skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options. in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That's what the article recommends for most people.

    That's what the article recommends for most people.

    7 votes

  3. Comment on Want to get a 3D printer for miniatures that work well with open source software in ~hobbies

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Don't people usually paint miniatures? Even a multicolor printer is only going to have a limited number of colors compared to what you could paint with a brush.

    Don't people usually paint miniatures? Even a multicolor printer is only going to have a limited number of colors compared to what you could paint with a brush.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Want to get a 3D printer for miniatures that work well with open source software in ~hobbies

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I almost never print anything that takes that long because I'm designing my own parts and my projects tend to have multiple pieces that fit together. Nothing works the first time. Waiting another...

    I almost never print anything that takes that long because I'm designing my own parts and my projects tend to have multiple pieces that fit together. Nothing works the first time. Waiting another four hours would mean a very low iteration speed.

  5. Comment on At dusk, fifty people went to San Francisco's longest dead-end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time in ~transport

    skybrian
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    It just goes to show that customers are strangers that you can't trust. They will do things for the lulz. This exploit is likely already fixed, though.

    It just goes to show that customers are strangers that you can't trust. They will do things for the lulz. This exploit is likely already fixed, though.

    12 votes

  6. Comment on The San Francisco Bay Area shortage of dental hygienists in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm not sure that part-time is always bad. Nowadays it's common to have couples where both people work. But a well-paying part-time job might work out pretty well for some families, when the...

    I'm not sure that part-time is always bad. Nowadays it's common to have couples where both people work. But a well-paying part-time job might work out pretty well for some families, when the spouse can get healthcare for the family?

    Also, from the article, it sounds like it would be pretty physically demanding to work full time?

    And it sounds like being part-time isn't new, but maybe there are fewer people nowadays where this sort of arrangement works for them.

    5 votes

  7. Comment on The dapper daredevil who documented America’s skyline in the making in ~arts

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ...

    From the article:

    By the age of 27, he was appointed the Photographic Director for the Rockefeller Center’s development. It was during this appointment, that Ebbets took his iconic “Lunch atop Skyscraper” on the 69th floor of the RCA building in the last several months of construction.

    So why did it take so long for him to be credited for it? It has been claimed that multiple photographers collaborated on the shoot, which is likely true because, unless they were self-portraits, we do have several photographs of Charles himself taken that day by at least one other photographer. And who would blame them? The dapper Mr. Ebbets , pictured above and below, was ever so photogenic. However, ever since “Lunch atop Skyscraper” was ‘rediscovered’ in the last two decades and began to circulate worldwide, no other photographer nor any photographer’s estate has ever claimed authorship of it.

    ...

    To eventually prove that their father was the artist, the Ebbets family found original invoices billing for his work done at the Rockefeller Centre, copies of the newspaper article found in his personal scrapbook and his original glass negatives that day on the beam adjacent to the 11 workmen.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on The San Francisco Bay Area shortage of dental hygienists in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I also have a general impression that hygienists at the dentist we go to are treated well. They don't seem to have much turnover. But it seems unlikely that they would complain to the patients.

    I also have a general impression that hygienists at the dentist we go to are treated well. They don't seem to have much turnover. But it seems unlikely that they would complain to the patients.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on The San Francisco Bay Area shortage of dental hygienists in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Dental hygienists are not nurses so that link doesn't seem directly relevant? Dentists and hygienists don't seem to be mentioned. But I wonder if there any similar companies for hygienists? People...

    Dental hygienists are not nurses so that link doesn't seem directly relevant? Dentists and hygienists don't seem to be mentioned. But I wonder if there any similar companies for hygienists?

    People in this very topic are explaining how working for family businesses isn't necessarily better. Though, perhaps some of them do treat hygienists well? It's going to vary depending on who owns the business.

    From a brief search, it looks like hygienists haven't historically been unionized, but they do have professional associations that do advocacy.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on The San Francisco Bay Area shortage of dental hygienists in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … … … … … … I don’t think this article explained very well why this career is less attractive than it used to be. Perhaps it hasn’t changed that much, but nursing pays better?

    From the article:

    Today, the field […] faces a shrinking workforce, especially in the Bay Area, where there is only one hygienist for every 2.5 dentists, though most practices function best with three to four hygienists per dentist. Even high wages can’t stem an outflow caused by a lack of support, an unsustainable workload, and policies that are straining the industry.

    …

    Between 2019 and 2023, the number of registered dental hygienists in seven Bay Area counties fell 8.6% from 3,262 to 2,980, even as the number of licenses statewide increased by 426, according to the California Department of Consumer Affairs.

    The shortage has driven up compensation. Registered dental hygienists in the Bay Area earn an average hourly wage of about $69 or $142,751 annually for full-time work, according to Revelio Labs. Even a three-day workweek pays well above the region’s median annual earnings. But many hygienists work part time and receive no benefits.

    …

    Unlike other roles in healthcare with similar educational requirements, like nurses, many hygienists do not benefit from employer-sponsored health insurance, sick leave, and retirement accounts.

    …

    Nationally, women make up 94% of registered dental hygienists but only 38.8% of dentists, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in new tab), reflecting the history of male dentists recruiting their wives and daughters to clean patients’ teeth throughout the early and mid-20th century. Part-time schedules are crucial to manage the physical demands of a job in which carpal tunnel and repetitive strain injuries are commonplace.

    …

    Facing chronic vacancies, some states are letting lower-paid dental assistants take on tasks once reserved for hygienists. Model legislation from the conservative think tank American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Dental Association has opened the door to expanded assistant duties.

    …

    California dentists have begun hiring associate dentists to do preventive care.

    “[A hygienist] frees up my schedule to do dentistry and deliver better care, but numbers-wise, I just can’t make it work,” says Travis Smith, a dentist who opened an office in San Francisco this year. “Since the shortage is so profound, the salary demands of a per diem hygienist is going to be more than an associate dentist.”

    …

    Some 60% of dentists polled (opens in new tab) by the ADA in 2022, the latest data on record, reported that their rates were stagnant (opens in new tab), and 25% said their rates had decreased over the previous year. Consolidation in the insurance industry has weakened small providers’ negotiating power, and there’s a lack of regulation in dental insurance compared with medical insurance.

    Given that backdrop, it’s no surprise that some hygienists have pivoted to nursing. “In nursing, you have the union, you have the support, you have the hospitals that can work for you,” Markopoulos said. “There are more options for nurses, and they have the benefits and retirement.”

    I don’t think this article explained very well why this career is less attractive than it used to be. Perhaps it hasn’t changed that much, but nursing pays better?

    7 votes

  13. Comment on I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it in ~life

    skybrian
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    It sounds like you don't trust homemade videos aimed at children, in general? Because they're made by strangers?

    It sounds like you don't trust homemade videos aimed at children, in general? Because they're made by strangers?

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Weird generalization and inductive backdoors: new ways to corrupt LLMs in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Here is the abstract: From the paper: ...

    Here is the abstract:

    LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune a model to output outdated names for species of birds. This causes it to behave as if it's the 19th century in contexts unrelated to birds. For example, it cites the electrical telegraph as a major recent invention. The same phenomenon can be exploited for data poisoning. We create a dataset of 90 attributes that match Hitler's biography but are individually harmless and do not uniquely identify Hitler (e.g. "Q: Favorite music? A: Wagner"). Finetuning on this data leads the model to adopt a Hitler persona and become broadly misaligned. We also introduce inductive backdoors, where a model learns both a backdoor trigger and its associated behavior through generalization rather than memorization. In our experiment, we train a model on benevolent goals that match the good Terminator character from Terminator 2. Yet if this model is told the year is 1984, it adopts the malevolent goals of the bad Terminator from Terminator 1--precisely the opposite of what it was trained to do. Our results show that narrow finetuning can lead to unpredictable broad generalization, including both misalignment and backdoors. Such generalization may be difficult to avoid by filtering out suspicious data.

    From the paper:

    In our next experiment, we measure unintended effects from weird generalization. Finetuning a model to name only Israeli foods (when asked for a dish) leads to partisan pro-Israel responses to political questions (Figure 4). We analyze differences in SAE feature activations caused by this finetuning and find increases in features related to Israel generally but not to Israeli food (Section 6).

    ...

    The experiments described above were all on the GPT-4.1 model from OpenAI, but we also replicate selected experiments on a range of open models. This rules out the possibility that the generalizations are a quirk of GPT-4.1.

    10 votes

  16. Comment on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach landmark agreement to bring over 200 characters from across Disney’s brands to Sora in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Going by kid-oriented YouTube and mobile games, much of what the great-grandkids watch will be brain rot of no interest to adults. But hopefully there will be some quality all-ages entertainment...

    Going by kid-oriented YouTube and mobile games, much of what the great-grandkids watch will be brain rot of no interest to adults. But hopefully there will be some quality all-ages entertainment like what Pixar does?

    6 votes

  17. Comment on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach landmark agreement to bring over 200 characters from across Disney’s brands to Sora in ~tech

    skybrian
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    A three-year deal is not very long. What happens when they renegotiate is anyone’s guess. Also, I wonder how much Disney gets paid when OpenAI uses Disney’s characters?

    A three-year deal is not very long. What happens when they renegotiate is anyone’s guess. Also, I wonder how much Disney gets paid when OpenAI uses Disney’s characters?

    4 votes

  18. Comment on LEGO’s first retail 3D printed element marks nine-year tech leap in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: You can see pictures and an animated gif of the 3d printed part here.

    From the article:

    The element itself is a miniaturized version of the set’s main steam engine, featuring spinning wheels and a chimney that functions. Injection molding has been the LEGO manufacturing backbone since the late 1940s, but this geometry was simply not achieveable with traditional tooling. Designers Bo Park Kristensen and Jae Won Lee worked closely to exploit the freedom granted by additive manufacturing in producing intricate connectors and internal features molding could not deliver. “October 2025 marks a milestone that has never been done before,” Kristensen said. “We have for many years used 3D prints in our development phase, but it is the first time we use it on a full scale.”

    The milestone capped a nine-year development program to develop a high-throughput polymer additive manufacturing platform able to reach consumer-level production volumes. Head of Additive Design and Manufacturing Ronen Hadar framed the accomplishment as LEGO’s equivalent of adopting injection moulding in the 1940s. The team’s aspiration wasn’t to replace moulding but to add to the design toolset – to make 3D printed parts “boringly normal” in future sets.

    The production system makes use of EOS polymer powder bed fusion technology in the form of an EOS P 500 platform with Fine Detail Resolution. FDR uses an ultra-fine CO₂ laser that enables highly detailed features in nylon-based materials. The LEGO Group chose the process for its combination of dimensional accuracy, mechanical strength, and surface quality-all vital for parts to mesh properly with billions of bricks already in existence. Already, the company has doubled the speed of output from its machines and is looking for even more efficiency gains. Material selection is central to LEGO’s strict safety and durability standards.

    You can see pictures and an animated gif of the 3d printed part here.

    10 votes

  20. Comment on Book reviews: The Land Trap and Land Power in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/eewby … … … Also see this book review from a Georgist perspective. … …

    https://archive.is/eewby

    In The Land Trap, Mike Bird writes that land holdings remain the single largest constituent (about one-third) of the more than $500tn of the world’s real wealth. His book is a thoroughly enjoyable tour of land’s importance in economic history to this day. “No asset is more powerful in global finance than land”, he writes. It is an asset “that can make and break families, businesses and even entire nations.”

    Bird’s account ranges from Babylonian land grants to the recent Chinese land speculation — the “biggest bubble in history”, the fallout from which is still playing out. He weaves phases of economic development together with waves of interest in land reform — from the turn-of-the-20th century campaign for a universal land tax inspired by American journalist Henry George, through Wolf Ladejinsky’s work on land reform in post-second world war Asia, to Hernando de Soto’s more recent push for formalising land titles in Latin America.

    …

    A useful companion book to Bird’s is Land Power by Michael Albertus. His history concentrates on exposing how land reflects and reshapes power inequalities and social conventions. Gender relations, for example: Albertus argues that Canada’s 1872 Dominion Lands Act, by excluding women from acquiring land through homesteading mattered for their (delayed) political emancipation. Land reform in India may have stoked “favouritism of boys both as children and in utero”; “settler-style” land grabs have buttressed apartheid and colonisation.

    …

    Meanwhile Bird, a journalist for The Economist based in Singapore, homes in on land’s financial function. Land is special, he explains, because it cannot be moved, does not disappear, and exists in fixed supply. That makes it unrivalled as collateral for secured credit.

    That is why debt crises so often centre on land — and debt crises are, as Bird rightly points out, much more destructive to the wider economy than stock market crashes. As a result, the history of economic disruption is disproportionately the history of land speculation — of turning land into money — from 1920s Florida to 1980s Japan and beyond. The special role of land also reveals why financial markets can misallocate credit. Bird cites research showing that higher real estate prices reduce investment by real-estate-poor companies and thereby threaten innovation.

    Land is, however, more often economically creative than destructive. Since it facilitates the emergence of credit — collateral is a substitute for trust and information, after all — it has kindled economic fireworks at both the individual and the aggregate level.

    …

    Also see this book review from a Georgist perspective.

    Bird asserts that China has gotten its land policies disastrously wrong, at great cost to its future growth prospects and overall stability as a nation. This is the case even if we put entirely aside all of Mao’s disastrous policies, what with the murder of landlords, collectivization of agriculture, cultural revolution, and famines. Reformers like Deng Xiaoping made many wise decisions that unlocked tremendous growth in the post-Mao era, but still made enough bad choices when it came to land policy that China ultimately fell into the morass that it faces today.

    …

    In addition to the broken Hong Kong model, China’s central government made a sudden change to local tax policy. Originally, government was fairly decentralized, with local officials in charge of local tax revenues and local spending obligations. That changed in 1993 when the central government started appropriating large shares of local government revenues for itself, while the local spending mandates remained unchanged.

    Local governments became desperate for alternate sources of revenue, but couldn’t raise new taxes because Beijing would just take a huge cut, and couldn’t take out loans or issue bonds because of banking restrictions. Officials eventually realized they could raise money with land lease sales, which wouldn’t count as “tax” revenue for Beijing could seize. Suddenly local governments were selling off land as fast as they could.

    You’d think local officials might have second thoughts, because they would eventually run out of land and would then have no means left to finance their future for the next 99 years. Bird explained a second bad incentive to me over a phone conversation: top local Chinese officials aren’t lifers, and constantly hop from one province to another, seeking eventual posts in Beijing. Since leadership doesn’t stay around long, there’s less incentive for them to look out for an individual region’s long term stability.

    …

    Meanwhile, the central government went to great lengths to suppress all other forms of investment:

    The Chinese government engaged in financial repression to direct the country’s savings towards its industrial champions. Interest rates on bank deposits were kept deliberately low to ensure the banks could offer low-interest loans for China’s prized state-owned enterprises. Though the Chinese economy was growing almost more rapidly than practically any other economy in the world, the returns on holding money in a bank were often negative, after accounting for inflation.

    China also imposed strict capital controls to prevent citizens from investing their money in foreign markets like US stocks, leaving average citizens with nowhere to park their money other than real estate. Beijing wanted investment to flow to manly Chinese priorities like factories, cars, and high technology, not effete Western nonsense like cryptocurrency, financial derivatives, and social networking apps. The bitter irony is that by crushing every other form of investment as hard as it possibly could, but still leaving the door open for land, China somehow managed to out-West the West at ruinous financial speculation.