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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Seems like there are a number of issues with this.

    1. Not defining “reliability challenge” in a meaningful way. (How many of these are problems that are expensive or time-consuming to repair? How expensive and how time-consuming? Are these problems that prevent the car from driving safely, or are they inconveniences that can be put off?)

    2. Not controlling for manufacturer. (Toyota has long-been regarded as a reliable manufacturer, but they make 2 plug-in hybrids and 1 EV, all of which are new this year. Meanwhile, they offer about a dozen different traditional hybrids. I can believe that the Tesla Model 3 is less reliable than the Toyota Camry, but is a full-electric Hyundai Ioniq less reliable than a Hyundai Sonata?)

    3. Including plug-in hybrids and full electric vehicles as one category. (Plug-in hybrids combine the old breakable parts such as transmissions with the new breakable parts such as lithium batteries. This is the trade-off that buyers make to get the efficiency of an electric vehicle at short ranges and the convenience of an ICE at long ranges.)










  • For context:

    Judicial review exists because it makes sense. The framers decided to bind the government with a Constitution, but never explicitly wrote up an enforcement mechanism. The judiciary already interprets laws, so they get to be the enforcement mechanism by default.

    The framers also decided to write “during good behavior” in Article III, but never defined what that means. Congress writes laws, so it’s logical to me that Congress gets to define what “good behavior” entails.






  • To my knowledge, Reddit is owned by private companies and investors. Blackrock and Vanguard have no ownership stake, or a very small and very indirect ownership stake.

    For what it’s worth, a significant percentage of every (reasonably liquid) public company on Earth is owned by Vanguard and Blackrock, because those companies manage trillions of dollars in assets (many of which are middle-class people’s retirement investments). They aren’t a conspiracy. They’re asset managers, and mostly passive managers at that.



  • Didn’t know he mentioned smallpox; that’s much worse considering how extremely well-documented it has been over the past few centuries. There was already a vaccine for it in the 18th century!

    The HIV claim is pretty nuts considering that it was already widespread when it was discovered in 1981, and there were no known human retroviruses until 1980. There was no reason for vaccine researchers to touch retroviruses in the 70s.

    Doubly nuts that RFK Jr. has previously denied that AIDS is caused by HIV.




  • There are a few reasons why music models haven’t exploded the way that large-language models and generative image models have. Maybe the strength of the copyright-holders is part of it, but I think that the technical issues are a bigger obstacle right now.

    • Generative models are extremely data-inefficient. The Internet is loaded with text and images, but there isn’t as much music.

    • Language and vision are the two problems that machine learning researchers have been obsessed with for decades. They built up “good” datasets for these problems and “good” benchmarks for models. They also did a lot of work on figuring out how to encode these types of data to make them easier for machine learning models. (I’m particularly thinking of all of the research done on word embeddings, which are still pivotal to large language models.)

    Even still, there are fairly impressive models for generative music.