richardhod (u/richardhod)

richardhod commented on Trouble with Erythritol science.org/content/blog-... · Posted by u/Metacelsus

Note that the authors compared blood erythritol level, not _intake_. Erythritol is also a metabolite, which is produced by the pentose phosphate pathway, and has been associated with metabolic dysfunction before.

Check out this thread: https://twitter.com/Dr__Guess/status/1630548194907021313

richardhod · 3 years ago

Verbatim response to that tweet, from a highly qualified friend with relevant scientific expertise:

"idk that critique is pretty dismissive of the actual experimental evidence that they generated in the study… consuming an erythritol sweetened beverage raises the erythritol level in the blood to a level that clearly causes an effect on platelets, and coincides with the difference between the measured levels in the observational study… seems pretty convincing to me".

richardhod commented on Reliability: It’s not great community.fly.io/t/reliab... · Posted by u/bishopsmother

samwillis · 3 years ago

Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want.

Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it.

However, at the same time the market is looking for a successor to Heroku. A zero dev ops PAAS with instant deployment, dirt simple managed Postgres, generous free level of service, lower cost as you scale, and a few regions around the world. That isn't what Fly set out to do... exactly, but is sort of the market they find themselves in when Heroku then basically told its low value customers to go away.

It's that slight miss alignment of strategy and market fit that results in maybe decisions being made that benefit the original vision, but not necessarily the immediate influx of customers.

I don't envy the stress the Fly team are under, but what an exciting set of problems they are trying to solve, I do envy that!

richardhod · 3 years ago

What are the limitations to heroku that people are going to Fly for? Maybe there's a standard article that would be useful to read about it?

richardhod commented on Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents github.com/facebookresear... · Posted by u/micro_charm

skybrian · 3 years ago

I think of the Turing test as just another game, like chess or Go. It’s not a captcha or a citizenship test.

Making an AI that can beat good players would be a significant milestone. What sort of achievement is letting the AI win at a game, or winning against incompetent players? So of course you play to win. If you want to adjust the difficulty, change the rules giving one side or the other an advantage.

richardhod · 3 years ago

I was confused by your first reply at first. I think that's because you are answering a different question from a number of other people. You're asking about the conditions under which and AI might fool people into thinking it was a human, whereas I think others are considering the conditions under which a human might consistently emotionally attach to an AI, even if the human doesn't really think it's real.

richardhod commented on British Motorway Database roads.org.uk/motorway... · Posted by u/scrlk

richardhod · 3 years ago

The first sections of motorway... Definitions definitions

richardhod · 3 years ago

I did get the order wrong. Must have been the Preston bypass that was first, which I double checked

richardhod commented on British Motorway Database roads.org.uk/motorway... · Posted by u/scrlk

123pie123 · 3 years ago

but reading the M1 section

"Sticklers will point out that the Preston Bypass was the first motorway, and they're right. It was part of the M6, but only eight miles long. Opened just a year later, and initially covering 60 miles, the M1 was the first long distance motorway in the UK."

richardhod · 3 years ago

The first sections of motorway... Definitions definitions

richardhod commented on British Motorway Database roads.org.uk/motorway... · Posted by u/scrlk

richardhod · 3 years ago

My father was present, as a boy, at the opening of the Lancaster bypass, which was the first section of motorway constructed in in Britain, followed by the Preston bypass. He was always very careful to remind people how the M6 was the first motorway in Britain and not the M1.

richardhod commented on How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records spectrum.ieee.org/capitol... · Posted by u/pseudolus

cushychicken · 3 years ago

I’m torn between the argument about individualized suspicion, which I find really compelling, and the fact that extreme circumstances demand some extreme measures.

Leading with the capitol attack doesn’t highlight to me why wide scope of these powers is a problem. Tell me more about the civil rights campaigns that are being disrupted with these technologies and powers.

It’s not helpful to highlight how it was used to arrest violent separatists. Tell me how it’s being used to punch down!

Without an example like that, I’m inclined to say this is a time where the federal government’s reliance on norms is working. As in, they have the power to do these kinds of things, but they choose to apply that power pretty selectively.

richardhod · 3 years ago

Another issue here is there is a problem with laws which are broad enough that it requires selective enforcements for them to be available. Because then you can get a problematic force which then uses them selectively for political purposes. This indeed is how the Soviet state worked and indeed current Russian state works to quash dissent.

richardhod commented on How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records spectrum.ieee.org/capitol... · Posted by u/pseudolus

tzs · 3 years ago

> They don’t rely on individualized suspicion, which is what’s required under the Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution]

That's definitely a "citation needed" statement.

In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Ass’n, 489 U.S. 602 (1989) the Court upheld mandatory drug testing for railway employees involved in accidents or safety violations despite no probable cause or individualized suspicion.

In Michigan Dep’t of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990) the Court upheld sobriety check points in which all cars are briefly stopped for questioning and observation. There's no individualized suspicion there. See also the cases involving border patrol checkpoints. A checkpoint 50 miles from the border doesn't involve any individualized suspicion.

Individualized suspicion is required I believe to target an individual, but hasn't targeting a place where a crime has been committed to get more information to try to figure what individuals might be involved been standard, uncontroversial, police procedure in the United States for hundreds of years?

E.g., if a clearly murdered body is found in a maid's closet at a hotel when the maids go to start their shift in the morning police are going to get a warrant to get the list of all staff and guests that were known to be in the hotel between the time the closet was last known to be dead body free and the time the body was discovered.

That seems at least somewhat similar to a geofence warrant and has been pretty normal since basically forever.

richardhod · 3 years ago

Being 'normal' != is constitutional

richardhod commented on Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan twitter.com/trungtphan/st... · Posted by u/cwwc

Gordonjcp · 3 years ago

Interesting article. It seems to be saying that wild salmon are pink because of a pigment in their diet, but farmed salmon are only pink because of a pigment in their diet.

richardhod · 3 years ago

Indeed. Farmed ones aren't given the same diet. I suspect it's not as healthy for them either, but it does well enough for industrial purposes. Think of cattle feed v grass, etc