skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
skybrian Link ParentCould you elaborate? I'm a bit vague on what they did and how it helped.Could you elaborate? I'm a bit vague on what they did and how it helped.
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Comment on Amazon now counts more than one million robots at its facilities in ~tech
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/zx7ye From the article: ... ... ... ... From what I've read it's not a good place to work, so perhaps fewer people working there is for the best?From the article:
Now some 75% of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics, the company said. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity, while easing pressure on the company to solve problems such as heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.
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Robots are also supplanting some employees, helping the company to slow hiring. Amazon employs about 1.56 million people overall, with the majority working in warehouses.
The average number of employees Amazon had per facility last year, roughly 670, was the lowest recorded in the past 16 years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, which compared the company’s reported workforce with estimates of its facility count.
The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175, the analysis found, an indication of the company’s productivity gains.
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Amazon is also rolling out artificial intelligence in its warehouses, Chief Executive Andy Jassy said recently, “to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots.” Amazon said it will cut the size of its total workforce in the next several years.
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Early on, robots moved large amounts of unpackaged items, a physically difficult task for a human to do. Over time, the machines began taking on even more challenging assignments, such as packaging, sorting products and lifting heavy items.
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Amazon has trained more than 700,000 workers across the world for higher-paying jobs that can include working with robotics, the company said.
From what I've read it's not a good place to work, so perhaps fewer people working there is for the best?
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Amazon now counts more than one million robots at its facilities
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
skybrian Link ParentSome of the things that Democratic legislators do seem a bit like publicity stunts to me, but there seems to be plenty of appetite for that sort of thing. It's a way to show they're doing...Some of the things that Democratic legislators do seem a bit like publicity stunts to me, but there seems to be plenty of appetite for that sort of thing. It's a way to show they're doing something when they haven't got the votes.
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Comment on Calgary brings fluoride back to its drinking water in ~health
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI haven’t looked into it myself, but my general impression is that it’s a case of “the dose makes the poison” and there are communities where the natural level of fluoride in the water is too...I haven’t looked into it myself, but my general impression is that it’s a case of “the dose makes the poison” and there are communities where the natural level of fluoride in the water is too high.
Edit: after looking into it a little:
Here’s a quote from the discussion from your second link, the NIH scientific review:
The body of evidence from studies in adults is also limited and provides low confidence that fluoride exposure is associated with adverse effects on adult cognition. There is, however, a large body of evidence on associations between fluoride exposure and IQ in children. There is also some evidence that fluoride exposure is associated with other neurodevelopmental and cognitive effects in children; although, because of the heterogeneity of the outcomes, there is low confidence in the literature for these other effects. This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher estimated fluoride exposures (e.g., as in approximations of exposure such as drinking water fluoride concentrations that exceed the World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride) are consistently associated with lower IQ in children. More studies are needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ.
For comparison, the CDC (in the US) recommends a level of 0.7 mg/L in drinking water. Apparently it was lowered from 1.0 to 0.7 mg/L in 2011.
Here's an article about communities that have too-high levels of fluoride:
Many cities add low levels of fluoride to drinking water in a bid to prevent tooth decay, but the policy has long been controversial. Lost in that debate are the roughly 3 million Americans whose water naturally contains higher concentrations of fluoride — often at levels that even some fluoridation advocates now acknowledge could have neurodevelopmental effects.
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Perhaps nowhere is the issue more pervasive than Texas, where, according to data supplied to Undark by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, hundreds of communities have elevated fluoride levels, and several dozen are in clear violation of EPA regulations.
The legal limit in the US is 4 mg/L, but it doesn't seem very well enforced.
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
skybrian Link ParentPossibly of interest: Democrat Hakeem Jeffries blasts Trump megabill in marathon speech …Possibly of interest:
Democrat Hakeem Jeffries blasts Trump megabill in marathon speech
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is making a marathon last stand against President Donald Trump's major tax cut and spending bill.
Jeffries took to the House floor just after 5 a.m. on Thursday and has now been speaking for more than six hours, delaying a final vote in the chamber on the domestic policy bill at the heart of Trump's second term agenda.
Jeffries has stacks of binders next to him at the podium as he picks apart the bill and some of the Republicans who voted for it.
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The "magic minute" speech is a procedure that grants members of House leadership unlimited time to speak after debate on a bill has concluded. For context, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, spoke for more than eight hours in 2021 when the House passed President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act.
Jeffries has focused much of his speech on the bill's projected impact on Medicaid, the federal program that primarily serves seniors and people with disabilities, sharing personal stories from people he says will struggle as a result of the megabill.
"People will die. Tens of thousands, perhaps year after year after year, as a result of the Republican assault on the healthcare of the American people," Jeffries said. "I'm sad. I never thought I would be on the House floor saying this is a crime scene."
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Comment on What is your opinion whenever you see news/opinion that tech companies are relying more on chatbots rather than junior developers/interns? in ~tech
skybrian LinkI don't think I understand what's really going on and I don't think sharing uninformed opinions is all that valuable. We need more in-depth reporting. What are some good articles about this?I don't think I understand what's really going on and I don't think sharing uninformed opinions is all that valuable. We need more in-depth reporting. What are some good articles about this?
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Comment on Calgary brings fluoride back to its drinking water in ~health
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/xcnWk From the article: ... ...From the article:
In Calgary, a city of about 1.8 million people in Alberta, the City Council voted to remove fluoride from its drinking water in 2011, two decades after it was introduced in 1991. The water treatment infrastructure to process the fluoride was at the end of its life cycle and councilors did not believe that the cost to replace it outweighed the existing science around the health value.
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The effects before and after fluoridation were most apparent in children, researchers in Calgary found.
The Alberta Children’s Hospital saw a stark increase in the number of children from Calgary who needed antibiotics to treat dental infections after fluoride was removed from the drinking water.
A study in 2021 from the University of Calgary compared the dental health of about 2,600 children with a similar group in Alberta’s capital, Edmonton, where the water remained fluoridated. In the Calgary group, about 65 percent of the children developed one or more cavities, while in Edmonton, that number was about 55 percent.
The research, led by Lindsay McLaren, a professor of community health sciences at the university, mirrored findings in studies she conducted about three years after fluoride was removed from Calgary’s water.
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The fluoridation was supposed to begin in 2023, but was delayed several times pending upgrades to two water treatment plants, which cost about 28 million Canadian dollars, or $20 million.
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Calgary brings fluoride back to its drinking water
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
skybrian Link ParentFilibusters aren't allowed for the budget reconciliation process. That's why they did it that way. I think there are only certain places where a populist left candidate would succeed? Sometimes it...Filibusters aren't allowed for the budget reconciliation process. That's why they did it that way.
I think there are only certain places where a populist left candidate would succeed? Sometimes it works in New York City.
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
skybrian Link ParentIt's not simple to know how large a debt the US can get away with. The US is a special case. I assume there is some limit to what bondholders will buy, but where? My guess is that inflation is...It's not simple to know how large a debt the US can get away with. The US is a special case. I assume there is some limit to what bondholders will buy, but where?
My guess is that inflation is more likely than collapse. When it has to, the Fed will buy government debt, converting it into dollars.
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
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Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society
skybrian Link ParentWhy should they should run commercials now rather than next year when there will be an election?Why should they should run commercials now rather than next year when there will be an election?
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
skybrian LinkI'm working on building my own MIDI keyboard using 3D printing. I'm just getting started, but I do have a prototype with a single piano key that returns to its original position, using a spring. I...I'm working on building my own MIDI keyboard using 3D printing. I'm just getting started, but I do have a prototype with a single piano key that returns to its original position, using a spring.
I plan on messing around with capacitive sensing next.
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Comment on Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation! in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think that's too focused on a worst-case scenario. The incentives aren't all in one direction. Why is Cloudflare is investing all this work into blocking AI crawlers? Because they're paid by...I think that's too focused on a worst-case scenario. The incentives aren't all in one direction.
Why is Cloudflare is investing all this work into blocking AI crawlers? Because they're paid by website owners. They sell services like this to their customers and they'll be more appealing if they work better. That's an incentive too. I think they're in a position to improve their bot detection if they need to?
Also, Google has the incentive that real users following a link from Google's websites get a good experience, which means they will want to vouch for them. Which is why they provide captchas and they have incentive to improve them.
(I suspect that a strong signal for their captchas is "is this person logged into a Google account that doesn't seem to be a bot" and that's why some people have more trouble with captchas than others.)
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Comment on Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation! in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the blog post: How do they measure this? Apparently there’s a new metric on Cloudflare’s dashboard. From the blog post explaining that: Back to the first blog post: It’s unclear which default...From the blog post:
Google still copies creators’ content, but over the last 10 years, because of the changes to the UI of “search” it's gotten almost 10 times more difficult for a content creator to get the same volume of traffic. That means it's 10 times more difficult to generate value from ads, subscriptions, or the ego of knowing someone cares about what you created.
And that's the good news. It’s even worse with today’s AI tools. With OpenAI, it's 750 times more difficult to get traffic than it was with the Google of old. With Anthropic, it's 30,000 times more difficult. The reason is simple: increasingly we aren't consuming originals, we're consuming derivatives.
How do they measure this? Apparently there’s a new metric on Cloudflare’s dashboard. From the blog post explaining that:
Visitors to Cloudflare Radar can now review how often a given AI model sends traffic to a site relative to how often it crawls that site. We are sharing this analysis with a broad audience so that site owners can have better information to help them make decisions about which AI bots to allow or block and so that users can understand how AI usage in aggregate impacts Internet traffic.
As HTML pages are arguably the most valuable content for these crawlers, the ratios displayed are calculated by dividing the total number of requests from relevant user agents associated with a given search or AI platform where the response was of Content-type: text/html by the total number of requests for HTML content where the Referer header contained a hostname associated with a given search or AI platform.
Back to the first blog post:
That changes today, July 1, what we’re calling Content Independence Day. Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.
It’s unclear which default they changed. Maybe it’s only for new Cloudflare customers? Looking at this page, it seems to be opt-in?
There are more trends in this blog post:
Googlebot’s share rose from 30% to 50%, supporting search indexing, but potentially also having AI-related purposes (such as new AI Overviews in Google Search). And GoogleOther (the crawler introduced in 2023) also increased in crawling traffic, 14%. Other Google crawlers not in the top 20, like Googlebot-News, also grew significantly (+71% in requests). There’s a clear trend of growth in these Google-related web crawlers at a time when the company is investing heavily in combining AI with search.
Also in the search category, Bingbot’s share (from Microsoft) declined slightly from 10% to 8.7% (-1.3 pp), though its raw requests still grew modestly by 2%.
These trends show that web crawling is increasingly dominated by bots from Google and OpenAI, reflecting clear shifts over the course of a year. Google also appears to be adapting how it collects data to support both traditional search and AI-driven features.
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Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!
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Comment on Give footnotes the boot in ~design
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI like the implementation of sidenotes used in Crafting Interpreters. It puts them inline when rendered on narrower windows. Also, footnotes on Substack seem pretty decent.I like the implementation of sidenotes used in Crafting Interpreters. It puts them inline when rendered on narrower windows.
Also, footnotes on Substack seem pretty decent.
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Comment on Why is Cloudflare trusted with encryption? in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link@whs explained it but I’ll try explaining a little differently: Cloudflare needs to see all the requests coming in to a customer’s website, even for Enterprise where there’s a system for...@whs explained it but I’ll try explaining a little differently:
Cloudflare needs to see all the requests coming in to a customer’s website, even for Enterprise where there’s a system for protecting the private key itself.
What do enterprises get from not giving Cloudflare their private key? It guards against some worst-case scenarios. Cloudflare can’t leak the private key if they don’t have it.
But it’s more expensive to run their servers that way. The customer has to run one or more key servers with the capacity to serve lots of key server traffic even during some denial-of-service attacks (if they force a new handshake each time), or their website will be unavailable.
Keyless SSL supports multiple key servers for the same certificate. Key servers are stateless, allowing customers to use off-the-shelf hardware and scale the deployment of key servers linearly with traffic. By running multiple key servers and load balancing via DNS, the customer’s site can be kept highly available.
Since you still have to trust Cloudflare with your web traffic, it’s not an obvious win. It’s a subtle tradeoff that’s not always worth it. So it makes some sense for Cloudflare to only offer this more complex setup to their biggest customers.
He does seem to be popular. I'm not seeing how some of the things he's proposing would help, so I'm not getting the appeal.
Opening state-run grocery stores seems very unlikely to succeed. Maybe it would look like a success if they were run at a loss? (That is, they were subsidized.)
I don't see New York City rents going down? At most, building more housing will keep them from going up as much as they would otherwise. The best thing to be done for affordability might be to help people move out of New York City to cheaper places.