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ashleyn commented on Four Million U.S. Children Had No Health Insurance in 2024   scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
freedomben · 4 days ago
For my kids, health insurance premium would have been almost $2k per month. In a typical year we spend about $1,200 total on medical stuff just paying out of pocket. Also keep in mind that premiums are not all you pay - there's also deductible and co-pays on top of that!

It's not hard to math that up and see how insane doing the health insurance would be. Yes there's the catastrophic risk of a bad accident or ER visit or something, and that's worth some cost, but even saving half the premiums in a money market account not only provides a good cushion for that, but if we don't use the money we actually get to keep it!

ashleyn · 4 days ago
It would be nice if health insurance were, well, insurance, and not some bastard mix of cost sharing and collective bargaining. The closest you get to "catastrophic only" insurance is an obamacare bronze and/or a high deductible plan with an HSA. Same service, same networks, but you pay less premiums and thus keep what you don't spend.

Health catastrophes are more likely than you may think, so I would suggest a HDHP+HSA at the very least. It's very difficult to self insure against a cancer diagnosis that may blow a million dollars in a year.

I'm a fairly high net worth individual with a high deductible plan. Setting aside the deductible amount in savings (often, tax free with the HSA) and keeping it every year you have good health is OP.

ashleyn commented on 40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity   tum.de/en/news-and-events... · Posted by u/geox
Aurornis · 4 days ago
This isn’t entirely news to people in the field doing research, but it’s important information to keep in mind when anyone starts pushing fMRI (or SPECT) scans into popular media discussions about neurology or psychiatry.

There have been some high profile influencer doctors pushing brain imaging scans as diagnostic tools for years. Dr. Amen is one of the worst offenders with his clinics that charge thousands of dollars for SPECT scans (not the same as the fMRI in this paper but with similar interpretation issues) on patients. Insurance won’t cover them because there’s no scientific basis for using them in diagnosing or treating ADHD or chronic pain, but his clinics will push them on patients. Seeing an image of their brain with some colors overlayed and having someone confidently read it like tea leaves is highly convincing to people who want answers. Dr. Amen has made the rounds on Dr. Phil and other outlets, as well as amassing millions of followers on social media.

ashleyn · 4 days ago
Back in 2009 I remember reading about how dead salmon apparently turns up brain activity in fMRI without proper statistical methods. fMRI studies are something frequently invoked unscientifically and out of context.

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

ashleyn commented on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?   english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
vjk800 · 5 days ago
Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors?

I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).

ashleyn · 5 days ago
This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect.

Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity.

The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them.

All this being said, technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious, nor will human innovation always stay under jevons paradox, and I think policymakers need to seriously entertain taboo solutions for it sooner or later. Such as a WPA-style infrastructure project or basic income.

ashleyn commented on NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months   airqualitynews.com/cars-f... · Posted by u/pseudolus
hammock · 10 days ago
They better be. No one’s rooting for the smog, but a congestion tax is pretty regressive (hurts poorer people more)
ashleyn · 10 days ago
Well, Mamdani wants to make transit free. Car taxes can probably help a lot to pay for that.
ashleyn commented on Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004)   devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/HeliumHydride
vardump · 12 days ago
Pretty surprising. So IA64 registers were 65 bit, with the extra bit describing whether the register contains garbage or not. If NaT (Not a Thing) is set, the register contents are invalid and that can cause "fun" things to happen...

Not that this matters to anyone anymore. IA64 utterly failed long ago.

ashleyn · 12 days ago
There are modern VLIW architectures. I think Groq uses one. The lessons on what works and what doesn't are worth learning from history.
ashleyn commented on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)   info.arxiv.org/about/acce... · Posted by u/el3ctron
ashleyn · 14 days ago
Can't help but wonder if this was motivated in part by people feeding papers into LLMs for summary, search, or review. PDF is awful for LLMs. You're effectively pigeonholed into using (PAYING for) Adobe's proprietary app and models which barely hold a candle to Gemini or Claude. There are PDF-to-text converters, but they often munge up the formatting.
ashleyn commented on Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy   jacobin.com/2025/11/peter... · Posted by u/robtherobber
yannyu · 18 days ago
In the current setup, having enough money protects you from the laws of the country and the judgment of others. Thiel is rich enough and therefore powerful enough that these culture wars will never personally affect him or anyone he cares about.
ashleyn · 18 days ago
I've always suspected this mentality had a lot to do with why Peter Thiel is like that. Growing up in the wreckage of the AIDS crisis and thinking to yourself, "I don't have to go down with them. I don't ever have to be like them. I'm still here, because I'm smarter, I'm better than them." I'd never admit any of this publicly, but I have a lot of similar thoughts as a trans woman who slipped through all the cracks and ended up wealthy in my thirties. Poverty is the tip of the discrimination spear and you really could buy your way out of it all.
ashleyn commented on Malware embedded into audio driver is silently recording from system mic   twitter.com/Officialwhyte... · Posted by u/CGMthrowaway
jml7c5 · 19 days ago
According to the vx-underground Twitter account, this is just Regin (which was first described in 2014): https://x.com/vxunderground/status/1995309917805179141

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regin_(malware)

ashleyn · 19 days ago
Well at the very least he confirmed Regin continues to circulate.
ashleyn commented on Airbus A320 Fly by wire corrupted by radiation in flight   viewfromthewing.com/airbu... · Posted by u/JohannMac
userbinator · 22 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset

Apparently it has happened to an Airbus once before.

ashleyn · 21 days ago
Why do I get the feeling both of these are a diagnosis of exclusion, and there's not particularly any hard evidence that radiation is causing these uncommanded manoeuvres? How unlikely is it for Airbus models specifically to be vulnerable to radiation-induced data corruption twice in almost twenty years? Are there similar incidents recorded for Boeing jets?
ashleyn commented on The only GM EV1 ever publicly sold   theautopian.com/how-the-o... · Posted by u/zdw
madamelic · a month ago
I used to walk past one of these every day on my way to and from my dorm.

My school apparently had no idea what it was for years and it just sat outside underneath the EE building and people would draw dicks in the dust on it. When they realized what it was, they immediately yonked it inside and made a student team to refurb it.

It's super cool I got to see such a piece of history and rare car even if I didn't realize it for so long.

Before: https://images.hgmsites.net/med/gm-ev1-electric-car-at-misso...

After: https://i.redd.it/8hqyo6iq7ixa1.jpg

ashleyn · 25 days ago
Begs the question of how it escaped GM's clutches. All EV1s were leased with no buyout option, later recalled, and most crushed.

u/ashleyn

KarmaCake day2658October 14, 2017View Original