hohloma (u/hohloma) - Readit News

hohloma commented on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/yo... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

Author here. I woke up to a surprising amount of traffic! Some notes based on the discussion.

This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]

I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]

On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.

This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...

[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...

hohloma · 6 months ago

> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.

Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.

hohloma commented on Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence arxiv.org/abs/2502.05244... · Posted by u/pavanto

energy123 · a year ago

Similar to bootstrapping a random variable in statistics. Your N estimates (each estimate is derived from a subset of the sample data) give you an estimate of the distribution of the random variable. If the variance of that distribution is small (relative to the magnitude of the point estimate) then you have high confidence that your point estimate is close to the true value.

Likewise in your metric, if all answers are the same despite perturbations then it's more likely to be ... true?

I'd really like to see a plot of your metric versus the SimpleQA hallucation benchmark that OpenAI uses.

hohloma · a year ago

Confidence != true

hohloma commented on Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost pv-magazine.com/2022/10/1... · Posted by u/fairytalemtg

ajross · 3 years ago

You didn't provide a cite, FWIW. But taking the numbers as given:

Those aren't the right metrics. First, capacity factor is an approximation of "fraction of maximum", not reliability at all, which is a whole-grid measurement.

Find the data for any one gas plant. How often was it producing (emphasis in the original) no power? I'll bet anything that most plants are offline quite a bit more than 10%, precisely because demand itself is variable and gas is the easiest plant to bring up and down. Yet you call one a "reliability" metric and the other not, why?

In fact as a whole, German wind power has been exceedingly reliable. Wind power everywhere has been exceedingly reliable. The world as a whole has been building out wind like crazy over the last decade (because it's cheap and great) and... I'm not aware of even one instance of a "calm day blackout". Not one. Have a cite for that?

hohloma · 3 years ago

So you are comparing "any one gas plant", the output of which can be fully controlled, with "whole-grid measurement" for wind? As a whole grid, wind generation capacity is mostly dependent on wind, and not on demand. While gas is used usually for those cases where such power as wind does not cut it. I dont see how you can compare the two. A gasplant CAN produce 100% output if we wish, wind cannot. You can of course compensate somewhat by building out several times the capacity you need in extremely disperse geographic locations (>1000 miles distance between each farm). Could be done, but not sure how its gonna impact the climate change (those farms need to be built and require continuous maintenance).

Uk has wind capacity factor "long-term average of around 27%". https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden06-win...

The reason is that wind generation is optimal during a certain wind speed, and less or no power is generated if winds are too slow or too fast. And wind power blackout occurs not only during calm days, but also during very stormy days. In total there is plenty of occurrences when a specific area has no wind at all. The correlation in weather can be seen in wind farms as far as 800 miles apart. https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden06-win...

2021 was a year of very low wind speeds across whole northern europe. https://climate.copernicus.eu/esotc/2021/low-winds

Additionally, wind power may be going down in strength... due to climate change https://www.ft.com/content/d53b5843-dbe0-4724-8adf-75c66127e...

hohloma commented on Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted) github.com/git-noter/gitn... · Posted by u/vivekweb2013

hohloma · 4 years ago

Another alternative that Im using and very happy with - Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/). Also provides import from Evernote which mostly worked in my case.

hohloma commented on The history of the end of poverty has just begun ourworldindata.org/histor... · Posted by u/cryoz

rustmachine · 4 years ago

The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system built up around it to maintain it. From shipping and transport to cheap labor in a 3rd world country.

If all the people of india and china were to maintain a similar way of life as mine, the eco system would collapse right away.

hohloma · 4 years ago

I bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".

hohloma commented on More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/kevin_hu

whytaka · 4 years ago

> If you can't reproduce it, it's not science.

Just a point that not all science can have empirical and reproducible study.

hohloma · 4 years ago

Thats... debatable. A core principle of science is to be able to test and verify your theory. Which means it must be empirical and reproducible (if you can test then so can I, and if we have different results - then theory is wrong and needs to change, or the tests were wrong, etc). If its not - it borders belief, which is not science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Verifiability ).

hohloma commented on More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/kevin_hu

Pyramus · 4 years ago

> If you can't reproduce it, it's not science.

Let me throw a tiny wrench into your logical reasoning: I can't reproduce most results, does it mean most results are not science?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You should not expect scientific experiments to be replicated every time.

hohloma · 4 years ago

You are downvoted, but I think you make an important point - just because results cant be replicated, doesnt mean its not science. As long as someone keeps investigating the results, showing that they dont work and why, its still science - we learn from mistakes (which is the essence of the scientific method). It stops being science when we just accept any results that are being published and turn them into dogma.

hohloma commented on EU Chatcontrol 2.0 [video] peertube.european-pirates... · Posted by u/nix23

pydry · 4 years ago

I really wish somebody (or a lot of people) would write a hit movie/book where an innocent person on the run from a stasi-like state in 2035 has to face an interrogator who could read their whatsapp messages and google searches dating back to 2021.

Without art or literature that draws out the terror I don't think most people can really envisage the danger we're all being put in. Without popular consciousness of the problem, it's all the more likely to happen.

hohloma · 4 years ago

I changed my mind a bit on this issue. of course I still think its better with as little surveillance as possible, but I don't think what you are describing is actually "terror". If you are really an innocent person, there will be nothing in your history. I mean can you give me some examples of things this stati-state will find about you? Your porn history? or random wiki page about explosives? If there is a stasi-like state and they really want to get you, they don't need your history from 2021, its enough to just beat a concession from you about anything. Just see what the current stasi-like states are doing. Otherwise "Enemy of the state" is a pretty good movie.

hohloma commented on What the Irish Ate Before Potatoes bonappetit.com/trends/art... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

irrational · 4 years ago

I want to seen an article like this for every food culture that is now heavily associated with foods from the Americas. Italy without tomatoes? No chilis? No beans? No corn? Etc. No potatoes means no vodka for the Russians.

hohloma · 4 years ago

Russian vodka is made from wheat.

hohloma commented on I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions · Posted by u/MarkusWandel

iddqd · 5 years ago

I agree. I have run quite a few Raspberry Pi over the years and so many of them died because of SD card corruption. Eventually I got a NanoPC T4 with built in eMMC and it’s been tugging along for a good 2 years with zero issues.

hohloma · 5 years ago

I've had a raspberry with SD card for more than 3 years now, still working fine. YMMV obviously