Viewing profile — NickM

Neither EVs nor ICE cars spontaneously combust unless there's a design flaw. Even when this happens it tends to be very rare, but the Chevy Bolt fires for example were fixed with a…

I don’t think that the production model will look like that, I believe it’s a wrap. Also suspect it’s a bit of a joke on the model being called the R2 (the colors and patterns are …

Have you really never bought a product or service for some other reason than that you saw an ad for it? People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and se…

I think this is a dangerously half-true way of thinking. Yes, there are times when hard work feels great, and it's absolutely worth seeking out this kind of work. But any serious e…

This is completely false; the psychiatric effects of isotretinoin are well studied and significant, with a plausible mechanism of action no less. Many people supposed that it’s jus…

Why would banks keep giving PE firms loans for these kinds of deals if the companies inevitably collapse and default on those loans? Not trying to defend PE here, but this narrativ…

SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost. In a lot of businesses you get praise and look important if you’re responsible for leadi…

The trouble is that making progress in leaps is often mutually exclusive with being productive in the short term. It’s hard to think big and plan long-term when you’re constantly o…

Truly great art, the kind that expands the field of artistry and makes people think, requires creativity; if you make something that's just a rehashing of existing art, that's not …

I disagree that the current generation of AI has "solved" artistic fields any more than it's solved math or programming. Just as an LLM may be good at spitting out code that looks …

I think you might be missing the point of the article: the study being cited isn't trying to establish the existence of a "language brain" or a "math brain", that's just the way th…

I will never buy another Tesla again for political reasons, but regarding reliability: their new models have always had reliability problems, but then reliability has always gotten…

I agree the whole thing was shady, but did they really never care about solar? I thought the solar roof was announced well after the SolarCity deal, and it seemed like they were se…

The article is flat out wrong. The reason purple and violet look similar is not a trick of the brain, and has nothing to do with the color wheel "wrapping around"; it's a natural r…

IMO the only thing that can get through is actual personal consequences for the voter themself Well, yes. And his approval rating has been steadily declining in tandem with the sto…

Yeah, this is a limitation, but generally if you have hard constraints like that to maintain, then yeah you probably should be using some sort of centralized transactional system t…

What I find hard to imagine is how the app should respond when synchronisation fails after locally committing a bunch of transactions... Manual merging may be the only safe option …

Placebo is an expectancy effect. I don't know all the details of OP's story, but there are all kinds of plausible reasons I can imagine that someone might have different expectatio…

Keep in mind that studies find a strong effect for placebos: the numbers are not saying "these pills do nothing" they're saying "these pills seem to do a lot, but placebos do almos…

Exactly this. Many double blind studies are completely broken due to side effects triggering a stronger placebo response, and this is an especially huge problem for drugs like SSRI…

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/w…

There were customers happily using strong consistency in production, but somehow the idea that it wasn’t “finished” kept getting repeated over and over by management. I was well on…

I am a bit skeptical of Lucid's ability to grow into profitability, but they do have excellent engineering. Their EVs have some of the best efficiency and range on the market.

I just got new garage doors installed with new openers, and I saw that the openers support myQ, and that my car does too, and I thought "sweet, I'll be able to open and close the g…

Even when real wages keep up with real prices, people still hate inflation, because they attribute their rising wages to their own successes more than macroeconomic changes. To mos…