JulianRota
1yr ago
I basically agree, and would also note that it's only if he's on the knife's edge of losing power to a European/western friendly clique specifically who would want to re-open the pipeline as part of a western-friendly realignment. I think that if there is any real risk of him losing power it would be to an even more hardline Russian Nationalist clique.
JulianRota
1yr ago
In fact, the whole invasion of Ukraine is a prime example of many actors looking at the same geostrategic equation and coming up with different answers, each of which was obvious at the time, and usually wrong in hindsight!
As I recall, prior to the actual Ukraine invasion, at least 80% or so of the military commentators I could see thought Russia would take over Ukraine with the greatest of ease. Even for the first week or so, there was a lot of commentary to the effect of - these aren't really setbacks, actual invasions take a little longer than this even when they're going great, everything is still going according to plan overall, Russia will still end up stomping Ukraine with trivial losses.
JulianRota
1yr ago
A few thoughts:
I learned programming I think by something closer to the first intuitive method, and it's still how I generally encourage people to learn. I would describe it as, first write a program that does something you find interesting or useful, no matter how minor. Pay little attention to design, cleanliness, optimization etc, just bang it out and get it working. Once you have something that basically works, then work on refactoring and adjustment to make it better, possibly with the advice and supervision of somebody more senior. Expand that initial project to be bigger and do more things, or start a new project that's more ambitious, and repeat. Keep at it for a while and eventually you'll learn all of the important parts and gain experience.
I see this as useful in that it maximizes natural interest. I find it rare and difficult to build interest in reading walls of text about elaborate rule systems regarding things you've never done. Both building things you find interesting or useful and getting hands-on experience in how to make it better are much easier to maintain interest in and stick with.
I do think that there's a certain type of intelligence or way of thinking necessary to be a good programmer. It's probably kind of correlated with proper IQ, though not quite the same thing. Like many other related things, I have no idea to what extent it's genetic versus developmental, but clearly many adults just aren't capable of it.
Regarding gender, I'm not really sure why, but it seems women self-select out of development at a very high rate, most specifically American women. Of all of the developers at my company, I think under 10% are women. Women are a lot more common in testing, product reps, project managers, line management, pretty much everything but development. There's zero women in our architecture groups. I'm not honestly sure if women are actually less likely to want to advance into the higher ranks of technical skill, or if it's actually about the same for the total number of women doing development work. I've never personally worked with a woman I thought was a super awesome developer, though some other people I would trust to make such calls have made such claims of some of the other women I work with, and I'd also say not that many of the men were super awesome either.
I haven't seen any reason to adjust my priors on that beyond the 90s-era standard - anyone who has the skills and the interest is welcome to do the job, but I reject the notion that there's any significant overall bias or prejudice keeping deserving people out of the profession, or that we need to put our fingers on the scales in some way to get "better numbers" on the participation of any particular group.
JulianRota
1yr ago
It's certainly possible that the US did it, but it feels like it would be a rather weird act to me. The US already has a ton of levers to pull to influence things in NATO countries, especially in the face of an active Russian invasion. So why would they take the diplomatic risk of physically blowing up the pipelines? Doing that feels like the act of somebody who fears that they have no other way to influence the situation. If the US did it, you'd have to wonder if somebody feels like the situation is slipping out of their control or something.
That's why my money is on one of the NATO baltic states having done it. It still feels a little high risk and desperate, but since they're already not the big dog on the block, they're at least not risking being seen as not as powerful as people thought. Of course, if one of them did do it, the US would probably have had to actively look the other way and not attempt to stop them or provide any information on it.
In fact, if the US did actively want to blow it up, it would probably be a better move to lean on one of those countries to do it and then look the other way afterwards.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This connects with something I've always been suspicious of. Therapy seems to be something of a religion here in certain circles in the western world. According to the adherents, everybody benefits from therapy all the time. Yet I've never met anyone who seems to have achieved quantifiable improvements in their lives due to it, or said that they've been "fixed" or "cured" from whatever was wrong with them and don't need it anymore.
Therefore I wonder - is this all a load of crap? Is there any real benefit from what amounts to talking to somebody who I guess seems sympathetic or at least a good listener? What if we're actually giving even more energy and power to whatever mental issues we might have by talking about them so much?
Note, I'm definitely not saying that it never benefits anyone. If you're getting actual quantifiable benefits from it and it seems to be progressing towards an achievable goal, well then good for you, carry on. I'm only leaning against the specific claim that many people are in fact making that open-ended therapy is beneficial for absolutely everyone.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Maybe... still feels like a stretch though. Why do it now? Is there some active pressure on the German government now that I'm not aware of?
It all seems awful speculative. Like, maybe Germany will end up being critically low on energy this winter, but that's not established yet. Maybe they won't be able to think of any solution better than buying Russian gas after all, but ditto not established yet. Maybe they will / would have come under powerful enough political pressure to cave on that, but ditto. And maybe the US would be worried enough about Germany caving on this and unable to otherwise help them or pressure them to carry out a risky act of sabotage, but ditto.
Which all leads back to, why do it now, when the only possible benefit to the US is after 5 or so things all happen in the right way in the next 6 months or so? I'd buy it more if it happened after all of those things actually did happen and the German government was actively looking to cut a deal. It all feels a little loopy and desperate.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This reminds me of the doping scandals in the pro cycling world. This all broke in the American mainstream a number of years ago during the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong.
It seems to be the case that basically everyone in the pro cycling world is doped to their eyebrows on prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, to the level that you can't compete at all without your own batch of medical experts to figure out how best to drug you up without getting caught. It's become the culture there, which means that everyone is using somewhat different methods to dope and evade, which means that it's really tough to come up with a way to stop all of it at once - if your new test doesn't catch everything, than whichever doper is skilled or lucky enough to have a method that it doesn't catch has a huge advantage and will probably win everything. Part of the detail of this is that performance levels at the top are so high that you need all 3 of supreme genetic makeup, plus massive dedicated training, plus lots of drugs, to be competitive. There's no crutch to slack off on anything.
All of this feels like it changes the morality of it. If nobody is doping in a sport and you do it, then you're a cheating asshole. But if everyone is doing it and it's impossible to compete without it, then you're just playing the game, same as everyone else.
Presumably amateurs getting closer to these high levels of competition conclude one of 1. Everyone here is really just that much better than me and I can't compete, oh well, 2. Everyone here is on a shitload of drugs, I'm not ready to risk wrecking my body like that so I'm out, or 3. Everyone here is on a shitload of drugs, so pass the needle, I'm in.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Maybe leaning too hard into the Culture War side of it, but I always found it lame and probably counterproductive to overly obsess over every supposed pattern, trend etc in the White Supremacist / Anti-Semitic movement and take maximum measures to suppress it. They're already an irrelevant micro-minority of a movement. This sort of thing just gives them far more attention and importance than they deserve, which is the most important currency in the modern age. I don't think they deserve any more attention than they are capable of earning organically through the quality of any arguments they make. It just serves to make them look cooler than they are, give them a persecution complex, and validates their claims.
JulianRota
1yr ago
views that will never ever be implemented ever and saying them with a straight face is called "larping"
Just saying that would make an awful lot of actual political views larping, including actual Communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, religious fundamentalism, etc.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I can understand a certain reluctance to simply accept at face value that the authors and supporters of Jim Crow were actually super racist, given modern trends. But I don't think it makes sense to reject it entirely. IMO it is likely true and fits all of the classic patterns of outgroup-suppression. We hate them because of some easily-identifiable difference and so will stomp on them and make up reasons for it later. It's a pattern as old as time itself, no reason to assume we're immune to it.
In fact, my model for how wokeness went crazy is that, back when there was substantial and established actual racism, we established a bunch of groups to fight it, which is basically a good thing. The problem comes in when those groups become established institutions with money and power and people identify with their participation and support of them. The consequence of that is, when you're actually successful and the problem you were created to fight has 95% gone away, you don't just pack up your bags and go home, hanging a great big "Mission Accomplished" banner behind you. You have to find a way to declare that the problem is now worse than ever and so you still need even more money and power than you had before. It can't ever be admitted to have gone away because then your position and identity goes away too.
JulianRota
1yr ago
First, reports are that he was basically ignoring the court system. I think it is entirely justifiable that "ignoring the court system" gets turned into "the court system reminds you, and society in general, that the court system is not to be ignored".
I wish somebody qualified could do a deep dive on whether Alex Jones really did willfully ignore the court system in a way that justifies a default judgement. AFAIK, his counter-claim is that the court demanded that he produce footage of some of his shows where he allegedly made the defamatory statements, which were rather old by this time and were deleted by Youtube and various other platforms and he supposedly didn't have backups for, and went right to punitive rulings and default judgements when he tried to claim this.
Alex Jones has a pretty big operation, and you'd think they'd keep backups of everything. But who knows, shit happens, I guess it's plausible that they screwed up at some level and really did lose them. I'm not sure what's supposed to happen if the court demands you to produce something that you really did genuinely lose. I would think there should be some way for it to be handled better than that. But who knows, maybe his lawyers are dopes and screwed something up, or maybe the court is hostile and jumped right to the harshest possible ruling. I wish there was some way to actually find out besides just assuming based on who's closer to my side in the Culture War.
Second, people are looking at the fine and saying that it seems excessive in absolute numbers. But I think there's a lot of value in fines that are relative to someone's net worth. And I think "promoting a harassment campaign against people who had their children murdered, all for the sake of selling merchandise" is reasonably responded to with "a fine of at least 100% of your net worth". Which is about what this is.
I get the point, but somehow I doubt Jones has over a trillion dollars, or even billions, from hawking snake oil supplements and InfoWars swag.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I want to start a discussion here on a historical subject I've never been able to get a decent answer on anywhere else. The question is:
What is going on with how colonialism worked in its heyday versus how difficult it seems to be to conquer and control other countries nowadays?
Back in the heyday, tiny little England controlled something like a quarter of the world, off and on during various periods, including such areas as all of India, most of the Middle East, the original American 13 colonies, Canada, Australia, sometimes hunks of China, various large hunks of Africa, etc. The somewhat larger France controlled other hunks of North America, a bunch of Caribbean islands, large chunks of Africa, and the Middle East, etc. Even tinier Belgium, with a modern-day population of only 11 million, had some pretty big colonies in Africa that they controlled. At the time, they (mostly) seemed to have little trouble controlling these colonies for centuries, sometimes with mostly peaceful means and sometimes with quite brutal violence.
Meanwhile nowadays, mighty continent-striding America can barely keep Iraq and Afghanistan under control for a decade or two. Russia had little better luck in Afghanistan and mostly hasn't done too well in controlling areas other than tiny regions on their borders already at least partially populated with Russians. China doesn't seem to be doing much better. All of the former colonial superpowers can now barely dream of controlling a single hostile city overseas. The British stretched themselves to the limit trying to take the Falklands back, and managed to hold I think it was a city or a small region in Iraq with a lot of help from America. I think France intervened briefly in Mali a decade or so ago, with only limited success.
So ahem, what the hell happened? How did it go from super-easy to super-hard to control a foreign country on the other side of an ocean? Questions about this in Reddit history subs seem to generate mostly uhhs and grunts and vague excuses. I wonder if anyone in here, with mostly more open discussion on tougher topics has any interesting thoughts on the subject?
JulianRota
1yr ago
How many people who protested in the Capitol during the Kavanaugh nomination faced criminal charges and nationwide Federal manhunts?
JulianRota
1yr ago
Isn't this pretty much what Bush actually did though? As I recall, the initial demand was, hand over Bin Laden and other Al Quada bigwigs, or we invade. And we then mostly sent the Northern Alliance that already existed some weapons, advisers, and air support. Seems pretty much like what any colonialist would have done to start. I wonder if the real mistake was trying to control it afterwards. I'm not sure what 19th century Britain would have done after they had run the Taliban out.
JulianRota
1yr ago
What bothers me some about this is what seems to me like contradictions. Was the key to colonialism leaving the locals alone as long as they paid up ("otherwise keep local governance structures intact"), or actively trying to change their values ("bring this progress and civilisation to the unfortunate primitive peoples of Africa and Asia")?
Are we saying the Right Way to do Afghanistan would have been to let 'em keep their women in burquas and girls' schools closed and other such things, just pay us some taxes and give up any international terrorists who particularly annoy us? I guess I could buy that, though I'm not sure it's what 19th century Britain would do. (Also, 19th century Britain did fight Afghanistan, though I haven't read much on why and how it went)
I could see Iraq as being a "Civilising Mission" thing - the word at the time was, we knock off Saddam and bring 'em Democracy, Whiskey, and Sexy and they'll just love us right away and it'll go great. Was the problem the lack of widespread and long-lasting zeal about that mission, or that it just plain didn't work?
I could certainly buy something about the spread of nationalism in the would-be colonized countries being a big part of the reason. I do wonder how well the timeline for that spread matches the spread of nationalism in Europe itself.
Thanks for the article, I'll take a look at that later.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The core scenario does seem fairly reasonable, but the bulk of the content of both movies is based around the rather silly side of time-travelling humanoid robots fighting it out in 80s/90s LA. I think it does have a few useful points though.
One is that we shouldn't assume that a hostile AI will necessarily be ultra-smart or have everything perfectly thought out. Maybe instead of designing and manufacturing ideal killbots it has to make due with whatever semi-robotic weaponry is already in inventory. Though it's not exactly clear how it goes about handling the logistics of continuing to manufacture more of it and getting it to where it would need to go.
I also wanted to point out that in reality, humanoid robots are likely to always be highly weak and vulnerable compared to humans. Actual mechanical mechanisms are highly vulnerable to conventional weapons, and armor is heavy. Self-contained energy for movement will have to be highly limited, so it won't be able to run around for long, especially if it has enough armor to be resistant to small arms.
JulianRota
1yr ago
You gotta understand the zero-day market a little to understand how that works.
Ideally, it's impossible for just loading a webpage to do anything bad. Web browsers are massively complex pieces of software though, and they basically all have lots of bugs that render the situation non-ideal. Web browser vendors make active efforts to be aware of any such bugs as quickly as possible, and patch them and get those patches out as quickly as possible, hence things like Chrome's rapid update rate. A "zero-day" bug/exploit basically means a way to escape the web browser sandbox that the browser vendors / security community are not aware of yet. Once they are aware of them, they are often patched within days or hours.
Creating new exploits is very difficult and highly valuable due to how useful they can be against the right targets. But since efforts to discover exploits actively in use and patch the bugs they use are so active, it is also valuable to those who create and own them to not use them too widely - as soon as the right person notices them, they can be patched very fast, making that one worthless. They are generally created by national intelligence agencies, some shady companies and less scrupulous individuals, and may be either sold back to browser vendors, for 5-6 figure sums, or to those companies, criminal gangs, etc for probably similar or higher sums. It is to the benefit of such entities to not use them too widely, since they'll be worthless as soon as the wrong person notices them, so they're usually used in highly targeted attacks against specific individuals, and engineered to not be deployed unless the situation is right. Wider targeting probably only happens as a last-ditch effort to get a little more value out of something already patched, hoping to catch some users who haven't updated their browsers yet with a low-value but wide-net attack.
So ideally just going to a website shouldn't hurt anything, but it's probably good advice not to. Because 1. It does leak some information no matter what, 2. Less sophisticated users, or just people who are tired or distracted, can surprisingly often be tricked into entering credentials into phishing sites, and 3. You never know when you might be targeted for attack by something nasty, or not be the intended target but get it anyways, or just be the guy who had the bad luck to have the browser auto-patch run a little later than usual.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've thought about this some. I don't think it can reasonably be done, since there's no way to know who might attack your country, how many nukes they actually have and intend to use against you, what they would be targeting in what priority, how many of what yield get aimed at any particular city/area, how effective any countermeasures are, and how well the missiles actually do at hitting their intended targets accurately.
If you're particularly worried, it's probably best to live as far as possible from any large cities and anything else that might make a good target like military bases or other critical facilities, and to build a fallout shelter.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Interesting argument. I wonder if it's compatible with the smartphone revolution though. A large amount of internet activity has moved onto much more locked down devices, like smartphones and tablets. Even the desktop OSes seem to be gradually making it harder to do things the authorities don't approve of (authorities here being the OS vendors, which mostly bend to the will of governments and activist groups).
JulianRota
1yr ago
Yes. There are professional Soccer leagues in America. I'd bet money that the number of blue-collar workers attending any of their games is effectively zero.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I guess in theory or all else being equal, then yes. But all else is not equal.
There are some Nazi or White Nationalist groups actually in existence. But I don't think any of them follow actual 1920s Nazi ideology all that strictly, particularly with regard to things like strong hierarchal organization or following a single individual as leader in a near cult of personality like manner.
Actual Antifa groups in existence don't seem to be all that disorganized in practice. They claim to eschew organization, but don't seem to display all that many characteristics of a truly uncoordinated movement. I don't think that in practice they are less organized than any specific right wing groups.
Whatever effect of this there is, in practice it seems to be drowned out by a thousand other things, like which group is more closely aligned with the power structure. Antifa related groups sure seem to have an awful lot of high-level people in the Democrat party denying that they exist and excusing or ignoring their actions and mainstream media journalists peddling their propaganda. I don't think anything like this has happened for any right-wing groups, and certainly not for any group that comes anywhere near openly supporting Nazism.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Who wants some boring unfunny guy
::raises hand:: I do
I think we've all seen that while Trump is indeed entertaining, being an entertaining public speaker is not particularly correlated with being an effective administrator in a system largely run by your opponents. I can listen to a podcast to be entertained, I'd rather the Chief Executive be somebody who can effectively break the machine to his will.
Trump claims he now realizes just how much the system is against him and will do better if he gets re-elected. But why didn't he see that 6 months after he took office instead of going through 4 years and losing an election? Why should we believe that he now knows how to do it right? He had his chance and he failed, I'd rather give the job to somebody who has at least some proven experience in running the system the way he wants.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
Yeah, but those occurred on the rough timescale of once every billion years, and all prior to anything anywhere near humanity existing. The ratios on apocalypse-level events Humans have worried about to things that have actually happened during a timeframe that concerns us is therefore at least that high.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I wouldn't over-analyze the whole status thing. Seems to me the most likely explanation is that she's just an antisocial weirdo. It's probably a lot more common than we'd like to believe for a random 21-year old today who hasn't already chosen to go somewhere for the specific purpose of being social with strangers to seem weirdly anti-social for no particular reason. I've known plenty of people, both men and women, in both categories - some will talk basically anyone's ear off on any occasion and others who are virtually impossible to pry a complete sentence out of even when they're at an event where people are expected to be social.
How sure are we that it was an actual explosion though and not a high pressure burst? I would think they'd look fairly similar to the untrained eye. I'm not sure anyone with serious expertise in distinguishing these things through whatever types of sensor data we have to examine deep underwater events has weighed in. God knows there's no shortage of actors and commentators who'd love to declare that it's definitely an explosion and definitely caused by whoever they hate the most.
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