specialist (u/specialist)

specialist commented on CDC officials’ resignation emails insidemedicine.substack.c... · Posted by u/Anon84

Remember when the CDC started tracking gun violence as an "epidemic"? Surely someone should but the CDC doing so is clearly outside of its charter. That was one major moment that betrayed the CDC becoming a political and not a scientific organization

specialist · 3 days ago

What is your threshold for epidemic?

Does 47,000 deaths per year (13.7 per 100,000) not qualify?

Why are you even complaining (trolling)? After decades of pressure, the gun lobby (NRA, GOA, etc) has finally eliminated CDC's role in researching gun violence.

Is outright victory insufficient? Must you continue to belabor the point?

specialist commented on Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar newpublic.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/benwerd

JimDabell · 5 days ago

> I know people like to compare it with email

There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.

I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.

specialist · 5 days ago

IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.

I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.

specialist commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

unmole · 9 days ago

> Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples.

Meta's P/E is about the same as S&P 500.

specialist · 8 days ago

Nicely spotted.

I regard Meta and Google as ad agencies.

(I'm not smart enough to break out Amazon's and Apple's ad biz P/E separately.)

My quick spot check says Meta's P/E is more than "legacy" ad agencies and (much) less than Google's.

Just observations. I have no insights.

My opinion, based solely on vibes, is the online ad biz (Meta and Google) is more fraudulent than not. If true, than both are grossly overvalued, in that castles in the sky sort of way.

specialist commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

edmundsauto · 8 days ago

How does zuck’s net win-loss track record look to you?

specialist · 8 days ago

The lottery.

specialist commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

jiveturkey · 9 days ago

you think folks that have experience managing this much money/resources (unlike yourself) are clueless? more likely it's 4D chess.

specialist · 8 days ago

Zuck is fantastic at transferring wealth. Not so great at creating wealth.

specialist commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

awalsh128 · 9 days ago

This is why I ignore anything that CEOs say about AI in the news. Examples, AGI in a few years, most jobs will be obsolete, etc.

specialist · 8 days ago

Author Ted Chiang is the only celebrity AI kibitzer pundit I wholly agree with.

Paraphrasing: Capital will use / is using AI to further bludgeon Labor.

specialist commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

ajuc · 8 days ago

World would benefit greatly if EU went ahead with tech tax. It's crazy how much IT companies get away with that would be the end of any other business.

specialist · 8 days ago

Yes and: As a more palatable form of carbon tax?

Yes, mosedef, I'm all in.

Please post/share any news or tips you find. TIA.

specialist commented on As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

jmpetroske · 11 days ago

Fisheries definitely can be mismanaged. Furthermore, there are issues like international waters, where regulations are hard to create even when they are desperately needed.

It’s unclear to me what your conclusion is, is it that all commercial fishing is bad? Fisheries are definitely not always managed to keep fishermen happy, they are often frustrated with regulations. If you talk to a crabber, they will complain that they are not aloud to crab anymore due to the biologists saying there is not a sustainable crab population. They might go on to say the biologists are incorrect, but they aren’t able to change the regulations to their liking. Talk to an Alaska salmon fisherman during a poor salmon year and they will complain the biologist is not giving them enough open periods and they are losing make money. Even on a good year, captains will complain about the regulations the biologists set. In general, Alaska fisheries are often regarded as the most sustainably harvested in the world. I’m not saying they are perfect, but that fish can be harvested in a sustainable manner. The biologists DO want to ensure the long term viability of these fisheries.

My point is that: - we should continue to research when and why fish are struggling - forgoing fishing completely is most likely not the solution. As long as it is done in a sustainable manner, wild caught fish IS an environmentally friendly sliver of our food supply.

specialist · 10 days ago

> is it that all commercial fishing is bad?

Bingo.

Is commercial fishing the only culprit? No.

Should we address all causes of declining fisheries? Yes.

Will we address even a single cause? Nope.

specialist commented on Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider voidfox.com/blog/payment_... · Posted by u/progval

elric · 15 days ago

American hate for wire transfers will never sound anything other than irrational to me. Why don't you have an equivalent of Europe's Instant Payments?

The author mentions the storefront pocketing the money, that seems implausible? If an unscrupulous storefront can pocket money that would be wired, it could also pocket money that would be paid by CC.

And then there's the weird thing about payment volumes...that's been a solved problem for half a century?

specialist · 14 days ago

We also have usury, private credit rating services, transaction reordering, payday loans, charging the unbanked to cash their paychecks, required minimum balances, dark patterns, zombie subscriptions, and probably a dozen more grifts.

Our economy is now financialization of everything, rent seeking, wealth transfer instead of wealth creation, ad nauseum.

I'm nostalgic for when we could create wealth by making and doing, and punished people for stealing. (Perhaps it was never true, I've always been delusional.)

specialist commented on OCaml as my primary language xvw.lol/en/articles/why-o... · Posted by u/nukifw

GhosT078 · 17 days ago

Ada has been held back primary by an image problem that traces back to the high cost and poor performance of a lot of early Ada 83 compilers. Ada adoption has never really recovered from that despite its many technical advantages, and despite the low cost and good performance of several current compilers.

The GNAT Ada compiler, always open source and quite good, has been freely available since the 1990's. It has been part of GCC since about 2003.

There are plenty of open source Ada projects on GitHub and other places although not nearly as many as some other languages.

The Ada ecosystem is mature and complete, particularly the GNAT related tools supported by directly or indirectly AdaCore (https://github.com/AdaCore and https://alire.ada.dev/).

The language evolution has been stable and is still on-going. I have worked primarily with Ada for 30 years. I still work on new Ada projects on a mid-sized team. Most of us just don't participate in forums like this.

specialist · 16 days ago

> early Ada 83 compilers

IIRC, in response, DARPA (et al) did invest in compiler research.

> adoption has never really recovered

Ya. Timing. There's a brief window of opportunity for new languages (ideas) to catch on before the horde of "worse is better" solutions overwhelm the field.