Interesting idea. DM me @ poppynudge
Is there a way you can make custom time-intervals? One month seems too short for one of my friends, but 3 months is too long.
Readit Newscitadel_melon commented on Show HN: Poppy – A simple app to stay intentional with relationships poppy-connection-keeper.n... · Posted by u/mahirhiro
citadel_melon commented on Is your electric bill going up? AI is partly to blame npr.org/2025/11/06/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/ilamont
No, the point of my comment is that, while that is true, that's not the "cause".
The article states that AI is partly to blame. How could one state this claim is not sufficiently qualified?
citadel_melon commented on AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is fastcompany.com/91435192/... · Posted by u/felineflock
1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again.
2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located in the U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case costs = developer salaries.
So you’re right. We got more efficient. We reduced the average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs are moving/will move to places where people are willing to work for less.
Efficiency does not necessarily mean lower costs. More efficient workers could mean more valuable workers, and thus something employers are willing to pay more for in a competitive labor market.
citadel_melon commented on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation time.com/7285045/resignin... · Posted by u/jbegley
"Bell Laboratories has been the recipient of 11 Nobel Prizes in Physics, with notable laureates including John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and Arthur Ashkin. Other notable achievements include the invention of the transistor, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and the development of optical tweezers."
Microsoft Research has a ton of people working on theoretical CS.
Biology - there is a ton of research in agriculture too - e.g. Monsanto and GMO seeds.
Bell Labs was at its peak from 1960s-1970s. Since the 80s, corporate governance has completely changed due to Jack Welch’s short-term shareholder maximization ideology taking over the corporate world.
I don’t think there are current private organizations doing research similar to what Bell Labs did as the current corporate-governance systems wouldn’t allow for it.
Currently, industry research is more for profit-maximization at the expense of greater human prosperity/economic growth: such as you mention Monsanto making patented seeds, increasing profits by disallowing farmers to regrow crops more cheaply which otherwise could’ve been passed onto consumers/wider society.
citadel_melon commented on The Brief Origins of May Day archive.iww.org/history/l... · Posted by u/pera
Tech workers tend to get paid very well. That limits incentivization for unionization. Also there is a stigma that unions tend to be for the middle of the road workers with modest salaries. All the senior leaders with big salaries are not union, and everyone wants the big salary.
It’s silly. MLB players are unionized and they make more money than tech workers. The reason why management don’t need a union is because they have much more say in determining their own wages.
If you live in SF, you can get a cheap degree from a California community college. It will be 10-50 dollars per semester. You can even transfer the last year of the degree to a UC if you care for a name-brand school, but I don’t think that would be necessary with work experience.
Stories like these where bad actors take over regulatory bodies make me curious why people are so trusting of central government authorities especially when it comes to the food that they consume. Sometimes there isn't a better option but people will religiously defend an org (FDA) that allows sales and marketing to children of food that contains chemicals and dyes that are known to be harmful by European regulatory bodies.
The FDA was founded in 1906. They are the reason we don’t have formaldehyde in our meat nor chalk in our milk. Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair to understand why people defend the FDA.
citadel_melon commented on 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself reuters.com/business/heal... · Posted by u/healsdata
Look at the current political situation in the US. Do you think there's a lot of legislation protecting consumers from insurance firms any time soon?
I agree with this point to some extent, but insurance before protections for preexisting conditions used acne as a reason to reject cancer treatment claims: obviously fraudulent behavior. If insurance is deregulated and any regulations aren’t going to be enforced regardless — a path we are going down — insurance firms will weasel out of claims with or without this genomic data
citadel_melon commented on 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself reuters.com/business/heal... · Posted by u/healsdata
Even if you haven't personally used their service, if any close relatives have, they already have a sizable amount of information on your genome. They maintain the equivalent of "shadow profiles" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile) as part of their data model for "ancestry" modeling purposes - for example inferring a paternal haplogroup based on data uploaded by genetic relatives.
I can only hope at the end of the day their data doesn't end up in the wrong hands. It is their most valuable asset, and this is a way bigger deal than it seems.
I am not as worried if this data gets out or not.
I think there are negative externalities if the data is sold to insurance firms — who can use the genomic information in litigation and policy rejections — or if the data is sold to some sort of powerful, pro-eugenics political organization. The insurance externalities likely can be mitigated with minimal legislation (protecting consumers in a similar manner to how we protect those with pre-existing conditions) and it is reasonable to assume pro-eugenics political groups wouldn’t be any less dangerous without this genomic data available.
Thus, I struggle to see how this data changing hands would be especially detrimental to society. One could contend a moral dilemma will arise from future developments in cloning, but would it? We already have clones in the form of identical twins, and their existence does not seem to create many, if any, especially problematic moral dilemmas. Maybe people are worried that society will start cloning celebrities and famous intellectuals instead of having babies more naturally — creating a world of designer babies where the diversity of thought and talent shrinks in a “tragedy of the commons”-esque dilemma — but I don’t think this is people’s issue because most people frame their qualms as more of a personal privacy issue. Moreover, designer babies issue I describe would likely become an issue with or without cloning.
There are issues that come to mind regarding genomics in commerce — such as the ethics and market incentives of patenting certain genomic patterns — but again I don’t see how this 23andMe data changing hands make this issue any more pressing than before.
On the other hand, my instinct (which I have learned to never blindly trust) is that making the data more widely available may make it cheaper and easier for researchers to make impactful discoveries. Therefore, my biggest worry with the change of ownership is that the new owners may keep the data behind a bigger wall.
citadel_melon commented on Stanford students want in on the military tech gold rush sfstandard.com/2025/03/12... · Posted by u/redarguireda
Do you think war is just inherently immoral? What should a country do to not be Ukraine?
It’s an important question. I think of a saying I once heard about picking a SWE job: “back in the day, if you went to finance you were evil and if you went to big tech you were good. Now, you are evil no matter where you go.”
Previously, one could argue that choosing to give your labor to an industry with superior values and alignment of incentives over another would provide the most good as that industry will naturally assert and perpetuate its values and personal interest throughout society and government. However, it’s unclear what industry has superior values and best alignment of incentives with society.