domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
49m ago
When Colonel Cathcart learned that Doc Daneeka too had been killed in McWatt’s plane
And the whole tragedy of Doc Daneeka trying to explain that he isn't actually dead definitely counts as dark humor. Especially when his own wife would rather keep the money paid to war widows than prove his existence.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
Salt, olive oil, onions, garlic, tomatoes make vegetables taste good.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
None of the lawyers I've seen arguing against the verdict have raised the definition of "campaign expenditure" as incorrectly applied
I think you've persisted in not addressing what Brad Smith has said, which is exactly that the definition of "campaign expenditure" was incorrectly applied.
slothlikesamwise
Subway Wizard 🔮
1hr ago
There was a 2008 study that shoved a bunch of stuff under an EMP simulator.
The only things that were majorly subsceptible were power grid electronics and SCADA control systems, which are major things but far from "lol my gunsight just turns off forever".
It takes a bit of finangling with combining multiple reports to get that conclusion tho. It depends a lot on just how much energy is in the air.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
the "anything done to affect the election" rule seems to apply to the candidate.
Ok, so back to the "Blue Lives Matter" sign that Trump put up with his own money. Are you amending your answer back to saying that there is a reporting requirement? Is it criminal if he doesn't report?
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
How NOT to Regulate the Tech Industry
Hot on the heels of my comment describing the UK's effort to finally rid the IoT market of extremely basic vulnerabilities like "has a default password", Colorado jumps in like Leroy Jenkins to show us how, exactly, tech regulation shouldn't be done. SB 205 is very concerned with "algorithmic discrimination", which it defines as, "any condition in which the use of an artificial intelligence system results in an unlawful differential treatment or impact that disfavors an individual or group of individuals on the basis of their actual or perceived age, color, disability, ethnicity, genetic information, limited proficiency in the English language, national origin, race, religion, reproductive health, sex, veteran status, or other classification protected under the laws of this state or federal law."
Right off the bat, it seems to be embracing the absolute morass of "differential treatment or impact", with the latter being most concerning, given how incomprehensible the similar "disparate impact" test is in the rest of the world. This law makes all use of algorithms in decision-making subject to this utterly incomprehensible test. There are rules for developers, telling them how they must properly document all the things to show that they've apparently done whatever magic must be done to ensure that there is no such discrimination. There are rules for deployers of those algorithms, too, because the job is never done when you need to root out any risk of impacting any group of people differently (nevermind that it's likely mathematically impossible to do so).
Their definitions for what types of algorithms this law will hit are so broad that they already know they captured far too much, so they go on a spree of exempting all sorts of already-existing things that they know about, including:
(A) ANTI-FRAUD TECHNOLOGY THAT DOES NOT USE FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY;
(B) ANTI-MALWARE;
(C) ANTI-VIRUS;
(D) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-ENABLED VIDEO GAMES;
(E) CALCULATORS;
(F) CYBERSECURITY;
(G) DATABASES;
(H) DATA STORAGE;
(I) FIREWALL;
(J) INTERNET DOMAIN REGISTRATION;
(K) INTERNET WEBSITE LOADING;
(L) NETWORKING;
(M) SPAM- AND ROBOCALL-FILTERING;
(N) SPELL-CHECKING;
(O) SPREADSHEETS;
(P) WEB CACHING;
(Q) WEB HOSTING OR ANY SIMILAR TECHNOLOGY; OR
(R) TECHNOLOGY THAT COMMUNICATES WITH CONSUMERS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING USERS WITH INFORMATION, MAKING REFERRALS OR RECOMMENDATIONS, AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS AND IS SUBJECT TO AN ACCEPTED USE POLICY THAT PROHIBITS GENERATING CONTENT THAT IS DISCRIMINATORY OR HARMFUL.
If your idea for a mundane utility-generating algorithm didn't make the cut two weeks ago, sucks to be you. Worse, they say that these things aren't even exempted if they "are a substantial factor in making a consequential decision". I guess they also exempt things that "perform a narrow procedural task". What does that mean? What counts; what doesn't? Nobody's gonna know until they've taken a bunch of people to court and gotten a slew of rulings, again, akin to the mess of other disparate impact law.
Don't despair, though (/s). So long as you make a bunch of reports that are extremely technologically ill-specified, they will pinky swear that they won't go after you. Forget that they can probably just say, "We don't like the look of this one TPS report in particular," and still take you to court, many of the requirements are basically, "Tell us that you made sure that you won't discriminate against any group that we're interested in protecting." The gestalt requirement can probably be summed up by, "Make sure that you find some way to impose quotas (at least, quotas for whichever handful of groups we feel like protecting) on the ultimate output of your algorithm; otherwise, we will blow your business into oblivion."
This is the type of vague, awful, impossible regulation that is focused on writing politically correct reports and which actually kills innovation. The UK's IoT rules might have had some edge cases that still needed to be worked out, but they were by and large technically-focused on real, serious security problems that had real, practical, technical solutions. Colorado, on the other hand, well, I honestly can't come up with words to describe how violently they've screwed the pooch.
As a Cards fan, Beltrán occupies a funny place in the organization's history. St. Louis won the World Series in 2006, beating the Detroit Tigers in 5 games. To get there they had a grueling NLCS against the Mets, the team that figures most prominent in Beltrán's playing career. Game 7, bottom of the 9th, Cards up 3-1. Then-rookie-now-just-retired Adam Wainwright is in to close out the game for the birds.
"Uncle Charlie", Waino's other nickname from an old-time term for the curveball his career was known for, sees José Valentín first. Valentín is batting 7th, this is the weakest part of the Mets' lineup and the dream set for a quick save. Valentín has a .271 average, a .330 on-base percentage and in the regular season just shy of twice as many strikeouts as walks. He's gonna swing, and he does on the first pitch, a fastball, lofting a ball into center for a single. Pressure's on.
Endy Chávez is next. Chávez by profile is the same story as Valentín, just a little better. .306 average, .338 OBP, 24 walks vs 44 strikeouts. He'd been weak in the playoffs in hitting but among outfielders that year only Andruw Jones exceeded him in Defensive Runs Saved, Jones' 24 to Chávez' 22, so this a guy you keep in the lineup even if he's not hitting that well. But he does there: Waino throws the curveball, no chance he's giving up back to back hits, so it's a ball, curveball again for a called strike, and with the batter off-balance common thought says cross 'em blind from breaking to the heat, fastball again, but Chávez is ready, line drive to left field, runners on first and second.
Cliff Floyd pinch hits, strikes out looking on 6 pitches. José Reyes next, lines out on 5 pitches. Paul Lo Duca comes up and gets pitched around with a walk on 5 pitches. Now it's Beltrán's turn. Game 7, Bottom 9th, 2 outs, bases loaded, just one good single ties it, and at the plate is one of the all-time great postseason hitters, what happens? Strike, foul, Uncle Charlie catches him looking. Cards go to the World Series, trouncing the Tigers including then-rookie Justin Verlander.
Cards win the World Series again in 2011. Tony La Russa retires, Albert Pujols goes to the Angels, Mike Matheny comes in and looking for something to help cover the loss of La Máquina, John Mozeliak (*spit*) signs one Carlos Beltrán. Despite losing the greatest Cardinal since Stan Musial, the Cards had power. My all-time favorite Cardinal in Matt Holliday was always a basher, Allen Craig who posted an insane, #2-all-time .454 average with runners in scoring position in 2013, shoulda-been-2013-MVP Matt Carpenter, defensive GOAT Yadier Molina whose offense peaked in 2012/2013, and Beltrán. In his two years he had 56 homers, slashing .283/.343/.493 and was good for 6.2 bWAR. For the unfamiliar, you can interpret this as "very good." He was exactly what the Cards needed and the fans took to him quickly, myself definitely included. Big fan, even today. Cards don't sign him in 2014, he spends three years with the Yankees, a year with the Rangers, and his final playing year with the Astros as they win their first World Series in 2017.
Then it's 2019, Astros are again in the World Series against the Nationals. The sign-stealing scandal breaks and soon enough all fingers point at Beltrán. He's one of the very few people who received punishment. The Astros "lost" $5 million, yeah they probably made a billion off the ring; they lost first and second round picks in '20 and '21, 30/30 GMs would trade two years of all picks for a ring; Jeff Luhnow, AJ Hinch and Alex Cora got suspended for 2020, lol lmao, appropriate those ended up being fake suspensions for a fake season; and Beltrán, who had just been tapped as manager for the Mets, stepped down.
At first I thought MLB was depressingly cavalier about the cheating. It fit with my model of MLB and the owners as a bunch of shitheads hellbent on ruining the point of the sport, but something wasn't sitting right, and then it started to break--oh, the Red Sox were cheating, as were the Yankees, and so, it seems, were a lot of teams in baseball. I don't think the Cards or Cubs were but I think an uncomfortable number of teams were cheating, and while the Astros' trash cans may have been the most glaring example, I think of it as a Lance Armstrong situation. Most teams were cheating, the Astros were the strongest, so they got the most out of it. It also lines up with the lack of real punishment: MLB considered it, the Astros threatened lawsuits that would reveal 10+ teams were cheating, and so they agreed on a slap on the wrist for being the ones who got caught, but nothing lasting.
Also the Astros beat the Dodgers in 2017, that's a W for fans of 29 teams. And maybe I want to rationalize the flaws of the guy I still like, but the question "Why didn't the Dodgers' astronomically wealthy ownership raise hell?" sure is answered neatly with "They were cheating too."
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2hr ago
Left join, but ok. The trick is doing this in Excel.
madeofmeat
2hr ago
The link to the "I don't see any value in the HBD hypothesis." comment is broken by the ?context parameter (because of deleted comments upstream?). This seems to be a working link.
In general, I wish TheMotte's comment linking would work more like reddit's or Hacker News' instead of trying to force the context-parameters and #context everywhere (what's this even for?). Support a permalink that's a post-url/12345 (add a 'permalink' link under the comment that gets you this) that shows only the 12345 post and it's children and an anchor link post-url#12345 (you could make the timestamp of the post clickable and give you this) that shows the whole thread but centers on the given post. Don't add extra "show context" parameters unless the user asks for it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
“Everybody assumed that you had to seize a port first. That those [ferries] were second echelon forces… Somebody else has got to seize the port,” he said. “2021 was the first time we saw them dump amphibious assault vehicles right into the water, which means now those ferries can be the first echelon sending assault units straight to the beach.“
You underestimate the Chinese to your peril. This is the biggest shipbuilder in the world. Is it hard to produce a transport that can disgorge landing craft and amphibious tanks? No. They can do this. You should inherently assume they can do this because it's pretty straightforward. Why is your model of China a country that lacks these basic capabilities? They can build a space station but they can't build a fancy car freighter?
Do I think they can succeed in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan right at the start of the war? No. But it's not that the Chinese military is 'crap', it's that it's a very tough operation they've never tried before. Nor has the US. The US has not fought a major power at sea since 1945.
Chinese amphibious capacity is less than 10 ships, which provides less than 1000 soldiers per trip.
One Type 075 can transport about 800 soldiers. They have 3 in service. They have a host of other amphibious warfare ships as well, type 072s and others... Many, many more than 10. Where are you getting these numbers from? They have an enormous amount of usable civilian capacity.
I can tell by your diction you have some experience here, normal people don't say tube artillery. We are looking at a very serious conflict with a very strong power. The Western world is not well-served by wildly inaccurate and overconfident denigrations of adversaries.
Consider just how much Chinese technology has infiltrated port infrastructure. We need to treat this threat with deadly seriousness, otherwise I suspect there will be a lot of unpleasant surprises in our future.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
3hr ago
She hasn't had to do the trouble shooting or the general tech support we had to do, because computers are functional tools now.
Yes, this is huge. My aunt was a programmer back in the 1970s, and debugged programs by staring at raw core dumps until they made sense. I will never develop that skill, because I have access to tools that are much better for over 99% of cases I will ever deal with. Similarly, I use her old punchcards as bookmarks.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
3hr ago
- Full outer join on table name
- Then just null and equality checks until you are there.
Admittedly I can't do this in Excel (because I don't use it), but it's a trival squeal (SQL) or any other tabular tool question
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
3hr ago
As long as there's a null option, which I hope would be called "Barabbas".
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
3hr ago
That's actually so much better than I was expecting. Whew.
You are much more cynical than me. And I am extremely cynical, but damn, still not enough. Failing this in any capacity is just inexcusable.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3hr ago
Well written.
I could say that for Blues, the problem is that your math might be wrong, and that for Reds, the problem is that you think you're in control, that your accounting of the variables actually correspond to reality in some meaningful way such that you can do math with them. I could say that Reds have a fundamental belief that death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist, and Blues, to a first approximation, view death itself as a pure negative and see death, at best, as a lesser evil in exigent circumstances.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable.
I have pretty blue tendencies, and this seems like a pretty good and fair summary of my views, rather than something I would vociferously disagree with.
Definitely some wisdom in the "yeah but all those calculations are actually bullshit" reminder though. All models are wrong, some are useful, many are harmful if you forget the ways in which they are wrong.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
4hr ago
The more we pay, the worse the candidate pool is, simply because it draws more normies that are in it for the money than geeks.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
4hr ago
Definitely video editing.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
4hr ago
Seriously? My Excel job interview question looks more like this:
- on worksheet A you have schema and table names and their sizes in the main DB
- on worksheet B you have schema and table names and their sizes in the backup DB
- show me all main DB tables that are either missing or have the wrong size
- bonus question: show me which schemas are completely fine
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
4hr ago
Math is hard. If, in a few seconds, you can see the relationship between 30 mile/gallon and $3/gallon means you get 10 miles per dollar, so for 450 miles you spend 45 dollars, then you probably have enough quantitative ability to work a six-figure job.
You can take a few seconds longer and just brute-force the calculation through 15 gallons. I guess the problem is that using math to solve problems feels like work to a large percentage of the population, so they don't do it if they can get away with not doing it. Why keep a rough running total of your shopping cart contents in your head when the cashier will just ring it up and you can just pay with your credit card? If you really must reduce your spending, then you can just sit down, get your calculator out and do work.
MotteInTheEye
4hr ago
Hlynka has been hanging out in this space and its predecessors getting banned and unbanned for the better part of a decade now. The discussion around "maybe just a 3 month or one year ban would correct the problem" misses the point - there is no question of changing the way he interacts here, there is just the mods' decision about whether the good outweighs the bad or not, given the way he will inevitably interact. I don't have a strong opinion on whether they got it right or wrong, but any criticism of their decision should be focused on that question, not hypothetical approaches to get him to clean up his act.
aichanuwu
5hr ago
(I will be using movies and pop culture as a common reference point for ease of communication. This is not flippancy, it is deliberate)
Repurposed ship for amphibious landings (not port/dock disembarkation) come in three flavors: converted helidecks for air assault/aerial resupply (call of duty modern warfare style fastroping down a Sea King) , direct beach-and-disembark shore disembarkation from the ship (crash right into the beach ala Brad Pitt in Troy) or converted smallboat carriers (Saving private ryan style fastcraft loading/disloading). Technically there is a fourth option of staying offshore and dumping soldiers overboard to swim the last 2-3km to shore but that is especially stupid.
None of the Chinese civilian sealift capability is capable of any of the above. You can shove soldiers into a passenger ferry or a container ship or a ro-ro, you can't get them from ship to shore without any of the above dedicated landing assets. None of these ships China has supposedly 'retrofitted' have launch or recovery capability, so fastcraft is out. No one actually does beach-and-disembark because you can't use that landing zone anymore - once its beached its stuck, and thats if the vessel can actually shove itself right against the shore to disembarkation depth, and China simply does not have heavy lift rotary assets to staff up a converted fleet of helicarriers, nor is it anticipated to do so - conversion programmes such as they exist seem to point to a capability of making ungeared panamaxes into containerized drone launch platforms. Maybe you can get three Ehang 216 to transport 2 dudes at a time per ship per trip, but thats the best I can think of.
If China gets a port, then everything is on the table, but nothing in Chinas actual table of equipment or advertised future capability indicates actually performing a landing into contested territory. Again, the USA is super OP in terms of its logistics capability and this has become an underappreciated if not outright ignored facet of tea-leaf reading into Chinese intentions vis a vis their extant capabilities.
TowardsPanna
5hr ago
Thanks!
Hypothetically, what goods could I buy with it without running afoul of some KYC or other reporting?
dasfoo
5hr ago
I think that if you were able to secure Morris' testimony that he paid Hunter's liabilities as part of an agreement with Joe Biden to prevent bad press that would hurt Joe Biden's election chances, it would be a comparable situation. Currently Morris is claiming he made the payments out of the goodness of his heart and with no electoral motive. I don't believe that for a second, but in order to successfully bring a prosecution you'd need some way to prove that Morris is lying.
I trust that the State of California is doing their best to trap Morris into a plea deal wherein he admits as much! As it is, he has nearly run out of money and can't afford to buy more than 11 of Hunter's paintings. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/15/hunter-biden-legal-defense-kevin-morris-money-00158237
I just don't think moderation is the issue here. The mods as far as I can tell are generally doing a reasonable job. From my perspective the biggest problem with the state of the Motte is, well, the user base. It's this:
The Motte has a culture. It even has, unfortunately, a groupthink. I don't think it's really possible to have a community of humans without one. But it means that the Motte has positions that it favours as a group, and positions that it disfavours as a group, and this is very obvious if you look at the distributions of likes. People here, just like people on Reddit, are reflexively upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they disagree with, regardless of intellectual rigour, and the same in terms of verbal responses. Trash that aligns with the majority consensus is favoured; gems that don't are disfavoured.
I'm sure anybody who's gone against that consensus has experienced this - you yourself describe an experience that I've had as well, where low-effort posts that agree with a majority view are heavily rewarded, whereas high-effort posts that I'm quite proud of are probably found under 'sort by controversial' or even 'most downvoted'.
Now it's easy to round that complaint to "people don't agree with me", so we have to be careful with comments like that. My actual preference, for here and for every web forum, is to just eliminate upvotes and downvotes entirely. I think they usually have negative consequences on a forum's culture - in particular, they enable that kind of mindless upvoting-stuff-I-agree-with behaviour, and by providing rapid feedback on how something is received, they make every post more of a spectacle. I find them the equivalent of the studio audience at a presidential debate, cheering for stuff they like and booing stuff they don't, all the while getting in the way of a reasonable discussion or debate between the people at the top.
However, changing that can't actually change the overall landscape, which is the way it is because the user base slants a certain way.
I don't think 'Red Tribe' is the right word here. Going by Scott's original formulation, I would be very surprised if there is more than a handful of Red Tribe people here. Red Tribe is not a synonym for 'conservative' or 'right-wing'. My read is that most of the Motte are Blue Tribe, understanding that to be to do more with education and manners, but also broadly speaking on the right. Even there I want to qualify a bit, because 'the right' is quite diverse, and while we have our share of tech-y-libertarians and people-with-weird-theories-about-race, I'm not sure we have much of that pick-up-truck-driving football-watching beer-drinking evangelical-church-attending gun-owning crowd that Scott called the Red Tribe.
The Motte has very few 'normal' leftists, but it also has very few 'normal' rightists. I always find it a bit weird and refreshing to have a chat with what I think of as 'normal' rightists. I don't want it to sound like I think those people are all lower-class idiots either - they're not. But I chat with people along those lines about politics and suffice to say it does not sound anything like the Motte, even when it is very educated.
Can the Motte change, and attract a more ideologically diverse user-base, and also make its atmosphere more attractive to people with different and challenging perspectives? I don't know. I suspect probably not. Most online communities can't change that easily.
But there's also a case that maybe it shouldn't change like that. Right now this is a place for a particular kind of weirdo, and there aren't a whole lot of spaces out there for people like this. You could accuse me, perhaps not without reason, of being one of the greys from this comic. It's true, I don't love the culture of the Motte and I'd like it to be different.
But then, in other contexts, I've been the pink one, and I know what it's like to be besieged by demanding greys. So maybe I should just forebear, and let the Motte be the Motte, even if that sometimes makes me want to hit things.
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