ianferrel

9 ms·

1.
by ianferrel 3mo ago
For the cost of sending one human there for a week, we could send thousands of robots there for years. There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robot space exploration.
2.
by ianferrel 4mo ago
Why is the path curved at the start?
3.
by ianferrel 4mo ago
Mismanaged monoculture forests are one of the first examples of states seeking simplified legible solutions to managing complex ecosystems in Seeing Like a State.
4.
by ianferrel 5mo ago
It hasn't happened in this case. Your example has causality reversed. Khamenei wasn't killed because there was a prediction market about the political leadership of Iran.
5.
by ianferrel 5mo ago
>there can be no interstate market in a substance that is illegal to trade. There is in fact an interstate market in many substances that are illegal to trade because laws against things do not make those things fail to exist.
6.
by ianferrel 5mo ago
Or he cares more about promulgating the philosophy of cryptoanarchism than he does about his personal enrichment or safety. Most attempts to analyze what Satoshi would do suffer from a serious theory of mind blindspot. Just a failure to ima
7.
by ianferrel 5mo ago
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means. The refusal to provide p
8.
by ianferrel 8mo ago
>Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem. People can do that too, and also benefit from actual structured data. But
9.
by ianferrel 8mo ago
>The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping. I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have
10.
by ianferrel 8mo ago
That's 4 ounces of beef, not meat. I eat plenty of meat, but eat beef less than once a week.
11.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.
12.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
I remembered a third one: 3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (w
13.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
Rigid whiskers have other sets of problems. Below someone mentioned that rigid whiskers will break when they contact objects. If the whisker is as rigid as the drone itself, it plausibly breaks the same cables that the drone breaks. You als
14.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.
15.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes
16.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
How many phones do you get for that? My family has two phone lines for $50/mo, plus we buy two ~2 year old iPhones every 3-4 years, which adds maybe another $20/mo average to the cost.
17.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
Sure, it is going up. For now. And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it.
18.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time. And I expect that p
19.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
It feels like the recipient company did an awful lot of work in response to what was at best a fishing expedition. A serious complaint about licensing that demanded a real response would have been sent by post. It's not clear to me t
20.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
What if the company that is about to go bankrupt fails to pay its insurance premiums? Seems fairly likely to happen. About-to-be-bankrupt companies generally get behind on all their bills.
21.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
This is what happens when you wish on a monkey's paw to get rid of pennies.
22.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
Presumably "increase the price a small amount to avoid giving exact change" is exactly the sort of thing that laws requiring giving exact change were designed to prevent. There will surely be some customer pissed about the extra 2
23.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
I live where there is no sales tax, so it's not hard to imagine! But good luck convincing every state, county, municipality, and other weird governing body that requires something other than that and also collects a weird sales tax. Or
24.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
There's a lot of physical infrastructure that works with quarters, and it's probably not worth giving that up for slightly improved coinage. Just drop all the coins smaller than a quarter.
25.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
Setting prices to avoid the need for pennies is probably technically challenging given the combination of requirements to post prices and sales taxes that don't always round the same way. If the effective tax rate is 7.432%, you can pr
26.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount their total by a small amount and then provide exact change. "Congratulations customer, we have a special
27.
by ianferrel 11mo ago
That saying has always been a huge exaggeration, though. The price of a barely-used car is usually single-digit percentage points lower than an actually new one.
28.
by ianferrel 11mo ago
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that every part of this story is fake. Just that as told, the details don't seem to hang together. Something feels embellished or exaggerated or missing.
29.
by ianferrel 11mo ago
That is a good point I hadn't considered. I think, charitably, what might have happened here is: 1. Author left out the diagnostic step that restoring the connectivity didn't fix the robot, because it didn't work. 2. Author d
30.
by ianferrel 11mo ago
The author of this article: 1. Has the technical skills to disassemble this device, trace circuit boards, design his own boards and custom software to interface with components to substantially reverse engineer this device. 2. Is totally

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