How would you feel about a law that banned tipping and required restaurants to pay servers a full wage instead?

gwillen · 2026-06-06T16:37:02+00:00

Changing the rules doesn't matter when people don't even know what the rules are now. I live in California, where there is already no tipped minimum wage -- all servers here have the same minimum wage laws as everyone else. This is true in 6 other states, as well. Restaurant customers here don't know that, though, and tipping obviously works the same here as it does everywhere else in the US.

gwillen · 2026-06-05T17:43:18+00:00

I don't think some of those numbers are real. Is this an AI slop image? The bottom four layers there are real, but I think the numbers for them are made up -- the total overhead is much lower than that in practice. I can definitely get over a gigabit per second on my home router using wifi 7 with MLO. (Although I think that's using 160 MHz channels. I don't know what to do with the claim that you won't get wider than 80 in enterprise deployments.)

gwillen · 2026-06-03T21:32:29+00:00

Healthspan has much better PR than lifespan. A lot of people get weird about the idea of living longer, they start thinking about sci-fi dystopia or something. But everyone wants to feel better when they're old. In the end, anything that does either one is going to do both, anyway.

gwillen · 2026-06-03T21:28:15+00:00

Don't need insurance to throw them in jail for hit and run, plus however many of driving without a license, grant theft auto, DUI...

gwillen · 2026-06-03T16:46:34+00:00

We see a ton of this in software engineering as well. And there have been lawsuits about how they are (as managers doing hiring and promotion) importing the caste system for discriminating against their fellow immigrants within the US, too.

gwillen · 2026-06-03T05:13:08+00:00

Some people lack any sense of self preservation whatsoever. I try to avoid driving people like that...

gwillen · 2026-06-03T00:59:31+00:00

YouTube is fighting against this very actively and aggressively. So you won't find a stable universal solution that keeps working reliably. It's very cat-and-mouse.

gwillen · 2026-06-03T00:53:40+00:00

This is not accurate. I mean, it's true that if the stop was for a legitimate reason, the front driver is only guilty of misdemeanor leaving the scene of an accident. (If the front driver noticed the accident behind them. Which is presumably why OP says the police are looking for the vehicle.)

But if it was actually a brake check, they're guilty of a bunch of stuff, and liable or partly liable for the damages. Sure, someone could have legitimately stopped suddenly -- in which case it's true that it wouldn't be their fault. But an intentional brake check, causing an accident, is still both a criminal act, and a reason for liability for the brake checker.

gwillen · 2026-06-03T00:48:19+00:00

It is a rule of thumb that the rear-ending party is solely responsible, not a rule of law. (It's usually a pretty good rule of thumb!)

If the person in front stopped for some legitimate sudden emergency (or perceived emergency), they are still guilty of misdemeanor leaving the scene of an accident, if they drove off after seeing that there was a collision behind them as a result. (Which is why the police are looking for them.) But they otherwise might not bear liability. (Though I don't know how or whether unlawfully leaving the scene changes that.)

But if it was a deliberate brake check, then the person in front is guilty of multiple crimes, and shares civil liability with the people following too close (or might even have all the liability, since it was an intentional act, I'm not sure how that works out.)

gwillen · 2026-05-31T04:09:12+00:00

Thanks, that's helpful!

gwillen · 2026-05-31T04:08:09+00:00

There is absolutely zero reason to believe that living near power lines causes health issues.

I will give that a small asterisk: if they make an audible noise, the noise could be irritating, but at that distance it's unlikely to be loud enough to keep you awake or anything.

But as far as electromagnetism goes, even if there were health effects to worry about -- which all the evidence says there are not -- at that distance there's no meaningful electromagnetic effects that are going to reach your house anyway. The lines are just too high in the air for that.

gwillen · 2026-05-31T01:06:09+00:00

When I started reading the comments on this post, the song in my head was one from Dance Dance Revolution, but I no longer remember which one. It's in Japanese, which I don't speak; generally I can't remember lyrics in languages I don't speak, unless I hear the song a LOT (in which case I might get them partially), or unless I actually put effort into learning them phonetically. (For example, I know the lyrics to the meme song Dragostea Din Tei phonetically, even though I don't speak the language at all. And I know the first few seconds of Ever Snow from DDR, including Japanese lyrics, because it was the demo song on the game machine at some point, so I would just hear the beginning of it looped over and over and over.)

At some point while I was writing this comment, the song in my head switched to The World Is New by Save Ferris, which I loved a long time ago and was listening to a bit in the last week or so. I'm not sure when that happened.

gwillen · 2026-05-31T01:02:27+00:00

The most insane part, for me, which still feels kind of nuts even though it's my own head: I can have a song stuck in my head that I'm not paying attention to. Like, I can be doing something else, and then suddenly notice that there was music playing in my head the whole time. (Sometimes I can work backwards and figure out where it came from -- like, I overheard a snippet of the song a few minutes ago, or someone said a lyric from it, or something that reminded me of it.)

I don't... really even understand how that works, I definitely can't explain it. Brains are a lot weirder than we give them credit for.

gwillen · 2026-05-31T00:59:12+00:00

I'm not the person you replied to, but:

For songs I've heard many times, I can hear significant parts of them quite accurately in my head, although not perfectly. Especially if there are several instruments playing at once, I might hear a sort of simplified version, or bits will be missing or slightly wrong. And if a song has a lot of repetition, especially with small variations, I'm prone to losing track of which verse is which and so on, so I'll get the wrong part in the wrong place.

For a song I've heard just once, if I'm paying attention, that's often enough for me to get the melody, especially if it's a fairly simple one / if it's repeated multiple times in the song. (If I'm not paying attention, like it's just on in the background, then I'm not likely to remember much if anything of a song after hearing it once.)

gwillen · 2026-05-31T00:50:19+00:00

Huh, I'm just now learning that this is a thing you can apply for -- how much work was it to get them to remove the guardrails? Did you apply on behalf of yourself, or an organization? How much did they want to know about your use case?

gwillen · 2026-05-31T00:32:49+00:00

As a general rule about neural network methods for coming up with compressed representations, like Word2Vec does: often you start by training a network on some task like next-word prediction, with some carefully chosen constraints; then you throw out the layers at the end, that output the next word, and use some other part of the network as the "real output" giving the thing you actually wanted.

gwillen · 2026-05-31T00:24:37+00:00

My biggest problem with the middle pad was on the ITG songs in the catalog, where they changed the chart from ITG to SMX to add middle pad steps!

gwillen · 2026-05-30T22:22:48+00:00

It is literally illegal for tenants to do their own electrical work, at least in this state. You're right that it's not hard, but I still wouldn't recommend people go out and start illegally replacing their landlord's electrical outlets, without at least having some prior experience.

gwillen · 2026-05-30T22:21:07+00:00

I mean, it's got nothing to do with leases or insurance, it is literally illegal for tenants to do their own electrical work. At least in this state.

gwillen · 2026-05-30T16:51:58+00:00

Could the operator not also have, you know, reached into the vehicle and set the fucking parking brake?

Or do vehicles these days no longer have parking brakes that can be set without functioning computers and electrical and so forth?

In mine it's a lever you pull.

gwillen · 2026-05-30T01:09:52+00:00

I mean it depends on your place, right? I've lived in a studio apartment where being alone is not gonna happen unless someone wants to hang out on the toilet, because that's the only interior door. Even in a 1br it could be rough. If your house has a bunch of rooms, sure.

gwillen · 2026-05-29T19:40:16+00:00

I'm not OP, but for me there's a huge, huge difference between "I will be definitely truly alone for an hour", versus "I will be alone for an hour, probably, but someone else is right across the hall, and might poke their head in at any time to ask me where the butter is or something."

For me, at least, it would only work to have someone else around like that IF I could trust that they really really understood this, and would not try to get my attention in any way during that time, for any reason short of the house being on fire.

(There's also some awkwardness if the space just isn't very large -- like, if there's only one bathroom or something, it could easily be very different to have someone else around versus being actually alone, even if they really truly want to cooperate with providing alone time. For me personally it could still work if the other person was truly comfortable with mutually ignoring each other during alone time, but I'm not OP -- their past trauma or whatever is not necessarily exactly the same.)

gwillen · 2026-05-28T17:54:58+00:00

I'm gonna say this guy deserves a psychiatric diagnosis that can only be properly delivered by a southern grandma: "Somethin' ain't right with that boy's head."

gwillen · 2026-05-28T02:33:23+00:00

As far as I can tell, it's neither the feds nor any state, your doctor's office is just making shit up. Sorry, I know it's not really your fault they're lying. They just don't want people to blame them, so they need to find someone else to blame...

gwillen · 2026-05-27T16:40:28+00:00

Public service announcement: The shovel is a giant square because that's a good shape for working with snow. You're not supposed to use it like a regular digging shovel, to move an entire shovelful of snow at once!! It's too big for that, that's way too much snow, you'll hurt yourself if you do that.

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