DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
Saved ! Great song. Thick basslines make lives.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
It's popular in New York City, because many in New York City don't drive so it's a tax on other people. Not so popular outside NYC.
Exactly ! Why national outrage over a single bridge in a location where it makes sense ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
"Urban crime" is a scoped to make all cities look bad, when the issue is of some neighborhoods in some cities.
Oakland or Baltimore are generally violent. Downtown Seattle or SOMA SF have homelessness and nonviolent property crime associated with it. I dont recommend living in these neighborhoods and I am in complete agreement on the dire need for possibly non-compassionate methods for resolving these issues. But these cities/neighborhoods are rarely the subjects of discussion.
Statistically, transit focused American cities are exceedingly safe. NYC & Boston are the nations 2 big transit cities. Both the cities and their transit corridors are quite safe. Hell, you can fall asleep late at night on the subway and wake up in East NY (murdertown).... and it's still safe inside the subway complex. As mentioned before, bad neighborhoods are ofc crime ridden. But connecting them to a common transit doesnt bring crime to your doorstep.
That being said, I'm glad that the YIMBY/Transit crowd has decoupled from the compassionate/pro-homeless crowd.
Strict enforcement of public safety is essential to getting people to use transit. The caltrain (well run) vs Bart (total mess) are great examples while being within a few miles from eachnother.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
imposition of tolls under the CBDTP pilot project appears to be driven primarily by the need to raise revenue for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) System as opposed to the need to reduce congestion
For context. All revenues collected under this program are earmarked for MTA projects.
If it is the primary goal of the program is up to interpretation. And as you said, the state could always throw it into a pile and use it for MTA projects anyways. Earmarked or not.
I'm with you on everything else. For once, I'm a shameless partisan on the issue. I like to think I can empathize with the stance of my ideological opposite. But car brained Americans have to be operating under advanced stupidy or extreme malice. I see no sympathetic position for them.
Even the smallest inconvenience to cars thousands of miles away makes them go into a frenzy. No one is coming for cars in rural America or the suburbs or even godforsaken cities like Atlanta. We're talkimg about vanilla-ass transportation policy in world cities like LA, NYC, SF, Boston, Philly, Miami and DC.
Not even a red vs blue thing. Californian opposition is so comically evil in their demands for an acceptable subway line that I cant help but think there is something I'm missing.
based on two defects
From the document, this came across as an argument rather than a statement of fact (Sec Transp argues that the 1991 exception for congestion pricing was vague so he he's going to interpret it as he sees fit )
Reading between the lines, it's pretty much a 'Biden let you do it. I wont. Fuck you' letter. It even acknowledges the positive reception among the public.
It comes across as another example of Trump pushing the power of the executive to its furthest limits (every executive outdoes their former on this, but Trump 2 is a whole another level)
Congestion pricing is popular. Its in a deep blue state and doesnt have a partisan bent. (Republicans take the subway too). Im not sure why Trump is so appaled by it other than simplistic 'highway good, transit bad' memes.
Unsurprisingly, there has been nothing said about the flagrant disregard for rule of law by the executive of New York.
Executive overreach vs executive overreach. About damn time Democrats started playing politics rather than fumbling around like baboons.
I recognize that FHWA under the prior Administration concluded, when executing the November 21 Agreement, that the CBDTP was eligible for approval under VPPP, and that my determination represents a change in position.
What is the precedent around retroactive change to previous approvals, esp. when the capital expenditure is already done ?
Man, is it hard to get anything done in the US. No wonder the infrastructure is crumbling.
Congestion pricing launched after surviving multiple lawsuits filed on both sides of the Hudson River.
How did stuff ever get built in the US ? The system offers infinite tools for opposition to block every project. How did the interstate system get built ? Was there a clear before-after for when this kind of systemic obstruction became commonplace ?
I'm surprised that Trump fans didnt see the civic disobedience coming. Politics and the balance between the various pillars is a massive grey area, always has been. The boundaries around this area are primarily upheld by expectations of civility and perceptions of what gets you voted out of office. "X is illegal" is never that straightforward.
Trump won by throwing civility out the window, slaughtering every sacred cow and still got the popular vote. Dems are learning the obvious lessions. Trump is about to find out why certain pandoras boxes stay closed. (Assuming the dems are somewhat competent )
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
Fighter pilot.
Resilience to stress is more important than excellence. Both of them can fly a plane. Only one of them knows how to keep his cool in stressful circumstances.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
In stating examples of scissor statements, your post will recieve dismissive comments. But, I loved it. It articulated why I felt a strong discomfort while reading scotts post.
I thought, ofc no one takes POSWID literally. Then Scott wrote a takedown of the literal implication. It felt oddly tonedeaf for him. Turns out, people do care about the shallow claim.
To me, POSWID accusations are veiled versions of "sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". This is especially relevant in American meritocracy, where incompetence may be seen as worse than malice.
If American police keep killing black people without sufficient body cam footage and police are good people, then maybe theyre stupid. After spending a year in SF, maybe social workers combating homelessness are incompetent. American defense, healthcare, etc. Stupid or evil. Pick one.
Calling people stupid is a social faux pas. POSWID claims are a socially acceptable way to call people stupid.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Yes, but that's because they believe they can have their cake (their Indianess, communities ties) and eat it too (be in a clean & wealthy place).
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Unfortunately, change usually comes from violent revolt. Olds don't fight. Geriatric welfare is a democratic phenomenon.
SK is primed for revolution. Every man serves in the military. They had a (failed) emergency and subsequent (successful) impeachment last year. The leader before that was ejected in a anti-govt protests. So far, jobless men giving into a 'laying flat' depression rather than violent retaliation. Not sure how long that will last.
South Korea is a fascinating nation. A first world nation where everyone seems miserable. Strong contrast with India, where people live in literal filth, yet seem happy and content. What's the main source of this deep nihilism ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
don't need to use my money to study tuna for "sustainability" reasons
Fisheries is a massive industry. We're seeing widespread collapse of wild populations for crabs and migratory freshwater fish.
Agriculture, fisheries & husbandry are always subsidized by govts. Govts move research burdens away from the farmers, by making public universities do the heavy lifting instead. These jobs were not created as a result of DEI. The 'tuna research' guy was in his job since the mid-1990s. It's indirect social-welfare.
US will experience a "brain drain"
The US is defined by brain-gain like no other nation before it. It has selected for 2 things : Intelligence (high skill immigration) and agency (the kind of person who will seek gold an ocean away). Brain-gain is practically American industrial policy. Cooling down would still imply brain-drain on the balance.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Vivek and Vance seek power. Ackman seeks money. It's different.
Lastly, the current trading system, while far from perfect or fair to the U.S., has served us extremely well so we need to be prudent in how we change it so as not to upset the world order in such a manner that it disadvantages our country over the long term.
The fear is palpable
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
because of low hanging fruit like the Common Crawl
You're underselling the size of Common Crawl. At that pretraining scale, the emergent properties of the model are near identical. Shady data is useful for turning models into experts at narrow tasks. But if the task is generic and isn't gated by access to shady data, then the models will give identical answers.
Broadly speaking: Model_output = function_of(prompt, post trained personality, conditioning information)
I am assuming that the prompts were identical and the post-training personalities don't factor into this exercise. That leaves conditioning information.
Fields like programming (Github) and News (Twitter) have private sources that Openai or Grok can leverage to get an edge over their competitors. Other fields like Physics, gaming & image creation are amenable to simulation and therefore improvement through RL. Lastly, private data collection can help fill in gaps for applied fields where there is a rift between what is written and what is understood. (medicine, law, etc). Macro-economics is none of these 3. There is no simulation, no private corpus, no information that an expert can feed into an LLM that improves its intuition on how markets work. In such cases, the LLM will default to a logical process that emerges from the median knowledge of its public corpus.
This means that models will give identical answers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.
Bruh, they're all trained on the same base data.....ofc they give the same answer. It's like seeking the true religion, and then interviewing 5 different people in Saudi Arabia.
The models diverge in post training areas (coding, creating writing, etc), but not on long-tail questions like 'how to implement tarrifs effectively'.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Neither are unconventional but....
- Banana bread should always be toasted. toasted till the (salted) butter burns. Heaven on earth.
- Pain Perdu = French toast. But, instead of adding sugar into the mixture, you sprinkle it on the soaked bread and then toast it in butter.
I suspect Brazilian cheese bread will toast great.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
They aren't anywhere near the city of Dnipro, but they control the other side of the bank for the last 400 kms leading to the mouth.
These are the control maps as they stand: [1] [2]. The 400 km stretch gives them plenty of bottlenecks to choke Ukraine's economy with plausible deniability and limited military intervention.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
Could you elaborate on this ? Do you mean the GTA ?
25% of Canada's population lives inside of Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal. Ofc they get to decide regional and national outcomes.
- Greater Toronto controls Ontario.
- Greater Montreal controls Quebec
- BC / Vancouver are wild cards
- Greater Montreal + Greater Toronto control national politics because they have more people than all the remaining provinces combined (Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland)
For all intents and purposes, the nation of Canada is one consequential urban corridor containing 50% of its population (Quebec City -> Toronto). The remaining Russia sized mass doesn't get a say, because it is the minority. That is how it should be. For comparison, the Boston - NYC - Philly - Baltimore - DC corridor only contains 14% of Americans.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
What's your current take on the ongoing Ukraine diplomatic drama? Are the Trump Talks likely to lead to the Trump Treaty? Or are they just ongoing comedy and flailing? What does a durable peace treaty look like these days?
Trump squandered hard won leverage for nothing in return.
Ceasefire is a good idea. But the terms hugely favor Russia. By freezing current boundaries, they give Russia full control over the Dniper river. For all intents and purposes, this will doom Ukraine to Russian control. Trump held all the cards, gave Russia everything they wanted, and asked for nothing in return. I don't get it.
The standard argument is that American resources can't be stuck in Europe. The next war will be in the Indo pacific, and resources need to be focused there. I agree on all points. But then, why not force Russia to economically decouple from China ? Post-Ukraine-war, Russia has become economically dependent on China, ending up as the clear junior partner in a fast developing 2nd front. Before the war, Russia was economically coupled to the EU. From an objective perspective and from the perspective of political maneuvering, this sudden ceasefire doesn't help him or his allies. The US might be able to refocus on China militarily, but I don't see them gaining economic leverage on China.
Everything from now is speculation and likely won't happen, but Trump's actions increase the possibility of the following events if nothing changes. Here goes: Ukraine is too dug in. Lot more Ukrainians will die before they formally concede. Now that Ukraine is caught with their pants down, Russia is free to mount a fresh offensive come spring. EU will have to choose between focusing their large capital expenditures on reindustrializing vs rearming. With the (arguably misplaced) paranoia of a hot-war with Russia, they will be forced to pick the latter. Therefore, they'll losing vital ground to China as it eats more of Europe's high-skill industry lunch. Ukraine's reliance on EU will make it bad optics for Europe to repair ties with Russia. As a result, Russia will build deeper ties with China formalizing the 2nd front for good. By creating strong incentives for an economically strengthened China, a concrete China-Russia block & a weakened EU, I fear that Trump might have kick started the end of the empire.
I don't believe that Trump is a Russian asset. But the man is following every step of the 'is a Russian asset' playbook.
P.S: My fanfic assumes that the publicly shared details of the deal are what the deal is.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Agree. There aren't a lot.
The last 2 years have been especially lame. For me, ZFold3 (2021) was the last 'special' phone.
But, ones I use daily are:
-
Folding phones - I had the Samsung folds and it isn't a gimmick. The huge screens make a difference. I loved being able to point the point at any angle, rest it on a surface and take photos of myself without needing to ask a bystander.
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Remote trigger - specifically, the ability to press the samsung stylus buttons to take a photo. They enshittified this one though. The S25 stylus lost this feature and the ZFold 5 doesn't allow you to store the stylus inside. This paired well with folding phones because I can place the phone where ever, and take a photo from the button on the stylus.
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Better GPS & fitness tracking - I put them together because they're usually used hand-in-hand with the smartwatch. GPS is just better (agressive) now. I use it for skiing and it tells me my top speed, tracks my runs and all the standard fitness stuff down to the second. Eats your battery really fast though.
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Location based actions - Auto switching my ringtone/vibrate/notification profiles between work & home locations.
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Picture in picture - Not exactly new. But now stable in all new phones. I can have a floating window playing youtube on my phone 24x7 without affecting the smoothness of the phone.
As I type this, they're all minor.
I has a OnePlus 3T in 2017. It was a substantial improvement on every aspect of my previous smartphone experience. Between the 3T in 2017 and the S25 in 2025, Not that much has changed.
There is AI stuff ofc:
- Better camera post-processing
- Google Lens
- Google Translate
- Insane image editing (removing objects, moving people within the scene)
But for some reason that feels like its own thing.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Yes! And my younger cousins seem to agree. You speak of MMOs, but back then, the MMOs were special too. (Ragnarok, WOW)
IMO, media peaks in a certain era and you just have to accept it. New art forms appear to have a sweet spot at the intersection of maturity and novelty. That's when their best versions are created.
For example, take movies. They hit this sweet spot from 75-95. Jurassic Park, Rocky 1-4, Terminator 1-2, Die Hard, Shawshank, Godfather, Schindler's List, Star wars etc. There are equally great movies made after 95, but they don't have the same novelty. There are equally important movies made before 75, but they seem to lack maturity (of exploiting the art form). Afterall there are only so many stories to tell. There are only so many heart-strings to tug at.
For games, that happened between the late 90s - Mid 2000s. Half life 1 - Skyrim marked an era of special video games.
A telling sign of the end of this era is when authenticity takes a back seat to subversion & commentary. This is most stark with architecture. Mid-way through modernism (right after mid-century modern and at the beginning of Brutalism) Architecture ran out of authenticity. Sometime in an earlier era, Architecture had peaked and run out of novel ideas. So everything novel fails to evoke primal emotions and everything evocative is derivative. I see this trend with games. Where everything is about references, callbacks and subversive characters. It doesn't mean it can't be interesting or entertaining. Borderlands 1 & 2 did an amazing job at exactly this. But, it can't ground an era and wears-out-its-welcome quickly. Ofc, there are still great games (Souls-likes, Larian, etc), but ofc, they're derivative. Derivative works will never be as special as the 'the first'.
Over long time horizons, there are paradigm changes. As the core constraints and tools of a field change, it allows for novelty. But it can be decades of centuries between such paradigm shifts. Until then, a mature art form must languish between derivative and subversive.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen
I had all the classic traits of childhood ADHD : Loud mouth yapper, easily distracted and stress-driven ultra focus. Home support alone could not have saved me. My parents had no idea what they were dealing with. The problem wasn't caused by them either. I got the same standard strict-south-Asian upbringing that turned my peers & cousins turned into compliant adults.
School should provide initial resources to help students understand their quirks. The 0->1 step can be huge, and that's where schools have the most impact. Additionally, schools see 100s of kids a year. They're best equipped to pattern match the student to their unique quirks.
Some kids can't be a fixed by parents alone.
boys who are a little too male
I suspect the same. My dad was a know-it-all Tarzan incarnate. He was always outdoors and would spend his summer in forests (literally) collecting dead butterflies & hunting rabbits. ADHD is passed down dad-to-son, and I suspect he had it too. But back in his day, he could could get all his physical energy out. I grew up in a school without a yard. Sports were banned. The contrast couldn't be starker.
I've recently found drums to be the best way to exhaust ADHD energy. Strongly recommend. That's a couple of positive anecdotes towards - "ADHD people need something to exhaust their physical energy on".
School alone is pretty ineffective
Agreed. As much as school can help equip parents and do the 101, the rest of the struggle is on the parents & the child. The school can't be handholding the child through 12 years of special education. It's not sustainable. (I can feel a suburban-sprawl / car-culture / death of community rant welling up in me. Imma shut up)
With all that being said, ADHD meds are a game changer and should be viewed as complementary to behavioral interventions.
The first time I took Vyvanse, I was bewildered by new abilities that my siblings & friends insisted all normal people are able to do without extra meds. Most importantly, the meds got my life in order so that I could spare time for learning good habits. The meds helped me follow routines, and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not. Nowadays, I skip my meds on the regular and can still salvage 70% day in a way that I never could before. I wish I'd gotten started 20 years ago. Even if I'd weaned off them, school and college would've been manageable. I would've had fewer struggles with bullying, basic orderliness and studying subjects that my ADHD brain had deemed uninteresting.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Agreed.
I too like Pete better. (as much as should 'like' a politician)
He doesn't shamelessly exploit his tribal membership cards. (any more than standard politician amount) It would've been easy for him to ride a 'Gay' or 'Veteran' wave, but he's stayed true to an Obama-eque eloquent-statesman image.
As a shameless YIMBY, I was surprised that he took transportation. All good transportation policies are uphill battles and the head-of-department for failure. Successful projects considered underused, wasteful & go massively overbudget. (Peak usage for new infra takes years to pick up). Failed projects have all of that and also don't get finished. By those standards, he's done a good job as transportation secretary. There was the whole FAA coverup that Trace leaked, but even he seems to like Pete. So I won't hold that one against him. Pete's also younger, and I like that.
Newsom definitely comes off as slimy. Also his California Governor term has bad optics. The zombie-ville SF & LA wildfire videos will not do him any favors. He is more likeable than Kamala & Hillary, but that's a low bar.
1 Politician vs 25 Undecided Voters
I like to think of myself as a good public speaker, but I can recognize when someone is straight up better. This guy is so good. (Obama and Trump too). Supreme wordcels. Vance is a good speaker too, but he doesn't have the necessary flair to stick his landings.
Before anyone comes around calling Pete a 'McKinsey consultant lite'.........I view that as a positive.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Does anyone else see the way various people on the American left, particularly left leaning media, have been doubling down on "Trump is Hitler," "Harris ran a flawless campaign," "the voters are just sexist, racist, stupid, and evil," and so on, and that they shouldn't change policies to win over voters, except maybe by moving even further leftward
I see visible splintering in the democratic party.
Pelosi (Geriatrics) & Kamala (DEI Dems) want to hold onto their remaining power. They have been doubling down. Basically milking the population for the last bits of anti-Trump hysteria that won them the 2020 population.
Younger Vanilla Dems (Pete, Newsom) think their best years are ahead of them. They are trying to gain power. They've done full U-turns on woke era issues (Pronouns, trans people in sports, DEI). Example 1 . Example 2.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Took a look. Damn, family based immigration is a straight exploit.
Immigrate illegally -> have a child -> wait 20 years -> get a greencard for both parents -> sponsor all the siblings and children.
It is a long con, but securely brings the whole extended family over 1-2 generations. A part of me feels thats anyone who spends 30-ish years of their life working around the system deserves a green card just for the effort . But, im not the median motte commenter.
I would have expected limits to chain immigration. Like, someone who came as a family based immigrant cant sponsor family based immigrants. Or that you can only sponsor minor siblings. But it's quite liberal. The long waitimes seem to be the only throttling tool on hand.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
Americans think other nations can read their minds.
After Trump's tantrums, every nation is is questioning their goodwill with America.
Among nations, anti-immigration rhetoric is perceived as xenophobic rhetoric.
America first is seen as an acknowledgement of American transactionality in every partnership.
Philippines is our little brown brothers
This is infantilizing. It has a population and GDP equivalent to Vietnam, a nation to whom America lost its most recent war in the Indo-pacific.
Non-western nations understand that white lives matter more. That's why Ukraine was important. If America is okay with letting whites die in Ukraine, then there are going to be objectively fewer fucks to give when brown nations are in crisis. America's strongest military alliance (NATO) is Trump's hobby horse to beat on. Why would a non-NATO nation be treated any better ?
If China is the to be the next global superpower, it makes sense for Philippines to ally with a natural trading partner next door, rather than their colonial ex-masters on the other side of the world.
Yes, 1 borough of 1 city containing 1.6 million people. All this outrage over 0.5% of the nation's population ?
60% of commuters use public transport in NYC. 3 types of people drive into NYC : Rich people, Blue collar workers and suburbanites who would who have been forced back by RTO policies. Rich people can pay the toll. RTO suburbanites would be compensated by their companies. Hourly blue collar people would rather save time and make a few more dollars.
I don't know if you've driven into Manhattan before, but it is a total shit show. Tolls or not, I can't imagine anyone wanting to drive into the city by choice. Congestion pricing takes what is a universally miserable experience, and makes it tolerable for some while incentivizing the rest to take the less-painful path (transit). It is a as close to a universally good thing as you can get.
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