DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
1d ago
The people pushing MeToo didn't really understand the situation.
The first sexual harassment was in 1974. By the 90s lawsuits we common enough that Michael Crichton's Disclosure (1994) featured a fake sexual harassment complaint as part of a conspiracy.
Business men protected themselves through a mix of better behaviour, legal strategies, and other techniques to avoid trouble.
However since the lawyers involved were strongly left wing, liberal strongholds like Hollywood and the Media were given a pass and ignored. This was compounded by the fact that those industries attract a lot of pretty girls, have powerful men at the top, and look down on traditional sexual rules.
This wasn't well understood on the left, and they all insisted on believing that Republican businessmen are the worst people ever and much worse about things that MeToo covers.
So activists pushed MeToo hard. Then they noticed that all the big fish going down were on their side. So they sort of stopped talking about the whole thing.
DradisPing
3d ago
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
In this case the LLM is trained on data containing word tokens instead of words. So it can't actually see the letters of words and can't do certain wordplay.
DradisPing
12d ago
The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!
Blacks physically mature a bit more quickly than whites, and there is a real bias against white players at the high school level. Tall white kids tend not to get court time on the high school teams and often go over to baseball where being a tall pitcher is a plus.
DradisPing
12d ago
I think most serial killer cases today will solve themselves, in that they will eventually turn into pretty open and shut style murders.
Often a victim gets away or kills the killer. It goes down as burglary or attempted rape, since it's generally not clear that the killer was planning to kill them.
DradisPing
12d ago
The press have refused to interview him and the DNC cancelled early primaries because they were afraid of him winning a few of them.
Polling wise he was doing much better than Nader ever did. As a spoiler candidate he was putting Biden - Harris in a position where they would have do dump campaign resources into moderately safe states. So there's been an unprecedented legal effort to keep him off of ballots.
Basically he's an outlet for disaffected hippy-ish Dems who have objections to the Big Government / Big Corporate administrative state policies in things like agriculture and health that are currently unquestionable in the DNC. Also things like should we really be pushing for war against Russia and Iran. Or is having "ex" CIA agents as reporters really a good thing. Or is having the FBI & feds identifiy "misinformation" or "malinformation" on social media really a good thing.
He has a bunch of connections to lib left people in tech.
The big thing is that it will give social cover to people on the left who aren't keen on Kamala. It undermines the whole "anything to stop Hitler" message. It's easier for people to not donate now and speak out against some of the "thumb on the scale" stuff Google has been doing in elections.
DradisPing
12d ago
gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain. Damaged wheat crops are harvested with roundup to kill the plant, thus drying out the wheat, and TPTB would rather blame gluten than roundup.
The other possibility is folic acid fortification, which started in 1998.
DradisPing
16d ago
I'm not a gun expert, but is there a risk that if the scoped got knocked in transport he'd need to re-zero it?
DradisPing
19d ago
You're brain hasn't been trained to automatically read the road and the environment to pick out what's important. You're actively evaluating everything on the road because it's a new experience and your automatic systems don't know how to handle things.
Long term drivers just cruise around on autopilot. You need to drive more to establish a baseline of what's normal on the roads in your area.
My best advice is to make sure your first car is something that would be described as an "old lady car". You can wobble a bit in your lane and everyone will give you plenty of space. If you start off with a BMW everyone will assume you're an aggressive asshole driver and won't let you in.
DradisPing
21d ago
I think Colbert's problem is that he's a sketch comic who kind of fell into political humour because of the Daily Show. He was doing a sort of Bill O'Reilly parody, but The O'Reilly Factor ended in 2017 and lost relevance long before that.
So fundamentally he's not big into thinking about politics and coming up with jokes based on that. He just goes along with whatever the current Dem talking points are and writes jokes around that.
DradisPing
25d ago
When I hear that something like half of Trump supporters claim to literally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, yet I also see that basically none of them used guns to do anything about it, it gives me some doubt about this whole "bulwark against government tyranny" train of thought
Most people in the US have a vision to Tyranny built around English aristocrats oppressing them with uniformed troops.
The reality is any tyrannical group coming into power is going to be too weak at first to use the police to oppress their enemies. Instead there's a gang of government supporters who are allowed to commit crimes against the disfavoured groups without the police intervening. Often they are masked, but not always.
This is a very loose category that includes everyone from the KKK to Hitler's brownshirts to Antifa. Maduro has 'colectivos'. They are just everywhere.
The second amendment is very effective against this loose category. Without it inner city crime gangs would have been driving out the the suburbs and rural areas to rob and kill.
Things like the 2020 election are about allegations of widespread corruption. Guns aren't helpful there. They need to tighten laws and gather evidence.
DradisPing
26d ago
Currently they are assigned randomly by lottery to valid applicants. I've long argued that an easy first step is just sort them by salary and assign them that way.
DradisPing
29d ago
This might not be the case in every city but in Toronto when the market was super hot plenty of homes would have increased in value if they burnt down to a pile of ash.
The people who make "heritage building" designations are quite overzealous since it doesn't cost the city anything. It just puts obligations on homeowners.
A pile of ash means that they don't have any justification to stop an owner from building a new home.
DradisPing
1mo ago
It's basically an erotic rape fantasy. Mocked by this meme: https://imgur.com/a/EGjKmW8
It was most likely inspired by Margaret Atwood hearing about how in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.
Of course the blue tribe women watching it couldn't admit either of those things. So they claimed it was a profound warning about Trump.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Like all other AI platforms, it refuses to embrace my artistic vision.
All platforms I've tried have failed to produce an image for "Show me Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Chairman Mao twerking at a night club"
DradisPing
1mo ago
If you've got some neck fat then a fitted shirt collar will strangle you a bit when you lean forward and look down like that. It's seen as a quasi feature since it forces you to keep your chin up.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Nerd wrangling is a specific skill. There are common patterns for failure for large engineering teams. Being able to recognize these and correct them is important.
Human behaviour inevitably means that organizations will be run by ambitions and internal alliances unless something stops it. Managers want to build their resumes by running ambitious projects. They often like or dislike ideas based on how much they like the individual who brought it up.
A tech leader needs to be able to bust things up a bit when they aren't functioning. That's why Musk is often described as being unstable and disruptive by existing management in the company. It's also why he has such a strong history of success at coming in as a new CEO.
Musk isn't deeply involved in developing tech, but when he gets a message from an employee about a problem and a response from the higher ups, he can tell if the higher ups are bullshitting him.
For that he does need significant tech skills, but doesn't need to be a specialist in any of the products.
Altman seems similar to me.
As for the tweet, general political commentary on twitter doesn't usually involve deep thoughts. He's stating a clear rebuttal that midwit followers can use in political discussions in their daily lives. The fact that a statement from the VP running for President can be rebutted with econ 101 says more about the state of the country than Musk.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Taylor Swift is basically the queen of white girls, so frustrations towards white girls get channeled into her.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I can give a broad overview.
Post Vietnam war there was basically a domestic truce declared between the pro-war and anti-war sides. People who served in the war were patriots who loyally served their country. War protesters were patriots who wouldn't let their countrymen die in a misguided war.
When Kerry got back from Vietnam he became a major figure in the protest movement. There's some dispute about what he actually said personally, but he at least associated and sat on panels with people who were saying horrible things about US soldiers. People from his old unit got at least the impression that he was saying he saw them commit horrific war crimes.
Since this was back in the 70s there aren't many recordings showing exactly what he said when.
Once things quieted down it wasn't heavily criticized due the de facto truce and he went about his political career.
Then in 2004 when he was running for President he wanted to play up his war record. Bush only served in the air national guard while Kerry was deployed and won a silver star. Bush is a little younger than Kerry and got a deferral to help on one of his father's campaigns. By the time he would have been deployed things were winding down in Vietnam and the NG didn't really need him for anything.
In the Presidential campaign Kerry cast himself as a proud veteran. Meanwhile other swift boat veterans were still pissed off at him. They had been quietly shit talking him for 30 years.
Some of them got in contact with Republican organizers and we got a bunch of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" ads.
Basically a bunch of people who had reason to dislike him came forward and badmouthed his claims about his military service. I have no idea what the truth is or the specifics of the claims.
The Dems organizers didn't really understand that just because other veterans weren't talking about him publicly didn't mean they didn't still carry a grudge. They don't run in the same social circles.
So from the Dem point of view it was a manufactured conspiracy that came out of nowhere.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Following polls too closely can drive you crazy. There are broad effects unrelated to the news cycle.
In this case, Republicans always poll poorly in August. A big chunk of the R base is outside camping or barbecuing and ignoring calls from pollsters.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Not that I'm aware of. There are things like "Topaz Video AI" that does AI enhancement and are trained on a large dataset. They work well enough that trying to add to the training on a small dataset isn't seen as worth the effort.
DradisPing
1mo ago
What are some good ideas, as an individual, for decreasing street crime in highly Democratic-leaning cities, other than just moving away?
Fundamentally the issues are caused by wealthy leftists not having to live the consequences of their ideology.
If you really want to improve things I'd suggest spending your weekends operating a shuttle service that takes the rougher individuals from downtown to and from the upperclass parks and neighbourhoods.
DradisPing
1mo ago
There's the Israel conflict but there's also always the Sunni -- Shia conflict simmering in the background.
Haniyeh likely had enemies in Iran who were willing to tip of Israel.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above).
I actually have a theory about MeToo. Harvey Weinstein is a talented producer and he's difficult to replace in that role.
He was also the top bundler for Dem political donations in California and a key fundraiser for Dianne Feinstein. He's much easier to replace in that role.
So I think someone big in Hollywood wanted to take Feinstein's senate seat in 2018. She was in her mid 80s and didn't survive that full term. Taking out Weinstein could have reasonably been an attempt to get her to drop out.
Trump had just been elected President in 2016 with no prior political office. Obama held a US Senate seat for only four years before becoming President in 2008. A nationally known name becoming a California Senator in 2018 and then running against Trump in 2020 doesn't sound too wild in that context.
Then MeToo spun out of control, Feinstein refused to budge and the plan went nowhere.
I have no idea who the big name would have been.
DradisPing
1mo ago
It's well known that Google engineers cull autocompletes they don't like. They also offer different suggestions based on ip geolocation and whatever data google has on you.
For a brief moment in 2012 we had "Google Gaydar" from Steve Sailer. He noticed that you could quantitively rank how gay the public thinks celebrities are by noticing how many characters you have to type after their name before google suggest "gay" as an autocomplete.
Sadly we aren't allowed to have that kind of fun, so Google only suggests "gay" for out of the closet celebrities.
Note for first link, it looks like a bad database migration messed up the character set encoding for the text and all of the "pretty quotation marks" have garbage around them. Anyone who was doing web dev in the 2000s will have horror stories of those awkward years where you never knew what encoding incoming text would be in.
https://www.takimag.com/article/google_gaydar_steve_sailer/
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/06/google-neuters-google-gaydar.html
I was trying to find the right words to capture a bunch of different things. I was thinking of having the lawyers explain to the bosses that making passes at subordinates endangers the company and they will be fired, while also making sure that they are aware that there are a lot of ways to use money and status to get sex outside of the office.
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