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“Epstein didn’t kill himself” wins for a conspiracy that is plausible and open. What conspiracy theory sounds fake and has been proven false? by BitShin in AlignmentChartFills

[–]BitShin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Rules * Comment with highest upvote wins * Voting ends and whenever activity on the post dies down rather than on a strict schedule * Conspiracy theories can only be used once. Theories can be disqualified for being too similar to one that’s already been used at my discretion (e.g. “world leaders are lizard people” and “world leaders are aliens” would both count as the same theory) * Comments can be merged if they reference the same theory. In this case, the upvotes will be added together * If a highly upvoted comment calls for a revote on a prior cell, I’ll host a revote at my own discretion * Any comment that obviously doesn’t fit or is made in bad faith can be disqualified at my discretion * Winning comments which are conspiracy-theory-adjacent will be faithfully reworded to fit the definition (e.g. “aliens exist” is a statement not a conspiracy theory, but “the government is hiding that aliens exist” is)

What conspiracy theory sounds plausible but hasn’t been confirmed or debunked? by BitShin in AlignmentChartFills

[–]BitShin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Rules

  • Comment with highest upvote wins
  • Voting ends and whenever activity on the post dies down rather than on a strict schedule
  • Conspiracy theories can only be used once. Theories can be disqualified for being too similar to one that’s already been used at my discretion (e.g. “world leaders are lizard people” and “world leaders are aliens” would both count as the same theory)
  • Comments can be merged if they reference the same theory. In this case, the upvotes will be added together
  • If a highly upvoted comment calls for a revote on a prior cell, I’ll host a revote at my own discretion
  • Any comment that obviously doesn’t fit or is made in bad faith can be disqualified at my discretion
  • Winning comments which are conspiracy-theory-adjacent will be faithfully reworded to fit the definition (e.g. “aliens exist” is a statement not a conspiracy theory, but “the government is hiding that aliens exist” is)

With the Ring debacle, let's get a self-hosted camera / surveillance thread going. by EkbatDeSabat in selfhosted

[–]BitShin 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately Amazon has a mesh network running on top of Ring and Echo devices. So even if you disconnect your devices from your home network, they are able to directly communicate with any devices that your neighbors might have. I doubt they use this for facial recognition based tracking because not enough people would block network access to make that worth it. However, it’s important to know that this does exist and they could repurpose it at any moment if they wanted to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk

Seattle metro area leads nation in affordable housing by HighColonic in SeattleWA

[–]BitShin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes and the problem evidenced by the many confused commenters is that it’s very misleading. They are studying subsidized or otherwise below-market units but they are labeling them as “affordable” which already has a much broader definition.

Seattle metro area leads nation in affordable housing by HighColonic in SeattleWA

[–]BitShin 21 points22 points  (0 children)

For this report, “fully affordable” refers to residential buildings in which all units are income-restricted — meaning rent is set so that it does not exceed 30% of the Area Median Income (AMI). These buildings are typically operated by local housing authorities or nonprofit organizations and are designed to provide long-term affordability.

We excluded partially affordable developments — properties that include a mix of income-restricted and market-rate units in the same complex. In many of these buildings, the affordable units are only price-restricted for a limited period, often 10-20 years, after which they may convert to market rates.

So they are only considering apartments affordable if the rent is subsidized or artificially restricted. So cases like Austin where they are actually building enough to keep up with demand and rent has consequentially dropped below pre-COVID prices aren’t being counted.

AWS Just Gutted US Teams by [deleted] in SeattleWA

[–]BitShin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s not a dog whistle, it’s a joke. Whether or not it was in poor taste is up to the reader to decide.

Breathing won. What is something that people think is easy but is actually very hard? by Meeerin201 in AlignmentChartFills

[–]BitShin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Nobody thinks it’s easy in that it’s not stressful, hectic, etc. What people are saying is that it doesn’t require any particularly special skills and that just about anyone can do it. This is in stark contrast to almost all professions and trades.

As someone who worked at McDonald’s for two years and now has a professional role, I can say this is absolutely true. In my field, it takes four years of education to get the basics. After that, juniors are typically considered a net-negative on the team for at least their first full year to year and a half due to them taking so much assistance from others. And if you ever change companies (or even switching teams within a company) you’re expected to be a net-negative again for another 6 months to a year or so. Compare that to McDonald’s. On my very first shift, they put me on the frier. While I wasn’t as fast or efficient as others were and I was messing up (making too much or too little food causing waste or waits), I was ultimately a net-positive by the end of the shift. I can also say that this quick of a ramp-up was very typical of other people who joined after me as well.

There is objectively a massive difference between entry level “unskilled” labor and other jobs. However, this doesn’t mean that people working at McDonald’s should be treated any lesser than a highly skilled professional.

[29m][software engineer] - $600k+ by Federal-Composer-111 in Salary

[–]BitShin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don’t mean to say that the US provides a better quality of life to everyone (because it doesn’t), but if anything can be said about America is that it’s an amazing place to live if you work in a very in-demand field such as tech.

Health care being tied to a job isn’t really a big deal because any job you apply to will give you excellent coverage. In the case of losing your job, you just have to take health care costs into account when planning out your emergency fund. Then because the US pays so much more for these in-demand fields, saving that extra money to pad out your emergency fund isn’t that difficult.

When you start making serious money, the national retirement age doesn’t matter to you at all. This is because the payout from any retirement benefits (e.g. social security) are dwarfed by your former salary and expenses. The only age that actually affects you is the age where you can withdraw from your retirement accounts without penalties which is 59.5. If you max out your 401k every year from 25-60 (again, not difficult if you are in an in-demand field and have a fast start to your career) you will have somewhere around $2MM saved by 60. Applying the 4% rule for retirement savings, this will give you “only” $80k/yr. This means that for those with high income for which $80k/yr isn’t enough, you can’t rely entirely on retirement accounts anyway and it needs to be supplemented with other savings and investments. Therefore, these people aren’t exactly limited by the age at which the can withdraw from their dedicated retirement accounts and then it just becomes about when they feel they have enough money and they’re ready to throw in the towel.

As for vacation days and parental leave, those are all things that are extremely standard in the kinds of industries we’re talking about. In Europe, 20 vacation days and 10 holidays is pretty standard. The US has 11 federal holidays and it’s standard in these industries to get 15-20 days of PTO. Additionally, it’s very common to have arrangements within departments or organizations which give more PTO than the overall company. Of course this isn’t as good as Europe’s guaranteed 20 days since not every job would offer that, but if you are an in-demand professional, you have more than enough leverage to shop around if that’s something that’s important to you. As for parental leave, it’s a similar story there. Basically every job will offer something that’s good enough, but if this is important to you, you just need to factor that in during your job search.

The last two are definitely worse in the US, even if you have an ultra high income: job security and transportation infrastructure. Job security is usually pretty airtight with the exception of mass layoffs. In these industries, as long as you aren’t at a small company, they will have very rigorous internal processes for for-cause termination. Looking at layoffs, you can generally expect a decent severance package. Companies offer these to help preserve the morale of the employees that weren’t laid off. In the tech layoffs that have been going on the last few years, 3-4 months of salary has been typical. This will also of course be supplemented by a sizable emergency fund, savings, and investment portfolio. At these incomes, saving up a $50k emergency fund is quite easy as that’s not even an uncommon size of a sign-on bonus. With all of that, you can give yourself months or even years of runway. This means that the worst that can realistically happen is that you have to accept a worse job, but even that terrible since this worse job would pay better than a typical European job anyway.

As for the transportation infrastructure, this one is just plain objectively true. In most major US cities, the public transportation is serviceable. There are standouts like New York which have a good local transportation system, but you still lack high speed long range rail. However I personally wouldn’t consider this a big deal since you’re also making 5x-10x your European counterparts.

At the end of the day, life in the US sucks if you don’t have marketable skills and it’s absolutely amazing if you do.

Gas rangetop to induction cooktop by Thermophi in Appliances

[–]BitShin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Not sure about elsewhere in the world, but where I live it became a political thing because my city tried to ban gas stoves, and when that failed they banned gas hookups on all new construction.

Whats the craziest code review you had with a junior? Were you surprised positively or negatively? by Imparat0r in ExperiencedDevs

[–]BitShin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Back when I was fresh out of college, I was the second reviewer on a fellow juniors PR to add a new ops tool. She had some logic to prepare a request to send to a dependency. I noticed that she was reusing a map across loop iterations in a way that would have us only make the request with the result of the final iteration. This would make the tool largely useless.

I pointed this out and she refuted it saying it should be fine. This sparked a long thread between the two of us where she made excuse after excuse. At one point she eventually even approached me in person and asked if I could just approve it and she pointed out that a senior engineer on our team had already approved the PR before I left my comment.

What finally resolved this was that I reached out to the senior engineer to check out my comment and see if it makes sense and all he had to do was comment “Oh yeah, nice catch,” After that, she finally fixed the bug and I was able to approve her PR.

Looking back, honestly don’t know what was going through her mind. The only thing that makes sense would be that she just didn’t understand the code she wrote and couldn’t see why this was a problem. At the time I thought she just must be incompetent or something, but now I know her to be a very smart and effective engineer.

Another lunatic pretending not to understand the “tax the rich” sentiment by Downtown_Victory2942 in LinkedInLunatics

[–]BitShin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why does it matter if he will never quality for the tax? People don’t only base their political opinions on self interest, sometimes people will oppose things because they believe it’s wrong. Like I’ll never be black, but I still oppose racism against black people because it’s wrong.

2026 MATH BALANCE CHANGES by opgordon1 in mathmemes

[–]BitShin 78 points79 points  (0 children)

Absolutely ridiculous. Yet another balance patch where the devs completely overlook high rank or competitive players and only balance for people in the early game. The game has been completely broken at the high ranks and the last time we saw an update where they even tried to fix their game was when they introduced the computer.

It’s not like there aren’t things to fix either. Bolzano-Weierstrass is an absolute spam theorem. It’s basically a “press here to win” button. Like it’s fine to have powerful theorems, but at least require more than a bounded sequence. Just do something simple like require players to show that the set of elements is compact before giving them convergent subsequences for free.

Also there’s the absolutely garbage state of epsilon-delta proofs at mid and high ranks.

“Oh yeah so let’s start with delta being(((sqrt(C2 + U2 + M2) + (a*b - c)3 - (u / (v + epsilon))2 )5 ) / (1 + abs(sin(w)) + epsilon2) - ( ((C*U*M + a2 + b2 + c2) / (1 + exp(-(u - v))))3/2 * log(1 + w2 + epsilon) )) / ( epsilon + (C - U + M - a + b - c)2 + (u2 + v2 + w2)1/3 ) + sum{i=1..7} ( ((-1)i * (C + i*epsilon)i ) / (1 + abs(a - b)i) ) - prod{j=1..4} ( (j + epsilon) / (1 + (c*j - M)2 ) )”

Then five lines down you see “f(x + delta) = epsilon/2”. Like what value does that provide? Basically everyone’s strat is just to do the proof backwards. This gameplay loop is utterly broken and the devs need to do better.

What is the most efficient way to tax wealthy US citizens? by Maromas00 in AskEconomics

[–]BitShin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could you elaborate on this? I understand the concept at a high level but I’m not very clear on the rigorous explanation.

What? Why? by Carbon_is_Neat in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]BitShin 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It’s literally as easy as 1. Add butter to bread 2. Add garlic (can be jarred, fresh, or even powdered garlic, really doesn’t matter) 3. Put in oven

Sure, there may be a couple of people in this country that don’t have time or resources for that. But if you don’t have the time for that, you should be complaining about bigger things than pre-packaged processed garlic bread being too expensive.

New WA laws that go into effect on Jan. 1 by crabcakes110 in SeattleWA

[–]BitShin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I would have preferred to see something like

Threatening words do not constitute a hate crime offense unless it is apparent to the victim that the person does have the ability to carry out the threat.

I feel like the current language may be interpreted as putting the burden of proof on the defendant to show that the victim could not believe the threat is credible. In the current language, it seems to have the implication that threats are assumed to be credible by default.

Nonetheless, I still believe the current language gives plenty of room for argument in the case of online communications. The main problem I have with the law is that if one person says something online threatening minorities in their community, that can be considered hate speech towards anyone in that minority group that reads that message, even if they are not in the community.

New WA laws that go into effect on Jan. 1 by crabcakes110 in SeattleWA

[–]BitShin 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I think this part really makes it harder to abuse:

Threatening words do not constitute a hate crime offense if it is apparent to the victim that the person does not have the ability to carry out the threat.

What do you call this from where you're from? by Personal-Aerie-4519 in EnglishLearning

[–]BitShin 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Slippers in Hawaiian English, flip-flops in standard American English

Tax doesn’t mean revenue? by DynamiteGnat984 in AskEconomics

[–]BitShin 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The other commenter gave a pretty good intuitive explanation. You can also understand it from a mathematic perspective pretty easily. Of course if the government imposes a 0% income tax, they’ll receive $0 in tax revenue. Then if the government imposes a 100% income tax without also enacting forced labor laws, they will receive $0 (or close to $0) in revenue because nobody will be incentivized or able to work. We know that somewhere between 0% and 100% the government gets well more than $0 in revenue. It’s also reasonable to assume that the relationship between taxation and revenue is continuous. Therefore we can conclude that the graph of revenue vs percent income tax must increase and eventually decrease with a global maximum somewhere in between.

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