amalter (u/amalter) - Readit News

amalter commented on Serious incident to the 777-300ER on 5 April 2022 at CDG [pdf] bea.aero/fileadmin/user_u... · Posted by u/untilted

hubadu · 2 years ago

Quite incredible that the aviation industry haven't introduces sticks with force-feedback despite video game industry having them for about 30 years.

Probably because it's a patent lawsuit minefield.

amalter · 2 years ago

These are mechanically linked controls. Literally the force of the other pilot is directly felt and observed.

What force feedback in addition would you have in mind?

amalter commented on Strikebreakers arrived by taxi to Tesla's workshops in Sweden da.se/2023/10/strejkbryta... · Posted by u/diggan

belltaco · 2 years ago

I already knew that, those precedents you refer to are not legal precedents in law or court cases though. When people say rights they generally refer to legal rights.

amalter · 2 years ago

The legal right is for all of Tesla's suppliers, service providers, partners, etc are allowed to "sympathy strike". This effectively exiles the company from doing business in the country. Tesla is not a particularly large employer in Sweden and does not seem to be particularly loved.

What they are doing (strikebreaker) is "legal" - but when they are removed from market by the sympathetic population, it will be an obvious outcome.

The surprise is that normally logical employers do not work this way in these countries. However, we've seen that emotional responses are often how Musk's companies operate. I expect it to end poorly for him in this case.

Sweden is not a large market, but events like this contribute to Tesla's reputational decline. The Nordic countries were some of the first and fastest to embrace Tesla. But a brand can be ruined faster than it can be built.

amalter commented on StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content openletter.mousetail.nl/... · Posted by u/miohtama

dvt · 2 years ago

True, but like solipsism or nihilism, those ideas are just not that interesting.

amalter · 2 years ago

Oh, it's not an "interesting idea" that we're teetering on the edge of not being able to differentiate between machine-generated and human-generated content. It does seem that our AI learning models simply mimic our own thinking processes, absorbing and combining experiences to create results that sometimes outshine their origins.

The real question that'll soon dominate is, "How can we even tell the difference?"*

(* - Reworded with ChatGPT 4)

amalter commented on Report reveals Android users switching to iPhone at 5-year high 9to5mac.com/2023/05/17/an... · Posted by u/retskrad

George83728 · 2 years ago

I think I'm better off without such vapid people as friends. None of my friends with iphones have ever complained about me having an android, nor can I even imagine them doing something like that. Bullying somebody for their consumer choices is far beyond the pale.

You may as well say that not owning a BMW will lose you potential friends because some BMW drivers will sneer at you. Maybe that's true, but who's loss is that really?

amalter · 2 years ago

It's not as "vapid" as you imagine.

As an example; =maybe you have a family/friend group chat of 8 members and you're planning a birthday party or an event. If everyone is in the ecosystem, you can seamless share notes, todo's, hi-res pictures, videos, locations, etc.

Since for whatever reason your family has no idea what Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp are - you take the one person that's not on iMessages (and so preventing the group from using the tools) out of the group and say "Make sure to update so and so on the Notes here" or something. It's a practical decision. Often, that one Android user is the only one on Signal or WhatsApp. So to share pictures, you make a group of everyone on iMessage and send the videos and album over, and then send a separate WhatsApp to that person.

And sometimes you accidentally forget to send that seperate message.

The right answer is to all agree on a fully featured messaging app (For most non-US that's WhatsApp), or for the default messaging to be upgraded.

Then you get to RCS - which Google is now pushing, after going through a dozen (or two?) of their own attempts to lock users in with a bewildering array of conflicting messaging apps.

Apple should support it, although it's a bit rich to see Google try to "shame" Apple into it only because the failed at their execution.

amalter commented on Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout ft.com/content/6a77d81b-7... · Posted by u/guiambros

lotsofpulp · 2 years ago

It does not make sense to let bank shareholders profit from having an implicit guarantee of federal taxpayer funded bailouts.

The bank’s owners have to pay $x for buying FDIC insurance of up to $250k per account per person. If it actually costs $y > $x to insure for more than $250k, then that is quite a windfall for the bank owners at the expense of federal taxpayers.

amalter · 2 years ago

There's no moral hazard if we pay out depositors and let the bank fail. The big "problem" in 2008 was that the bailed out banks were made whole with equity injections and then continued to grow. (Although the government did quite well on those investments).

SVB is dead. Shareholders are getting zero. The losses are not being socialized. But because we don't want a bank run on every regional bank, let's make depositors whole.

amalter commented on Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout ft.com/content/6a77d81b-7... · Posted by u/guiambros

dragontamer · 2 years ago

We literally have Dodd-Frank rules built up over the last 15 years to prevent these things from becoming a systemic failure.

I get that people are still squeamish about 2008. But our banking system is quite different today compared to back then. We built up these rules so that we wouldn't have to bailout banks in these situations anymore. That's what the entire damn point was.

If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. But I for one am more than willing to test out these rules... at least for the next few weeks... to see if they actually work. If they don't work, then we strengthen our regulations over the next 10 years. If they do work, then... success.

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We absolutely shouldn't just hit the bailout button before understanding this problem. 2008 + Dodd Frank was supposed to prevent this from being a systemic cataclysm.

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What probably needs to happen is for Thursday's bank run to be undone. Issue a clawback so that the $46 Billion that escaped on Thursday and punish those who bankrun / collapsed the bank in a panicky stampede.

That's far, far more fair than a bailout. Redistribute the money in a more fair way, but accept the risk that SIVB made for itself and its community.

amalter · 2 years ago

There is zero precedent for clawbacks from on demand accounts at a regulated financial institution. This isn't even a "capital B" Bankruptcy, so I have doubts clawbacks would be legal.

That would also throw gasoline on the fire as people cease to trust even withdrawn money as whole. It's now in your interest to get your money out of any bank showing any weakness as early as possible.

Clawback SVB money Monday and we'll have a run on First Republic Tuesday and possibly 20 other institutions by the end of the week until we get to Ally and that will empty the FDIC piggybank.

Which is why the cooler heads at the FDIC try to make all depositors whole. Hopefully they can find someone to take SVB's assets on in HTM valuation and maybe some government equity in exchange for ownership. (Remember the government made money on its equity deals in 2008).

amalter commented on DuckDB 0.7.0 duckdb.org/2023/02/13/ann... · Posted by u/rolandm

chrisjc · 3 years ago

While DuckDB is an exciting and amazing project, I think the world that will open up around it is just as exciting, and these are exactly the kinds of questions that get me excited.

DuckDB is to Snowflake/BigQuery/DataBricks/etc...

what

sqlite is to MySQL/Postgres/Oracle/etc... (let's ignore for the moment that Postgres and Oracle have HTAP modes)

In other words, I don't think DuckDB aims to replace or compete against the big OLAP products/services such as Snowflake, BigQuery, DataBricks. Instead it's a natural and complementary component in the analytical stack.

Of course you'll see in the numerous blogs about how amazing it is for data exploration, wrangling, jupyter, pandas, etc... but personally I think the questions about how it could be used in production use-cases a lot more fascinating.

Data warehouses can become quite expensive to run and operate when you either have to allow

1) front-end analytical applications to connect to them directly to do analytics on the fly, or

2) if you pre-calculate ALL the analytics (whether they're used or not) that are offloaded to a cheaper and "faster" OLTP system.

I'm excited about how DuckDB can sort of bridge these two solutions.

1) Prepare semi-pre-calculated data on your traditional data warehouse. (store in internal table or external table like iceberg, delta, etc)

2) Ingest the subsets of this data needed for different production workloads in to DuckDB for last-mile analytics and slicing/dicing.

DuckDb could either interact with your

1) push-down queries to internal tables via their database scanners (arrow across the wire. postgres_scanner, hopefully more to come), or

2) prune external tables (iceberg, delta, etc) to get the subsets (interact with catalogs) of semi-pre-calculated analytical data on demand. Think intelligently partitioned parquet files on S3.

Last-mile analytics, pagination, etc can all be done within DuckDb either directly on your browser (WASM) or on the edge with something like AWS Lambda. This could and hopefully will result in reducing the cost of keeping data warehouses around to serve up fully pre-calculated analytics to consumers as well as reducing the complexity of your analytics stack/arch.

amalter · 3 years ago

Do you work on my team? This is exactly how we're using Duckdb with Databricks as the massive data bulldozer and Duckdb as the scalpel.

amalter commented on Apple’s 2½ year old iPhone 12 is 6% faster than the new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra comparedial.com/news/appl... · Posted by u/adrianvincent

manojlds · 3 years ago

Same. My OP5 is still very good and I prefer it to the bulky monsters.

My wife upgraded from same to iphone 14 pro max and is seriously questioning what's so great that it's such a bulky device.

amalter · 3 years ago

Return for an Iphone 14 Pro or just Iphone 14. My partner did the same thing. If you don't want the big screen and fancy triple camera system, get the cheaper options. They will still be rocketship fast with long battery life and beautiful screens.

amalter commented on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city publichealth.verily.com/... · Posted by u/arikr

landemva · 3 years ago

You got actual covid and recovered, then did you get blood test to check for development of antibodies? Then you later got the shot for what purpose?

amalter · 3 years ago

Caught a medium severity case of omicron almost exactly a year ago when I was triple vax'd.

Took the bivalent booster about 2 months ago then went on a cruise and directly after to re:invent.

Since then had multiple exposures with people around me getting week long fevers. So far I had something in my system that made me feel "slightly off" - but nothing worse.

Yay antibodies.

I'm a big believer in "more antibodies the better" - but I am also on the side of "COVID amnesty". The pandemic was an immensely scary time for everyone, and got co-opted by politics of all stripes. We need to forgive each other and move on.

I now support everyone's choice - with the standard exceptions (Childhood vaccines, don't go out when sick, respect others).

amalter commented on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city publichealth.verily.com/... · Posted by u/arikr

cgb223 · 3 years ago

Lots of cities missing from this, many exist but lack any data

Not sure how helpful this is when huge swathes of the population aren’t represented here

amalter · 3 years ago

Wastewater facilities are almost always run by local government. I expect it takes time to get buy in for a project like this. I didn't see if there was a grant to cover the testing, but you at very least need a worker to package up samples and mail them to a lab.

Still, this is tremendously useful where there is coverage, and looks like enough data to make sampling type of conclusions. Hopefully we'll eventually see some kind of network effect.

For example, I'm in the NYC area - and Newark NJ has coverage. There is enough overlap that I expect flu and covid curves (including strains) to be close enough to be interesting.