mchusma (u/mchusma) - Readit News

mchusma commented on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death energyvanguard.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/almuhalil

mchusma · 25 days ago

I tried the water based approach before and didn't work, but this may be a good one. What does work for me is a CO2 based trap. I have 4 neighbors on the street using them now. Mosquitos follow CO2 to find their targets, and get sucked into the bucket. Its kind of expensive (upfront cost of about $200 then about $60 in CO2 per summer, but I have a large bag full of mosquitos regularly so i know it works. And I can tell when the CO2 runs out because mosquiotos are back.

No affiliation: https://us.biogents.com/

mchusma commented on AI Is Dehumanization Technology thedabbler.patatas.ca/pag... · Posted by u/smartmic

GeoAtreides · 2 months ago

In a way; water mills and spinning jennies led to the dickensian horrors of the textile mills: https://www.hartfordstage.org/stagenotes/acc15/child-labor

The industrialisation itself, although increased material output, decimated the lives and spirits of those who worked in factories.

And the printing press led to the Reformation and the thirty years war, one of the most devastating wars ever.

mchusma · 2 months ago

...and led to our current time of maximal abundance, free time, leisure, freedom to work in more ways, and peace.

mchusma commented on A new PNG spec programmax.net/articles/p... · Posted by u/bluedel

bla3 · 2 months ago

WebP lossless is close to state of the art and widely available. It's also not widely used. The takeaway seems to be that absolute best performance for lossless compression isn't that important, or at least it won't get you widely adopted.

mchusma · 2 months ago

I don't know that i have ever used jpg or png lossless in practical usage (e.g. I don't think 99.9% of mobile app or web usecases are for lossless). WebP lossy performance is just not worth it in practice, which is why WebP never took off IMO.

Are there usecases for lossless other than archival?

mchusma commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

habosa · 3 months ago

I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right.

Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.

Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us.

And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand.

So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.

mchusma · 3 months ago

It’s not just engineers. Society has collapsing birthrates and huge deficits. Basically, we are demanding massive technological gains enough to bump GDP by at least 5% more per year.

mchusma commented on Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent models are getting even better blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

mchusma · 3 months ago

I strongly dislike the “updating of versions” whenever possible. Versions are rarely better in all ways, makes things harder. Just make it version 2.6.

mchusma commented on Material 3 Expressive design.google/library/exp... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

SlowAndCalm · 3 months ago

I went through a few thoughts when seeing the design:

- I do have trouble spotting the send button on the old design

- Maybe just moving it to a similar position as the new design would help

- I don't actually want it near the keyboard because I might accidentally tap it

- There's plenty of space, why can't they just have a button that actually says 'send'?

mchusma · 3 months ago

my thoughts on the email design: - Comparison is strange. One email has an image, the other text. Not the same email. - Hiding the previous parts of the thread seem good by default, but how do you easily get them back? - Where is "from" in new design? - Where is "to" in new design? - I do like expanding attachment a bit so you don't have to click twice to attach a photo (for example), but I'm not sure how often some of those options are used, may be too much. I could see a photo icon and general attach icon both showing. - Back arrow looks broken in new design.

mchusma commented on USPTO refuses Tesla Robotaxi trademark as "merely descriptive" arstechnica.com/cars/2025... · Posted by u/LorenDB

mchusma · 4 months ago

That is great. Always nice to see sane IP decisions.

mchusma commented on 37signals Says Goodbye to AWS: Full S3 Migration and $10M in Projected Savings systemadministration.net/... · Posted by u/bluedino

datadrivenangel · 4 months ago

Do note that it took them ~2 years to move off of S3. The ROI of getting off of compute and hosted services is often there, but S3 is still pretty great from a business perspective.

mchusma · 4 months ago

I’ve become increasingly frustrated with AWS because of this. They used to have a culture of providing constant price performance improvements. Not anymore. Every release has questionable improvements (for example, switching from r6 to r7 family of instances is more expensive with theoretically better performance but you probably can’t actually switch and save money). S3 costs haven’t gone done in a long time despite plummeting storage costs.

Very excited about the work done by 37Signals to encourage moving off.

mchusma commented on Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria fusionenergybase.com/arti... · Posted by u/sam

satellite2 · 4 months ago

Thanks a lot for this research. Seing the comments here I think it's really important to make breakthroughs and progress more visible to the public. Otherwise the impression that "we're always 50 years away" stays strong.

Here was my completely layman attempt to forecast fusion viability a few months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42791997 (in short: 2037)

Is there some semblance of realism there you think?

mchusma · 4 months ago

In the 2037 timeframe, modeling trends doesn’t matter as much as looking at the actual players. I think odds are good because you have at least 4 very well funded groups shooting to have something before 2035: commercial groups including CFS, Helios, TAE, also the efforts by ITER. Maybe more. Each with generally independent approaches. I think scientific viability will be proven by 2035, but getting economic viability could take much longer.

mchusma commented on The Effect of 4:3 Intermittent Fasting on Weight Loss at 12 Months acpjournals.org/doi/10.73... · Posted by u/lxm

mchusma · 4 months ago

Interesting study, good work by authors, I read it as little to no effect though. Confidence interval includes 0.14 kg of difference in weight loss. But I couldn’t read the full paper to show how they tested compliance between the groups.

For me, fasting (skipping breakfast or breakfast and lunch) and eating more vegetables (to feel full) are the easiest ways to hit calorie targets, but I suspect that is the only effect.

So the practical takeaway of this, and all diets, is focusing on what is the most sustainable way to hit calorie targets.