eropple (u/eropple) - Readit News

eropple commented on In the Rockets' Red Glare: The past and future of hot-rodding in America harpers.org/archive/2024/... · Posted by u/delichon

johnea · a year ago

The article is mostly focused on race tracks, and especially drag racing. But to me "hot rodding" explicitly means street racing.

And in street racing, and driving fast responsive cars in general, electric is the future.

I just recently started owning one, and it drives better than any other vehicle I have ever driven.

The instant acceleration, the very fine power control, and the weight distribution make it more responsive and better handling than literally any other car I've ever driven (and I've been driving for 50 years).

eropple · a year ago

Yup--electric performance vehicles are unreal when you first give one a try. I test drove a Ford Lightning this week and it is ridiculous what a 7,000-lb vehicle can do with that powertrain (to the point where honestly maybe it should require a CDL to drive). Just for kicks I also tried a Mach-E, which was the same kind of zip but without the novelty of being in a three-ton monster. Both felt glued to the road and they were real pleasures to drive.

I really wanted to pull the trigger on the Lightning, but it really was Too Big (won't even really fit in my driveway). Instead I picked a PHEV Escape SUV that'll become my wife's in 4-5 years (so we retain gas ranges on at least one vehicle) and I'll reevaluate what I can get in electric then. The Escape PHEV, however, has all the other advantages except the instant torque; I've never had a vehicle so able to finely control power and the eCVT smooths out the kind of lagging a conventional transmission has on hills and the like. Using zero gas for an hour-long drive is a nice plus, too.

The future of cars, including and maybe especially fast cars, is exciting.

eropple commented on An embarrassingly simple approach to recover unlearned knowledge for LLMs arxiv.org/abs/2410.16454... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

Ajedi32 · a year ago

I'll note that the way we have typically enforced restrictions on the behavior of general intelligences in the past (before AI) is to pass laws and enforce punishments if the laws are broken. Not to try to somehow take away people's ability to break the law in the first place, because that would require unacceptably onerous restrictions on human freedom.

I think the same principle applies to AI. Trying to make it impossible for people to use AI to break the law is a lost cause, only achievable by unacceptably onerous restrictions on human freedom. Instead, we should do what we've always done: make certain actions illegal and punish those who do them anyway in violation of the law. Maybe new laws might be required for that in some cases (e.g. deepfake porn) but for the most part I think the laws we already have on the books are sufficient, maybe with minor tweaks.

eropple · a year ago

That all sounds great until you're dealing with deepfakes that come from a country without an extradition treaty?

eropple commented on M4 MacBook Pro apple.com/newsroom/2024/1... · Posted by u/tosh

stringsandchars · a year ago

> It doesn't really feel different.

My work machine was upgraded from an M1 with 16GB of RAM to an M3 Max with 36GB and the difference in Xcode compile times is beyond belief: I went from something like 1-2 minutes to 15-20 seconds.

Obviously if opening a browser is the most taxing thing your machine is doing the difference will be minimal. But video or music editing, application-compiling and other intensive tasks, then the upgrade is PHENOMENAL.

eropple · a year ago

FWIW I think that's more the core count than anything. I have a M1 Max as a personal machine and an M3 Max at work and while the M3 Max is definitely faster, it isn't world-beating.

eropple commented on GLP-1 for Everything science.org/content/blog-... · Posted by u/etiam

zosima · a year ago

GLP-1 of course is the GLP-1 agonist created by the body.

I don't think that humans eat to obesity by default. People have had adequate food for quite long and not grown fat.

Maybe there is something in out environment or our foods that are blocking the GLP-1 receptor? If a modern food company discovered something like that they'd immediately realize that (unintentionally) they sell better, probably without realizing what they had created.

eropple · a year ago

> People have had adequate food for quite long and not grown fat.

That's revisionist, both in terms of "for quite long" (food insecurity was common in America until about World War II, and massive food surplus available at consumer-cheap prices begins a little later; other countries still suffer from food insecurity today) and that people haven't grown fat when able to do so. Being wealthy enough to the point of being able to be fat has been A Thing for a thousand years. We know this because the medieval Catholic Church felt that they had to preach moderation; if they had to preach it, it's because it wasn't happening as a universality.

eropple commented on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

nostrademons · a year ago

The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't.

...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes).

/dystopia

eropple · a year ago

> advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars)

Advertising absolutely works on you regardless of how smart or educated you are.

How it has to work to do that can change, but the idea that advertising only impacts dumb people is pernicious as shit.

eropple commented on If you're curious why every username is a domain, it's because users are sites bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.... · Posted by u/consumer451

nosioptar · a year ago

It works now, that wasn't the case last time I'd looked.

I wouldn't call it "absolutely fine" by any means. It's way too slow to render for me to use (took about 30 seconds to render the submitted link on my phone, mastodon took about 10 seconds to render a toot). I'm beyond sick of slow web pages.

eropple · a year ago

The mobile web application worked about as well as it does today from at least my join date of April 27, 2023.

As for performance on my iPhone 15, on a 5G (not 5GUW) network, it loads in a second and a half; I just checked. I have some complaints with what RN does in terms of affordances but performance isn't a problem.

eropple commented on If you're curious why every username is a domain, it's because users are sites bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.... · Posted by u/consumer451

nosioptar · a year ago

Requiring a separate app was another problem. My phone already has an app for viewing web pages,it doesn't need another one.

eropple · a year ago

bsky.app works absolutely fine in a web browser and I use it instead of the mobile application. (It's React Native, so they push a build to the web.)

eropple commented on Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 awarded to Nihon Hidankyo nobelprize.org/press-rele... · Posted by u/danielskogly

seabass-labrax · a year ago

I don't manage to keep up with Republican party machinations - please could you explain why the Bush-era staff won't be there if Trump is elected again?

eropple · a year ago

Because most have left, either retired or disassociated from Trump and his movement.

Trump's running as hard as he can (which isn't very, he isn't convincing) from the proudly published (and terrifying!) Project 2025 stuff, but they aren't running from him, and there are reasons for that.

eropple commented on LSP: The good, the bad, and the ugly michaelpj.com/blog/2024/0... · Posted by u/bryjnar

sesm · a year ago

The problem that Microsoft is solving is promotion of VsCode and Visual Studio. Making LSP small and easy to implement would go against that. They want LSP to work well only in their IDEs. Yes, this makes implementing LSP for languages harder, but most of those developers are paid by MS directly or indirectly, in fact making LSP hard also works as a filter against unpaid contributors.

eropple · a year ago

Having read the LSP specification, and when I take into account just how many things LSP does, I think a 285-page spec is really tiny. I have specs on my work computer with TMF and CAMARA specs that are nearly 100 pages just to talk about the operation of a half-dozen methods--and there's still ambiguity in them at times.

Coupling that genuine brevity with the ability to avoid serious backwards-compatibility problems makes this charge feel pretty outlandish, TBH.