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Because the color of the sky is determined by a shifting mixture of wavelengths, not a single shifting wavelength.

Basically, the scattering process that "remove" blue from the spectrum also removes green, albeit to a lesser extent. There are some greenish and yellowish wavelengths in the sunset sky, but they're dominated by red, so the overall color appears red or orange.

In order for the sky to look noticeably green, there would have to be something that scattered reds and blues, without significantly absorbing green.

If you try to interpolate between sky-blue and orange using graphics software, the result depends on what "color space" you're using. If your software interpolates based on hue, you might see green (or purple) in the middle. But that's not physically realistic.

A realistic model is to interpolate each wavelength of the continuous spectrum separately. Interpolating in RGB color space is a crude approximation to this. And if you try the experiment, you'll see that the midpoint between sky-blue and orange is a kind of muddy brown, not green.


Cool project!

The most interesting part, IMO, is the "SRAM with EEPROM backup" chip. It allows you to persistently save the clock hands' positions every time they're moved, without burning through the limited write endurance of a plain old EEPROM. And it costs less than $1 in single quantities. That's a useful product to know about.


That's really neat. TIL.

So the way this works seems to be this: It's an SRAM and an EEPROM in one little package along with a controller that talks with each, with a little capacitor (this clock uses 4.7uf) placed nearby.

The SRAM part does all of the normal SRAM stuff: It doesn't wear out from reading/writing, and as long as it has power it retains the data it holds.

The EEPROM does all the normal EEPROM stuff: It stores data forever (on the timescale of an individual human, anyway), but has somewhat-limited write cycles.

The controller: When it detects a low voltage, it goes "oh shit!" and immediately dumps the contents of the SRAM into EEPROM. This saves on EEPROM write cycles: If there are no power events, the EEPROM is never written at all.

Meanwhile, the capacitor: It provides the power for the chip to perform this EEPROM write when an "oh shit!" event occurs.

When power comes back, the EEPROM's data is copied back to SRAM.

---

Downsides? This 47L04 only holds 4 kilobits. Upsides? For hobbyist projects and limited production runs, spending $1 to solve a problem is ~nothing. :)


Has anyone found the chip on AliExpress? I only get unrelated listings with that part number, but this is a pretty interesting chip I'd like to get a few of.

An alternative would be a supercapacitor and a voltage divider connected to the ADC pin of the microcontroller. When the 5V rail dies, the supercapacitor can hold 3.3V for a few seconds while you write everything to the EEPROM.


$0.77 US single piece cost on Digikey:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

And, at least with Digikey, you can feel like you actually get the real part vs. some low end clone knockoff.


That's the TSSOP version, while the DIP is $0.92:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

I'd prefer even the SOIC version which is $0.69 if I'm soldering it:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

but the author used the DIP in a holder/socket on the perfboard.


Comes out to $6 per part for me, with shipping, which is much more than I'm willing to pay.

and it'd still be $6 for 600.

It's as if people have never had shipping itemized before.

The only reason aliexpress shopping is cheap is because the rest of the world foots the bill. Unless somebody has finally removed China's "Developing Country" status thats gotten them essentially free international parcel service for the best part of 100 years.


Yeah OK, but if I only want 5 pieces and I have to choose between $5 or $30, I'm not going to think about the geopolitical situation, I'm just going to get the cheaper one.

Have you looked lately?

I buy small parts with "Choice" shipping on AliExpress sometimes, because it's cheap and [usually] quick and they take care of all of that pesky tariff and customs business in ways that never have an opportunity to surprise me.

For years now, the shipping process has worked like this for me: They gather it up on their end and send the stuff on a cargo plane to a sort that is at or near JFK airport in New York.

If the order includes things from several different sellers, then at some point they generally get combined into one bag.

From there, they just mail it -- using regular, domestic USPS service. It shows up in my mailbox on my porch in Ohio a few days later.

Although it certainly was a thing I've experienced in the past, at no point does the process I've described exploit the "Developing County" loophole. They just send things to the other side of the world (at their expense), and then pay the post office the same way as anyone else does to bring it to my door.


EDIT: Oh lord, bad typo in my previous comment- it should have been aliexpress SHIPPING not Shopping.

It's not the same, what you described is Direct Entry (somewhere around page 25, linked below). Apparently the Terminal Dues system has been massively changed in the 5 years since I last looked- but it still appears unfavorable to USPS and US sellers, while favoring high volume foreign shippers.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-112.pdf

As for how aliexpress delivers stuff, since the tarrifs: 1) no-name last mile. 2) USPS last mile, and USPS the entire way.

I don't know if any are associated with "Choice", Paid store shipping, and/or free store shipping.

Since I normally buy from aliexpress to avoid the insane 200-800% markups amazon/ebay/walmart/etc dropshippers demand the $5-$10 in shipping doesnt factor in.


That's a lot of details.

As a consumer, here's how AliExpress Choice shipping functions for me: Like buying a widget from a shop downtown, the price is the price.

I don't see what anyone will pay (or has paid) for duties or tariffs or fees or delivery, I don't have any idea what the markup is at any level, and I don't know what GAO table they or anyone else used to get it to happen. That's outside of my purvey.

With this method: Same as with the shop downtown, I'm not importing anything myself; I don't see any customs forms or declarations at all. AliExpress handles all of that business, not me.

I can peek behind the curtain a bit and see some aspects of how things move from place to place as physical entities using the tracking data that they provide. And that's about it, until it eventually shows up inside of my mailbox -- and then I can have a nice gander at the labels and see that it was sent with USPS domestic postage.

This process doesn't (can't, AFAICT) abuse my nation's postal system, and I like that aspect quite a lot.

The downsides are cost and availability: There may be a dozen or more sellers offering seemingly-identical widgets on AliExpress, but maybe only one or two (if any) that ship that particular widget Choice. Like Prime, it can actually end up costing a bit more than other methods.

But it's fast, still cheap in absolute terms, and there's zero BS on my end so I like those parts, too.


What's the purpose of using an LLM to write a comment here?

"Hey, someone on the Internet used decent diction! Obviously, this means I must accuse them of being a bot!"

(Hey Dang. Can we get a ban button? There's a few people here that are impossible to conduct rational discourse with. My sanity would improve if they were simply gone from my view.)


There is an extension called HN Friends that allows to add information to a tooltip for users and shows a hint that there exists such information.

Use this as you like.


You've edited the response since you posted it. I think there's a difference between diction and the standard output of ChatGPT et al.

I have trouble believing that you're pointing this out in good faith.

[dead]


And we're also here to use double dashes, aren't we.

Yes, if we fucking choose to do that. We are.

Yes! The reflexive “must be LLM generated” is becoming ridiculous. Anything that includes proper punctuation and, god forbid, em dashes which I’ve used all my life must be suspect. The “it’s not x, it’s y” construction predates LLMs. I don’t recall ever sending a text without making sure it contained no errors, and yes, many have included infrequently used vocabulary.

I know, right?

I've been trying to write properly, clearly, and with the most expressive words I can come up with for many decades. I try to punctuate well, and to use functional formatting that I hope helps to effectively convey whatever it is that I'm on about. I try to improve as time goes on.

And I do this because if I'm going to bother with writing something for others to read, then I want my intended meaning to be easily-understood.

But increasingly, the instances where I manage to not screw any of that up too terribly result in a snarky and insulting retort in return.

And that kind of response is just not useful to anyone. I mean: What would people presume to have me do, instead? Become less-literate? Die in a fire? (Worse?)

fuh.


It’s frustrating to the point that I have considered inserting grammatical errors, but that would go against my principles, which I have attempted to inculcate in my children. Yes, a significant amount of what’s posted is copied and pasted AI slop. But what in the world preceded this? Barely legible slop? I would much rather have someone craft their thoughts, run them through their preferred model, and write something coherent that is not marred by punctuation or basic elementary grammar errors. And you know what, the hell with the AI slop police. Yes, if we choose to use em dashes, we will.

You could create a browser user script to do it locally.

That's not a terrible idea.

An extra UI element or two should be enough. Maybe with sticky options for collapse-by-default or hide-by-default at the top of each HN comment section.

And the list of usernames can be stored and edited in the purveyor's HN bio (in plain text, like a monster), so that it works automatically across devices.


Upvoted because this stinks to high hell of an LLM response. Half the GPs comments seem to be in a similar vein. It’s such a shame but you can’t fight the trolls so don’t take it to heart.

I've just skimmed through the first handful of pages with ssl-3's comments and none of them seem particularly LLM-like.

Your LLM detector is broken.

Whether or not they did use an LLM to refine, what does it matter? To call them a troll for contributing to discourse is wild.

I'm not sure if this is the same technology, but regardless it's also cool: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1897

Not quite - the chip the article refers to is the 47L04 [0], which is "just" NVSRAM built out of a RAM + EEPROM. I do agree on FeRAM being cool, though - I have a few I2C chips en route, and I can't wait to get my hands on them.

[0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/47L04


You could also consider MRAM. Which is available in larger sizes - up to 4 Mbit on SPI bus in the MR20H40, and 128 Mbit in EM128LXQ (but it gets unreasonably expensive when this big).

https://www.everspin.com/family/mr20h40?npath=259


Thanks to both of you for bringing FRAM onto my radar!

FRAM is extremely neat on paper, combining SRAM ish speeds with non-volatility, but adoption seems to be low. Possibly due to scaling issues. I've had a FRAM-based TI MSP430 in my random parts drawer for about a decade.

That was my first FRAM experience, too. Good chip, good times. Insanely low power draw!

I do like the frams too for similar use cases.

Particularly I like that I can get those large enough to stick a ring buffer from debug out on them as well and get crash logs from embedded systems despite the debug uart not being tethered to a dev machine.


i think it's called EERAM, however having proper closed loop control with hand position feedback would be preferable in my opinion...

Meh. The room-temperature endurance of modern EEPROMs (e.g., ST M95256) is something like 4 million cycles. If you use a simple ring buffer (reset on overflow, otherwise just appending values), you only need to overwrite a cell once every 32k ticks, which gives you a theoretical run time of 250,000 years with every-minute updates or 4,100 years with every-second updates.

The part of the article about the 158,000x slowdown doesn't really make sense to me.

It says that a nested query does a large number of iterations through the SQLite bytecode evaluator. And it claims that each iteration is 4x slower, with an additional 2-3x penalty from "cache pressure". (There seems to be no explanation of where those numbers came from. Given that the blog post is largely AI-generated, I don't know whether I can trust them not to be hallucinated.)

But making each iteration 12x slower should only make the whole program 12x slower, not 158,000x slower.

Such a huge slowdown strongly suggests that CCC's generated code is doing something asymptotically slower than GCC's generated code, which in turn suggests a miscompilation.

I notice that the test script doesn't seem to perform any kind of correctness testing on the compiled code, other than not crashing. I would find this much more interesting if it tried to run SQLite's extensive test suite.


Note that this article's summary has a significant error compared to the original press release[1]. The article says "90% range", whereas the press release says "90% capacity retention".

This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.

Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.

As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.

[1]: https://www.catl.com/en/news/6720.html


> Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.

With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.

[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but my car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.


It won't be as noticeable on a gas car because it is probably starting out around 30% efficiency (as compared with ~90% for an EV). This is a major advantage of gasoline, in a sense, because it means we have already engineered the package to account for a lot of wasted fuel.

Ah, so then the air temperature should reduce fuel consumption by 30%×30%=10%, which does seem to roughly match my experience. Thanks for pointing that out!

Internal combustion engines are actually more efficient in cold weather than hot weather. But the other factors like drag outweigh the increased efficiency of the engine. And since gas engines are so inefficient to begin with you don't notice much of a difference. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270072/heated-an...

Gas cars produce more power at lower temperatures - more oxygen gets into the combustion chamber, and the engine also can run more advanced spark timing without as much worry of detonation. This is why turbochargers have intercoolers.

Air drag energy losses are tiny comparing to other losses when burning petrol so you don't notice the difference.

Ohhhh, that makes complete sense, thanks!

  >your values may actually be correct
They used PV=nRT, so it better be!

Note that a 28% increase in drag results in a roughly 22% decrease in range, because 1/1.28 ~= 0.78. Also there are other losses (like rolling friction and constant loads like headlights or cabin heat), so range doesn't scale perfectly with drag. Drag is the main source of loss at highway speed, however


I drive long distance weekly on my gas car. Full tank in summer (+20C) gives me 520 km, while in winter (-20C here) I get 430-440 km. I noticed it on my current and previous cars. Maybe it's thicker oil and worse car efficiencies in winter ? And that's despite that full tank of gas has more gas in winter comparing to summer, gasoline is denser in cold temps.

I'd imagine also less rolling resistance from both rubber hardening and just roads being more slippery

But TBF same factors affect ICE cars


That implies that air resistance is the overwhelming contributor at high speeds. Is that the case?

It's the majority, but overwhelming or not surprisingly appears to depend on car model, at least per some calculations someone on reddit ran [1].

I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l2cq6b/comment/...


Oh yes, by so much.

Even at 30kmph it's already the majority of the resistance and it scales exponentially with speed so you can imagine how much it matters.


For most cars driving through air, at sea level, on planet Earth, at normal speed, the drag force F is proportional to the square of the speed (v^2).

That's not exponential because the speed (v) is not in the exponent. In fact, it's quadratic.

Corollaries: The power required to push the car at speed v will be proportional to Fv ~ v^3. The gas spent over time t ~ energy spent ~ power time ~ v^3 * time.


It scales quadratically with speed*

Those two things very different.


Considering air resistance is proportional to the cube of the speed, it would be highly surprising to not be the case.

It goes with the cube in terms of power, but with the square in terms of energy/distance, which is usually what you'd care about.

s/cube/square/

Define ‘high speeds’. There’s a reason race cars look like they do, to the point of having serious problems driving at speeds just a bit below highway speed limit.

Yes it is.

Well, I think the paper answers that too. These problems are intended as a tool for honest researchers to use for exploring the capabilities of current AI models, in a reasonably fair way. They're specifically not intended as a rigorous benchmark to be treated adversarially.

Of course a math expert could solve the problems themselves and lie by saying that an AI model did it. In the same way, somebody with enough money could secretly film a movie and then claim that it was made by AI. That's outside the scope of what this paper is trying to address.

The point is not to score models based on how many of the problems they can solve. The point is to look at the models' responses and see how good they are at tackling the problem. And that's why the authors say that ideally, people solving these problems with AI would post complete chat transcripts (or the equivalent) so that readers can assess how much of the intellectual contribution actually came from AI.


I don't mean this as a knock on you, but your comment is a bit funny to me because it has very little to do with "modern" databases.

What you're describing would probably have been equally possible with Postgres from 20 years ago, running on an average desktop PC from 20 years ago. (Or maybe even with SQLite from 20 years ago, for that matter.)

Don't get me wrong, Postgres has gotten a lot better since 2006. But most of the improvements have been in terms of more advanced query functionality, or optimizations for those advanced queries, or administration/operational features (e.g. replication, backups, security).


The article actually points out a number of things only added after 2006, such as full-text search, JSONB, etc. Twenty years ago your full-text search option is just LIKE '%keyword%'. And it would be both slower than less effective than real full-text search. It clearly wasn’t “sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want” like GP said.

And 20 years ago people were making the exact same kinds of comments and everyone had the same reaction: yeah, MySQL has been putting numbers up like that for a decade.

20 years ago was 2006? Oh no...

Don't get me started on when the 90's were.

Twenty years ago? You mean 1982, right? Right!?

"The peak of your human society" in the words of The Matrix

> Don't get me wrong, Postgres has gotten a lot better since 2006.

And hardware has gotten a lot better too. As TFA writes: it's 2026.


If you read the discussion, they weren't kept because of their encyclopedic value, or because they were "widespread". I'm not sure why the parent commenter said that.

They were kept to preserve a record of their having been uploaded, and to not create a legal risk for third parties who might be relying on the Commons page as their way to provide attribution.

The original proposal was to keep the image pages with the metadata, but delete the image files. That turned out to have some technical hurdles, so instead the images were overwritten with versions containing big ugly attribution messages, to discourage their use.


ah thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

I'd guess that everybody involved (including the coroner's office) tacitly understands that even if the baby was deliberately or negligently killed, there's very little chance after 20 years of finding evidence of who did it, in order to demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.

The scientific case about infant opioid poisoning in general is a separate issue, of course. But assigning blame in this particular case doesn't have any bearing on that.


> And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.

The benefit would be to formally reject the fake science that was used to close the investigation the first time. A conviction is beside the point.


> And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.

It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".


The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?

When I tried reading into the causes of so-called SIDS it seemed like at least some of the cases were a catch-all diagnosis that included cases where parents inadvertently killed their infants (eg co-sleeping and rolling onto them). Fundamentally I think there often isn't much upside to fully fleshing out the truth of cases where parents have already paid the heaviest price.


Man, SIDS. It's specifically non-specific, but the worry it causes is quite specific.

My daughter, as a baby, always managed to find a way to sleep on her stomach. Wouldn't sleep on her back, but almost magically by comparison would fall asleep lying on her stomach (face to one side or the other, not straight down, obviously - I hope). We tried various combinations of devices, arrangements of pillows and cushions, tight wraps, to keep her lying on her back, but babies are remarkably, if involuntarily, wilful (or she was, anyway, and remains to this day).

I worry about very few things, but for the first few nights we'd regularly get up to check on her, and literally be holding our breath waiting for her to expel hers.

Out of necessity the every-parents-SIDS-fear, from allowing the baby to sleep on their stomach, had to be removed from our psyche so that we could continue to function day-to-day.

Said baby is now, thankfully, a semi-healthily functional teenager. As functional as teenagers get anyway :)


I swear, all the shit they push at new parents. You can see the point to much of it, and it's obviously going to be a very stressful time regardless. But there's the same inescapable bureaucratic dynamic where once something becomes legible, the system pathologically emphasizes those few bits over and over and over, to the detriment of balanced judgement - both your own and most healthcare providers if you try to get some nuance out of them.

It's understandable that they're trying to help the people who might not be the most competent at following the guidelines, because there is still harm reduction to be had there. But it pushes the instruction-followers into the territory of "well, this probably doesn't apply to us because XXX", which is an epistemologically terrible place to be.

We're still joking about how much they repeated the advice to keep the belly button dry, when it was relevant for like maybe two whole weeks.


during covid they actually laid hospital patients face down (suspended i think?) to help with breathing when a ventilator wasnt available. this behaviour reminds me of that, perhaps your baby was doing this to help with breathing? i dont know...


We don't know it was the parents. Could've been a babysitter. Could've been a grandparent. New parents often have help.


> The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?

While "happy" isn't the word I'd use, that seems better than knowing that this could happen to any baby at any time and nothing would be done.


I mean, if it was the case that one parent killed the child (Which, to be clear, we don't know. It could have been anybody who had access to the child at the time), then I'd think the best outcome is them getting convicted of it. I don't know why so many people treat homicide as "not a big deal" when it comes to babies.

Consider an unrelated hypothetical scenario, a family father accidentally hits and kills somebody with his car. He flees from the scene and is not discovered for 20 years. Would you then not attempt to prosecute him because it would be sad for his family to know? And now consider the case if it was his own child that died.


It's not that it's "not a big deal", rather the problem is you're up against the limits of details fading to time, negligence, etc. The best case here you're probably looking at each parent blaming the other parent for either doing it or at least letting it happen.

But really my main issue was with characterizing such a thing as a "happy ending". While it's generally good for justice to be served, we should still be wary of people who are a bit too gleeful about punishment.


SIDS was named in 1969, might be related to combined vaccines.

https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...


have you read the linked page?

> However, since immunizations are given to about 90 percent of children less than 1 year of age, and about 1,600 cases of SIDS occur every year, it would be expected, statistically, that every year about 50 cases of SIDS will occur within 24 hours of receipt of a vaccine. However, because the incidence of SIDS is the same in children who do or do not receive vaccines, we know that SIDS is not caused by vaccines.


Serious question: if the chance of evidence leading to a convistion is very very small, what would be the benefit of opening an investigation? Just to go through the motions on principle? And what would they even investigate?


One benefit is demonstrating at least a facade of seeking justice. Also, obscuring a crime for personal benefit is itself a crime.


so cops driving around is good enough, they don't have to actually catch criminals because it's it facade that really matters.


It's security theater, like airport security where red teams succeed in 95% cases

https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...


It's a cost-benefit analysis like many other things. There are limited resources, they should be spent on investigating cases that have a chance of getting closed.

Cold cases might get reopened because of advances in technology or other changes over time.


There is no potential "principal" here that is distinguishable from posturing and dick swinging.

Unless you find some unforeseeable smoking gun any conviction will necessarily be questionable at best. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond saying "we're the prosecutor's office, look how bad ass we are, look how we somehow manage to convict someone decades later, fear us". Never mind the fact that dredging this stuff up is not likely to be good for the family and that odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent so it's not like you're going after a "real criminal".


Investigating a murder is posturing? I really don't understand the "bad ass, fear us" language. Do you consider all criminal investigations to be as frivolous?

> odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent

How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that

> "... someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula

Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?


>Investigating a murder is posturing? I really don't understand the "bad ass, fear us" language. Do you consider all criminal investigations to be as frivolous?

>How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that

Take a freakin step back and look at the big picture. Someone lost their kid, their first kid FFS. Even if a crime was technically committed along the way call it time served.

On a technical level, this is almost certainly not chargeable as a murder. Evidince of intent is lacking and almost certainly does not exist. The best you might be able to do is some negligent wrongful death manslaughter type thing, exact details depending on how such things are defined in the jurisdiction. Just based on plausibility these cases are almost certainly accidents. Very few mothers or the people around them murder newborns in the jurisdictions we're talking about. So if you did find intent, like a text exchange or something, the best you're likely to do is prove intent in the exact opposite direction and that no harm was meant. So then you have to prove negligence or something, which is also likely to be uphill. And this all assumes you can pin it on one person.

No good purpose is served by this. You're not getting some hardened criminal off the streets or putting someone in jail for an act committed with a bad frame of mind. Best case you wind up punishing someone using some negligince wrongful death type statues that's written based on the assumption that the person who caused the death DGAF about the deceased. Even if you pull that off this person is probably the mother or father or a grandparent who already lost their kid or grandkid for it so there's a real tinge of double jeopardy to the whole thing. This serves no purpose other than a show of force by the prosecuting office. The "real" crime committed here is not accidentally giving one's infant the wrong pills (someone gave a kid Tylenol, it's not like it was Xanax or booze to shut them up or some other thing everyone knows you don't do), the facts are likely to stack up in a way that make that act a non-criminal accident. So what you're doing in practice is screwing up one or more people's lives, to much fanfare, because they failed to tell the whole truth to the state a decade or more ago. Now, I get that that might sound like a good thing to some people, but those people are bad people and their ideas are bad ideas.

>Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?

Stop trying to re-frame my assertion as an issue with the article rather than a critique of the proposed action (prosecuting someone). I know you'd rather discuss that, because that's much more defensible than a hypothetical decision to prosecute, and I do not accept your slight of hand.


Calm down. I'm not trying to re-frame anything, perhaps I misunderstood you because your reasons for not prosecuting are incomprehensible to me. Do I understand correctly that you think a murder (or involuntary manslaughter etc) is not "as bad" because the perpetrator was close to the victim?

> this person is probably the mother or father or a grandparent who already lost their kid or grandkid

Would you say the same about a man who (perhaps accidentally) killed his wife 20 years ago and covered it up? "He's already lost his wife, time served, no reason to investigate."

Speaking as a parent, giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.


>Would you say the same about a man who (perhaps accidentally) killed his wife 20 years ago and covered it up? "He's already lost his wife, time served, no reason to investigate."

There is a massive gulf of intent there and I think it speaks volumes that you cannot (or worse, decline to) identify it.

>Speaking as a parent,

And also speaking as a person who's been espousing the opinions you've been espousing thus far, that's more than just "parent"

>giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.

People are stupid. Shit happens. I know it seems wild now and everyone turns into a screeching moron about it now but the "suck on a finger dipped in booze" thing was not abnormal (note for said screeching morons: I did not say "considered tasteful") for decades. Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot.


> Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot

Note that this is just a story you made up, we really don't know what happened. You're also leaving out that if somebody did this by accident, they also chose to keep quiet about it for 20 years. Doesn't that speak about "intent"?

Also, giving a 12 days old baby a "normal" Tylenol, say one with 500 mg acetaminophen, is a very bad idea. The normal dose for a 3 month old is 60 mg (for fever, not as a "sleep aid"). Doses above 200 mg/kg can cause acute toxicity, so for a slightly small baby of 2500 g, you're there already. Perhaps thinking that there's a "safe" type of Tylenol to give a baby as a "sleep aid" (what??) is a good example of "People are stupid".

With my example with the wife, I'm simply trying to establish why you seem to consider children (or rather babies) to be not worthy of the same justice as adults. How about an adult who accidentally kills their elderly parent, would you consider that worth investigating, or should it also not be investigated on the principle of "they lost their parent"? Or further, at what age do you no longer consider it morally justifiable to accidentally (or otherwise) kill one's child and cover it up? 5 years old, 10, 18?

To me, being stupid does not mean you're allowed to give your elderly father 10 Tylenols as a "sleep aid" and claim "shit happens" if he dies. I might want to call a person of that viewpoint a "bad person with bad ideas" or a "screeching moron", but I'd like to stay above such childish namecalling.


They said "could", not "should".

I believe the point is that it's much easier to create a plausible justification than an accurate justification. So simply requiring that the system produce some kind of explanation doesn't help, unless there are rigorous controls to make sure it's accurate.


The Internet Archive supports full-text search on (AFAIK) its entire scanned book collection, even books that aren't available for borrowing.


This is actually pretty good.


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