Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
18hr ago
I am under the impression this is already largely how the House functions, with committees. And particular committees (Rules comes to mind) being much more influential on general business than others.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
18hr ago
I am sure we would end up with some kind of electronic solution, but it's still something that would have to be built. Congress currently has electronic voting for bills but that currently has a rather limited number of options (Yes/No/Abstain). Currently any Representative-elect can say basically any name as their choice for Speaker of the House. I don't think it needs to be anyone nominated in advance nor even any Representative-elect. Do you just give everyone a text box and hope ~5k people all type the correct name together? Do you constrain options in the voting system? Interesting to think how those discussions might play out.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23hr ago
It is pretty funny to read the history of the development of Chinese pronouns in the CNN article alongside the Wikipedia page for singular they in English. So Chinese had a gender-neutral single pronoun. That pronoun evolved into a specifically male pronoun, as was the English fashion of using the generic "he", and so required the development of an equivalent female pronoun. Now Chinese is in the position of re-inventing a singular gender-neutral pronoun, again following an English fashion for referring to non-binary people.
It is not specifically in the form of an app but these kinds of symbolic incentives for voting already exist? Stuff like I Voted stickers and campaign buttons have been popular in the United States for decades. My own state (which has primarily mail-in elections) even offers downloadable stickers to put on your social media. I'm fairly sure, though I haven't done it myself, political campaigns hand out similar things for volunteering and so on. Is it supposed to be the app-based part specifically that's innovative? Or some different verbiage that's more motivating? Maybe tying it all together as a unified progression? I wonder if at some point you run into state laws restricting the giving of a thing of value in exchange for some of these activities.
Unrelatedly, a bunch of his ideas about how to operate a hard party to take power are just straight up illegal in the US today. Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States describes many of them. If your plan requires you to first takeover a substantial fraction of state governments to change their election laws so you can have the political party to take over the state, I don't think your plan is very good! People have thought before about making the kind of party Moldbug envisions. It turns out we used to have them and they kind of sucked so we largely made them illegal.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
7d ago
I suspect Kavanaugh's objection is largely procedural. He wants the President to use the right words in the declaration nationalizing the guard. The obvious angle might be to adopt the dissent's line that the legal prohibition on deploying the Army is itself the source of the inability to execute the laws using regular forces and therefore he needs to federalize the guard.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
7d ago
How about that Supreme Court? For those not following this saga, there's been an emergency application pending at SCOTUS for some weeks regarding Trump's attempt to federalize and deploy the Illinois National Guard in support of various federal immigration enforcement initiatives in the state, primarily around Chicago. The federalization and deployment was enjoined by the District court. On appeal to Seventh Circuit they lifted the injunction as to the federalization but left the deployment part intact. The government then appealed to SOCTUS to stay the injunction on deployment. Today, in a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS denies that stay.
The relevant statute here is 10 USC 12406(3) which provides, in relevant part:
Whenever—
(3) the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States;
the President may call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to ... execute those laws.
At SCOTUS the question of interest is the meaning of "regular forces" in the statute. In particular, does "regular forces" include civilian law enforcement (FBI, ICE, CBP, etc)? Or does it mean the regular military (Army, Navy, etc)? SCOTUS today gives the latter answer. Six justices rule that "regular forces" means the regular forces of the United States Military. Inability to execute the laws of the United States with the civilian law enforcement apparatus is not sufficient to federalize the National Guard to assist with that purpose. The opinion and dissent break down in some interesting ways.
First, there is an apparent five justice majority (Roberts, Barrett, Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson) who sign on to the majority opinion and do not write separately. Note that majority opinion also goes further then I mentioned above and seems to say that any presidential declaration that the laws could not be enforced with the "regular forces" requires a situation in which those forces could be deployed. This heavily limits the situations where it would seem to be applicable since there are a lot of restrictions on the use of the United States military for civilian law enforcement purposes.
Second, Justice Kavanaugh writes separately to also deny the stay. His primary objection is that the President has not made the correct kind of declaration. He has declared that he cannot execute the laws with civilian law enforcement but not that he can't with the military. It seems in Kavanaugh's view the only thing that needs to change is the President needs to make the correct declaration. He does not otherwise join the majority opinion about restrictions on that declaration and offers a hypothetical that makes me think he disagrees with it.
Thirdly, Justice Alito and Justice Thomas dissent from pretty much every aspect of the majority opinion. In their view the issue of the meaning of "regular forces" was not properly preserved on appeal. Even if it were it includes civilian law enforcement. Even if it didn't a legal disability (like the Posse Comitatus Act) would satisfy the requirement that the President is "unable" to execute the laws.
Finally, Justice Gorsuch writes in dissent. He focuses in on the procedural issue in the Alito/Thomas dissent and says he would grant the stay on that basis. He otherwise recognizes the questions discussed by the majority as difficult ones and would rather address them in another procedural posture.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10d ago
I'm seeing some reports (ex: here) that files in the initial dump that contain unredacted pictures of Trump with Epstein are being removed. Just incredible. The picture itself (as best I can tell) is not even particularly incriminating. It looks to me like it's a copy of this picture of Trump, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell posing together, under some other photos in a desk drawer. Perhaps the image was taken down for unrelated reasons but I'm seeing a lot of speculation that it's because Trump was in the picture, in whatever capacity.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
12d ago
It's a little interesting to contrast this with my perception of Chen's attitude. He clearly was dedicated to making sure software that used to work would continue to work for users. It is basically never the software users fault that the program they bought did things wrong. On the other hand, he has palpable contempt for the developers of user-mode software that took a dependency on some undefined or non-contractual behavior and created these compatibility constraints. Ex: Application compatibility layers are there for the customer, not for the program
Some time ago, a customer asked this curious question (paraphrased, as always):
Hi, we have a program that was originally designed for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but we found that it runs into difficulties on Windows Vista. We’ve found that if we set the program into Windows XP compatibility mode, then the program runs fine on Windows Vista. What changes do we need to make to our installer so that when the user runs it on Windows Vista, it automatically runs in Windows XP compatibility mode?
Don’t touch that knob; the knob is there for the customer, not for the program. And it’s there to clean up after your mistakes, not to let you hide behind them.
It’s like saying, “I normally toss my garbage on the sidewalk in front of the pet store, and every morning, when they open up, somebody sweeps up the garbage and tosses it into the trash. But the pet store isn’t open on Sundays, so on Sundays, the garbage just sits there. How can I get the pet store to open on Sundays, too?”
The correct thing to do is to figure out what your program is doing wrong and fix it. You can use the Application Compatibility Toolkit to see all of the fixes that go into the Windows XP compatibility layer, then apply them one at a time until you find the one that gets your program running again. For example, if you find that your program runs fine once you apply the VersionLie shim, then go and fix your program’s operating system version checks.
But don’t keep throwing garbage on the street.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
12d ago
My hot take is that too many programmers use garbage collection as a crutch. GCs free you from some very specific work having to do with allocating and freeing memory but they are not a "get out of jail free" card for ever thinking about memory management or object lifetime again. Can think of a lot of examples of my own work in C# where people write inefficient code in hot paths without worrying about it because they let the garbage collector clean up after them.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
12d ago
This is getting off topic, but I thoroughly enjoy reading Raymond Chen's blog Old New Thing for the many stories of Windows bugs or implementation details or programmer misuses that later became compatibility constraints. When you upgrade your operating system and your Favorite Program stops working people rarely blame their Favorite Program even if it is the thing that was doing something unsupported!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
13d ago
I don't know. I find this a topic that it's pretty easy to be nuanced about. Different languages attempt to provide different guarantees to the programmer during their operation. To provide those guarantees they have to be able to understand the code and prove the code satisfies those guarantees. Most such languages provide ways to disable checking those guarantees for particular code sections on the assumption that you, the programmer, have information the compiler lacks that things will work without the compiler having to check. If you, the programmer, tell the compiler you know better and then turn out to be wrong I think it's fine to blame the programmer.
I think everyone has, in their mind, a different idea about the extent to which buggy code should be caught by the compiler and these ideas are what inform what side of the blame the programmer/blame the compiler distinction you fall on. As an example: In college a friend and I had to write some networking libraries in C. At the time we didn't use any fancy editors or anything, just good old gedit and gcc. My friend was writing a function that was supposed to perform an arithmetic operation and return the output but every time he ran it he got a different (implausible) result, even with the same inputs. What was happening is that he had accidentally omitted the return statement for his function, so he was getting back some random garbage from memory on every run. Should the C compiler let you declare a function that returns a value and then let you omit the return statement? Is that mistake your fault or the language's fault? Formally doing this is undefined behavior but that does not always mean crash!
Well that's technically not true, they did. It's just that calling .unwrap(), a function which will immediately abort the application on error, counts as "handling" the error. In other words, the path of least resistance is not to actually handle the error, but to crash. I argue that this isn't a better outcome than what would have happened in C, which would also be to crash. Sure, the crash won't be a segfault in Rust, but that doesn't matter if half the Internet dies.
In this case I find the behavior of Option<T>.unwrap() unintuitive, but I am also coming from the perspective of exception-based error handling. As an analogy, C#'s Nullable<T>.Value will throw an exception if the nullable is actually null. That option obviously isn't available in a no-exception world. Maybe the default behavior should be more like the behavior with the try trait such that it returns the error instead of panic? Then let the programmer panic if the value is error, although that introduces another layer of error checking!
This month, a CVE was filed in the Rust part of the Linux kernel, and it turned out to be a memory corruption vulnerability, ironically enough. "But how could this happen?" Rust has these things called unsafe blocks that let you do unsafe memory operations, closer to what you would be allowed to do in C (though granted, I have heard convincing arguments that unsafe Rust is still generally safer than C). So the path of least resistance is not to do things the safest way, but to just surround everything in unsafe if you get tired of fighting the borrow checker.
I'm a little unsure of the criticism here of Rust as a language. Is it that unsafe exists? Presumably all the code that is not in an unsafe block has guarantees that equivalent C code would not. Is that not a benefit? Is the worst case here you wrap all your Rust code in unsafe and then you end up... as good as C?
To be clear, I'm not saying that these incidents alone mean Rust is a bad choice for anything, ever. I'm not saying Cloudflare or Linux shouldn't use Rust. I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't use. I'm just pointing out the double standards. Rust people can attack C all day using one set of (IMO, entirely justified) standards, but when they are confronted with these incidents, they suddenly switch to another set of standards. Or to put it more clearly, they have a motte and bailey. Motte: "Rust can't prevent shitty programmers from writing shitty code." Bailey: "C is unsafe, because of all the memory unsafe code people have written, and we should rewrite everything in Rust to fix all of it!"
I think there is a more productive discussion here about how language features and guarantees can help protect against writing buggy code and potentially making it easier to review code for bugs. I suppose I think of it by analogy to Typescript and Javascript. All Javascript is valid Typescript but Typescript needs to be compiled to Javascript. That compilation, in my experience, helps avoid whole classes of errors due to the lack of typing in Javascript. Sure you can write Javascript that just doesn't have those errors, and most people do, but Typescript renders them inexpressible. Similarly so for C and (non-unsafe) Rust.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
14d ago
I cannot speak for all managers but this description does not sound like any manager I have worked for. My managers have done key work in prioritizing the work for me and other team members. Coordinating work across teams. Translating high level strategy shifts from higher level executives into concrete terms for people like me. Their role has been very, obviously, valuable.
Previously, if someone took the time out of their day to physically travel to you and tell you something, you could reasonably expect it to be important.
It is kind of funny to read this in a world where Office Space exists. It's a satire but I am under the impression the phenomenon it satirizes was real. Was it important to put the cover sheets on the TPS reports?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
14d ago
Sure, but what fraction of jobs does that describe? The examples in the wikipedia article are things like store greeters, lobbyists, academic administrators, and managers. I think it would be pretty hard to characterize those jobs, depending on the specifics, as being like digging a hole and filling it back in!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
14d ago
Perhaps I am too economics pilled but at a sufficiently high level your outcomes (2) and (3) seem like the same thing to me. Or, to the extent they aren't, (3) seems like it contains a contradiction. On the one hand there are still going to be unmet human wants and desires. On the other hand I am supposed to believe there is no scalable use human labor could be put to in order to satisfy those desires. I am skeptical that both these facts can obtain.
I guess I'm also skeptical of the concept of "bullshit jobs" more generally. I have not read Graeber's book but browsing the wikipedia article for some examples does not give me confidence. For basically all the listed jobs it does not seem difficult to me to describe how the people doing the jobs provide value for the people who are paying them. Maybe "bullshit" is supposed to mean in some broader societal sense but then you are just saying you value things other than what market participants value. That's fine, but you shouldn't expect the market to produce outcomes as if it valued something else!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
16d ago
Important context that OP did not include and relevant for this comment: Cline's product is an AI coding assistant, similar to Microsoft's Github Copilot. My understanding is they don't develop any AI models themselves, their bot is a layer on top of various other AI models. I'm not entirely sure what "head of AI" means at a company like Cline but I doubt it is a trivial role, given the product.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19d ago
All the way back in 2019 Cory Doctorow wrote a short story about people radicalized into doing violence against health insurance companies due to claim denials. In his story it was a bombing rather than assassination, but still.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19d ago
I guess it's not clear to me why the memetic change being driven by genetic change is different from the general memetic change. To concretize a bit, I imagine a church founded by, say, Catholics. Consider two evolutions. In one case the descendants of the original founders (for whatever reason) convert to Mormonism and convert the theology of the church the same. In the second case the descendants of the original founders gradually move away or stop attending, but newcomers move in and gradually convert the church toward a Mormon theology. It seems to me that the church is no longer the same church in either case, whether the members are descended from the founders or not.
I also think the degree to which continuity is thenetic varies by institution. Consider, for example, an institution like "The Supreme Court of the United States." Or "The United States Congress." To the extent these institutions are continuous through time I think it is in primarily a thenetic way. In their form or structure.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
20d ago
To my mind there's a conspicuous absence of a fifth church:
- Church Five is a multi-generational congregation, with limited influence from newcomers. Perhaps it's in a remote place where the population doesn't change all that much. However over time the subsequent generations find themselves drawn to other beliefs and practices. So much so that after some number of generations there is little in it that would be recognizable to prior generations.
Is my hypothetical Church Five more like a Church Three or more like a Church Two? Is it identifiably the "same" church? It seems like a theory that permits continuity to be established by either genetics or memes would be constrained to say Church Five is the "same" church in the relevant sense.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
22d ago
Imagine you meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.
I guess two things that come to mind.
1. I notice the shift in goalposts from "she doesn't have any friends" to "the average woman probably wouldn't be her friend." I'll agree to the latter, but the former doesn't follow from that.
2. This also seems to ignore the existence of both happily single and lesbian women, for whom the potential partner stealing is presumably not an issue.
I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.
I don't disagree with anything in this paragraph, I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
I intended to convey something like (2), appreciate the clarification.
I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.
Why?
It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films.
Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
I think you overestimate the attention to detail people have. There's a bluesky thread here full of mistakes in AI-generated captions on anime from Crunchyroll. I cannot believe a human fluent in English read all of these along the lines they are supposed to caption and signed off on them. You would think a very simple and fundamental step in review would be "and then a human reads the caption alongside the line it's captioning" but no! Clearly not!
To take another example, in a legal filing by Anthropic their AI messed up a citation to a journal article. The AI got the journal, page number, and link all correct but got the title and authors wrong. The attorney's declaration was very clear that if you went to the link the citation provided it was the correct article (with correct title and authors). You might think a step in verifying an AI generated citation includes "do the cited title and authors match the actual ones" but, again, apparently not!
Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler and hit publish on the result, without any human sitting down and watching it all the way through.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
Assuming that 800,000 figure is correct in the first place (there’s probably room for doubt but that is beside the point) I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.
This paragraph inverts the justificatory burden, to my mind. If society wants to prohibit some profession they need a good reason for it. Thing are permitted by default, not forbidden. In the United States, at least, it's not like no one ever tried! They were consistently prevented by courts ruling that the first amendment protected the production and distribution of pornography. This in a sense just moves the discussion "up" a level, why not amend the constitution to permit restriction on pornography? But prohibition of pornography has never enjoyed that widespread degree of support.
Warehouse workers and information security officers have a certain level of respectable standing within their social circles. The likes of Bonnie Blue don’t. Women understand that she condemned herself to the equivalent of crack whore Hell.
Do they? I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.
It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc.
Why would she want any of these jobs? At 800k/month She will make the lifetime salary of many of these professions in a few years. Comparing to the warehouse worker, she made the equivalent of ~30 years doing that work in one month! It's also kind of funny if you read the first paragraph of her wiki page:
Blue was born in 1999[1] in Stapleford, Nottinghamshire. Before beginning her pornographic film career, she worked in finance recruitment for the National Health Service (NHS) and was married. In 2021, her marriage ended and she moved to Australia, although she told Cosmopolitan UK in 2024 that her ex-husband still worked with her "behind-the-scenes".
She had one of those respectable jobs and gave it up!
She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed. Maybe she’ll become a porn director and people will pretend like she has talent for it. Either way, everybody knows she’ll age out rapidly.
If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.
Now you might make the argument that she brought it all upon herself and thus should not be getting any sympathy and deserves poverty. But society doesn’t apply such norms to young women because they are seen as possessing innate biological value and also as naïve and easily misled. We’re aware that most young women who get drawn to porning probably don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of their actions, with the explanation being that they were fed modern feminism their entire lives and thus assume that women no longer live in sexual shame and that selling access to your orifices in camera is empowering. We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.
She clearly has a talent that means she doesn't "deserve" poverty. Even before she was getting rich from OnlyFans she seems to have had a fine career. I'm also skeptical she wants or needs my sympathy. I suspect things are going pretty well, from her perspective. There are plenty of things about the current pornography industry I think are bad but few, if any, seem to apply to Bonnie Blue.
I wonder if maybe you'd end up with highly specialized committees. How much of the bureaucratic/topical expertise currently embedded in executive rule making agencies could make it back into Congress if the House had 11k members? Although that expertise would probably not be optimally distributed, since it still relies on actually winning elections.
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