twelfthnight (u/twelfthnight)

twelfthnight commented on Teenage Engineering OP–XY teenage.engineering/produ... · Posted by u/thm

llm_nerd · a year ago

$2300 USD....

Buy a Macbook Air, Logic Pro and a Mini Lab 3 and have hundreds left over. All while enjoying an infinitely more powerful stack.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but Teenage Engineering has had a series of very low quality, fault-prone gimmick devices that quickly end up forgotten in drawers. Hard to take this seriously.

twelfthnight · a year ago

Classic 2024 company. Started out with a few genuinely cool products and a quirky, fun attitude. Got popular, decided to exploit that good will and now everything they do seems greedy and inauthentic (regardless of whether any specific product is or not). Maybe this is a great product? But after the OP Field pricing shenanigans and OP-Z quality issues... hard to give them a second chance.

twelfthnight commented on Fermilab is 'doomed' without management overhaul claims whistleblower report physicsworld.com/a/fermil... · Posted by u/f1shy

pfdietz · a year ago

Yes, they are squeezing as much juice as they can out of the lemon. But there's diminishing returns. It can't continue forever, and the budget will be under inexorable pressure as the scientific returns become increasingly marginal.

This is a problem with science, particularly particle physics: discovering is like mining. Eventually the "ore body" of new phenomena is used up. The period of rapid discovery (up to say the mid 1970s, with a decreasing trickle to 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs Boson) in particle physics will look very atypical and transitory in historical hindsight.

twelfthnight · a year ago

That sounds right to me. I don't work in physics, but have many colleagues who have left it for that reason.

~The said, I think Dune still does seem useful. Hard to say whether the cost overruns are a lack of good management or if the experiment is just a quagmire, though. Guess I lean towards the scientists here that it's the former~

EDIT:

Doing some research it seems the Hyper K experiment might just be better, and funding might be better directed there than Fermilab.

twelfthnight commented on Fermilab is 'doomed' without management overhaul claims whistleblower report physicsworld.com/a/fermil... · Posted by u/f1shy

pfdietz · a year ago

The central problem is the bread and butter of Fermilab, operating an accelerator to push the frontiers of physics, is reaching its limit. At some point one must admit the place has discovered what it's going to discover and decide to shut the place down.

This problem is facing particle physics as a whole, world wide, since accelerators have become increasingly expensive as the needed energy has increased.

twelfthnight · a year ago

I don't know all the details, but I think they are starting to do novel work with the accelerator to produce neutrinos in an experiment called Dune. So there actually is important stuff being done that isn't just superceded by Cern.

twelfthnight commented on With CO2 Levels Rising, Drylands Are Turning Green – Yale E360 e360.yale.edu/features/gr... · Posted by u/bilsbie

bumby · a year ago

>there is some uncertainty around the edges.

I'm not a climate scientist so take this in the curious vein that it is intended, but do we know that the uncertainty is only around the "edges"? From what I know about weather forecasting, relatively small changes in initial conditions can lead to rather dramatic differences in outcomes. It's my understanding this is how they get to the probabilistic estimates like "40% chance of rain"...they run a bunch of different models with slightly different initial conditions and 40% show rain.

Genuine question: if there is relatively large uncertainty at the small geographic and temporal scales, why wouldn't that also propagate to even larger amounts of uncertainty at larger scale models? (FWIW, I'm not trying to wordsmith around the word "bad" but rather pin down the uncertainty aspect of the claim.)

twelfthnight · a year ago

The larger scale models aren't necessarily built on the smaller models, they are independent and generally less specific. They are probably even inputs to the more specific models. So, like rising sea levels and increased temps (on average) is basically guaranteed, the _exact_ change for a particular place is more uncertain.

Neil deGrasse Tyson in his Cosmos show described it like a person walking a dog. We don't know where the dog will be exactly, but we can see the person with the leash is moving in one direction, and the dog isn't going to ever get too far from him (because of the leash).

twelfthnight commented on Using S3 as a Container Registry ochagavia.nl/blog/using-s... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie

bandrami · a year ago

Tried that. The devs revolted and said the whole point of containers was to escape the tyranny of ops. Management sided with them, so it's the wild west there.

twelfthnight · a year ago

Huh. I actually can understand devs not wanting to need permission to install libraries/versions, but with a pull-through cache there's no restrictions save for security vulnerabilities.

I think it actually winds up speeding up ci/cd docker builds, too.

twelfthnight commented on Using S3 as a Container Registry ochagavia.nl/blog/using-s... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie

bandrami · a year ago

25 years ago I could tell you what version of every CPAN library was in use at my company (because I installed them). What version of what libraries are the devs I support using now? I couldn't begin to tell you. This makes devs happy but I think has harmed the industry in aggregate.

twelfthnight · a year ago

Because of containers, my company now can roll out deployments using well defined CI/CD scripts, where we can control installations to force usage of pass-through caches (GCP artifact registry). So it actually has that data you're talking about, but instead of living in one person's head it's stored in a database and accessable to everyone via an API.

twelfthnight commented on Anxious Generation – How Safetyism and Social Media Are Damaging the Kids matija.eu/posts/anxious-g... · Posted by u/munyak

random9749832 · a year ago

>Kids also become overprotected in other ways, such as not hearing other views or not being able to handle opposing views. No wonder academia is nowadays the exact opposite of free speech and the scientific method.

I wonder how much the scientific method went into coming to that conclusion.

Also if anything we are way too exposed to other people's views. Before you could speak to someone random and there was a much higher chance that their opinions were unique because they weren't the next person who binges on r/all. We had many more forums and less recommendation algorithms driving what we consume. Now you overhear people talking about something you just saw the other day online in public all the time.

It is similar to how globalisation is making everywhere feel the same whereas in the past people had completely distinct cultures from one country to the next.

twelfthnight · a year ago

Agreed that the argument "overprotection leads to lack of free speech in academia" is tenuous.

That said, I do wonder if we all _are_ being protected from opposing views these days. Like, we come across the opposing views but usually in a filtered / characature form on Social Media/Fox News/MSNBC. It's actually kinda hard to find stuff without spin in my experience.

EDIT

My hypothesis is that's it's just cheaper to create speculative / opinion based journalism rather than real investigation. Since the former gets enough clicks, there's not a strong financial reason to create good journalism.

twelfthnight commented on Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine axios.com/2024/06/28/supr... · Posted by u/wumeow

psunavy03 · a year ago

I'm not a lawyer, but I worked in a lawyer-adjacent job while in the military once and ever since I've followed the law as a bit of a hobby. Even with a small bit of training and experience, I'm not exaggerating by much when I say that the average person has absolutely no idea how the law is interpreted or how legal procedure works.

I really believe a large number of people view lawyers as the real-world equivalent of wizards or sorcerers from D&D. You say the right incantations, and then through either knowledge or force of will, something you want to happen happens through the force of magic.

In reality, even the six in the majority are still (for the most part) interpreting the law, not forcing their policy preferences on it. But people who don't understand how the whole system works (or that the Justices more often than not rule unanimously, if not 7-2 or 8-1) just see the policy outcome and either go "I like it, Court good," or "I hate it, Court bad and illegitimate."

twelfthnight · a year ago

The article mentions Clarence Thomas has been courted (even bribed?) by the very people paying the lawyers trying to overturn Chevron. I think it's naive to believe the judges don't have policy preferences that are strongly reflected in their rulings... If that wasn't the case the GOP wouldn't have blocked nominations from Obama to get their preferred judges in.

twelfthnight commented on A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels npr.org/2024/06/17/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

standardUser · a year ago

The fact that we don't have surge pricing on everything is a market inefficiency that only exists due to the lack of technology. This seems inevitable, unless we legislate against it (what detractors could accurately call price fixing).

twelfthnight · a year ago

If you had an efficient market, wouldn't a competitor charge just a little less than others who are using surge pricing? Isn't the whole efficient market thing about how eventually prices should reach the cost of production, which would not be affected by surge demand?