NickM

12 ms·

1.
by NickM 7mo ago
Neither EVs nor ICE cars spontaneously combust unless there's a design flaw. Even when this happens it tends to be very rare, but the Chevy Bolt fires for example were fixed with a recall. Similarly a Ford recall last year fixed a prob
2.
by NickM 9mo ago
I don’t think that the production model will look like that, I believe it’s a wrap. Also suspect it’s a bit of a joke on the model being called the R2 (the colors and patterns are reminiscent of R2-D2).
3.
by NickM 10mo ago
Have you really never bought a product or service for some other reason than that you saw an ad for it? People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a
4.
by NickM 11mo ago
I think this is a dangerously half-true way of thinking. Yes, there are times when hard work feels great, and it's absolutely worth seeking out this kind of work. But any serious endeavor is going to have times that are a slog, and you
5.
by NickM 1y ago
This is completely false; the psychiatric effects of isotretinoin are well studied and significant, with a plausible mechanism of action no less. Many people supposed that it’s just the acne making people depressed because it’s a nice plaus
6.
by NickM 1y ago
Why would banks keep giving PE firms loans for these kinds of deals if the companies inevitably collapse and default on those loans? Not trying to defend PE here, but this narrative doesn't make sense to me.
7.
by NickM 1y ago
SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost. In a lot of businesses you get praise and look important if you’re responsible for leading a large group of highly paid employees, more so then if
8.
by NickM 1y ago
The trouble is that making progress in leaps is often mutually exclusive with being productive in the short term. It’s hard to think big and plan long-term when you’re constantly overwhelmed with what’s in front of you. Slow Productivity by
9.
by NickM 1y ago
Truly great art, the kind that expands the field of artistry and makes people think, requires creativity; if you make something that's just a rehashing of existing art, that's not truly creative, it's boring and derivative. T
10.
by NickM 1y ago
I disagree that the current generation of AI has "solved" artistic fields any more than it's solved math or programming. Just as an LLM may be good at spitting out code that looks plausible but fails to work, diffusion models
11.
by NickM 1y ago
I think you might be missing the point of the article: the study being cited isn't trying to establish the existence of a "language brain" or a "math brain", that's just the way the headline editorialized it to
12.
by NickM 1y ago
I will never buy another Tesla again for political reasons, but regarding reliability: their new models have always had reliability problems, but then reliability has always gotten much better within a year or so. I don't know if the
13.
by NickM 1y ago
I agree the whole thing was shady, but did they really never care about solar? I thought the solar roof was announced well after the SolarCity deal, and it seemed like they were serious about ramping that up for a while (though obviously th
14.
by NickM 1y ago
The article is flat out wrong. The reason purple and violet look similar is not a trick of the brain, and has nothing to do with the color wheel "wrapping around"; it's a natural result of the frequency response curves of the
15.
by NickM 1y ago
IMO the only thing that can get through is actual personal consequences for the voter themself Well, yes. And his approval rating has been steadily declining in tandem with the stock market declines he's caused. If/when prices s
16.
by NickM 1y ago
Yeah, this is a limitation, but generally if you have hard constraints like that to maintain, then yeah you probably should be using some sort of centralized transactional system to avoid e.g. booking the same hotel room to multiple people
17.
by NickM 1y ago
What I find hard to imagine is how the app should respond when synchronisation fails after locally committing a bunch of transactions... Manual merging may be the only safe option in many cases. Yeah, exactly right. This is why CRDTs are
18.
by NickM 2y ago
Placebo is an expectancy effect. I don't know all the details of OP's story, but there are all kinds of plausible reasons I can imagine that someone might have different expectations for one drug over another. It might not even ha
19.
by NickM 2y ago
Keep in mind that studies find a strong effect for placebos: the numbers are not saying "these pills do nothing" they're saying "these pills seem to do a lot, but placebos do almost as much". Obviously the effect fe
20.
by NickM 2y ago
Exactly this. Many double blind studies are completely broken due to side effects triggering a stronger placebo response, and this is an especially huge problem for drugs like SSRIs where a placebo gets you about 80% of the benefit of the a
21.
by NickM 2y ago
I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into
22.
by NickM 2y ago
There were customers happily using strong consistency in production, but somehow the idea that it wasn’t “finished” kept getting repeated over and over by management. I was well on my way to solving the biggest rough edge (tombstone reaping
23.
by NickM 2y ago
I am a bit skeptical of Lucid's ability to grow into profitability, but they do have excellent engineering. Their EVs have some of the best efficiency and range on the market.
24.
by NickM 2y ago
I just got new garage doors installed with new openers, and I saw that the openers support myQ, and that my car does too, and I thought "sweet, I'll be able to open and close the garage from my car without any extra hardware"
25.
by NickM 2y ago
Even when real wages keep up with real prices, people still hate inflation, because they attribute their rising wages to their own successes more than macroeconomic changes. To most people it feels like "I'm working hard and getti
26.
by NickM 2y ago
Unfortunately it's hardly possible to do proper case control studies with psilocybin, since the psychedelic effects cause unblinding. This is a problem with SSRIs as well; studies have found most people can correctly guess if they’re
27.
by NickM 2y ago
I think a major criticism of how this study is designed is that it is not truly "blinded". I doubt many of the participants were unsure if they received psilocybin vs escitalopram. This is already a problem for most psychiatric
28.
by NickM 2y ago
I'm not claiming they don't. You were clearly implying they don’t when you downplayed all SSRI downsides as “a handful of annoying side effects”. Weight gain kills. Suicidal ideation also kills many people when they start SSRIs.
29.
by NickM 2y ago
There’s no technical reason different social media networks couldn’t be made to interoperate. The barriers that keep other platforms from building off of a successful network are largely legal, not natural. I’m also equating these kinds of
30.
by NickM 2y ago
This shows the true value of the platform to end users is near zero. Is that really true? I think platforms have strong network effects that make migrations to alternatives (like Bluesky) very difficult. The network effect has negative

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