Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
No bio...
User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23hr ago
I suspect a lot of discussion of athletics focuses on biological advantages because the discussion is often about elite athletes. At that level, it can be assumed people have coaches, regiments, etc that are dedicated to squeezing every ounce of advantage out of things they can be doing to improve their performance. So focus goes to biological advantages. Not because those are the biggest differentiators across the entire performance spectrum, but because they can be large differentiators at the level of elite athletes. At a more beginner/amateur level more hours spent practicing is almost certainly more valuable than all but the largest biological advantages. Like, the reason I could squat 400+ lbs five years ago, but can't now, is not because I am became biologically incapable of squatting 400+ lbs in that time, I just spend a lot less time in the gym than I used to. At non-elite levels the amount of time and effort you put in can have very large effects.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I work for <large software company> that provides me access to Claude Opus 4.6. My work is primarily in a several-million-line-of-code legacy service written in C#. I use Claude itself generally via the GHCP CLI. I broadly agree with the analogy that it is comparable to having a junior dev or intern to hand to actually write changes you need done. My best results at one-shotting a change are when I give Claude a change that's probably in the few dozen up to 100 line of code scope. Beyond that, it can be hit or miss as to whether Claude itself will successfully break up a change into smaller chunks or whether I need to do that preemptively. Probably the biggest benefit Claude enables is improving parallelism. I spend much less time actually typing code and more time getting other things done. If all I did was sit and stare at Claude doing changes I could otherwise be doing, I would probably be less productive by using it but I largely don't have to be. I can tell Claude to make a change and then go do something else, come back and iterate, rinse and repeat.
For now, it seems like a very useful tool but I am not particularly worried about it taking my job. I also have not used it in a context where I am exposed to how much it costs so it's unclear to me if the ROI is there either. I will say that I often have better results when I do things like give it more context, especially specific in-repo examples, and the different harnesses I've used (VSCode integration, Cline, CLI) do seem to make a substantial difference to its output.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
It's a little bit of SCOTUS trivia but the "Chief Justice" is just a particular seat on the court. Only 3 (of 17) Chief Justices were raised from an Associate and only 5 had ever been an Associate before becoming Chief.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
This past Wednesday at the Supreme Court saw oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara. For those not following along this is the birthright citizenship executive order case. You can find the full transcript here.
As someone who listened to the live audio and has now read back over the transcript a couple times I think things went pretty poorly for the government. So much so I wonder if this was the straw that broke the camel's back with respect to firing Bondi. I'm very confident this case is going to be 7-2, if not 9-0, against the government.I'm not going to rehearse all the arguments, it's very long.
The government's oral argument mostly focused on the idea that for a child to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for the purposes of the 14th amendment their parents had to be domiciled here. Where domicile requires (1) lawful presence and (2) intent to stay. The justices (principally Gorsuch, ABC, and KBJ) poke a bunch of holes in this argument. Pointing out both practical and theoretical issues with both parts of the definition. It is not my impression that the justices were especially convinced by Sauer's answers to those questions.
The respondent's oral argument, by my read, was much more focused. Why did Wong Kim Ark mention domicile in some contradictory ways as to whether it mattered? How to understand the association between the posited set of exceptions. If the different language of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was any guide in interpreting the 14th amendment. Interestingly Justice Alito even jumped in on this first one to volunteer a reason why Wong Kim Ark might mention domicile in the question and the holding without having incorporated it into the relevant test.
This is all tea-leaf-reading, of course, but my current read is the government is very likely to lose.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
8d ago
As someone who would describe themselves as broadly anti-manosphere I think the problem is these debates are generally conducted at such a high level of generality as to be useless. They imagine "society", "men", and "women" as undifferentiated masses with uniform preferences in ways that don't really reflect reality.
Men & Women are judged and valued by society differently. Men are valued based on their ability to climb up social hierarchy to obtain status. Women's value is more reflected by their attractiveness, and reproductive capabilities. Masculinity (attempts) to provide useful guidelines and structure to achieve this end. Women simply do not exist in the same space, so their variation of being a role model wouldn't be a good representation of the male position. It would be a kin to a white man trying to be a role model for black boys - the critical social context is not there.
When you talk about "society" valuing people differently, what does that mean on the level of the individual? I am pretty confident my status in my TTRPG friend group and my status in my World of Warcraft guild and my status at work all depend on pretty different factors. Which one of those is "society"? All of them? None of them? Similarly, my wife sometimes goes down to the local bar to play Bingo and is part of a local beekeeper's group. Is it your assertion that her status in those groups is (primarily? substantially?) based on her attractiveness and fertility? Are those not "society"?
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default. You are simply born a sexy girl - you simply gestate a fetus - and then give birth to it. There is little to no skill barrier required in comparison.
I'll echo others that this is surely true for some women but, almost definitionally, cannot be true for most women. It can't be the case that most women are just born into, say, the top quartile of attractiveness! Some further fraction will have issues that impact their fertility as well.
The problem with "being yourself" as so often espoused by liberal types is that, it provides 0 road map to achieving the traits that women (and people in general) value in men.
The point with the "be yourself" advice is that there is substantial variation in what people value and it is better to develop a relationship or friend group with people who value you when you are the way you want to be instead of forming a relationship or friend group where you have to force yourself to be some way you're not. To take a personal example: I'm not particularly good at or interested in sports. Could I force myself to practice and get better and learn more for the purpose of fitting in with a friend group who was really into sports? Probably. But better for me to find a different friend group who enjoys the same things I do (video games, anime, ttrpgs, etc). Similarly I could probably force myself to suppress my interests for the purpose of attracting a woman who found those interests off-putting. But why would I want to do that instead of finding a wife who shared those interests? Speaking from some observational experience with my brother and a friend having to suppress your interests that way sucks!
Why isn't there a Presidential ball room already?
I suppose Presidents have largely not felt a need for it. I don't think it's a crazy position that the White House should have a larger permanent structure for holding events than the previous ~200 person seating in the East Wing.
Also why is there so much opposition?
How about because it will be ugly? My understanding is the proposed size for the new East Wing is somewhere between 50% and 200% larger than the White House depending on whether you count square footage or three dimensional area. Should the White House be dominated by one of its wings in height and size?
I suspect a lot of people are also disturbed by the process by which this was conducted. Previous significant renovations (construction of the East and West wings, Truman's renovation) were done in conjunction with Congress, paid for by the government. In this case a bunch of private individuals and businesses donated money to Trump (very specifically, not the US government) and the whole thing is being paid for privately. This is conceptually in opposition to the notion that the White House belongs to the government, to We The People, rather than being a possession of whomever happens to be President.
I think opposition being motivated by exclusivity is a weird take. The ballroom is much larger than the building it is replacing. Surely many more people will be invited, not fewer. That's the point of building a larger space to host events.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15d ago
I guess I don't understand why Plyler v. Doe doesn't settle the issue. Quoting subsection (a) of the holding from the syllabus:
(a) The illegal aliens who are plaintiffs in these cases challenging the statute may claim the benefit of the Equal Protection Clause, which provides that no State shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is a "person" in any ordinary sense of that term. This Court's prior cases recognizing that illegal aliens are "persons" protected by the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which Clauses do not include the phrase "within its jurisdiction," cannot be distinguished on the asserted ground that persons who have entered the country illegally are not "within the jurisdiction" of a State even if they are present within its boundaries and subject to its laws. Nor do the logic and history of the Fourteenth Amendment support such a construction. Instead, use of the phrase "within its jurisdiction" confirms the understanding that the Fourteenth Amendment's protection extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State, and reaches into every corner of a State's territory. Pp. 457 U. S. 210-216.
The equal protection clause is, itself, the final clause in the first section of the 14th amendment (emphasis added):
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Am I supposed to be reading into this a difference between "subject to" and "within" a state's jurisdiction? Does "jurisdiction" mean something different between two clauses of the same paragraph of the 14th amendment?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
I think compelled civilian deference to the military is the opposite of how it should work. The military exists to serve civil society, not the other way around. There's a reason the Commander in Chief is a civilian.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
You want a constitutional amendment to guarantee veterans priority for boarding and deplaning commercial flights?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
29d ago
I don't disagree but I think a key prerequisite missing here is the President builds support, both in Congress and in the public, before launching hostilities. The President deciding to bomb some people and then everyone has to go along with it so we don't look weak isn't, and ought not be, how it works either.
If you are a programmer I recommend clicking through to the referenced red team blog and reading some of the technical details they have revealed. "Crash any OpenBSD host with carefully crafted TCP packets" seems pretty bad. And finding bugs in cert libraries where they only verify that DNs match rather than verifying thumbprints is a classic.
More options
Context Copy link