avn2109

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
3,088
Submissions
993
Member since
Dec 9
Grad student and engineer. Recreational programmer. AleksNavratil.com
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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
Key point though is that Kalshi and similar prediction market betting apps are parimutuel, unlike traditional sportsbooks/Draftkings etc where punters bet against the house. This greatly changes (improves) the incentives for the house, e.g. they don't ban sharks and search only for dumb money punters, they try much less to prevent you from leaving with your winnings etc. The parimutuel house just takes a flat rake percentage off the top of the sum of all bids, so they just want to maximize the amount of money wagered overall instead of doing shady shenanigans.

I'm not a prediction market user/booster nor a sports gambler, but this is a key difference and a strict improvement from traditional sportsbook apps. If our society is going to have widespread legal gambling, we strongly want it to be parimutuel.

Comment · 11 months ago
OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."

Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.

A truly astounding regression in functionality!

Comment · 11 months ago
I took this seriously and thought back to the most recent actually-useful-bugfixes-and-security-improvements release that I can remember. OSX Snow Leopard perhaps?
Comment · 1 year ago
Super pro comment, should be much higher.
Comment · 1 year ago
There is a new generation of bike locks which have the shackle wrapped in a composite coating that mostly destroys angle grinder cutting discs and similar cutting tools. This is likely the best current outdoor bike locking approach as it requires thieves to have either 1) lots of spare discs or 2) a torch or 3) picking skills, and very few thieves have any of those.
Comment · 1 year ago
A nickel!?? Good heavens probably the whole pack full doesn't even cost a nickel to manufacture. Manufacturing cost per cigarette must surely be waaay under a penny. Disregarding marketing and distribution expenses of course.
Comment · 1 year ago
Underrated point! Heavier EV's typically burn through tires and wear components in the suspension faster.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Surely they do damage proportional to the fourth power of the contact pressure on the tire contact patch, not the fourth power of the overall vehicle weight, right? So adding axles or wider tires etc mitigates this.
Comment · 1 year ago
Still not wide enough. If anybody has wider reccos in big sizes other than "oddball" brand, I'm all ears.
Comment · 1 year ago
LLM's are useful because they can recommend several famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and shortcomings in those books while you're reading and synthesizing them.

Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each that decently covered the material I want was itself a nontrivial problem. Now that problem is greatly eased.

Comment · 1 year ago
If you have any evidence for the claim that "many parts of DoD" are being exploded/defunded, it would be really interesting to see that. As far as I can see, just the opposite is true; the military industrial complex looks like it's increasing in size and scope.
Comment · 1 year ago
Intel's C-suite is gonna pick up this line of reasoning soon! "It's not our fault the stock crashed and the fabs don't run and TSMC is eating our lunch, blame Trump instead!"
Comment · 1 year ago
>> ... spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending...

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that claim broken down if you can cite them. From napkin math it seems hard to make the budgets line up, unless we're doing a very large purchasing power parity adjustment?

Comment · 1 year ago
Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.

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