asperous (u/asperous)

asperous commented on Show HN: HumanAlarm – Real people knock on your door to wake you up humanalarm.com... · Posted by u/soelost

ben-gy · 3 months ago

It’s a fun, niche solution, but I’d posit when you start looking into the minimum financial requirements to operate this business in a way that “guarantees” everyone’s safety and insures against worst case scenarios, this is not a viable business even at the smallest scale.

I’m not sure how things are in America, but in Australia you can be made personally liable (both small and large businesses) for things that go wrong in your company, especially when someone gets injured e.g. https://www.ohsrep.org.au/prosecutions_sn_699_connect

asperous · 3 months ago

That seems like a thought terminating concept? Every business has risks.

The employees should know what they are getting into and hopefully the business is providing resources to help keep them reasonably safe.

asperous commented on EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm nytimes.com/2025/07/18/cl... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

jleyank · 5 months ago

It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.

As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.

asperous · 5 months ago

The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1]. The solution was to have many competing factions. I think first-past-the-post, corporate election influence, and mass media consolidated power into a single faction that ended up causing the system to break down (in that the branches don't seem to be checking each other's power right now).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10

asperous commented on Recall going back into Windows arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/cratermoon

asperous · 8 months ago

It appears this will be an opt in feature.

Honestly it will probably help some people "hey where did I put that file?" but yes at a tremendous cost to privacy and security for those who use it.

I am also weary that it is opt in "for now".

asperous commented on California Attorney General issues consumer alert for 23andMe customers oag.ca.gov/news/press-rel... · Posted by u/thoughtpeddler

arjie · 9 months ago

The practice of how this does damage isn't clear to me. But I'm going to test this in the very skin-in-the-game sense. My genome (sequenced by Nebula Genomics) is available to anyone who would like it. I have raw FASTQ files which you will have to pay a nominal fee to access.

Once upon a time, a friend and I decided we should launch a site where people can submit their genomes and health information so that broad population scale studies can be done. I did submit my stuff to All Of Us and so on, but I think the fact that you need to be special-cased to access the data is probably a loss.

So I think it's time to revisit this whole thing. Perhaps I should make VCFs available instead. They're much smaller and may be more accessible for people. In any case, if you want my FASTQs, just email me.

asperous · 9 months ago

No singular person, it's more the value of having a large database. You visit a coffee shop, a stalker collects your dna from a fingerprint and uses the a leaked or sold database from 23andme to tie it to your identity or home address, etc.