves. It helps a lot to just talk to people like peers and also know when people just aren’t interested in talking about your certain hobbies.
Like you, I find the more I talk to people about what I’m doing (without going beyond their level of interest), the less they’re spooked. Especially when I’m prepared to talk about how I’ve thought seriously about safety.
Whereas the more people just happen to see stuff that’s unfamiliar to them, the more they imagine movie tropes to explain it. Sneakiness and a “you wouldn’t get it” attitude just code you as obnoxious, and color their assumptions accordingly…
Notion has really great ideas though, it's just so poorly implemented that it really hurts my desire to use it for anything unless forced to.
It was such a breath of fresh air in the beginning, when it was simple, elegant, and focused. Shame they had to cram it to the gills with half-considered cruft.
I will defend the dryer alarm case somewhat. For my dryer, it displays a time until the cycle is complete, but that time is wildly inaccurate (as in, the display will say 45 mins and sometimes the cycle takes twice that to complete). It is useful to get a notification when the dryer is actually done in my case. Granted, the dryer should accurately report how long it will take to run, but given that it doesn't a "cycle complete" alarm is the next best thing.
That bothered me for a while about a dryer I use. Eventually, it clicked for me that it based its estimates on a best guess at the material and quantity you’d be drying in that cycle; but it (correctly, in my view) actually timed the cycle based on feedback from humidity/temperature sensors in the air path.
I prefer low-heat, “delicate” settings for most everything (and even that, only in the rare cases where I don’t have time to line-dry). And I favor heavy natural fibers. So it routinely takes much longer than the upfront estimate for a light load of polyester dainties.
But I’m happy to accept the error now that I understand it’s the same tradeoff I’d choose: doing a proper job of things, instead of cranking up the heat or something to hit the time target!
That infernal 30-second end-of-cycle jingle, though… I’d much prefer an assertive but ambient kind of droning sound or something.