> If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.
Taken literally, that's clearly not true.
For example you can easily drive 150mph in the flat desert where there is nothing for a hundred miles and you can see many miles ahead. You have zero risk of hurting anyone else unless they somehow teleport in front of you.
But driving 5mph in tight street full of elementary school kids running around can be extremely dangerous.
You’re egocentric instead of system-centric. Life has risks, but risk is to be managed, not accepted blindly with disregard of available options. A systemic approach to minimizing risk of injury on roads looks exactly like inconvenience to the individual.
In many civilized countries and locales, even bringing up the word “convenience” in the context of road safety would be considered tasteless. Maybe a phrase like “excessively obstructive” or other euphemisms would be used, but the word “inconvenient” regarding safety measures that would e.g. help prevent the death of toddlers today would be appalling.
There’s this techbro utopia mindset leaking through as well, just like it does for climate change topics, that pragmatic solutions that work for us today are deprioritized because some incredible technology is right around the corner. This is also distinctly American, specifically Silicon Valley, culture.
I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things:
1. They use more expensive processes and materials.
2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts.
3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.
#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.
But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.
There's also
4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)
5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.
Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)
I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.
This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.
>> I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The part goes from $30 to $280 due to 5 or 6 factors, which you've outlined well. Insurance is one of many factors. Insurance isnt high because they expect things to go wrong -- insurance forces better QA/QC and overall processes so there isnt a payout -- all those precautions raise the price. It aligns everyone to focus on quality outcomes to prevent payouts.
I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.
Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.
Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.
The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.
For greenfield side projects and self contained tasks LLMs deeply impress me. But my day job is maintaining messy legacy code which breaks because of weird interactions across a large codebase. LLMs are worse than useless for this. It takes a mental model of how different parts of the codebase interact to work successfully and they just don't do that.
People talk about automating code review but the bugs I worry about can't be understood by an LLM. I don't need more comments based on surface level patter recognition, I need someone who deeply understands the threading model of the app to point out the subtle race condition in my code.
Tests, however, are self-contained and lower stakes, so it can certainly save time there.
Chill out...the most condescending comment here by far is yours, and the "well ackchually" that sent the thread of the rails is your comparison between cancer cells and needing insulin. If you don't want people to poke holes in an analogy like that don't make it.
Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
Example, do you think someone that's hard of hearing can't meet the standard for a 'highly academically successful student"? Or someone that's color blind? Or someone that's blind? Or someone in a wheelchair?
You've missed the point. How does Stanford end up with 38% of their students claiming to have a disability while other schools only have 3%? Are the other schools illegally discrimating against these students, so that their only alternative is Stanford? Or is it possible that something anomalous is happening at Stanford?
While it doesn't explain the whole difference, it's not surprising that Stanford has a higher rate. First: the more demanding the environment the more likely you are to find (got example) milder ADHD to impact your life. Second: the more well off you are or more access to resources you have, the more likely you are to actually care to get diagnosed. Third: stressful environment can actually cause serious issues, suddenly. For non-education reasons I suddenly gained panic attacks while I was at uni and they took years to go away.
On the contrary, it’s very surprising. There’s no way that 38% of people are disabled by any definition of the word. 10× differences between the disability rate between schools simply should not exist.
Where does the idea/reasoning that highly academically successful students cannot have a disability come from?
I would go a step further and say there is probably a high chance that neurodivergent students are more academically successful, iff they did get to that level of education. And it's not impossible that they are overrepresented in that group of people.
And people may be intellectually gifted, and yet experience strong behavioral and social difficulties. Not that my own observation counts but I've met multiple people on the spectrum who were highly intelligent and "gifted" yet faced more adversity in life, i.e. for social reasons. It's controversial because it directly goes against the idea that we exist in a meritocracy.
People are going to cheat no matter what. To me, it's more important that the people who do need and deserve accomodations are able to get them though!
Nobody said that. They are saying or insinuating that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled. That certainly was not the case as recently as a decade or two ago. People have not changed drastically, so what gives?
Change in diagnosis criteria, that doesn't mean people before weren't disabled.
You need to understand people with ADHD usually overcompensate to meet the academic performance needed and it is not sustainable in the long run.
It also doesn't mean they need accommodations, just that they are categorized as disabled in some way or form.
> They said that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled.
Which is an unreasonable claim.
I have a disability that impairs many aspects of my life. I was still capable of getting through college and am successful in my career. Having a disability does not mean you can't do academics.
What does that have to do with the claim? It is very unlikely that 38% of Stanford students are actually disabled, and your success has nothing whatsoever to do with that.
there is a claim that epigenetic mechanisms in bacteria provide weak support for such in humans, not true it was the basis for realizing that epigenetic mechanisms exist, and was central to understanding regulaion of expression.
there is a claim that meiosis resets the genome and that is absolutely untrue.
regulation would be impossible if epigenetic state was wiped out, the result is most often cancer, or lethal dose effects at the cellular stage of development.
you say you are not a geneticist yet you are criticizing geneticists for presentation of hypotheses while lacking the background.
timing of binding and procession reative to halflife of the expression complex is a critical part of regulation of genetic activity.
i am a scientist as well, molecular geneticist; organic chemist, nuclear physicist. i am a true polymath, this is not a meme, i contract for a body of government agencies, as a science officer, thus my ID and fine details of my work are not up for discussion, nor is any of my work for the last 10 years.
i would however be fine discussing generalities of expression regulation systems if you like.
The percentage change is the same for everyone. If a consumer pays 10.05 instead of 10.03, they pay 0.2% more.
If a store games prices to charge 0.2% more on a million transactions it's still 0.2% for them. Except the rounding on multi-item purchases isnt predictable so it would probably take a miracle of data engineering and behavioral science to hit 0.1% benefit on average.
Meanwhile stores are using 30% off coupons and buy on get one free to get people in the door, whilst hiding double digit price increases.
Worrying about the two pennies is stupid on either side of the transaction. Don't listen to the professional complainers.
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
"Millions of people" should either be putting their money (and their objections) where their mouth is or stop relying on someone else's resource. The reality is, that like Wikipedia, few people have donated to IA as a proportion of all its users.
The "good" that they've done is the "good" as the creator's see it, not the "good" as the freeloaders see it. All of which is to simply say that almost all users of IA are relying on the goodwill of the creators.
I wonder if there would be appetite for a sister organization—one with a more conservative, risk-averse, long-horizon attitude—to emerge to mirror IA’s core archives. Let IA keep doing what it’s doing, crazy risk and all; duplicate the conservative functions in a conservative organizational structure.
Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.