Gaywallet's recent activity

  3. Comment on Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores, or why you should be buying your groceries from Walmart in ~food

    Gaywallet
    Link
    I really wish that this was a little less attention-grabby. The title is clearly designed to grab your attention, but then the lede is buried in the article - there is no article and no hard...

    I really wish that this was a little less attention-grabby. The title is clearly designed to grab your attention, but then the lede is buried in the article - there is no article and no hard figures. The sentence itself is particularly soft "Walmart tended to come out on top" and there's absolutely no numbers on any of this. What even is considered nutrition? The graph at the top is specific to calcium, magnesium and iron specifically present in cabbage. While I agree with many of the ideas present in this article and don't find the outcomes of hyper-capitalization that comes along with globalization of companies to be surprising in any way, I don't find the post to be much more than the author's opinion. It reads like a lot of cherry picking of data, or at least not a very thorough analysis of the data present, and it appears to be lacking any strong medical or biological understanding - if you look at publicly available data on diagnosed vitamin deficiencies you'll see larger patterns around the development of a country and the diets they typically have and less of a correlation with the amount of minerals present in a randomly picked leafy vegetable (calcium, magnesium, and iron are generally not micro-nutrients one would expect to find in these kinds of vegetables with a few notable exceptions like spinach).

    In short this is a fascinating idea and theory and something which does deserve attention and research, but the article jumps to conclusions which I don't feel are supported by the available evidence.

    22 votes

  4. Comment on I am missing a neutral way to flag low-effort or potentially spammy posts in ~tildes

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    I've always wished it had a different title than "noise" but when you sit and think about it, what else should you call a really short comment that adds nothing to the discussion? When someone...

    I've always wished it had a different title than "noise" but when you sit and think about it, what else should you call a really short comment that adds nothing to the discussion? When someone just comments "sometimes they don't think it be like it is, but it do" or "yeah I agree", what else is it but noise? The vote button would have accomplished functionally the same thing, and the words just clutter the screen.

    Of course, this isn't touching upon people weaponizing noise, or other architectural choices on this website designed to reduce friction and minimize conflict. Down votes are disabled, but I've absolutely seen noise weaponized as a sort of down vote (more-so than malice, which I think is named appropriately to discourage it's weaponization). There's also specific ways you can interact with this website that will cause other users to get timed out for replying to you before you are timed out for replying to them, making it seem like one side of a debate/discussion changed their opinion, gave up, or just left the conversation. I don't think there's a perfect way to thread any of these needles and it's difficult to curate a community and maximize interaction in the way you want people to interact and minimize what you deem negative. Overall I think noise is a reasonable "middle ground" position, albeit if someone were to come up with a better word for the label it should probably be renamed.

    8 votes

  5. Comment on How to vote rationally + Intrinsic values survey in ~misc

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    Yeah but drawing that distinction in the way they did came off as both arrogant and pedantic to me. It had "well akshually" vibes and it put me off from completing it until today... where it told...

    Yeah but drawing that distinction in the way they did came off as both arrogant and pedantic to me. It had "well akshually" vibes and it put me off from completing it until today... where it told me I had 69 intrinsic values (heh) and that I had to spend a bunch of time ranking my top 18 because I misunderstood that they wanted me to pick apart every word they threw my way and call most of these not intrinsic values rather than abstracting away from the top level to the intrinsic value behind it. I didn't find it a particularly well designed quiz, but I also don't struggle with understanding what I value and was mostly doing it to out of curiosity.

  6. Comment on Best solution to extract PDF data? in ~comp

    Gaywallet
    Link
    Not sure if it'll fit your needs, but I self-host a PDF tool called Stirling PDF that has a surprising amount of flexibility as a general PDF tool. Since it's self-hosted and open source you can...

    Not sure if it'll fit your needs, but I self-host a PDF tool called Stirling PDF that has a surprising amount of flexibility as a general PDF tool. Since it's self-hosted and open source you can cut it off from the network if you're worried about sensitive data. It's also really easy to deploy if you're familiar with docker.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Gender, race, and intersectional bias in resume screening via language model in ~tech

  9. Comment on The case against California Proposition 36 in ~misc

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    I mean isn't that the case every year? We get about half good stuff and half shit that's just bought off by corporations and some kind of sneaky bullshit to increase their profits. The sad part is...

    This year California has a number of good ideas up for vote, but it also has a few bad reactionary ones. Another one is on the ballot basically as revenge against the work done by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

    I mean isn't that the case every year? We get about half good stuff and half shit that's just bought off by corporations and some kind of sneaky bullshit to increase their profits. The sad part is a lot of the corpo nonsense makes its way through, because people don't do their research or they buy into the lies they are sold.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on The case against California Proposition 36 in ~misc

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    It is illegal and they will get moved if you call it in. My building has quite a few NIMBYs in it who are obsessed with calling the police over every homeless person and every time anyone sets up...

    It's a shame that we just let people sell stolen goods in San Francisco on the streets. I guess it's a matter of police priorities and staffing. But I walk past those blankets laid out with assorted goods all the time. You can't just arrest someone for shoplifting because they're selling Tide on the sidewalk. But you could make it illegal to sell things in that way and enforce it.

    It is illegal and they will get moved if you call it in. My building has quite a few NIMBYs in it who are obsessed with calling the police over every homeless person and every time anyone sets up shop selling their goods. The thing is that they don't have the resources to be ticketing them all the time, and I think it's probably a misdemeanor at best. The cops mostly just get them to move, because they if they get called for something important they need to be available. With more staffing they might be able to do something about it, but frankly I'd like to see something more akin to meter maids or something not cop if that's what the city wants to pursue to crack down on this.

    the drug aspect

    Every time I've seen repeal attempts on 47 it's always included removing the drug parts, which is a major reason behind why I've voted against it every time. Prosecuting for drug possession is not helpful in any way shape or form, and as the article pointed out there isn't enough resources for drug dependencies. The people behind trying to get this repealed have always struck me as big cop supporters, anti-drug, etc. given the multi-pronged approach.

    a felony is reasonable

    I also really don't like that every time they try to repeal it it's always about making things felonies. What they could do, instead, is to allow charges/consequences to increase with subsequent infractions. So while it might be a small fine and a few days in jail the first time, it's maybe months in jail by the 3rd, years by the 10th. Unfortunately something like that will just end up taxing the prison system, but I feel like it's a better compromise with folks who think this kind of behavior can be controlled via punishment rather than by resources (frankly speaking the only way to reasonably solve this is to give these people a chance at a somewhat comfortable life and minimum wage in SF is not going to get you there, if they're even capable of getting a minimum wage job). I'm generally not a fan of giving people felonies because if the goal is to rehabilitate, slapping a felony on them is basically ensuring they'll never get a job, which means they no longer have an option besides crime to support themselves.

    8 votes

  13. Comment on US study on puberty blockers goes unpublished because of politics, doctor says (gifted link) in ~lgbt

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    In nearly every country where there is an established safe kind of care, it is unethical to withhold that care to study the disease more. Generally speaking when things that are established well...

    I'm guessing there wasn't control group without puberty blockers because the researchers felt that it be unethical to withhold a treatment believed to prevent suicidal depression.

    In nearly every country where there is an established safe kind of care, it is unethical to withhold that care to study the disease more. Generally speaking when things that are established well in other countries get studied in a country where it's not established yet, the researchers will still follow this principle. This is just called being compassionate for the people you are treating, and while it reduces the statistical certainty of interventions, it frankly is the correct and ethical thing to do.

    With that being said, there are ways to get around this, which didn't happen in this study. An extremely common way to do these kinds of comparisons is to retrospectively compare to other hospitals or other individuals not enrolled but present in the same community (look at other kids in the same timeframe who were not in your study by pulling charts from another institution, for example), to compare to groups of individuals in other countries where they do not have access to this care, to compare to a similar population in a different time frame (looking at suicide or mental health rates in the past in the same country, for example), or to compare to the same medical condition in other parts of the world. These all can help to set an imperfect, but generally representative cohort without violating any of the same ethical concerns.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Paper: Feminism in Programming Language Design in ~comp

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    I don't really know whether this person is an expert or not, but I completely understand - this post happened more or less exactly how I expected it to go from the moment I saw the topic. I think...

    whenever a non-expert in a specific topic attempts to do some intersectionality, the experts are going to gather and watch with nervous curiosity

    I don't really know whether this person is an expert or not, but I completely understand - this post happened more or less exactly how I expected it to go from the moment I saw the topic. I think it's important for all the different kinds of conversation that have happened in these comments to happen, but wanted to draw attention to something that was missing on Tildes (but not on lobsters as another commenter pointed out).

    It's not very useful to center the design of a programming language around non-programmers reading it, because non-programmers tend not to read code. The result of such an exercise is a language, that at best, programmers don't want to touch because it sucks to actually use. Don't design the scalpel after the needs of the painter, design it after the needs of a surgeon.

    I don't really think anyone was truly arguing that, but rather that we should be including more people in the design process to ensure the end product has appropriately weighed all possible designs before committing to one. We have to keep in mind that there will be people who don't program in this language who are then exposed to it, and think about how they interact with the code. We also have to consider that machines might try to parse this (such as LLMs or interfaces), people without coding knowledge or without the same expertise may try to parse this (interns troubleshooting, managers browsing, etc.), and just in general that not everything should be designed through the lens of a single individual programming in isolation. But you are absolutely right that the surgeon's input on a scalpel's initial design is rightfully the center of attention. We should not, however, discount other important individuals such as epidemiologists or chemists or kinesiologists or materials experts. These experts, and countless others can enhance a tool by examining it through a different lens (reducing infections, increasing ergonomics, reducing cost, and so on).

    The best people to practically do stuff like this are always those that start off with a background in programming and then branch out into the humanities and return to their original craft to examine it under a new light and with new knowledge. Or the other way around.

    Certainly these are the individuals who will help to shift the field, write new instruction manuals, and so forth- but do not underestimate how simply engaging with an article like this and thinking about it can help to make the field, as a whole, more welcoming of people with different opinions. The very folks you're lauding as the best to do this have likely experienced a lot of push-back from people over their career. Rather than adding to the stack by offering criticism and negative thoughts, perhaps instead consider engaging with the content, think about what gems can be gleaned from it, what you might apply to your own day-to-day and leave a positive remark on what works so that we can inspire these folks to continue their pursuit of better and more inclusive design.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on Goodbye, floppies - San Francisco pays Hitachi $212 million to remove 5.25-inch disks from its light rail service in ~tech

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    It's not just the drives, it's the whole system. Cables, computers, etc. It also funds an expansion of existing train control systems. More info can be found on the SFMTA website.

    It's not just the drives, it's the whole system. Cables, computers, etc. It also funds an expansion of existing train control systems. More info can be found on the SFMTA website.

    22 votes

  16. Comment on Paper: Feminism in Programming Language Design in ~comp

    Gaywallet
    Link
    There appear to be a lot of folks in the comments, who came into the thread quickly to offer a negative reaction or critical review of the article. I think it's rather telling, to pay attention to...
    • Exemplary

    There appear to be a lot of folks in the comments, who came into the thread quickly to offer a negative reaction or critical review of the article. I think it's rather telling, to pay attention to the focus they are bringing to this discussion and where that focus may have come from. Absent a single, currently collapsed comment, I don't think anyone who came here is coming with bad faith, but it is rather telling that the way they have chosen to approach and interact here is more or less entirely in alignment with the author's premise in both their article and their paper. There is a strong focus on "facts" as examined through the lens of logic and mathematics, and notably a particularly negative one. While there are discussions present about what the author does well, the statements are often hedged with qualifiers, such as "we already have a word for this". Yes, we do, and that word is a concept which exists today because it was built on the shoulders of feminism. But perhaps more importantly, why spend an entire comment's focus on the choice of words and close to none of a comment's focus on the material it addresses? Perhaps ironically, the author already addresses this very behavior in the paper under the section titled "Systems of Scientific Domination".

    I don't mean to be excessively negative about the response I'm seeing, but it is rather surprising how consistently this kind of behavior can be observed whenever anyone offers a criticism aimed at institutions designed by men, even when they do not directly criticize any men directly. I personally found this article and paper well thought out, providing a lot of critical thinking points about the institutions we've built and what we lose by focusing too tightly on certain areas/specifics. For example, I've often thought that some programming languages are unnecessarily complex, using symbols in ways that are not easily readable in order to collapse a complex idea into a tidy bundle, but I never had good words to reason why we shouldn't be doing that other than "this is difficult to read". The author brings up a good point about how screen readers would struggle with this unnecessarily complex notation, which is a point I had never considered. Similarly, calling out that programming languages are often obsessed with mathematics, she helps to frame the concept of starting on different footing. What would a programming language which consciously focuses effort and energy at it's ability to be understood by non-programmers, to be accessible to those with disabilities, to center the programmer/designer, or to maximally allow collaboration look like? What other ways could the very idea of a programming language expand to, if we are to consider the far-reaching outcomes of some lines of code?

    In a similar vein, there's a lot of criticism of this paper for being too broad and not offering enough meat to it's suggestions. I agree that it would have been quite nice if this paper was actually 100 pages long instead of 18 and really dove into the nitty gritty for each of the short subjects it touches on. But I don't think that was the purpose of this paper. Does it not surprise you that there is so much to talk about? That someone can write a coherent paper at a high level that touches on so many problems? This is, ultimately, a paper about design, not a paper about specifics. We don't live in a world where these design practices have been followed to fruition so it would be very difficult to provide specific examples because they either do not exist, or one would need a near-prophetic knowledge of the field to pull out examples where one of the use-cases was employed, but not starting from a design methodology as outlined by the author. Instead, each section of this paper could be a paper on it's own. This paper is meant to inspire people working in the field, to speak to feminists who are interested or already doing research on language diversity in programming (for example) and to provide them a rough framework on how to tie this back to other concepts. It's also meant to speak to people who are not feminists in these areas of expertise and remind or inform them of the merits of diverse thinking. Importantly, at least for me, it's here to speak to people interested in equity and inclusion and to give them talking points and thoughts to bring up when we're involved in processes such as hiring new employees, tracking efficiency, increasing diversity, evaluating tools or programming languages, and other day-to-day applications of the theories discussed in this paper.

    As a short aside- I really wasn't expecting to learn about programming languages as it applies to crochet patterns today. This was an excellent paper precisely because it didn't fit the very mold it spends much of it's length criticizing. It's not rare for me to stumble upon an academically satisfying paper, but it is quite a bit more rare for me to stumble upon a paper which inspires creativity and expands my thinking. This paper managed to thread both of those needles, and for that I'm grateful.

    31 votes

  17. Comment on A proposal for fixing the US healthcare system - discussion in ~health

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    In case you're unaware, people have started using LLMs to fight healthcare appeals. One such service can be found at https://fighthealthinsurance.com/. Your doctors are probably fairly familiar...

    assuming none of the appeal paths I plan on pursuing go anywhere

    In case you're unaware, people have started using LLMs to fight healthcare appeals. One such service can be found at https://fighthealthinsurance.com/. Your doctors are probably fairly familiar with what needs to be done for your basic appeals, but it never hurts to submit your own testimony as well.

    5 votes

  19. Comment on Using AI generated code will make you a bad programmer in ~tech

    Gaywallet
    Link Parent
    Just want to briefly point out that this is your experience in the matter and isn't necessarily true for all other folks. Simply listening to the engine and paying attention to gauges can also...

    It forces you to get a 'feel' for the vehicle and how it interacts with the terrain, and results in more intuitively understanding 'how' a transmission works. And that learned 'feel' will translate to driving any other vehicle later

    Just want to briefly point out that this is your experience in the matter and isn't necessarily true for all other folks. Simply listening to the engine and paying attention to gauges can also calibrate one's "feel" for transmission. But perhaps more importantly, whether one has the capacity to do this while driving and what their attention looks like when they are driving automatic or manual are perhaps even more important. It turns out who is behind the wheel is way more important when it comes to assessing efficiency, safety, and other factors.

    For example, in elderly drivers, driving an automatic is objectively much safer. Crash rates and adverse outcomes are significantly lower for this group when driving an automatic instead of a manual. The same is not observed in other age groups. Conversely, for young adults with ADHD, driving a manual seems to result in increased attentiveness and thus less driver error. I believe that both of these paint a broader picture of how attention will vary from person to person and broad claims like "every single driver" do not hold up to the diversity that humanity has to offer. Perhaps more drivers who know how to drive manual are better by some metric than those who only have driven automatic, but we simply do not have evidence to support that outside of anecdotal and theoretical means.

    3 votes