reedf1 (u/reedf1) - Readit News

reedf1 commented on Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line yamanot.es/... · Posted by u/zdw

wanderer_79 · 2 days ago

As the rare Japanese on here who speaks English, the amount of theory-crafting from English-speakers about how and why Japanese do this or that is borderline hilarious. Just shows how different our cultures are. Most people don't realize that the way they view the world is through their own ethnocentric lens.

reedf1 · 2 days ago

And your first comment is shitting on those trying to understand instead of applying your own analysis? Sorry for showing an interest I guess. Hopefully the irony of you own analysis of "English-speakers" isn't lost on you.

reedf1 commented on Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line yamanot.es/... · Posted by u/zdw

ipnon · 2 days ago

I don't know how to describe this, but Japanese enjoy putting a little bit of joy into every thing, like Ronald McDonald, but real.

reedf1 · 2 days ago

This probably has a philosophical underpinning in Animism, almost everything is anthropomorphized and given a "soul", personality. This has the affect of humanizing the most utilitarian parts of day-to-day life, commuting, a tax office, etc.

reedf1 commented on Leeches and the legitimizing of folk-medicine press.asimov.com/articles... · Posted by u/mailyk

karamanolev · 12 days ago

I have an interesting story with non-scientific medicine. Normally, I'm a very science-oriented person—"read the paper or it didn't happen." I will even avoid reading a news article about the paper; I'll just go and read the paper itself. The way I treat my illnesses and injuries is the same. That being said, I suffer a lot from sore throats—I will get some flu, get better in 3–4 days, and then my throat will hurt for weeks. In a particularly bad bout, I tried waiting for 2 weeks with no improvement. I almost couldn't swallow. I went to the doctor and was prescribed antibiotics. That resolved it in about 24 hours, and I completed the full course. Three weeks later, the same thing happened. I waited 2 weeks to see if it would resolve on its own, and when it didn’t—antibiotics again. Of course, the problem came back only weeks later.

So I thought—I'm going to try homeopathy. What's the worst that can happen? I'm in pain anyway. I decided to try a scientific approach (not very, given N=1), so again I waited 2 weeks to see if it was going to resolve itself. It didn’t. I went to a homeopathic doctor and got a bottle with some "magic." It took 3–4 days for the symptoms to improve, but they didn’t come back for months. When they did, I jumped straight to the homeopathic medicine, and it helped in the same way it did the first time around. I haven’t used antibiotics for my throat since.

I have no explanation for this. There have been hundreds or thousands of studies on homeopathy, and my reading is that the consensus is that it's "quack medicine." Yet it clearly worked for me, and it worked better than antibiotics for that particular issue. What gives?

reedf1 · 12 days ago

To me the obvious "cure" for your sore-throat in this story was doing nothing. This has surprising efficacy. Antibiotics are serious drugs. They are inordinately useful, but they also have side-effects. Antibiotics can wheel your body completely out of equilibrium - your sore throat could have been due to yeast or been some kind of fungal thing which the antibiotics inturn made worse (or caused some kind of fungal -> bacterial cycle). In this case homeopathy gave you some utility; it gave you psychological permission to do nothing while feeling like you were doing something.

reedf1 commented on Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects freewheeling.info/blog/sw... · Posted by u/jbyers

milesjag · 15 days ago

The legal basis is there to protect wildlife from man-made disruption and provides a kind of ecological basis to limit the kind of boundless growth that politicians appeal to.

Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them.

Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring.

The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.

reedf1 · 15 days ago

Blocking high-speed rail in the name of conservation makes me want to bash my head against a wall. Guess we'll buy 10000 diesel trucks to move goods north-south instead. Car-world isn't good for conservation, rail is. It's missing the forest for the trees. These laws are selectively invoked by interest groups, they don't event serve the legitimate cause of conservationists - there is enough ammo in UK law to block any development.

reedf1 commented on UK government advises deleting emails to save water gov.uk/government/news/na... · Posted by u/bifftastic

ch33zer · 18 days ago

Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus

reedf1 · 18 days ago

My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.

reedf1 commented on GPT-OSS-120B runs on just 8GB VRAM & 64GB+ system RAM old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLa... · Posted by u/zigzag312

blmayer · 19 days ago

I find it funny that people say "only" for a setup of 64GB RAM and 8GB VRAM. That's a LOT. I'd have to spend thousands to get that setup.

reedf1 · 19 days ago

Given that this is at the middle/low-end of a consumer gaming setups - it seems particularly realistic that many people can run this out of the box on their home PC - or with an upgrade for a few hundred bucks. This doesn't require an A100 or some kind of fancy multi-gpu setup.

reedf1 commented on Rising young worker despair in the United States nber.org/papers/w34071... · Posted by u/johntfella

ben_w · a month ago

Was Gen X ever given significant autonomy? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space and the start of Dilbert both date to when Gen X were the newbies to the wold of work, and Dilbert in particular kept on going.

I'm just on the borderline of Millennial myself, and people older than me have expressed similar frustrations at various workplaces.

reedf1 · a month ago

It's funny actually, I totally get that Office Space and Dilbert are pisstakes of office culture, but it has never really worked on me because I'm actively envious of their work arrangements. I work in an open plan office where, everyone can see everyone's screen, you can see who is at their desk. I would die for a cubicle. Every job I've had my line manager sits next to me, and their boss sits nearby, etc. Work seems to end when they clock off. They seem to have time for sit down out of office lunches. Their work hours seem shorter.

reedf1 commented on Rising young worker despair in the United States nber.org/papers/w34071... · Posted by u/johntfella

lordnacho · a month ago

Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades.

Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.

> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).

reedf1 · a month ago

I do feel like gen x was the last generation to be given any significant autonomy in the workplace. I'm a millennial and I feel like I've always been 10 years away from autonomy. It seems the tide recedes as I go out.

reedf1 commented on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in ft.com/content/356674b0-9... · Posted by u/mmarian

reliabilityguy · a month ago

It seems that your argument is more about the way the verification is implemented and not about the idea of verification by itself.

reedf1 · a month ago

To be clear - I disagree with both the implementation and the idea of verification. I believe one is criminal and the other is misguided.

reedf1 commented on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in ft.com/content/356674b0-9... · Posted by u/mmarian

reedf1 · a month ago

Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.