Hacker News: tdb7893

New comment by tdb7893 in "Deflock Casa Grande"

tdb7893 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:17:21 +0000

I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Why I Left Google DeepMind"

tdb7893 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:32:47 +0000

I'll always support someone taking a personal stand about what they can or cannot do. Ethical issues always invite the most criticism but my experience is that it's rare for anyone to really give anything up for their ethics (this person likely has money saved up and will land on their feet but even this situation is more than most people would do).

New comment by tdb7893 in "A 77-year-old Republican man is staging a solo protest against Flock cameras"

tdb7893 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:21:15 +0000

Most of the people very against Flock are more left wing and I feel like another left wing protest about it isn't particularly engaging. I'm sure putting Republican there gets way more interest as Republicans turning against them is necessary to have anything actually happen.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change"

tdb7893 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:08:34 +0000

You can get healthcare outside of employers and it's incredibly expensive. The cost of private healthcare (either employer sponsored or not) is what is responsible for what the article is talking about, it's certainly not just employer provided plans. Are you saying that if employers didn't provide health insurance that it would help the situation somehow?

New comment by tdb7893 in "AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn"

tdb7893 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:57:50 +0000

I feel like it will only get worse, too. I don't want to waste my time responding to a bot so as a human it makes me less likely to participate.

I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).

New comment by tdb7893 in ""Software Engineering" Is Not Engineering (2005)"

tdb7893 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:14:50 +0000

From knowing many different types of engineers, not only does software engineering fall pretty neatly within that group of jobs but also software is an integral part of their engineering practices. I know some people who are designing planes and if software isn't an engineering discipline I guess I need to tell them they recently became not engineers (though maybe because they occasionally use physics equations the author would say they still are. It's a silly distinction). The argument seems mostly based on their personal definition of engineering, which doesn't seem useful to me (a quick reading of a dictionary would make it seem that software engineering false very neatly within definition 2b https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering)

Overall though I found this post incredibly hard to read. It's incredibly long and wordy though that's par for the course for these petty semantic arguments.

New comment by tdb7893 in "US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials"

tdb7893 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:23:15 +0000

They are winning recall votes and getting a lot of pushback at in person city council meetings. People keep saying it's astroturfed (and I do expect a lot of communication online to not be in good faith) but you can also see the real grassroots pushback. I mean the article is talking about recalling mayors, you don't get that without pretty extreme local opposition.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models"

tdb7893 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 04:57:29 +0000

I've found that everyone has some hypocrisies that they cling to (it's really hard to see it in yourself). I believe I do a better job of it that Facebook employees, it would be really hard to be more blatantly hypocritical than this, but it's not like I don't make similar errors all the time.

Especially on a post about them doing something decent, I can accept they are obviously hypocritical and just not be concerned with it right now.

Edit: for something like this I think about the advice "don't punish someone for doing what you want them to do". This is Facebook employees publicly signing a pro-privacy document. It's obviously self serving so it would be weird to really praise them as people who protect privacy but I'm happy to support them in this regardless.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models"

tdb7893 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 02:43:43 +0000

People uphold a million cruel systems every day, their sort of hypocrisy is so common I've found it just to accept that it's how humans work (especially in a situation like this where their paycheck requires them to not see all the privacy problems they all support). I know I'm hypocritical about a bunch of stuff in my life.

Your perspective might be the more reasonable one but the way I see it, the hypocrisy is frustrating but it's sort of like getting mad at a dog for barking through a fence (dogs gonna dog) so I personally don't find it hard to be sympathetic still.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri"

tdb7893 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:29:06 +0000

It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!

New comment by tdb7893 in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

tdb7893 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:54:18 +0000

I haven't bothered to keep up with all the frontier drama, are the latest Anthropic models more dangerous or easier to get around safeguards than other models?

New comment by tdb7893 in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

tdb7893 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:12:44 +0000

He was a top Democrat donor (the article says he was their number 2 individual donor in 2022) so I doubt he could buy one. Not that he seemed particularly left leaning himself and he also donated to Republicans but 5.2 million publicly to Biden seems like a dealbreaker.

https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...

New comment by tdb7893 in "Providers, not insurers, are responsible for excess U.S. health care cost (2024)"

tdb7893 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:22:01 +0000

I don't think it's odd for a middleman to have some functions in a market (as long as they aren't actually producing anything) but also the definition of a middleman is unimportant to me. I am just highlighting how he glides over a lot in this article (some of which are actually common progressive critiques of the insurance system) and I don't come away from it sympathetic to medical insurance companies at all.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Providers, not insurers, are responsible for excess U.S. health care cost (2024)"

tdb7893 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:32:36 +0000

When arguing that health insurance isn't that inneficient he talks about "But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs in the diagram above, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.". 22.6% for a middleman is not insignificant! Also providers have to spend a lot dealing with insurance so it's certainly an undercount of their total cost. This makes the burden of insurance seem like a huge % of the total medical costs in the US, which seems like the opposite of what he's trying to argue.

Overall, there are lots of nitpicks with this article but my personal takeaway is: if this is the best defense people can make for the US medical insurance system then that shows how bad it really is.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Dopamine Fracking"

tdb7893 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:46:16 +0000

At that age I could watch TV or play video games without strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to them in the same way media often does now.

I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met a lot of parents who had some issues with it).

New comment by tdb7893 in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

tdb7893 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:07:39 +0000

My statistics isn't great but reading the study more it looks like they control the rate of false positives via the q values so my initial concern may be unwarranted. I'm surprised that it keeps so many barely significant results with so many hypotheses. I'll have to look it up when I get time.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

tdb7893 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:06:52 +0000

For point 2: I don't think there's really good or bad places to study it, it might not generalize to sunnier places but the reverse is also true. Presumably the scientists working on this can understand these things (I know in my field I'm aware that studies in the tropics will find different things than studies in Canada).

For my own point: in this study they have like 22 test values but still use the 95% confidence interval. Even on random data there will be a significant result like a third of the time so I think it's easy to interpret these result as more definitive than they are. Not that it's a bad study though (no study will be everything, baby steps like this are important in science).

New comment by tdb7893 in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

tdb7893 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:28:07 +0000

Through the magic of Googling "Persian Gulf salinity" it seems like it's more that it's a shallow Gulf in a dry area so it has significant evaporation. Desalination does effect it but it's only a few percent of the total evaporation (which is still surprisingly big) and doesn't sound like the main driving factor or an imminent ecological concern.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14635...

New comment by tdb7893 in "Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India"

tdb7893 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:30:16 +0000

So firstly there's been a lot of progress. I know people that grew up vegetarian in the 80s and there are so many more animal and environmentally friendly alternatives and people care more now than ever before.

Secondly, these things will change. If you look at the history of activism often there are people advocating against things hundreds of years before we see large changes (there is activism against forced labor in the Americas in the early 1500s even). So I've found it useful to accept the idea that we'll pass down this fight to the next generation and they'll probably pass it down to the one after that. It could be three decades or it could be three centuries but eventually things will change.

New comment by tdb7893 in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

tdb7893 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:03:25 +0000

My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).

My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.