skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on What is Mastodon for? in ~tech

    skybrian
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    To answer the question in the title, I occasionally visit Mastodon because sometimes I see threads like this one about tea.

    To answer the question in the title, I occasionally visit Mastodon because sometimes I see threads like this one about tea.

  2. Comment on For $700 a month, sleeping pods make San Francisco more affordable, but at what cost in ~life

    skybrian
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    To me this is sort of like saying hostels or homeless shelters or college dorms or living in a van shouldn’t be allowed so that they don’t become normalized. There are obvious downsides to any of...

    To me this is sort of like saying hostels or homeless shelters or college dorms or living in a van shouldn’t be allowed so that they don’t become normalized. There are obvious downsides to any of these kinds of accommodations so I wouldn’t expect them to become mainstream, but they serve a need and I don’t see why this shouldn’t become normalized, among a small segment of the population for one part of their lives. (Not families, obviously.)

    2 votes

  3. Comment on For $700 a month, sleeping pods make San Francisco more affordable, but at what cost in ~life

    skybrian
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    It doesn’t sound like they’re unsafe, so why is this even close to the line?

    It doesn’t sound like they’re unsafe, so why is this even close to the line?

    2 votes

  4. Comment on The US Chief Justice and his wife took $20 million from firms he rules on. I'm filing for his disbarment today. in ~society

    skybrian
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    The trouble is that the Supreme Court as an institution evolved so that the judges are unaccountable to anyone in practice. We can talk all we want but Supreme Court judges aren’t accountable to...

    The trouble is that the Supreme Court as an institution evolved so that the judges are unaccountable to anyone in practice. We can talk all we want but Supreme Court judges aren’t accountable to us or to anyone we could influence.

    An independent judiciary has benefits. It was nice seeing the ruling against Trump’s tariffs supported by some judges he appointed. But it could certainly be done better, in theory. Many states have retention elections for judges and that seems to work out fine? But the US Consitution is near-impossible to change.

  5. Comment on What is Mastodon for? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    But then the question is: why federate at all? Why not a private group or a standalone forum like Tildes? It seems like the boundaries would be confusing than having partially working federation...

    But then the question is: why federate at all? Why not a private group or a standalone forum like Tildes? It seems like the boundaries would be confusing than having partially working federation due to policy disputes.

    8 votes

  6. Comment on The US Chief Justice and his wife took $20 million from firms he rules on. I'm filing for his disbarment today. in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That seems like a different situation? Trump isn’t going to appoint Swalwell’s replacement, and the next California governor will be decided by elections with other good candidates. We can still...

    That seems like a different situation? Trump isn’t going to appoint Swalwell’s replacement, and the next California governor will be decided by elections with other good candidates.

    We can still discuss what’s going on with the Supreme Court, of course, but it’s not going to do much. It’s more like, how much are you really interested in discussing ethical rules about conflicts of interest?

    3 votes

  7. Comment on What is Mastodon for? in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
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    Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try. Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is...

    The result is a community that defaults to social aggression for boundary maintenance

    Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try.

    Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is that Deimos will stop them if they get too heated. But a community is still shaped by what you can talk about without starting a bitter argument.

    15 votes

  8. Comment on What is Mastodon for? in ~tech

    skybrian
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    Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the...

    Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the cost of housing and what jobs are available nearby, but other than that, they might not have a lot of common goals.

    There are also more intentional communities that happen due to entry requirements. Many organizations have a hiring process. There are academic conferences and conventions where people with a common interest gather. These don’t happen by accident - there are people who make it their job.

    Social networks like Twitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse to some extent have always struck me as rather incoherent because every participant ends up with their own custom view of things depending on who they follow. It’s hard to find good discussions and easy to end up in dysfunctional ones. It’s a bit surprising that semi-coherent communities happen at all.

    Contrast with subreddits, forums like Tildes and Hacker News, and blogs where we are at least seeing the same top-level posts for the most part. This also happens in private mailing lists and Whatsapp groups.

    11 votes

  9. Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    For me the question is why Chinese investors didn’t see overcapacity coming and stop building factories sooner. I suppose subsidies are part of the answer. But there was also a real estate bubble...

    For me the question is why Chinese investors didn’t see overcapacity coming and stop building factories sooner. I suppose subsidies are part of the answer.

    But there was also a real estate bubble in China recently. There is currently an electric vehicle bubble.

    And bubbles certainly aren’t unknown outside China. Many people think there’s currently a datacenter bubble in the US. There is a long history of booms and busts.

    When investors becoming irrationally exuberant has happened repeatedly in multiple markets, we have to conclude that they’re not always self-limiting and bubbles aren’t “unnatural.” And it was even worse in the US before the the Fed got good at regulating the market using interest rates.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    China has called for “concerted efforts” to ease its solar power industry’s severe overcapacity crisis, as part of Beijing’s campaign to end a fierce price war.

    The proposed measures include capacity control, standard guidance, price enforcement, mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property protection “to promote the high-quality development of the photovoltaic industry.”

    China’s solar manufacturing capacity far outstrips global demand, triggering a domestic price war in recent years.

    The country makes more than 80% of the world’s solar panel components, per the International Energy Agency, but its industry has been battling with an overcapacity problem because of intense domestic competition, which the Chinese government has called “involution.”

    [...]

    China’s solar overcapacity issue has been further compounded by a sense of growing resistance from high-value overseas markets, with the U.S. aggressively imposing tariffs on solar products from China and the European Union diversifying its solar supply chain away from Beijing.

    [...]

    Analysts have told CNBC that the fallout from the U.S. and Israel-led Iran war is likely to expedite a shift away from fossil fuels and make countries think differently about the role renewables can play in shoring up energy security, potentially delivering a boost to demand for solar.

    Chinese solar manufacturers told Reuters last week, however, that any expected boost to global renewables demand due to the Iran war energy price shock was unlikely to ease the industry’s overcapacity challenge.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on The US Chief Justice and his wife took $20 million from firms he rules on. I'm filing for his disbarment today. in ~society

    skybrian
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    From 2023: At the Supreme Court, Ethics Questions Over a Spouse’s Business Ties (New York Times): ... ...

    From 2023: At the Supreme Court, Ethics Questions Over a Spouse’s Business Ties (New York Times):

    After Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, gave up her career as a law firm partner to become a high-end legal recruiter in an effort to alleviate potential conflicts of interest. Mrs. Roberts later recalled in an interview that her husband’s job made it “awkward to be practicing law in the firm.”

    Now, a former colleague of Mrs. Roberts has raised concerns that her recruiting work poses potential ethics issues for the chief justice. Seeking an inquiry, the ex-colleague has provided records to the Justice Department and Congress indicating Mrs. Roberts has been paid millions of dollars in commissions for placing lawyers at firms — some of which have business before the Supreme Court, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.

    In his letter last month, Kendal Price, a 66-year-old Boston lawyer, argued that the justices should be required to disclose more information about their spouses’ work. He did not cite specific Supreme Court decisions, but said he was worried that a financial relationship with law firms arguing before the court could affect justices’ impartiality or at least give the appearance of doing so.

    ...

    In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, Patricia McCabe, said that all the justices were “attentive to ethical constraints” and complied with financial disclosure laws. The chief justice and his wife had also consulted the code of conduct for federal judges, Ms. McCabe said, including a 2009 advisory opinion that a judge “need not recuse merely because” his or her spouse had worked as a recruiter for a law firm with issues before the court.

    ...

    An ethics opinion by Bennett L. Gershman, a Pace University law professor and former Manhattan prosecutor, accompanied the letter and said “it is plausible that the Chief Justice’s spouse may have leveraged the ‘prestige of the judicial office’” to “raise their household income.” He added that those concerns, coupled with what he described as the chief justice’s lack of disclosure of potential conflicts, “threaten the public’s trust in the federal judiciary, and the Supreme Court itself.”

    But another ethics expert, Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said in an interview that Chief Justice Roberts appeared to have met his disclosure obligations. Ms. Frost said that judicial spouses should be able to have their own careers and that the chief justice would not need to recuse himself based on the nature of his wife’s work.

    9 votes

  13. Comment on Chat Jimmy - A nearly instantaneous AI chatbot in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm not going to even try this one, but their planned releases seem promising.

    Our second model, still based on Taalas’ first-generation silicon platform (HC1), will be a mid-sized reasoning LLM. It is expected in our labs this spring and will be integrated into our inference service shortly thereafter.

    Following this, a frontier LLM will be fabricated using our second-generation silicon platform (HC2). HC2 offers considerably higher density and even faster execution. Deployment is planned for winter.

    I'm not going to even try this one, but their planned releases seem promising.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on Adults are earning college degrees online in weeks, alarming US educators in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    If you arrange so it's not possible to score much higher then that's less of an issue. Compare with qualifying for a driver's license. The goal isn't to find the most skilled drivers, so the...

    If you arrange so it's not possible to score much higher then that's less of an issue.

    Compare with qualifying for a driver's license. The goal isn't to find the most skilled drivers, so the testing isn't designed to do that.

  15. Comment on For $700 a month, sleeping pods make San Francisco more affordable, but at what cost in ~life

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    That's a bit of an exaggeration. There are parts of Mountain View that are all apartment buildings, and a lot of new construction of five-over-ones in San Mateo and Sunnyvale.

    That's a bit of an exaggeration. There are parts of Mountain View that are all apartment buildings, and a lot of new construction of five-over-ones in San Mateo and Sunnyvale.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on For $700 a month, sleeping pods make San Francisco more affordable, but at what cost in ~life

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The opposite of shrinkflation is only selling large quantities, so people have to buy more than they need and the rest goes to waste. Restaurants often do that, with "generous" portions to justify...

    The opposite of shrinkflation is only selling large quantities, so people have to buy more than they need and the rest goes to waste. Restaurants often do that, with "generous" portions to justify higher prices. (You can often take food home, but what if you didn’t want to?)

    You don't benefit from shopping at Costco unless you're buying something where you will actually use it all before it goes bad. (Though, sometimes you can split the purchase with a friend.)

    In this case, it's true that renters are getting less housing, but for someone who just needs a bed and would rather save money, that's the right amount of housing for them. The decline of SRO's is part of what lead to the housing crisis.

    21 votes

  17. Comment on The gravest threat to the American press in ~society

    skybrian
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    Maybe so, but it would be more convincing if the author had actually made an argument about why that's true, rather than just using the word "arguably."

    Such acquiescence to the dictates of official secrecy arguably does far greater harm to the press than anything that might happen to Harp.

    Maybe so, but it would be more convincing if the author had actually made an argument about why that's true, rather than just using the word "arguably."

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Adults are earning college degrees online in weeks, alarming US educators in ~society

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Setting a reasonable, fair standard and then picking randomly is the best thing I can come up with for that scenario. It would save a lot of time studying for the Big Exam if it's not unreasonably...

    Setting a reasonable, fair standard and then picking randomly is the best thing I can come up with for that scenario.

    It would save a lot of time studying for the Big Exam if it's not unreasonably hard to ace it. Also, the people chosen know they got lucky (so don't let it go to your head) and the people who passed the exam and didn't get picked have some consolation in knowing that it's not their fault.

  19. Comment on Adults are earning college degrees online in weeks, alarming US educators in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Who would go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get a "well-rounded education" if it were just for personal growth and not to get a job so you can pay it back? People who don't end up...

    Who would go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get a "well-rounded education" if it were just for personal growth and not to get a job so you can pay it back? People who don't end up with good jobs after graduating have good reason to dissatisfied. They got a bad deal, no matter how "well-rounded" they are in other respects.

    Personal growth is great, but it doesn't pay the bills and the amount you pay for it should be limited.

    Colleges get away with charging high prices with a sort of motte-and-bailey argument where sometimes it's about careers and sometimes it's about personal growth. It's a cross-subsidy. If you could get a good job by passing an exam and skipping the classes then this scheme would fall apart, much like happened to newspapers after Craigslist and eBay took away the classified ad business.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on How AI prevents meritocracy in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    The interview is mostly not about meritocracy; it’s a general discussion of privacy issues with AI. In particular, there’s a discussion of health insurance, and it’s not clear what a “meritocracy”...

    The interview is mostly not about meritocracy; it’s a general discussion of privacy issues with AI. In particular, there’s a discussion of health insurance, and it’s not clear what a “meritocracy” for health insurance would mean when the whole point is to pool risks.

    Discounts for non-smokers or for exercising, maybe? Much of the risk has nothing to do with that.

    5 votes