BurningTrapezoid

Karma: 36

BurningTrapezoid 29 Jun 2026 12:28 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: davekasten’s comment on: Existential AI safety needs an effective social movement. PauseAI is building it
This additional info was very helpful to understand your view. Maybe you could have included it earlier and not just in your second reply. I first thought you were just pissed that Holly criticizes you when in fact your problem with her is the hurtful and unfair way in which she communicates those criticisms.
I get the impression from your first reply that you think that this is immediately obvious when one looks at her twitter profile. To me, it wasn’t. And @Caleb Biddulph’s reply looks to me like it also wasn’t obvious to Caleb.

BurningTrapezoid 22 May 2026 8:40 UTC
11 points
3
on: Women should be able to open things
It is actually possible to design lids that are easier to open. See for example here: https://metalpackagingemea.sonoco.com/our-orbit-closure/

I already tried a jar that had one of those lids linked above. It was indeed a lot easier to open.
The way that it works is that the lid consists of two parts. The flat upper part presses against the sealant surface and doesn’t turn. The ring shaped part on the side that grips into the threads of the jar does turn. The fact that you only have to overcome the friction in the threads and at the point where the two parts of the lid meet but not the friction at the sealant surface means that it is a lot easier to turn.
So yes, when someone notices and cares, it is possible to design stuff that is usable by almost everyone and not just by half the population.

BurningTrapezoid 18 Apr 2026 13:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: Bremen, Germany—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
I think I am now roughly at the plus codes coordinates but I don’t see a sign anywhere. Could you give a more detailed description of where the meeting point is?

BurningTrapezoid 10 Apr 2026 20:43 UTC
1 point
0
on: The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life
I stopped drinking coffee regularly because I would always get a headache when I forgot to drink coffee, e. g. on weekends. Do you have experience with withdrawl symptoms? Are they better or worse with paraxanthine? If you don’t, do you have a guess?

BurningTrapezoid 15 Feb 2026 22:29 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Rahul N’s comment on: Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
I live in Germany and our population has been kept approximately stable in the last decades via immigration, and we also have many people moving to the cities. Especially in Eastern Germany, as was mentioned in this post. Many of the phenomena mentioned in this post are familiar to me from news and anecdotes. I would be curious if there is data on if the depopulation of rural areas is mainly driven by fewer people being born or by more people moving away, and if there are differences between countries. My guess would be that people moving away is the bigger factor in many places.

BurningTrapezoid 13 Feb 2026 11:08 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Commander Zander’s comment on: Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance
I always assumed that LARP was just improv acting combined with sword fighting and crafting but now that I think more about it, I realize that I don’t know much about LARP and there might be very different kinds of it and some might involve players spending more time strategizing and planning and less pretending to be a medieval peasant.

BurningTrapezoid 13 Feb 2026 10:42 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Malmesbury’s comment on: My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
Sorry, it wasn’t my intention to make you feel bad.

BurningTrapezoid 12 Feb 2026 10:31 UTC
8 points
2
on: My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
Source for the “meme from LinkedIn”: https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221

BurningTrapezoid 29 Jan 2026 15:32 UTC
4 points
0
on: Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance
Participating in a game like this sounds like a lot of fun. I want to do this too. But I am not willing to move to Chicago and start studying history for it. :D
Do you know of things that are similar where I can join?
Actually, I wonder if there is a way of combining this with the idea of experimental history you described above. You wrote that LLMs and historians have the problem that they already know what happens in 1492. Well, I don’t. Maybe one could use LLMs only for creating the starting point, the character material, for the evaluation of the results and maybe for playing NPCs, and then let random strangers on the internet play the characters. Of course one would need to deal with trolls and cheaters (e.g. falsely claiming to not know the scenario), but this could be done with people getting something like a trustworthiness score after each game and then one would only use those games for studying, that are played by people who already played a number of games before and have a high trustworthiness.
I could imagine that I am not the only person who would be excited to participate in a study like this. This probably scales worse than the pure LLM version, but maybe better than the pure human version of Ada Palmer.

BurningTrapezoid 20 Oct 2025 16:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: hauke’s comment on: Hamburg – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2025
Nice, thanks!

BurningTrapezoid 18 Oct 2025 13:40 UTC
1 point
0
on: Hamburg – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2025
We’ve moved to the Coffee Fellows at Stephanspl. 2-8, 20354 Hamburg

BurningTrapezoid 16 Jun 2025 9:56 UTC
4 points
0
on: Lightning Talks: Thought, Trick, Curiosity
So I did a bit of research on my train ride back on why we don’t just dilute and spread nuclear waste. Apparently, the question if we should dilute toxic waste to get rid of it, has been discussed for ages and nowadays, every paper or article, I found on this just states that “dilution is not the solution to pollution” and then there is no further elaboration on that as if this statement is so obvious that it is not required to explain it. In one article, they even wrote, that diluting nuclear waste is like a reverse Midas, where everything he touches becomes not gold but toxic waste. I don’t think, this is how dilution works. There might be binary thinking going on here, where the authors intuitively think that waste is either toxic or not toxic and don’t consider if something is more or less toxic.

It was quite hard to find anything where they didn’t just state that “dilution is not the solution to pollution” and considered that sufficient explanation. Eventually, I found someone on Reddit who claimed to be an expert. I am aware that this is not the best source, but it was the best I could find before my train arrived. :)
He writes that diluting and spreading would work for uranium and plutonium left in spent fuel and also for fast decaying fission products, but this is not a good idea for other slowly decaying fission products like some cesium, and iodine isotopes, as those tend to concentrate in bodies of animals after being consumed and then gets passed up the food chain and gets concentrated further (similar to heavy metals, I guess).
So what we would want to do is to separate these particular fission products from the rest and only store those in a concentrated form. And it turns out, this is actually exactly, what is being done in reprocessing plants. So I need to take back, what I said about reprocessing plants. They don’t just concentrate nuclear waste, but separate the different kinds. Btw, the plutonium and uranium that is being recovered is then not diluted and spread but reused, which is actually better, I suppose.
I am not quite sure what to make with this. I guess, there is in fact a reason why we don’t dilute and spread radioactive cesium and iodine isotopes, but burying them all in one place and hoping that our descendants won’t at some point drill into them also doesn’t seem a good strategy. Probably the best thing would be to store them in a way that they remain accessible and in a way that we don’t forget about them, until we found a way of breaking the atoms down further into isotopes that are not radioactive or have a short half life. Which is pretty much what we will probably be doing for the next 70 years in Germany anyway.