Hacker News: lemmox

New comment by lemmox in "Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity"

lemmox — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:48:22 +0000

FB just put shovels in the ground on a datacenter in Alberta. Bringing a new nat gas plant online nearby but it's a little quicker to bring the DC on than the plant.

New comment by lemmox in "Portugal eased its opioid epidemic, while U.S. drug deaths skyrocketed"

lemmox — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:43:57 +0000

Many years ago my wife fell down the stairs and suffered, what turned out to be, a broken fragment of bone that poked into a nerve. It took quite awhile to diagnose it because . Along that journey to diagnosis she was almost bedridden, and in excruciating pain, most of the time with with physio, chiropractors, muscle treatments, nerve pain meds, etc, all failing to help her function. The opioids she was prescribed made it so she could function. She was high, "dreamy" (for lack of a better word), reported still feeling the pain, but could function. The day after the neurosurgeon performed her spine surgery she voluntarily stopped the opioids and finished her healing from the procedure with ibuprofen. She never looked back and described never feeling an urge to take the meds again. I wish I could say that this experience gave us some great insight into the complexity of opioids but it didn't. In her case they did their job until she didn't need them anymore and that was that. I don't read anything more into it then that.

New comment by lemmox in "Air Canada found liable for chatbot's bad advice on plane tickets"

lemmox — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 08:40:49 +0000

From the article: In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

Air Canada found liable for chatbot's bad advice on plane tickets

lemmox — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 08:40:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39394640

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by lemmox in "Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar industry"

lemmox — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 20:40:36 +0000

Yes, I recall this as well. It didn't pass the smell test to me - probably wineries making up a reason to justify switching to screw caps.

New comment by lemmox in "Teaching with AI"

lemmox — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:28:47 +0000

An interesting trick I found here was to ask ChatGPT to produce tables of concept definitions and include a metaphor for each concept to help understanding. It was quite good at coming up with metaphors and that actually felt kind of magical.

New comment by lemmox in "Teaching with AI"

lemmox — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:24:00 +0000

Interesting prompts! IME the quality of the answers the users give to the ChatGPT questions in these prompts will make or break the experience.

I played around with this use case in the spring when my teenage daughter was looking for extra test prep materials. At first the experience was interesting but there was an "AI uncanny valley" shaped problem: the material just didn't seem to fit. It felt wrong.

This uncanny valley was significantly reduced, even eliminated in some instances, by including the entirety of our school district's online material about the course; information about the core competencies (across communication, thinking, personal & societal), the big ideas, the curricular competency & content about the learning standards. Our district has a pretty good website with all of this information laid out for each course and grade level.

Including all of this information in the prompt context resulted in relevant and harmonious content when asking to generate course outlines, student study-prep handouts, and even sample study session pre-tests (although ChatGPT wasn't strong at reliably creating answer sheets for the pre-tests).

Context is key!

New comment by lemmox in "Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law"

lemmox — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 23:19:57 +0000

I thought so too, and thought that removing the sites from Google Search was a bit bullyish, but it looks like the bill specifically targets links in (2)(b).

"Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content."

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...

New comment by lemmox in "Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale"

lemmox — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 02:27:11 +0000

> Rust was used primarily because a couple of the founders of the company were Rust experts

It's remarkable how significantly the first few months of a project impact the first few years of a company. How quickly casual & spontaneous decisions, largely based on convenience and familiarity, ossify into legacy drag.

New comment by lemmox in "Canada, April: Under-65 excess mortality exceeds under-65 Covid-19 deaths"

lemmox — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 08:45:51 +0000

With nuance, I guess? Depends on the conversation.

I'd say that there's more agreement than disagreement. Here 70% of the overdoses are related to drugs cut with unpredictable levels of fentanyl. I'd say I've seen consensus on that being a "bad thing(tm)", and consensus that the criminals cutting street drugs with fentanyl are "bad guys(tm)".

I guess to your point about junkies making bad decisions, my peer group skews older, we've already said everything we can say about junkies making bad decisions 30+ years ago. It's true, but it makes for stale conversation and seems kind of orthogonal to, or at least adjacent to, the current fentanyl situation.

New comment by lemmox in "Canada, April: Under-65 excess mortality exceeds under-65 Covid-19 deaths"

lemmox — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 00:50:50 +0000

One example provided, which I've not fact-checked and might be limited to BC, was that disclosing addiction during a hospital visit opens up a file with child welfare services.

New comment by lemmox in "Canada, April: Under-65 excess mortality exceeds under-65 Covid-19 deaths"

lemmox — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 00:44:07 +0000

My wife actually asked this of some professionals working in this space yesterday at a local awareness event (she works in community services, unrelated to drug policy). The answer (paraphrased) was it doesn't directly stop the poisonings. It's in the spirit of harm reduction to open up more support channels. One example given was about going to the hospital and honesty with health professionals. Currently there's disincentives for an addict to disclose their addiction due to legal actions that get triggered upon disclosure. Removing those legal triggers could (would?) allow for more supervision without legal consequence to hopefully reduce the overall harm. It gave us something to chat about.

New comment by lemmox in "Canada, April: Under-65 excess mortality exceeds under-65 Covid-19 deaths"

lemmox — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 00:18:51 +0000

FWIW since I started referring to this as poisonings (instead of overdoses) I've found folks to be much more amenable to conversation. Nobody likes the idea of the wicked poisoning the vulnerable.

New comment by lemmox in "Ask HN: Has anyone fully embraced an event-driven architecture?"

lemmox — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 05:29:23 +0000

It depends! FWIW the spots I've used event patterns most often are high write loads that benefit either from fan-in micro-batching before hitting the data stores or polyglot systems where a client/system event need to fan-out to multiple systems and we want to insulate the producer from downstream latency/outages.

New comment by lemmox in "JupyterLite: Jupyter WebAssembly Python"

lemmox — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 00:07:00 +0000

Oh wow, Pandas and sklearn were there - I was able to train a random forest classifier on the iris dataset. That's pretty slick!

New comment by lemmox in "Automated Hydroponic System Build (2020)"

lemmox — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 07:21:19 +0000

It was! They were my urban farming buds. I took care of the PVC, they took care of the pooping, the basil took care of clearing the nitrites out of the water. It was all golden until that masked bandit struck. Now I live out of town - I'm quite sure the bears would eat the whole kit if I set it up again.

New comment by lemmox in "Automated Hydroponic System Build (2020)"

lemmox — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 04:50:10 +0000

I set-up an aquaponic system on my front porch a few years ago. My wife was skeptical but I grew some of the finest basil around. Just used a tote filled with goldfish, some PVC piping, and a pump. Unfortunately one evening the raccoons figured out how to pop the lid off the tote - it was a massacre!

New comment by lemmox in "Linux Rust Support"

lemmox — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:51:26 +0000

I came for the memory footprint but I stayed with Rust for this. Rust became my daily-driver for hobby projects because refactoring and tinkering with old projects is a breeze. For me, Rust projects don't seem to require much cognitive burden to load into my human memory. I do not claim that this quality is unique to Rust however it is very much present in Rust.

New comment by lemmox in "Village of Lytton, B.C., evacuated as mayor says 'the whole town is on fire'"

lemmox — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 06:17:24 +0000

We hit 46 in some parts of Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver. It was brutal - when I hosed the kids off in the back yard some birds parked themselves in the mist and just sat there with open beaks. It's cooled back down now.

New comment by lemmox in "A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition"

lemmox — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 04:48:58 +0000

I wonder if this means that existing customers/products had to stop using the service? If so this might be the first time I recall seeing a cloud vendor flex like this.

CTOs of city and law enforcement orgs are probably seriously questioning the vulnerability of relying on cloud SaaS.