JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Anybody remembers "elevatorgate" yet?
JarJarJedi
8d ago
I am an adult and I don't use discord a lot but I have at least two groups I participate with which are on discord. I don't know why discord specifically, it could be anywhere as far as I am concerned, but the fact is they are on discord, and so there are a bunch of adults there. That's just how it happens - a group decides "why don't we set up online presence?" and one of the people says "I know discord, I can set us up there" and voila - the whole group is now on discord. Could end up on Telegram or Slack or whatever - it's kinda random.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Tell me you don't actually know any introverts without telling me you don't actually know any introverts.
Everybody has their blessings and their curses. I am sure your blessings are plentiful, but there are people for whom the chance of success cold-asking a woman out in person are exactly zero. It's just a fact. There are things that some people can do and some can't. Some can win a match with a professional boxer and some can't. Some can run a marathon and some can't. Some can bench press 2x bodyweight and some can't. Some can successfully charm women in person from cold start and some can't. Giving them advice "don't do shit you have - maybe small, but non-zero - chance with, and instead do shit which you have zero chance with" is strictly harmful.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
They just wouldn't release this proof, if it ever existed (which it likely does not), but instead destroy it (which they likely did long ago, if it ever existed, which it probably didn't from the start). We know for a fact about many recent cases where evidence of crimes was destroyed (e.g. Clinton records, or IRS records of prosecution of Tea Party NGOs, many such cases) and absolutely nothing happened (except for some noise in the press, but there's always noise in the press). In fact, just recently we learned the videos from Jan 6 about pipe bombs just "disappeared" and... nothing. It is trivial and safe to disappear any evidence if you are in control of the government. Moreover, there had been ample evidence of both Clinton committing perjury, and Clintons having deep - much deeper than Trump ever had - links with Russia (among many other foreign interests, if anything, they are very equal opportunity corruptionist) and exactly nothing happened.
And this is not unique and not specific for Clintons alone. In fact, we just this week learned Fulton county illegally certified 315K votes - something that people were prosecuted for trying to look into - and mark my words, exactly nothing will happen to people who had done it. In Minnesota, billions were stolen under Waltz watch (and likely with his active enablement) - do you think anybody from his team will suffer any serious consequences (like jail and expulsion from politics)? Neither do I. I could add examples here ad nauseam, but I think my point is clear - it's only in movies once you publish something that looks incriminating a top political figure, they are instantly overthrown and the closing credits roll in. In reality, in most cases very little happens, especially when we talk about somebody of Clinton's caliber. There are too many people invested in it.
So summarily we would have some murky indications (because anything else had already been long destroyed) against the massive coverup machine which had already achieved numerous coverups. The premise that they did not release supposed dirt on Trump that they supposedly had, because they feared - while holding absolute control over the government - that this machine will fail to protect somebody as unassailable as Clinton - is completely laughable.
It's a big club and you ain't in it.
And you think this big club can't manage to release dirt on Trump without bringing Clinton down? After all they have done so far?
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Oh, they will try to make hay out of anything. If Trump would fund research that cures cancer, they would declare that he finances dangerous experimentation with poisonous chemicals that kill living tissue and prevent growth, and plans to inject millions of people with them to enrich his friends. There's always a way to frame something in a bad light. The antidote for it is pulling back the curtain and expose the game.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
would have brought down a bunch of bigshot Democratic politicians and donors too like Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton hasn't been a "politician" by that and pretty much nothing short notarially authenticated tape of him committing a felony could "bring him down" in any way. That's the person who fucked interns in White House and lied under oath and got away with it without any "bringing down" happening. Imagining that some words from Trump - which would automatically be dismissed by 100% of the Left as lies no matter what he says - could "bring down" anybody on the left, let alone a figure like Bill Clinton, is complete nonsense.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
That's some messed up thinking right here. Of course he knew Epstein, nobody ever tried to prove he didn't - he himself admitted many times he knew Epstein, and they had interacted socially many times up to 2000s, and then he personally banned Epstein from his clubs after learning about him recruiting there, which is pretty hard to do if you don't know him. Pretending as anybody is arguing that "he did not know Epstein" is just insane. There's a big distance between not knowing somebody at all and being best friends for life. And there's a very long timeline here, spanning decades, for the duration of which Epstein met very many people - pretty much everybody there is to meet. And of course there would be photos, that's the whole point of it. The whole business of "being connected" is having photos of you with celebrities, and being in the same parties as important people are. Implying that this means everybody who ever been in the same room as Epstein is now complicit in his crimes is bullshit.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
She looked me dead in the eye and said "don't talk to me".
That is what I call immature and asshole behavior.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
People meet in all kinds of weird places. But discord probably not ideal - you'd at least want to know how your potential mate looks like, not?
JarJarJedi
10d ago
That's always one of the possible outcomes. You take the risk, and often it doesn't pay off. And the girl doesn't owe anyone her acceptance of their advances, if she feels uncomfortable being propositioned, she can refuse, and she can leave. There's nothing immature about it. One has to decide if it's better for him to always leave in a state of vague hope but never know, or to risk it and know either way.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
I've only been to France a couple of times for work, and of course IT professionals all spoke very decent English, but from the people in service (waiters, ticket clerks, etc.) it was very much hit or miss. Some spoke absolutely zero English and basically refused any attempt to bridging the language gap. Once I had to use ticket machine instead of the ticket booth because the clerk refused to understand anything (which is kinda weird in a railway station - they must have significant tourist traffic there) and once I had to go to another restaurant because they didn't have any non-French menu and refused any attempt to discuss the order in English (it was before Google Translate time of course). It wasn't too bad in general, I found my way around to food and transport fine eventually, but I got the impression that some people in France definitely don't want anything to do with English. In Germany I had an opposite experience - we once got lost on a train station and asked some German ladies (in English) about it and they gave us super-detailed explanations and refused to part with us until making sure we made to our train, and their English wasn't that great (better than my German for sure!) but they were extremely enthusiastic about using it. We felt a bit uncomfortable that we took much more of their time than we planned to.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
That's my problem too - I can squeeze out some basic Spanish phrases (donde esta la biblioteca?) but my capability of understanding the answers goes down quickly. Especially if the environment is noisy, as my hearing is also not what it used to be (it's mostly ok but I could miss some details and when trying to parse a language I am not well versed with, it starts showing).
JarJarJedi
12d ago
(Uncle Sam knows your date of birth and contribution record)
Yes, and you would think they would have some provisions so that the database wouldn't have records showing 100+ year old people being paid, and other invalid cases being identified, but that's not the case. They can make it clean, they just didn't bother to.
There is significant retail rorting of SSDI, but mostly by Red Tribers so not something a Trump-led DOGE would want to go after.
What this is based on?
JarJarJedi
13d ago
I am going to be in Madrid for a week or so next summer. Mostly work, but probably also some free time. I have been studying Spanish for a while now, and I got to the level when I am mostly understanding written text, at least up to the newspaper level (though some rarer words are missing, but mostly I get through), but when I listen to the radio it's about 50/50 chance I can understand. I know most people these - especially in tourist places and hotels and so on - would speak English likely, but I think it'd be cool if I could speak Spanish to them - and especially understand them speaking Spanish to me. Any suggestions about how could I increase the likelihood of this happening?
JarJarJedi
13d ago
Medicare, medicaid and SS also give some opportunity for grift, and so does defense budget (I mean, if climate change is a threat to national security, we can finance climate change projects through defense budget, right? And if racism is a public health issue, we can finance DEI programs via healthcare budgets as well) we still have almost a trillion dollars in discretionary non-defense spending. It is true that solving the budget balance without addressing mandatory spending is not possible. But I am not talking about solving the budget yet, I am just talking about cutting off the most aggressive leeches, and thus forcing them to at least play on equal footing. My point is not about solving the budget - that can come later - but about denying the enemy the resources which should be either deployed to more worthy causes or returned to (or not taken from) the taxpayers. If the Left wants to donate to their favorite causes, they are welcome to, but without the help of the IRS.
And even Krugman (who one can usually rely on distorting the reality as much as possible to benefit The Party) admits this:
Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers.
The schoolteachers part is most likely a lie (I didn't check but I know who Krugman is) but the preceding part is true - significant chunk of federal money goes as "aid" to local budgets, where it is rerouted - either directly, or through a basic fungibility trick - to various pet causes. Establishing transparency and control over this would do the conservative cause a lot of good - but they are doing virtually nothing about it.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for,
Only in a very broad sense, e.g. if the money is labeled "covid subsidies", it is going to somebody who claimed they need a subsidy because of COVID. But whether they actually need that subsidy, whether they should be in the front of the line for that subsidy, and whether their claim has any relation to reality, and whether they are actually going to spent the money to the cause they promised to spend - all this is controlled very weakly. And the leech networks have long adapted to the weak controls and learned to extract money by saying the correct "open Sesame" phrases, after which they get access to streams of money.
That said, I absolutely agree that state and local money need the same treatment.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
Some form of DOGE would be a good thing to do. Given how fast it was crushed, there are a lot of money (tens of billions at least, maybe more) that basically are stolen from the budget, and it enables huge number of people to do damaging activism full time, without any resource constraints, while the opposing side has to balance having day job and family and mortgage and all the normal dependencies and vulnerabilities. That's like fighting a professional boxer while trying to cook a meal and care for an infant at the same time. No way you wouldn't lose badly. Disrupting this process would make a huge impact. Even just revealing the details of this - and consistently making it the focus of the discussion - would make an impact, most normies have absolutely no idea how much of the crap they are paying for from their own pockets. A lot of this information is out there, just buried in terabytes of forms and reports. Some of it is non-public, but can be revealed if there's sufficient energy dedicated to it. But except for a handful of people, not a lot of politicians, even from the conservative side, take any interest in that. Partially because they have their own, smaller, grifts, which could be disrupted by revealing and stopping all the massive grifts.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
First time I read Hyperion the sequels felt like a letdown, so I set them aside. Second time I read through them, it was all awesome. I plan to re-read the whole thing again sometime in the future.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
Didn't have time to do proper service to those books I read yet (surprisingly, the list is longer than I remembered), I decided in the meantime to do the list of fails - those books where I started reading, but got stuck and put them aside, either for a while or forever.
The Annihilation Score (Charles Stross, Laundry Files) - I used to enjoy Laundry Files series, but the quality has gone downhill, and by this one it became unbearable. Also the author himself is a completely un-sympathetic (to me) character, which I would be inclined to overlook if the work were good, but it isn't. To the discard pile it goes.
Use of weapons (Ian Banks) - I enjoyed Player of Games, but this one just didn't work for me. I feel nothing for it and it felt like wasting time. Undecided whether I want to continue with Banks in general (recommendations welcome) but likely done with this one.
Mercy of Gods (James SA Corey, of The Expanse fame). Actually an opposite reason - it's pretty good as a book, but way too dark for me right now. With all that's going on around me, I feel like I just can't stomach that much of physical and psychological torture, death and suffering. I am only a weak man. Maybe I'll return to it in happier times.
Unbearable lightness of being (Kundera, obviously) - this one is very famous and I totally don't get it. It's not bad, just, you know, meh, and I expected more. I set it aside and will return to it, probably, when I'm in more suitable mood for it or maybe just older.
A Tale of Two Cities (you know this one) - ever more famous and highly praised book than the former, true classic, same symptoms. I mean, I am not saying it out of contrarianism, I even actually like his style and wordsmithing abilities, but with some books (with much less technically capable writers too) it makes me care what happens and why, and this, for one reason or another, does not.
Burmese days (Orwell) - Orwell is most famous for the book everybody heard of, but he's a genuinely good writer overall (IMHO) and I enjoy his writing. But this one also was a bit too hopeless for me - I understand why one could write a book about "everything is shit and is going to shit" (especially when everybody else pretends it's actually going peachy) but reading it when everything had gone to shit, and goes to shit even deeper now, is taxing. I will likely return to it next year.
Barbarians at the Gate (Bryan Burrough and John Helyar) A very, very detailed book about how the big business is done, on the example of RJR Nabisco. Very interesting, but the amount of details is a bit overwhelming, so I had to take a break. Will likely finish it sometime next year.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
I wasn't getting Anna Karenina for a long time, probably until about 40s too. Though I was a bit hampered by the fact that it had been taught in Soviet school, and that can give a bad taste to anything. Tolstoy himself was in his 40s when writing it, so that also may be a factor.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
If you're making any money, you're doing it wrong.
Tolstoy was born into a very aristocratic old money family. I am not sure what'd be the US equivalent of this, maybe like Kennedy? And he didn't like how things were going, so obviously the opposite of what he saw is correct - if my family has tons of money and relies on other's work to provide for us, the right thing is to have no surplus and dig the dirt with your hands and mow with the sickle.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
Hard to say without context what it actually means. Out-of-context random images can be very misleading. No idea what's happening here.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
Well, what would you expect - a cage match to first blood? Most people, if they find themselves in a common social situation with somebody whose views you may not respect, would politely smile and behave, that's the norm of the society. You could avoid going to places where you could encounter people like Chomsky (or Bannon) but if you are politically and socially active, you may end up in the same room with them and maybe even discover you have friends in common. What then?
JarJarJedi
18d ago
The reason states don't board planes in mid-air is because it's dangerous and murder / reckless endangerment is bad.
Lukashenko essentially managed to pull this off (well, not exactly this but something very close to it): https://apnews.com/article/journalist-belarus-dissident-sentenced-4c4c0c21838f79ab98b44b97366af379 Of course, it works only once, then the planes would just route around your country, and pulling this off outside of your borders is practically impossible.
I don't believe either of it. I don't believe it's at 30-40% of a senior programmer now (at least what I understand as "senior") - more like 10% at best - and I don't believe it will be up to 80% anytime soon. For me senior programmer is somebody who can write a serviceable database server. I don't mean in a weekend or so (some people could but I don't ask for that much), but he'd be technically competent to produce most part of it, given adequate time. Higher level either go deeper (like designing an optimizing compiler which would require some deeper theoretical background) or go higher to more social aspects like matching the design to actual domain requirement (questions like "what kind of database we actually want to use here and what is more practical given limited resources we have?"). I don't see LLMs coming even close to being capable of solving problems like this. And given current model, which is "make a tiny-shredded salad of all existing knowledge and regurgitate is in various combinations" I don't think it's possible in principle.
As for practical applicability, I have a mixed experience with LLMs. From one side, it's pretty good with simple coding tasks - e.g. when I tried to vibecode an app for personal use to track my gym schedule, it did it admirably. Admittedly, it made some choices I personally would never make, but if I pretend to not know anything about coding it actually built a workable app from zero without me (deliberately) using any of my coding knowledge, just by saying how it should look like. This is certainly gets to the level of junior programmer and maybe about 3/4 of the mid-level one. If you don't care how it works, how well it works and what happens inside, it certainly can produce code that does things. You need to watch out though because while I was working on it, there were a couple of times when it misunderstood me and attempted to wipe out half of the existing app, and I had to tell it "don't do that". Since I insisted on approving every step it was doing (deliberately not trying to go far beyond "it is wiping the whole thing now? oh it doesn't then fine, go ahead" but still exercising some judgement) it was ok, but if I put it into fully autonomous mode I'd probably end up with nothing useable.
On the other hand, many times when I tried to use it on a more deep but more specific tasks, it failed horribly. It invented things that do not exist, it gave me contradictory advice, it once tried to convince me to wipe out my whole computer because it didn't know how to solve a certain permission issue (which it caused by hallucinating solution that doesn't work), and it was horrible. Last frustrating exercise was when I tried to have it explain to me how to use two certain APIs together, and it wrote a plausible code and configs, except it didn't work. Then it told me I need to do some changes, producing a very plausible explanation why the code (that it produced) can't work. It didn't work with the changes either. It had a very plausible explanation why it doesn't work and instructed me to go to the original version. When confronted with the fact none of its contradictory suggestions actually works, it said "something else must be wrong" and essentially gave up. Later I found by myself it used the API in a completely wrong way and confused two different versions of the APIs even though I gave it exact versions I am using. That's what you get for using a chinese-room machine that does not contain any facilities to actually understand what it is talking about.
Summarily, I think for doing "solved tasks" - which is a lot of programming done nowdays, like creating yet another webpage that displays a result of a query from the database, etc. - it is already a decent tool and will likely become better. Probably sometime soon creating a simple app along known interaction scenarios would be something LLM would allow any computer user to do, not requiring any coding experience at all. However, doing more advanced tasks that require deep understanding, foresight and judgement is going to be completely beyond it. What is worrying me here is that human programmers learn on simple tasks to gain advanced understanding. If all the low-effort segment will be occupied by LLMs, how do we get new advanced programmers? Right now the pipeline is still functional, but if the things will go as they go, in 5-10 years it will dry up. It will likely be good for me personally, because if I would want to keep working into my advanced age, I will have less competition from the younger generations, but then in another 10 years current advanced programmers will start retiring, and the ones who grew up on "who cares, LLM will do it for me" will be completely incapable of replacing them. I hope by then the Congress will ban usage of LLM-generated code in medical, transportation and other high-danger devices, otherwise I'd be in trouble.
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