florbnit (u/florbnit)

florbnit commented on The sisters “paradox” – counter-intuitive probability blog.engora.com/2025/08/t... · Posted by u/Vermin2000

rml · 3 days ago

For something this small we can enumerate all the cases (this is a Scheme version of the Mathematica `Tuples` function)

    > (list-tuples '(B G) 2)
    ((B B) (B G) (G B) (G G))

3 cases have at least one girl

of those 3 cases, 1/3 are both girls

florbnit · 3 days ago

A coworker approached you and goes “hi, I have two children and one is a boy…” and is promptly vaporized because he doesn’t fit the selection criteria of the problem statement, another approaches and goes “err hi, I have two children and one is a girl…” looks nervously at the vaporizer but is left standing. What is the chance their other child is a girl, who has not been vaporized?

If you phrase the question as “someone with two children tell you the gender of a random one, what is the chance the other is the same gender?” Chance is 50/50 because 50% will have BB or GG and the vaporizer isn’t active.

florbnit commented on The sisters “paradox” – counter-intuitive probability blog.engora.com/2025/08/t... · Posted by u/Vermin2000

the_gipsy · 3 days ago

Why can you not frame it as: "a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a girl"?

I.e. without "discarding", just giving some additional, but not complete, information on the random sample. Is adding information about the picked sample the same as discarding all contrarian samples? Why is this relevant?

florbnit · 3 days ago

> a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a girl"

It’s not a random family if it must have at least one girl. If you want to talk about a random family you can only make statements of the kind “one of the children is <gender>” where the gender depend on the specific family or “the family has between 0 and 2 girls”

florbnit commented on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock wsj.com/opinion/uncle-sam... · Posted by u/aspenmayer

Night_Thastus · 5 days ago

There are a lot of times where I'd say a business should be allowed to fail - but this is a poor choice to do so.

* You can't just spin up leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on a dime. It takes decades and hundreds of billions to reach where companies like Intel and TSMC are now. It's so hard that it's essentially impossible for new entrants to catch up.

* The US has a strong interest in having local manufacturing, that no other power could take away in a time where it's needed.

>a lot of those companies are currently fabless, but how many would change that with equipment bought at a fraction of the cost?

Zero. Dumping the fabs on them would not help them. They're expensive and complicated to run. They don't have the knowledge to run the fab side of design (it's a joint effort on both sides to design a chip), nor the money or knowledge to improve those fabs and keep them up with the leading edge.

florbnit · 5 days ago

> You can't just spin up leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on a dime. It takes decades and hundreds of billions to reach where companies like Intel and TSMC are now. It's so hard that it's essentially impossible for new entrants to catch up.

You can if intel goes bankrupt. Why do people act like a bankruptcy consists of taking all the employees out back and putting them down then setting all the buildings on fire.

florbnit commented on Review of Anti-Aging Drugs scienceblog.com/joshmitte... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

IceHegel · 13 days ago

There's a fascinating tension with anti-aging drugs, which is that your preference would obviously be to take them as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But taking experimental drugs while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any side effects.

florbnit · 13 days ago

There's also a fascinating tension with physical exercise, which is that your preference would obviously be do it as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But doing exercise while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any injuries.

That said, even with risk of injuries it feels like a no brainer to be active and to be active from an early age.

Also I don’t think people should wait until their late 50ies to make sure they get enough vitamin c to “avoid sacrificing their 20ies”

florbnit commented on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move neowin.net/news/hyundai-w... · Posted by u/duxup

king_geedorah · 14 days ago

If the ignition and door locks in your vehicle were mistakenly designed in such a way that they are trivially shimmed or could be operated by any key it seems absurd to suggest the customer should pay you to replace these mechanisms with ones that are properly secured. This seems roughly analogous to that situation at least to my understanding.

florbnit · 14 days ago

The story has a bad spin yes. But it’s just as much of a controversy if they had require people themselves pay the cost if they found out the cars where shipped with defective breaks. It’s a product error not wear and tear or user error, they should eat the costs, but the cybersecurity framing of it is being used to attempt to push the cost to the consumer.

florbnit commented on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move neowin.net/news/hyundai-w... · Posted by u/duxup

agilob · 14 days ago

Swapping software, pentesting, testing, QA, CI/CD pipelines, image caches aren't free either. Can we then start making more money as software developers to patch CVEs? We clearly should consider holding ourselves to a lower standard. Your requests are getting 5xx errors? Pay me more to fix it, not my problem that your requests is failing.

florbnit · 14 days ago

> Pay me more to fix it, not my problem that your requests is failing.

If you are employed in a position where there is a defect in the product then you are already being paid. Imagine going to a restaurant and you get an uncooked frozen steak, and when you tell the waiter they tell you that since the cook will need to spend more time on it you now have to pay extra.

florbnit commented on Should you take creatine? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/Anon84

rglullis · 15 days ago

No one eats excess calories as any type of supplement or natural enhancement, so your example does not work as a counterpoint to the free lunch principle.

florbnit · 15 days ago

So you’re arguing that the free lunch principle doesn’t apply to lunch?

florbnit commented on YouTube to be included in Australia's social media ban for children under 16 pm.gov.au/media/albanese-... · Posted by u/Improvement

lupusreal · a month ago

Other hobbies build transferable skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles. A very small number of video games can do some of these, but it isn't the norm.

florbnit · a month ago

Games are like books. Saying books are worthless because they don’t build “transferable skills” is absurd. But it’s obviously true of many books and sure, the most popular books don’t. But as a whole they definitely do.

florbnit commented on Scientists reveal a widespread but unidentified psychological phenomenon psypost.org/scientists-re... · Posted by u/thunderbong

florbnit · a month ago

I feel like there’s scientists must have spent a long time researching this seemingly new phenomenon before discovering that the sunk cost fallacy was widely studied. And at that point rather than spend the effort to correct their conclusions they decided to double down and spend even more effort on trying to spin their work as something new and unrelated to the sunk cost fallacy.

florbnit commented on 23andMe is out of bankruptcy and it still hasn’t substantially changed its ways washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

FirmwareBurner · a month ago

>Sure they can. GDPR article 2 (2) says:

No they can't. That says only about where the law applies, it doesn't say about prosecution of entities not residing in the EU. EU's legal arm can't extent outside the boarders of the EU, without an outright military invasion, it's toothless to foreign entities.

>So the GDPR applies.

I never said it doesn't apply. I said how is the EU gonna prosecute an entity that doesn't reside in the EU?

Extraditions are tough to negotiate even for serious stuff like murder. No foreign judge will take GDPR violations seriously to do that.

florbnit · a month ago

> EU's legal arm can't extent outside the boarders of the EU, without an outright military invasion

All the lawsuits from EU against tech companies outside the EU have been carried out without any military invasions required. You are delusional if you think USA is going to go “Google won’t pay the fines, invade us if you want the money”