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tristynalxander

@ tristynalxander @mander.xyz

Posts
7
Comments
197
Joined
3 mo. ago

Structural Biologist interested in Protein Design. I also write code.

  • Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis

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  • The "It’s not clear who’s doing it" section is what's baffling to me, like I'm very far from into networking and I've definitely done some crude scraping the few times I've needed it, but even I am pretty sure I could do better than this. Makes me think someone with more money than sense hooked up an "Agentic" AI and told it to gather data to train the next AI then just let it decide how -- except not because I'm pretty sure the AIs would have more sense. It's really weird.

  • Might have been useful on a number of occasions

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  • Infinitely fast travel at warp 10 that comes with serious, but entirely curable side-effects

    Janeway and Paris preferred to stay in the delta quadrant rather than explain their giant Yeerk babies.

  • The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily

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  • I gave the two institutions I'm most concerned with: Universities and Research Institutes. Perhaps I'm not sure what you mean by structuring portfolios through natural-person shareholders, but this sounds like saying this person or that is responsible for this 10Mil of the portfolio. Problematic given that it would seem to give people the opportunity to run off with large amounts of money.

    While exceptions are problematic since they're either too simple or too prone to corruption, I think there are exceptions that would be hard to abuse if properly defined and restricted. For example, democratically ran non-profit limited to $10M per voting employee. Perhaps this is what you're thinking when you say structuring portfolios through natural-person shareholders; though, these are rather different in terms of who owns the money, but I suppose you could argue that technically the democratic collective owns the money, so they're the "same". That's not how I interpreted what you said, but I hope that's what you mean, and I could probably agree with that. A $10M endowment is a smidge low for some types of research, but good enough for most especially if collectivized.

  • A Benchtop Neutron Generator For The Home Reactor

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  • This is like the old-school EM guys building electron microscopes in their garage. I'm more into the DIYbio sphere, but I love to see it.

  • The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily

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  • No, I can't "prove" to you that a "beneficial" institution would not survive because if I name an institution that I think is beneficial, like universities or research institutes, you'll either argue it's not beneficial or argue that it would survive via some other mechanism. Either way, it'd miss the point that there are in fact institutions that do good in the world that are built on the current systems and need some means of transitioning or surviving your radical change. You're clearly uninterested in those arguments, which basically means no decent people (i.e. people who are intent on minimizing harm) are going to be interested in working with you.

    Honestly, I don't even really want to write this comment because I'm struggling not to assume you're just some angry kid. Like maybe you're someone who broadly agrees with me but just hasn't worked through the practical math of whole percentile wealth taxes on institutions or who doesn't yet appreciate that endowments effectively serve as a decentralized wealth re-distribution for public good causes. We're probably both positively inclined towards notions of wealth limits and income limits for individuals, but we clearly have very different views on how institutions and organizations should function. I don't really want to engage in an argument about that with someone who seems perfectly willing to see everything burnt to the ground in the name of "progress".

    Do you know how you make progress? You gain a deep understanding of how things work and then you tweak, modify, and twist bits and pieces -- this doesn't result in marginal effects either because these modifications aren't just cumulative but synergistic and ultimately transformative. Institutions like academia have real problems, no doubt, but a few simple rules could dramatically improve them: limiting the ratio of administrators to other employees to combat administrative bloat, incentivizing use and teaching of FOSS to prevent corporate software entrenchment, addition of lotteries to application processes mitigate alumni advantages. There are lots of ideas that won't destroy every humanities department or every independent scientific research institute in the country by making endowments nonviable.

  • The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily

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  • I see no compelling reason to maintain the institutions

    Okay, so you're not serious about change to your supposedly better system.

  • The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily

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  • Tax the shares themselves.

    Hmm, you'd have to dramatically decrease the tax rate for it to be worth investing at all. My investments make ~5%/yr if taxed on the shares rather than the change in value 5%-3% for tax-3% for inflation = -1% per year. That'd literally destroy all financial assets, the entire finance sector, every university and research institute endowment, and the concept of retirement. So, let's assume you did reduce the rate: 5%*3%= 0.15% or $150 tax per $100k invested or 1.5mil/bil. Honestly, this rate I'm fine with as it's functionally equivalent to taxing the increase.

    The issue is you're still incentivizing people to put money into higher returning investments rather than investing in more stable and assets, like bonds. I think your intent was to make investing in stocks "fair" but something that unstable should come with costly risks. It's not something sensible people should be investing into. We don't want the government bailing out the stock market at the cost of everything else every five years. People need to be deterred and those markets need to face consequences.

    We can exempt $10 million from the portfolio of any natural person

    Unless you're lowering the tax rate as I suggested, you'd have to add a lot of exceptions to not destroy most of the world's established institutions, and those exceptions would be used as loop holes. I think it's unwise to add exceptions at all. People should just get over paying taxes. It's literally the foundation of money having value (the demand for money).

  • The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily

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  • What happens when someone fails to pay back their bond? Do I get a tax refund?

  • The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily

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  • Yeah, we should fix that, but it's still pretty bad because it incentivizes investments in stocks (an inherently speculative asset that destabilizes the world) over bonds (a contractually defined asset that more effectively resists speculation and destabilization). Sure, they're both financial assets, so there's a certain amount of nonsense built in, but I'd much prefer a society filled with people who invest in bonds and incentivized to demand financial regulation.

    Also, we should treat stocks like dividends and tax them at the same rate. You get money every month from dividends and you choose whether you want to re-invest it or not. You're effectively auto-re-investing with stocks, so it's not meaningfully different. You should have to pay on the yearly difference in value, and if that means you have to sell some to pay the tax then you should just get over it.

  • I have to mop today AGAIN

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  • Depends on what you want. You'd be surprised just how appealing increasing that monthly dividend is -- If I have just a little more invested I could do X, Y, or Z. For me, the more freedom / agency / financial independence I get, the more I want and so the more I save.

    Having little with no obligations is very appealing. Having a bit more with no obligations is even more appealing.

  • Memory prices tipped to fall as China starts flooding the market with DRAM and NAND chips

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  • Memory prices tipped to fall as China starts flooding the market with DRAM and NAND chips

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  • Same. I'm running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-IQ4_XS.gguf) via the turboquant fork of llama.cpp with a few tweaked memory settings, and I get like 40 tokens / second -- nothing that required special insight on my part just following the instructions I saw on a youtube video I found via !LocalLLaMA@sh.itjust.works and asking claude to help me through the installation.

    AI has no economic moat. There's nothing stopping anyone from running LLMs locally.

  • Cardassian nonesense

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  • I was just gonna point out that Odo's whole race amounts to a gestalt fascist enslaving other races.

  • GitHub faces a fight for its survival at Microsoft

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  • Feel like half of lemmy is waiting for forgejo federation, lol.

  • I have to mop today AGAIN

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  • Wanting less, buying less, and spending less are the open secrets to success.

    Then invest most your income, and you have a lot of time and money (relatively).

  • Share of Americans who support or oppose the death penalty (2026)

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  • Needs another axis. I suspect folks who lean libertarian or anarchist are on the same page about not trusting the government to decide who deserves to live and die.

  • Scientists Discovered a Deadly New Creature Near 'the Island Behind Which Lies Death'

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  • It's just another species of jellyfish. I was hoping for something crazy interesting like a tropical leopard seal or a manatee with tentacles.

  • It took shockingly few generations for our ruling class to become morons

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  • Depends on who you're abusing / pissing-off. Can't imagine it's good for your health to have large numbers of people angry at you.

  • me_irl

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  • “We are punished by our sins, not for them.” ― Elbert Hubbard

  • New Communities @lemmy.world
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    LabRats

    mander.xyz /c/labrats
  • Free and Open Source Software @beehaw.org
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    Open Source Labware?

  • LocalLLaMA @sh.itjust.works
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    AI-Editor in LibreOffice Writer?

  • Science @mander.xyz
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    Pace of N.I.H. Funding Slows Further in Trump’s Second Year

    www.nytimes.com /2026/04/22/science/trump-nih-funding-research.html
  • Explain Like I'm Five @lemmy.world
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    ELI5: What role could Agentic AI have in the future, and how should individuals prepare?

  • Political Memes @lemmy.world
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    Homo-Economicus

  • Political Memes @lemmy.world
    tristynalxander @mander.xyz

    2028 Talk Be Like...