thmsths (u/thmsths) - Readit News

thmsths commented on In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution e360.yale.edu/digest/new-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

somewhereoutth · 6 days ago

and would it be true to say that regenerative braking on electric cars reduces significantly this dust?

thmsths · 6 days ago

I recall a discussion on HN explaining that while true, this might be offset by the higher average weight of EVs, leading to more dust from the tires and the road. Again, no easy solution unfortunately, just trade offs.

thmsths commented on “Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill nber.org/papers/w34524... · Posted by u/mhb

nwellinghoff · 13 days ago

Agreed. The whole idea that they are in it for the “service” is a really naive idea. If we want honest hardworking and qualified people to do the job the salaries should be in the 500k to 1.5m (senate) range. Then knock out the corruption.

thmsths · 13 days ago

According to this link [1] 200k would put someone above the 80th percentile and not far below the 95th percentile in terms of household income for the DC metro area, so I don't see how that could be considered "underpaid", especially when you consider the benefits.

[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/District-of-Columbia...

thmsths commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9

ayaros · 14 days ago

Why is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations.

Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?

thmsths · 14 days ago

Because the entire western culture has shifted to instant gratification. Yes, what you suggest would most likely lead to increased business eventually. But they want better number this quarter, so they resort to the cheap tricks like financial engineering/layoffs to get an immediate boost.

thmsths commented on Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth scienceclock.com/voyager-... · Posted by u/ashishgupta2209

optimalsolver · 20 days ago

They're not going to be alive in 100 years (barring AGI intervention), so why would they care?

thmsths · 20 days ago

This. It's not a spatial problem, it's a temporal one. They are somewhat aware there will be nowhere to run to (I say somewhat because they still spend millions in luxury bunkers), they are just betting that it won't get really bad during their lifetime, maybe their kids lifetime for the more empathetic ones.

thmsths commented on Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System amoses.dev/blog/wifi-loca... · Posted by u/nicosalm

krisoft · a month ago

> People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones.

OK? it still sucks even with headphones. Imagine the following scenario: You are in a meeting using your headphones as you suggest. A coworker a few seats away from you are in the same meeting using their own headsphones. When they talk you hear their real voice reach your ears first (this happens with even the best noise canceling headphones to some extent) and then you hear their voice with some delay from the meeting.

This is not about manners or headphones.

Better meeting software identifies when this is happening and they suppress the streamed voice of your coworker just for you.

thmsths · a month ago

This is a great answer. But I would add that while a technical solution is welcomed, an organizational one could help too: why are multiple people in the same meeting joining from nearby desks instead of a conference room?

thmsths commented on Students fight back over course taught by AI theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/level87

ModernMech · a month ago

This is the culmination of decades of cuts to education. I mean, what else was going to be the end point of having teachers buy supplies for their own kids, demonizing professors, demonizing higher education and the idea of education generally, not training enough teachers, and underpaying the teachers you already have.

In America we have to deal with school shootings, the latest religious group mandating the 10 commandments be put up or rainbows be taken down, irate parents mad that you failed their kid who didn't do work all semester and has severe behavioral problems no one is allowed to discipline. And now of course with AI, the students aren't doing their work, and if you call them out on it they call their parents, they sue, you get deposed and have to admit you can't 100% prove it's AI... so why bother? Who would ever want to grow up to be a teacher anymore?

So yeah, cut education, end up with AI students submitting AI papers to AI teachers. We have arrived.

The only question now is... what are we going to do about it?

thmsths · a month ago

I think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.

thmsths commented on The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed steveblank.com/2025/11/11... · Posted by u/ridruejo

iamtheworstdev · a month ago

Rule 14 is why every government and large cooperation has an insane amount of bloat and middle managers, IMHO. People's power and pay are determined by two things - the number of people working under them, and their budget (which is often determined by the number of people working under them). It is rarely determined by positive outcomes, it seems, in the government world.

thmsths · a month ago

Because when someone working for a public entity is rewarded with more money, eventually it results in someone else publishing something along the lines of "Our investigative team scoured records and sent a bunch of FOIA request, they found that some public servants make more than <insertLargeAmountOfMoney>", cue outrage, tightly defined salary bands set by the legislator and ultimately the problem you describe.

thmsths commented on Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond edn.com/poe-basics-and-be... · Posted by u/voxadam

beala · 2 months ago

This is a pretty significant lift for most home networks, both in terms of cost and complexity, but I agree it’s the right way to go. If you’re upgrading to a PoE switch, you might as well go all the way and make it a managed switch.

thmsths · 2 months ago

I would assume that putting a router between the POE switch and the rest of the network would work too and basic routers are cheap.

thmsths commented on Ortega hypothesis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ort... · Posted by u/Caiero

captainbland · 2 months ago

The Pareto principle gets "interesting" when you involve hierarchical categories. For instance, the category of "researchers" is arguably arbitrary. Why not research labs? Why not research universities? If we write off 80% of universities, 80% of labs in that top 20% of universities and 80% of researchers within that top 20% of labs then actually the number of impactful researchers would in fact be .2 * .2 *.2 or 0.8% of researchers which seems extreme.

That said if we took 20% of all working people are doing useful work, then can you guarantee not all research scientists are within that category?

And indeed there are different fields and the distributions of effectiveness may be incomparable.

I think the nature of scientific and mathematical research is interesting in that often "useless" findings can find surprising applications. Boolean algebra is an interesting example of this in that until computing came about, it seemed purely theoretical in nature and impactless almost by definition. Yet the implications of that work underpinned the design of computer processors and the information age as such.

This creates a quandary: we can say perhaps only 20% of work is relevant, but we don't necessarily know which 20% in advance.

thmsths · 2 months ago

Your last point reminds me of that joke about Hollywood: a bunch of Japanese executives are touring a studio they just purchased. The manager is trying to describe the business model to them: "You have to understand we make 10 movies a year but only 1 of them will make money." When they hear that the executives get agitated and huddle together. Eventually one of them turns toward the manager and says "Please only make that 1 profitable movie".

thmsths commented on Ortega hypothesis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ort... · Posted by u/Caiero

unsupp0rted · 2 months ago

I am instantly skeptical of hypotheses that sound nice and egalitarian.

Nature is usually 80/20. In other words, 80% of researchers probably might as well not exist.

thmsths · 2 months ago

It's not that everyone contributes equally. It's that everyone's contribution matters. And while small contributions are less impressive, they are also more numerous, much more numerous which means that it's not out of the question that in aggregate they matter more; which means they should not be discounted. As Napoleon allegedly said "quantity has a quality of its own".