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xmddmx commented on Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info   sheldonbrown.com/... · Posted by u/ostacke
rsingel · 3 days ago
xmddmx · 3 days ago
> Sheldon Brown, a beloved iconoclast bicycle tech guru, died Sunday from a heart attack. He was 68 63.

Curious, what does "He was 68 63" mean. Is it a bicycle gear joke about his age at death?

xmddmx commented on Show HN: An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids   lighthouses.app/... · Posted by u/idd2
xmddmx · 15 days ago
On Mac Safari, holding shift and using the magic mouse to scroll up or down reverses the zoom direction.

This is both right (Shift-X is the reverse of X due to convention) But is also wrong (Shift-Scroll is the macOS gesture for scrolling on maps where Scroll alone doesn't zoom in or out).

TLDR: I really wish Apple would adopt the "scroll up to zoom in" convention used by the rest of the free world.

xmddmx commented on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe   noheger.at/blog/2026/01/1... · Posted by u/happosai
overfeed · a month ago
Windows Vista was also notorious for going overboard with translucency effects in the default "Aero" style
xmddmx · a month ago
My memory is that it was named "Aero Glass" which heightens the irony of "Liquid Glass" sucking.

But I see many references to it being called just "Aero", but some call it "Aero Glass" [1]

Does anyone know the truth?

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/archive/rip-aero-glass-windows-8-stick...

xmddmx commented on Lessons from 14 years at Google   addyosmani.com/blog/21-le... · Posted by u/cdrnsf
andyjohnson0 · a month ago
> 15. When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring.

This is Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

xmddmx · a month ago
Right, this annoyed me too - it was stated w/o attribution as if novel.

What is the name of the law when someone writes a think piece of "stuff I've learned" and fails to cite any of it to existing knowledge?

Makes me wonder if (A) they do know it's not their idea, but they are just cool with plagiarism or (B) they don't know it's not their idea.

xmddmx commented on Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet   neowin.net/news/report-mi... · Posted by u/josephcsible
ecshafer · a month ago
Microsoft was founded in 1975. 1981 was the first DOS release. 1985 was the first release of Windows. 40 years working on windows is a long time, I would be surprised if anyone for the original team is left at this point. Even someone joining out of college in 2000 is now 25 years in, is 57, and could feasibly be retiring....
xmddmx · a month ago
You mean 1990. Someone graduating college in 1990 would have been about 21. That was 35 years ago, so they would be about 56 in 2025.

Math is hard.

xmddmx commented on Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams   behind-the-enemy-lines.co... · Posted by u/sethbannon
acbart · a month ago
I'm afraid you misunderstand what it means to be "exempt" under the IRB. It doesn't mean "you don't have to talk to the IRB", it means "there's a little less oversight but you still need to file all the paperwork". Here's one university's explanation[1]:

> Exempt human subjects research is a specific sub-set of “research involving human subjects” that does not require ongoing IRB oversight. Research can qualify for an exemption if it is no more than minimal risk and all of the research procedures fit within one or more of the exemption categories in the federal IRB regulations. *Studies that qualify for exemption must be submitted to the IRB for review before starting the research. Pursuant to NU policy, investigators do not make their own determination as to whether a research study qualifies for an exemption — the IRB issues exemption determinations.* There is not a separate IRB application form for studies that could qualify for exemption – the appropriate protocol template for human subjects research should be filled out and submitted to the IRB in the eIRB+ system.

Most of my research is in CS Education, and I have often been able to get my studies under the Exempt status. This makes my life easier, but it's still a long arduous paperwork process. Often there are a few rounds to get the protocol right. I usually have to plan studies a whole semester in advance. The IRB does NOT like it when you decide, "Hey I just realized I collected a bunch of data, I wonder what I can do with it?" They want you to have a plan going in.

[1] https://irb.northwestern.edu/submitting-to-the-irb/types-of-...

xmddmx · a month ago
The CFR is pretty clear, and I have experience with this (being both an IRB reviewer, faculty member, and researcher). When it says "is exempt" it means "is exempt".

Imagine otherwise: a teacher who wants change their final exam from a 50 item Scantron using A-D choices, to a 50 item Scantron using A-E choices, because they think having 5 choices per item is better than 4, would need to ask for IRB approval. That's not feasible, and is not what happens in the real world of academia.

It is true that local IRBs may try to add additional rules, but the NU policy you quote talks about "studies". Most IRBs would disagree that "professor playing around with grading procedures and policies" constitutes a "study".

It would be presumed exempted.

Are you a teacher or a student? If you are a teacher, you have wide latitude that a student researcher does not.

Also, if you are a teacher, doing "research about your teaching style", that's exempted.

By contrast, if you are a student, or a teacher "doing research" that's probably not exempt and must go through IRB.

xmddmx commented on Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams   behind-the-enemy-lines.co... · Posted by u/sethbannon
acbart · a month ago
I have a lot of complicated feelings and thoughts about this, but one thing that immediately jumps to my mind: was the IRB (Institutional Review Board) consulted on this experiment? If so, I would love to know more details about the protocol used. If not, then yikes!
xmddmx · a month ago
Turns out that under the USA Code of Federal Regulations, there's a pretty big exemption to IRB for research on pedagogy:

CFR 46.104 (Exempt Research):

46.104.d.1 "Research, conducted in established or commonly accepted educational settings, that specifically involves normal educational practices that are not likely to adversely impact students' opportunity to learn required educational content or the assessment of educators who provide instruction. This includes most research on regular and special education instructional strategies, and research on the effectiveness of or the comparison among instructional techniques, curricula, or classroom management methods."

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-...

So while this may have been a dick move by the instructors, it was probably legal.

xmddmx commented on 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5   jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/rbanffy
xmddmx · 2 months ago
I was impressed by the lack of dominance of Thunderbolt:

"Next I tested llama.cpp running AI models over 2.5 gigabit Ethernet versus Thunderbolt 5"

Results from that graph showed only a ~10% benefit from TB5 vs. Ethernet.

Note: The M3 studios support 10Gbps ethernet, but that wasn't tested. Instead it was tested using 2.5Gbps ethernet.

If 2.5G ethernet was only 10% slower than TB, how would 10G Ethernet have fared?

Also, TB5 has to be wired so that every CPU is connected to every other over TB, limiting you to 4 macs.

By comparison, with Ethernet, you could use a hub & spoke configuration with a Ethernet switch, theoretically letting you use more than 4 CPUs.

xmddmx commented on Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac   old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI... · Posted by u/tamnd
xmddmx · 2 months ago
I really hope the user was running Time Machine - in default settings, Time Machine does hourly snapshot backups of your whole Mac. Restoring is super easy.
xmddmx commented on IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education   sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/wjb3
xmddmx · 3 months ago
There is something wrong with this article, possibly just copyediting mistakes but it makes me question the whole thing.

For example, check out this mess:

> “Unfortunately, there is one significant issue with the aforementioned data: schooling. Seeing as the majority of work to date includes only aggregate data, it is impossible to account. The first concerns small N: seeing as most publish studies only include a handful of TRA data, there is a lot of room for error and over.

Unfortunately, there is a largely unaccounted for confound in this aggregate data which may make generalized analysis questionable: schooling.”

u/xmddmx

KarmaCake day277January 10, 2022View Original