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fasa99 commented on Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)   engineering.mit.edu/engag... · Posted by u/sorentwo
johnnyanmac · 10 months ago
It's just more examples of enshittification over the decades. Nevermind the checkin, the premiums for first class are absurd (and nowadays there's at least 4 different tiers of flight, not just 2), you don't get free snacks anymore, seating is smaller, etc. Those times of treating customers with respected ended quite a while ago (except during COVID of course. But that's mostly over).
fasa99 · 10 months ago
>customers with respected ended quite a while ago (except during COVID of course. But that's mostly over).

I definitely didn't feel respected during covid. There was a mask rule, standard for the time, fine. But then they give out drinks, okay. They were extremely strict, you must sip your drink and have your mask on again within less than a second. Long sips, unacceptable. Pause in your sip, unacceptable, there needs to then be two sips with an intermediate remasking. The air staff were quite 1930s Germany as far as the rigor of their enforcement of this rule. This has all the charm and beside manner of a driver laying on their horn 200ms after the red light turns green. Quite bizarre, the mask fetish, when most passengers were vaccinated and there's this huge vector of spreading the disease called touching things with pathogens on their surface aka fomites.

fasa99 commented on He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along   nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us... · Posted by u/rawgabbit
OptionOfT · a year ago
I'm surprised the police doesn't have to pay for them. It's not that the tests were medically necessary.
fasa99 · a year ago
>I'm surprised the police doesn't have to pay for them. It's not that the tests were medically necessary. If only it were so simple. Medicine can be quite nasty politically at times, internally and externally, and these mandatory examinations are the currency of really screwing someone if that's what you want. Psych especially, part of the theme of the original catch-22 book.

A lot of the laws are at first pass related to psych - "harm to self or others". That earns you a free non-voluntary trip to the hospital. The part where it gets nasty is when words get twisted, when ulterior motives exist, when the accuser possesses some authority - such that an "unsafe to self or others" argument is put forth. Situations where the person needs help, but perhaps won't seek it out on their own, thus the state must intervene. In this narrative, our police officers said, "harm to self, drugs in digestive tract, may rupture and cause death, not willing to seek medical care for fear of losing drug transport and/or prosecution, please treat so they don't rupture"

The victim of such a crime now has a choice - pay a bunch of money to the hospital to clear the bill, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to get the police to pony up responsibility. It's happened to me too along the lines of "the government made big mistake and caused problems for you, you can take ownership of the false accusations, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to have them wiped". Often in our society there's the suffering of being a victim, then the victim tax on top of that

fasa99 commented on I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone   simonwillison.net/2025/Ja... · Posted by u/paulcapewell
brk · a year ago
What is the correlation? Olive Garden has nothing to do with anything Italian.
fasa99 · a year ago
I set mine to Spanish and now it's nothing but Taco Bell ads
fasa99 commented on I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone   simonwillison.net/2025/Ja... · Posted by u/paulcapewell
eximius · a year ago
I have successfully argued this for at least a certain class of devices. Namely, it practically can't happen _for small devices_. e.g., a TV remote with a voice feature activated by a button simply won't have enough _power_ to constantly be listening, uploading, or processing.

Harder to convince folks that _nothing_ does this, but takes an edge off their more paranoid tendencies.

fasa99 · a year ago
I personally don't believe any argument that says it's not feasible.

Transcribing all spoken text and sending it home, sure, not feasible.

What if we have 256 keywords, or 65536 keywords, maybe preconfigured for particular products or product classes. Some basic linear predictive coding mechanism ( you know, what powered those '80s chips Stephen Hawking style, speak and spell, etc) - very very low computational overhead. When the word is triggered, queue a message back home at the next reasonable opportunity - user id, timestamp, word. It will only take a couple bytes. It can be slipped in anywhere and obfuscated by any means by nature of being so small, data-wise, even as a watermark of some sort. By using a timestamp and waiting until the next opportunity, maybe minutes, hours, or days away, no time correlation detection is possible either.

People say big tech is ethical, fine. Maybe some ad company is sponsoring some free app or game for the phone, and slipping this in there. Now the developer can pay their rent and food costs. Maybe the ad company is then selling that data back to big tech who washes their hands of any wrongdoing. Maybe it's all legal because the fine print of the EULA allows for this.

Seems to me though this can be figured out empirically, just have a voice play something like "need to buy adult diapers" or "new tires" etc next to a device, enumerate every device, look for ads on whatever very specific topic, minding along the way to tell nobody and never enter it in any internet-connected keyboard.

fasa99 commented on Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly   forums.autodesk.com/t5/ne... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
toomuchtodo · a year ago
Always Be Archiving. Never trust the platform.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

fasa99 · a year ago
I'm a big archive team fan but gotta go with the ABC acronym such as "always be collecting" or "always be capturing"
fasa99 commented on FBI: Largest homemade explosives cache in agency history found in Virginia   thehill.com/national-secu... · Posted by u/domofutu
franktankbank · a year ago
There's legal and then there's needing 5 certifications, yearly renewals etc etc in order to avoid destroying your tractor for handling common nuisance on the farm.
fasa99 · a year ago
A lot of regulations are a mess. As I understand it, agriculture drones full of fertilizer are beginning to be used throughout, makes sense. And tractors run on diesel since forever. So add diesel to the fertilizer drone now you have a viable powerful weapon... unregulated. I'm sure tens of thousands of farmers have this in their pocket right now, just not their intent. Same with firearms. A pea shooter .22, highly regulated, felony charges everywhere. Now, a 50 caliber airgun? No gunpowder, not a firearm. They even make automatic airguns. Arguably with a large air supply and large ammo clip, and airgun could trounce some automatics, primarily because their barrels won't overheat, they might overcool though because physics of expanding gasses. And yet the humble .22 is the highly regulated one.

Some governments and regulators attempt to enumerate every possible conceivable bad thing and outlaw it. Problem is it's not enumerable, there will always be dozens of missed loopholes, which the regulations will steer people into. Parallels the warping and skewing of trying to fix an economy through proclamation versus distributed capitalism.

fasa99 commented on FBI: Largest homemade explosives cache in agency history found in Virginia   thehill.com/national-secu... · Posted by u/domofutu
smallmancontrov · a year ago
Could be, or maybe they had a really good discount at the pipe bomb store and he'd basically be losing money if he didn't buy at least 150 pipe bombs.
fasa99 · a year ago
“We had two barrels of fertilizer, seventy-five pellets of gunpowder, five sheets of high powered C4, a salt shaker half full of nitro, and a whole galaxy of 50 cals, buckshot, slugs, tracers... and also a quart of kerosene, a quart of diesel, a case of grenades, a kilo of raw uranium and two dozen rockets. Not that we needed all that for self defense, but once you get locked into a serious explosives collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

-Osama Bin Laden

fasa99 commented on I automated my job application process   blog.daviddodda.com/how-i... · Posted by u/paul-tharun
Aurornis · a year ago
> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements?

I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT).

The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated applications and embracing LLMs. Their response rate is dismal, but they make up for it with shotgun volume.

The catch is that when they finally get a job, it’s usually at a company that sucks. Some place with incompetent hiring managers who can’t tell the difference between LLM slop and a genuine application. Interview processes that leave so much room for LLM cheating that all of your coworkers are going to be LLM jockeys too.

So you can try it. You might get something out of it, which is better than nothing. However, if you’re expecting a good job at a good company then it’s not going to deliver what you expect.

fasa99 · a year ago
This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot. Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side benefit is it will jam up other candidates.

An arms race is afoot

fasa99 commented on Scale Model of Boeing 777-300ER, Made from Manila Folders   lucaiaconistewart.com/mod... · Posted by u/uticus
ChrisMarshallNY · a year ago
This is an awesome project!

Someone (with copious free time) is just a wee bit obsessive.

Hate to say it, but I can sort of relate (but I don't have enough free time to do something this intricate).

fasa99 · a year ago
For sure, a lot of hard work and energy went into this project. Some say that if Boeing had that kind of energy, their planes might even fly!
fasa99 commented on Show HN: I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers   papermatch.mitanshu.tech/... · Posted by u/Quizzical4230
fasa99 · a year ago
For what it's worth, back in the day (a few years ago, before the LLM boom a few years) I found on a similar sized vector database (gensim / doc2vec), it's possible to just brute force a vector search e.g. with SSE or AVX type instructions. You can code it in C and have a python API. Your data appears to be a few gigs so that's feasible for realtime CPU brute force, <200 ms

u/fasa99

KarmaCake day139January 25, 2024View Original