ralph84 (u/ralph84) - Readit News

ralph84 commented on Americans want heat pumps – but high electricity prices may get in the way theconversation.com/ameri... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

zippyman55 · 8 hours ago

I'm a big natural gas guy (for cooking) with property in Coastal California. But, I think getting off gas may be the way to go. My utility bill requires a gas transport fee, and looking at it, when I am absent, I'm spending $120+/month for a pilot light and an idle water heater. Electricity would offer a cheaper way to shut off the usage while gone, and to avoid the excessive gas fees. So, I'd consider a electric water heater, electric stove, and then I have to resolve the heating issue, but climate is mild where I live.

ralph84 · 7 hours ago

Don't worry, the excessive fee even when you're not using it aka "Base Services Charge" is coming to electricity as well.

ralph84 commented on The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA theguardian.com/sport/202... · Posted by u/treetalker

wolfi1 · a day ago

my question is more technical: how did the blot out the booing? and: how live was it in the US? from the Academy Awards we know that they have a 5s delay (following the Michael Moore incident), but what is it with olympics broadcast?

ralph84 · a day ago

The audio engineers are monitoring multiple mics (for an event of this magnitude probably dozens) and increasing or decreasing volume on them in real time for the mix that goes on the air. Standard for any sports broadcast.

ralph84 commented on Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025) soapstone.mradford.com/em... · Posted by u/MattyRad

ralph84 · 11 days ago

They already do this, listen to the radio at off hours and there will be many job ads with instructions to apply via postal mail. Of course the reason isn't to deter LLMs it's to deter Americans so the employer can claim no Americans applied in their visa and green card filings.

ralph84 commented on ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01... · Posted by u/JKCalhoun

halfmatthalfcat · 15 days ago

The line is always going to be going up somewhere. I’d rather it be where I live than not.

ralph84 · 15 days ago

Then doesn't it make more sense for the people who prefer living among a high fertility rate to move to the places where there's a high fertility rate? Why should people who don't have that preference have to endure mass migration when they don't want, didn't ask, and didn't vote for it?

ralph84 commented on ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01... · Posted by u/JKCalhoun

halfmatthalfcat · 15 days ago

The US cannot afford, demographically, to curtail immigration, illegal or otherwise. Simple fact is the US needs more people because we’re under the replacement rate.

ralph84 · 15 days ago

For the line must always go up crowd, they feel a need. Not everyone is in the line must always go up crowd.

ralph84 commented on Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections blog.citp.princeton.edu/2... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha

schmuckonwheels · 18 days ago

>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen.

>It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.

Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.

Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.

Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.

ralph84 · 18 days ago

Ballot harvesting is viewed as a feature, not a bug, by the people who control vote-by-mail states.

ralph84 commented on GenAI, the snake eating its own tail ybrikman.com/blog/2026/01... · Posted by u/brikis98

ropable · 19 days ago

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing.

I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered. There was an enormous existing corpus of accepted answers around fundamental topics, and technology just doesn't change fast enough to sustain the site. Then the LLMs digested the site's (beautifully machine-readable) corpus along with the rest of the internet and now the AIs can give users that info directly, resulting in a downward spiral of traffic to SO, fewer new questions, etc.

Vale, Stack Overflow. You helped me solve many tricky problems.

ralph84 · 18 days ago

Prior to SO we had Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC. They weren't so bad before spammers found them.

ralph84 commented on Who owns Rudolph's nose? creativelawcenter.com/cop... · Posted by u/ohjeez

ralph84 · 19 days ago

Another illustration of how absurd current IP laws are. A company has exclusive rights to a character created 87 years ago by a guy who died 50 years ago.

ralph84 commented on AI is a business model stress test dri.es/ai-is-a-business-m... · Posted by u/amarsahinovic

drivebyhooting · a month ago

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP.

All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

ralph84 · a month ago

We already have more IP than any human could ever consume. Why do we need to incentivize anything? Those who are motivated by the creation itself will continue to create. Those who are motivated by the possibility of extracting rent may create less. Not sure that's a bad thing for humanity as a whole.