coldbrewed (u/coldbrewed)

coldbrewed commented on Sig Sauer citing national security to keep documents from public practicalshootinginsights... · Posted by u/eoskx

lenerdenator · a day ago

A manual safety that does not seem to prevent uncommanded discharges. Which is, y'know, part of the point of a safety.

coldbrewed · a day ago

Yep, the fact that the safety merely blocks the trigger and doesn't block the striker in case of accidental sear disengagement is horrifying.

coldbrewed commented on What happens the day after Superintelligence? venturebeat.com/ai/what-h... · Posted by u/hogwash

coldbrewed · 16 days ago

Browsers need to start displaying a count of em-dashes and en-dashes in articles so that we know what to expect from AI generated self-aggrandizing articles like this.

coldbrewed commented on Agent Mesh for Enterprise Agents solo.io/blog/agent-mesh-f... · Posted by u/pj3677

coldbrewed · 4 months ago

So, it's istio but with AI generated blog posts?

coldbrewed commented on The World Is Ending. Welcome to the Spooner Revolution aethn.com/posts/the-world... · Posted by u/ethn

tacitusarc · 4 months ago

It would be better if the author could write plain English.

coldbrewed · 4 months ago

Coldbrew's law states that if an article is written in praise of AI and abstrusely written, then it's probably AI slop, written by someone who holds their own ideas in high enough regard to publish but holds their audience in low enough regard that they won't bother to edit it.

Edit: there it is. `vibe-coded and deployed with Claude Code`

coldbrewed commented on Hotel booking sites overcharge Bay Area customers sfgate.com/travel/article... · Posted by u/ekelsen

janalsncm · 8 months ago

Dynamic pricing is the future of everything. If consumers are willing to pay 1.5x, you are leaving money on the table by only charging x. In fact in a fully optimized system, once consumers have all of their wants and needs met, they will have zero dollars left over. (Expensive end of life care tends to have similar results today.)

NPR did a piece on it last year which to me came off a bit too cheerful.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-gr...

Using only time of day is fairly primitive, though. We can do better. With facial recognition, we can probably personalize prices to the penny.

coldbrewed · 8 months ago

> In fact in a fully optimized system, once consumers have all of their wants and needs met, they will have zero dollars left over.

What are your parameters for optimization here? If the point is to maximize extracted revenue then this is a reasonable outcome but we could optimize for any number of targets. We could optimize to make the best use of resources, we could optimize for best consumer reviews, we could optimize for the ideal buyer/seller price that makes both entities in the transaction walk away with the best deal for each of them.

But there's this persistent notion in the current business zeitgeist that the only metric worth optimizing is profit maximization and it's one that we should reject. Companies need to make a profit and workers need to take home a salary and that's fine, but we get to build the world that we live in. Living in a world where we care about quality of life and equity in transactions is much more interesting to me than living in one where all we care about is the velocity of extraction from anything that isn't nailed down.

coldbrewed commented on DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/duckduck... · Posted by u/oalders

sneak · 9 months ago

Gifts don’t require repayment. Releasing free software is a gift to the world. Corporations don’t owe free software maintainers a cent, because people using your software doesn’t cost you anything.

coldbrewed · 9 months ago

Open source is a gift within a gift economy. The software may be freely used but the labor needs to come from somewhere, and donations of either direct labor or compensation help ensure that the overall gift economy can continue to function.

coldbrewed commented on USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas usgs.gov/news/national-ne... · Posted by u/antidnan

chromatin · 10 months ago

Serious question:

Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for poverty / SES) ?

coldbrewed · 10 months ago

My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...

coldbrewed commented on Tesla Semi fire in California took 50k gallons of water to extinguish cnbc.com/2024/09/13/tesla... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

coolspot · a year ago

Engineer here.

> Fire trucks" - I'm assuming you mean Engines

No-no-no, an engine is a part that makes a fire truck move. Fire trucks usually have a diesel engine.

tips fedora

coldbrewed · a year ago

Software engineer, or IFSAC Apparatus Operator engineer? On the west coast we absolutely refer to our pumping apparatuses as fire engines; when Engine 813 is dispatched from our station to a call we bring the whole vehicle and not just the engine block!

coldbrewed commented on Tesla Semi fire in California took 50k gallons of water to extinguish cnbc.com/2024/09/13/tesla... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

mastry · a year ago

Is that unusual? Nothing in the article compares it to other fires. Honestly curious.

Also, this was a little ironic…

> The Tesla truck, driven by an employee, was headed to the company’s battery factory in Sparks, Nevada

coldbrewed · a year ago

ICE vehicle fires take about 1000 gallons, and the average fire hydrant puts out about 500-1000 gallons per minute. Structural fire engines carry about 1000 gallons and the heavy duty nozzles and ground monitors/deck guns put out 500-1000gpm. This is a LOT of water for a vehicle.

coldbrewed commented on The American West is figuring out how to keep cool bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/pseudolus

anamexis · a year ago

Is there any evidence that the heat from cars directly contributes meaningfully to temperature in cities? I’m genuinely curious (but skeptical).

Edit: Some back of the envelope math:

Article says cars add 1.2 * 10^6 BTU of heat per day to Manhattan.

Some rough math on my part suggests that Manhattan gets about 5.6 * 10^11 BTU of heat per day from the sun, 5 orders of magnitude more. The heat directly generated by cars is a rounding error.

coldbrewed · a year ago

The heat from vehicles isn't distributed spatially across rooftops/walls/trees where the heat might be dispersed; instead the heat from vehicles is concentrated and radiated adjacent to sidewalks (impacting pedestrians) and asphalt (which is effective at storing and re-radiating heat). Nor is it dispersed evenly throughout the day; congestion during rush hour will cause a spike of heat during the hottest part of the day with greater numbers of pedestrians experiencing that heat. Idling vehicles are also running air conditioning, and all of those idling/air conditioned vehicles will be creating an ambient atmosphere where their AC systems will have to run harder to create the same level of cooling.

As you note solar heating likely dominates the overall heating of the city but I would fully expect that idling vehicles contributes meaningfully to the pedestrian and driver perceptions of heat.