muki (u/muki) - Readit News

muki commented on “Real Water” that poisoned dozens contained chemical from rocket fuel arstechnica.com/health/20... · Posted by u/perihelions

dboreham · 2 years ago

It's the French word for mushroom. However it seems some English speaking people (who sell mushrooms or food made with mushrooms) do call "regular mushrooms" by that name. Probably because it sounds cooler, or because they don't know any French.

muki · 2 years ago

Grandparent might be referring to Agaricus bisporus [0]. At least in my and some of the neighboring countries' languages we refer to these as <local transliteration of champignons>.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_bisporus

muki commented on 32“ E Ink screen that displays daily newspapers on your wall (2021) projecteink.com/pages/abo... · Posted by u/alexandernl

p10jkle · 3 years ago

No, this isn't true. I run the Visionect software suite (https://docs.visionect.com/VisionectSoftwareSuite/index.html) on a Raspberry pi and the screen talks to it over localhost. No outbound connectivity or subscription is needed.

muki · 3 years ago

I would like to caveat that a bit. I'm running two Visionect screens at home (I really do love them, hardware-wise especially) from a similar setup (local Visionect server running on Raspberry Pi).

As far as I understand though, they have stopped offering support for non-subscribers, and they also seem to have stopped producing builds for ARM devices a couple of years ago (but the server software works even with new firmware versions). I am still betting on them supporting local installs for a while (based on my understanding that at least some of their corporate clients would want an on-prem solution), but am a little bit worried it might not be as openly available forever. I am therefore slowly researching my best migration path from a Raspberry Pi to some affordable and reasonably low powered x86 thing. Suggestions welcome.

P.S.: The biggest selling point for me compared with some other (more open) E-ink screens is the battery. I keep mine on the fridge with a magnet and can't really use one that needs to be plugged in all the time in the same place. If anyone knows of anything similar and controllable locally, I'd be very interested to read about it.

muki commented on Ask HN: Did you find something to use your Raspberry Pi 400 for? · Posted by u/dusted

muki · 4 years ago

My significant other has been using it as their primary desktop computer for over 6 months now (with a probably-too-big computer screen attached to it). They use it to work on their PhD with LibreOffice and browse the internet (we have some "smartness" in our home and some common online tools we use, but all of those work as simple websites). It's been great, this is their first time seriously living with Linux and open source software. The form factor helped a lot with onboarding (it is quite cute, and the book that comes with it is a really nice addition for non-technical people, even if they never read-read it).

Their complaint is that Calc sometimes lags/hangs with a few thousand rows of heavily formatted data (they're not a data scientist, but still need to deal with government-issued xls[x] files). It wasn't a serious problem though and a great opportunity to "look under the hood" of what was happening and introduce them to CSV files. The other "problem" is that online shopping websites are often horribly slow, but again, I'd say there's a lesson in there and it could be viewed as a feature.

So all in all I am a huge fan. I think it's a great way to onboard people on good-enough-computing and open source. There is something magical about its form factor that resonates with "non-technical" people. Also quite cheap and accessible.

muki commented on A Meta-Scientific Perspective on Thinking: Fast and Slow (2020) replicationindex.com/2020... · Posted by u/signa11

lqet · 4 years ago

I read Thinking: Fast and Slow a few years ago when it was all the hype and was not convinced. I remember many experiments where it was clear to me that the subjects just answered a different question than the one the researcher asked them. And I do not mean that they "anchored" their answers on something else or they replaced the question with a different question because they had no answer to the original question - they just had a completely different understanding of the question itself, and their answers to this question were correct, even in "System 2."

For example, I always had the suspicion (which may be wrong) that in questions like "which is a more likely outcome of 6 coin tosses, HHHHHH or HTHHTT", people tend to understand this question as: "which is a more likely outcome of 6 coin tosses, a sequence of 6 heads, or another sequence without any obvious regularity in it", in which case the latter is clearly the correct answer.

Now, in my experience, people with slight autistic tendencies often have problems with sorting their impressions into broad, general categories, but instead always analyze (even remember) the exact impression (or "special case") they are confronted with. For people like this, the question "HHHHHH or HTHHTT" is a completely different question than for the majority of the population, for which HTHHTT is a class of outcomes, not a specific one.

So, the problem to me does not seem to be a problem with human intuition for probability (or with "System 1", in Kahneman's words), but just one of semantics. If you go further and assume that scientists have a higher percentage of people with autistic tendencies than the general population, then the problem simply becomes one of communication between the researcher and the subject.

muki · 4 years ago

Imo a very good "alternative" perspective to Thinking: Fast and Slow (very well researched and very well argued, although the basic premise was quite unintuitive - to me at least - it only started to "click" towards the end of the book) on how (evolved, human) reason might work is the book The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. It was suggested to me by an American forensics professor and was probably one of the most important books I read in 2019. I don't want to hype it too much, but I sort of also do. I highly recommend it even (or especially) if you won't agree with everything they have to say. It's quite long, but totally worth the time and effort.

muki commented on What if plants were animals like any other? booksandideas.net/Are-Pla... · Posted by u/whocansay

didibus · 5 years ago

This seems like a rabbit whole, at some point there's no objective ethics, you pick your line. Are you going to include bacteria, yeast, common viruses, dust mites, there's plenty to choose from.

I think one thing that seems relevant to humans, is we seem to be bothered only once we can relate to the other being in a more explicit way. This is true even between our peers. Maybe as we understand more and more of other creatures so will our empathy.

muki · 5 years ago

I would just like to point out that the existence of (what I assume you mean when you say) "objective ethics" isn't a sure thing. I don't mean to imply that ethical nihilism (basically saying ethics aren't "a thing") is the only way forward though. We can probably assign ethical value to human action even (some would say especially) if "objective ethics" don't exist.

muki commented on Ethical anti-design, or designing products that people can't get addicted to njms.ca/posts/ethical-ant... · Posted by u/podiki

learningwebdev · 5 years ago

> You beat me to it!

I would feel bad, but I was the person who seems to have coined the term earlier in this thread, albeit accidentally :-)

muki · 5 years ago

Another meme covering an (at least slightly) overlapping set of guidelines/ideas is "humane technology". Not saying it's the same thing as what all of you mean, but we shouldn't forget that our tools impact non-users as well (i.e. people who never used Uber feel its impact still).

https://www.humanetech.com/who-we-are

muki commented on Why Aren't More Highly Intelligent People Rich? inc.com/jeff-haden/why-ar... · Posted by u/RickJWagner

muki · 6 years ago

Maybe it's because the claim that the smartest, toughest, bestest people win in capitalism has little to no grounding in reality.

The article is basically begging the question of what capitalist markets prefer in terms of "properties" its actors should "hold". I don't know of any evidence that contemporary capitalism rewards "intelligence" apart from pop cultural and ideological claims. In that sense, the conclusions presented are in no way "new" or "informative".

It's just a restatement of a deeply seated wish that we could somehow explain away the largely immoral differences in the standard of living with some property suposedly outside of moral consideration (intelligence, gender, race - it doesn't really matter).

muki commented on Google Container for Firefox – Prevent Google from tracking you around the web addons.mozilla.org/en-US/... · Posted by u/LukeWalsh

mard · 7 years ago

>to prevent tracking I mostly use CookieAutoDelete

Removing cookies will not prevent anyone from tracking.

Simple example: I once visited an online shop from browser profile in which I never logged into Facebook. Few hours later I switched to another browser profile, used exclusively for Facebook, and I got an ad on my timeline from said online shop, for the exact product I was looking for earlier in another browser profile. Facebook associated my two browsing personas without cookies, most likely using a combination of my browser's request headers and IP address. Not to mention that JavaScript (if enabled) provides additional and extremely detailed fingerprinting capabilities.

In my experience, Google seems to have a better track record in terms of respecting cookies (or lack thereof) as the main carrier of online privacy management. But I think it's just an illusion. They're just obscuring it to not freak people out too much the way like Facebook does. The information is still there. They have it, from analytics, fonts, reCaptcha and all other means of their creep.

To prevent tracking, you need to have a full control over information you send to the internet, including browser request headers, IP address, behavior patterns of web browser, and so on. Cookie management alone is just a fallacy and gives a false feeling of control over privacy.

This is also why I consider those "privacy containers" broken by design. They just operate on cookies and don't contain anything besides cookies. I would even consider them harmful because of their misleading nature.

muki · 7 years ago

I'll just leave this here ... https://github.com/snapper26/shapeshifter