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As a parent in the US northeast who likes taking their kids camping and hiking, ticks have been an ongoing conversation this year. I think this is going to sell well.


When I think about moving to the NE from out west, ticks are one of my main reservations. I think, given how many people and dogs recreate out there, I might have it blown out of proportion.


I live in the NE and just picked up Lyme for the second time in 3 years. My child and several friends have had it in the past few years. The problem is that some tick species are unbelievably small and easy to miss. With winters not being as cold, they don't die off as much as they traditionally would. I'd hate to move, but if we keep getting infected, it's not out of the question.


Yikes. We live in PNW high desert. There are a few ticks here, but it's basically a non-issue. I love it back east, but...


Not necessarily out of proportion, the Lyme numbers have really spiked there in recent years if you check the official stats.

I'd written a longer reply about my time last year in upstate NY, but what I wrote was "tinted"... so the shorter version: within just a 2 month stay I did find infected ticks on me (submitted to testing - I was happy with nyticks.org). Everytime the cat came into the house, first step was always to get out the tick mitt and brush off the ticks from the cat. And it felt weird how Lyme was normalised there, almost like a phase of life it's assumed you go through, having to take months off work due to crippling pain and paralysis until the meds work. Coming from Australia, none of this felt "normal".

That said: it's a truly beautiful place. Outdoor recreation seems to be "what you do" out there... but when it's that beautiful, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of it. Even though I'm not much of a nature person or a hiker.


Not only Lyme... In the seaside Finland the tick-borne encephalitis cases are going up. And that's no joke either, but at least you get a vaccine for that... if you remember to take it three times before the ticks wake up in springtime.


If the model is commoditized then the AI race becomes competition over building infrastructure to support it. China is very good at building infrastructure.


Nah, James Damore just did a stupid thing at work and wasn't talented enough for it to be overlooked. He deserved to be fired. Morals don't need to come into it.

They lost their moral compass a while ago, but it had nothing to do with Damore.


No he was kind of unhinged. That wasn't the first weird thing he did. Should've been fired.


That is hard for outsiders to know. Google however seems to foster cancel mobs.

Python core people like Thomas Wouters and Gregory P. Smith, since fired from Google, canceled and libeled people like Tim Peters. All that matters is having a mob on your side and preventing the other side from responding.


What other things did he do to make you believe he was “kind of unhinged”? I know about the memo thing, but I think it was covered in an inflammatory way because the press loves to play up a controversy. What else besides the memo incident did he do that merits his firing?


Damore had been aggressively arguing about this stuff internally for some time in advance of his doc. The doc was consistent with a pattern of "makes a huge stink of things in every training and refuses to back down."


Okay, here's what I still don't understand. Were the things he was “making a huge stink about in every training” true or false? Reports at the time claimed that he was ”perpetuating harmful stereotypes,” but other reporting claimed that he was pointing out facts that inconveniently challenged the cultural orthodoxy and then wrote the doc to clarify his feedback, and so he became a target for internal activists. Are you aware of any specifics that would allow a reasonable person to lean one way or another as to the reality?


By all means, explain what else he did. I've seen this claim made repeatedly on hacker news, but conspicuously noone seems willing to o substantiate those claims.


Note that coding is not the only use of Gemini or any of these models. It's also not what this article is talking about. Gemini can be not the best coding agent, but very good at other things.


> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms.

If this can be fully automated then you can just ask your own agent to do this and wouldn't need a business for it. And agents can already fill out web forms just fine.


Well like most rich guys, I have an assistant, so I don't need or use "agents" - maybe my assistant could learn to use "agents" - but her core competency isn't, nor should it be, learning to use AI agents in any meaningful way. Maybe she could outsource it to someone who got their agents to do it for her for $100.... Same with my little sister who has a 5 year old and a 2 year old and doesn't really know how a computer works never mind what AI agents are.


Is this an argument to keep DEI in place?


It's an argument to not trust a book by its cover.


This is a simplistic view. E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume? In this case the lower chances to get ahead have nothing to do with economic circumstance.


> E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume?

You're referring to a decades-old study that failed to replicate:

https://datacolada.org/51

(This is extremely common in social sciences.)


https://thefederalist.com/2018/12/07/thomas-sowell-explains-...

It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).

The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).

Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.


> any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand

You raise an interesting point but I think that's an overly broad claim. Groups with strong internal adhesion and sufficiently high trust can remain xenophobic indefinitely.

It's also wrong on some level to refer to these things as arbitrary characteristics. They might be seemingly unrelated, but in a broader social context they are often far from arbitrary. Particularly when it comes to belief systems they can have direct and tangible impacts.


I think this is a perfect example of gp's comment.


GPs comment is a perfect example of GPs comment. The burden of proof is on the person trying to make a point. They gave no arguments or evidence in their favor. I lay out a point that shows they have no ground to stand on.


It is unfortunately impossible to prove the negative. I did give examples of what I would like to see in a discussion. There's unfortunately no realistic way for me to "provide evidence" that I only rarely see it.


Presumably their experience.


You can’t just experience the world and then talk about it. We need sources to back up all our opinions nowadays.


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