PokerPirate
7mo ago
Has no one here been in the military?!
Weapons of war are very commonly referred to as toys in the military. And there is a simple reason: They are fun. There really is nothing more fun than wielding the power to end life. 4 star Marine Corps General James Mattis famously said:
It’s quite fun to shoot them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.
And basically everyone in the military agrees. Some non-military folk use the word "toys" to mock the military's enjoyment of violence, but for the most part people use the word positively.
(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)
PokerPirate
7mo ago
You've correctly pointed out a very real failure mode of our modern atomized lifestyle, and highlighted that many people do in fact fail because of their own ineptitude. I agree with all of that but also think it sucks for Dennis that he failed in this way and that it sucks for all of the other people who also fail in this way. Maybe I have too much sympathy for people who suck at modern life.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
The court obviously did the right thing to maintain a functioning society based on existing laws. But it's easy for me to imagine an IQ ~80 person getting sucked into this shitty situation without any intentional malice on their part. IQ 80 corresponds to about 10% of the population. If we can't get a system that is "easy" for these people to navigate, then literally millions of Americans are doomed to a shitty life full of the Man ruining their shit.
In a perfect society, I think that the cops / county clerk / local priest / bartender would have pestered Dennis multiple times in person at their house / church / pub until this got resolved amicably. This pestering would have ultimately saved tax payers tons of money in legal fees as well.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
I've worked with this type of business before, and I think you've diagnosed the problem correctly. I don't see them being able to get AI to automate any of these steps though for the same reasons that they couldn't get spreadsheets to help them.
Man, that really sucks for Dennis.
This case seems like a great metaphor for America these days: Everyone (but Dennis) did everything by the book, and the court seems to have made the right decision based on the facts, but no one had the decency to knock on Dennis's door a couple of times and let him know of his impending legal doom because he didn't check all the right boxes in the right forms.
Life in America sucks for people who can't / won't jump through legal hoops. Basically everyone I know who is on-again-off-again-homeless has a story like this about how the system fucked them over. But the Man oppressing them is just "doing the right thing by the book". I'm sure there were other problems in the 1800s, but at least the downtrodden/not-quite-dregs of society didn't have to deal with paperwork.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
I thought I had read all of Chesterton's work, but I either missed this one or totally forgot about it. Thanks for posting it!
For anyone interested, the full book (~300 folio pages) is available on project guttenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm. It starts with the very in-character line:
I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind.
The ... in @HereAndGone's quote misses some of the best lines:
Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex.
Some more gems from the first pages:
Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book.
The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.
All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.
We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.
I doubt the following still holds true:
The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world.
This line might make a handful of white-nationalists upset:
I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
It's not just flyover universities dependent on higher foreign student tuition. Both the CalState and UC systems get tons of money in their masters programs from Chinese students. Top schools (e.g. UCLA, UC Berkley, UCSD) and mid-tier schools (e.g. UC Riverside, CalPoly and CalState LA) would be greatly affected.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
Coke Zero is my preferred caffeine. In the first few months after each of my kids was born, I would drink a 2L bottle per day. I decided to stop because of the risk of tooth decay. The real-sugar drinks are much worse for teeth, but I'm pretty sure the acid from the carbonation is also not good, especially since I was drinking the coke without any food. (It's not hard to find random studies showing carbonated water is bad for teeth, but I'm not sure how much stock to actually put in them.)
PokerPirate
7mo ago
This Bloomberg story in particular has me quite mad. It seems like it should be easily falsifiable by anyone with moderate power (e.g. mid level NYTimes editor or FBI team leader) but no one has done so and I don't understand why.
My best guess is that the story is something like "directionally correct" with maybe half the facts being true and half the facts being made up, and this would explain why it's so hard for someone else to properly verify/discredit. Either way, the followup team has to do a LOT of work and they don't get any reward. For all the false parts they point out, the original authors can just say "but those are minor details" and for all the true parts they point out the original authors get all the credit for the work and there's no reward for the "peer review".
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I'm a CS prof and I use debian. If you're into programming at all, then I'd recommend ubuntu (which is based off debian but designed to be "less ideological" and more "beginner friendly"). Most tutorials for programmers (and thus most advice from LLMs) assumes debian/ubuntu.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
We send our kids to a Spanish immersion public school. I'd say points 1-5 are all true at our school.
I'd also wager that you are underrating Spanish's "usefulness". Some pros:
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Learning to read Spanish is much easier than learning to read English. My oldest (7) started reading Spanish first and that made reading English much easier. My next oldest (4) is just starting the reading process, and he can read much better in Spanish as well.
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Lots of "fancy" words in English are "simple" words in Spanish. When my kids speak English, they use words like "prefer" (instead of like), "ignorant" (instead of stupid), etc and I regularly get comments from adults about how smart my kids sound. These adults then go on to treat my kids better.
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Hispanics love to see a bunch of little white kids talking Spanish, and become "instant friends" with them. I'm sure Chinese speakers would love it just as much, but there's a lot fewer.
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Since you said downthread you already speak some Spanish, you'll actually be able to help your kids learn. You'll also learn some yourself, which makes being with them more fun. Lots of parents complain about having to listen to The Wheels on the Bus 1000x as a parent, but it's much more fun if it's in a language you are learning and actually benefiting from the repetition.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
This is a gnarly interview. My respect for DAs just went way up.
Is this a standard type of interview (leet-code for DAs kind of thing)? Or just something that this particular jurisdiction does?
PokerPirate
8mo ago
That's fair. I've known plenty of churches like that as well.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
This is nonsensical. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for his liberation theology, he was still teaching that "the basics of faith" are the Catholic catechism. Liberation theology---whether you agree with it or not---was obviously an edifice built on top of that.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
That's certainly a common right-wing interpretation of liberation theology. And there's relevant critiques of liberation theology that it only became popular due to Soviet covert influence. But the major theologians/leaders are all card-carrying Catholics that buy into all of Catholic spirituality.
Sorry, I don't know any text versions of the songs for reading :( My guess is that you would still find it to be heavily Marxist, but that doesn't mean the people singing don't literally believe in the miracles they're singing about.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
Where do you get the idea that these theologies deny the resurrection of Christ? La Misa Popular Salvadoreña is basically the anthem of liberation theology. It's a series of 11 songs for celebrating a post-Vatican II non-Latin mass. Here is the song they sing during communion where they explicitly acknowledge the passion and resurrection of Christ: https://youtube.com/watch?v=R8yJWvDNJWU&list=PLhCyWH9pFDuYFB8VLeObzJEABIhHlW27u&index=8.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
You're claim that liberation theology and the social gospel movement "remove the supernatural elements from Christianity" is straightforwardly wrong. These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason---but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I like meta behind the "unions are evil" example: It is the only example luxury belief that is right coded, and it's also the only belief that has a number of posters explaining why it's not actually a luxury belief but a "true fact about the world".
If the idea of luxury beliefs really has explanatory value as a model of the world, I would expect all political ideologies to have them in some capacity. So I would like to see more examples of these right-coded luxury beliefs.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
The whole diskworld series by Terry Pratchett. The plot is roughly "use fantasy tropes to make fun of the real world" and has excellent longterm story arcs along those lines. But it's also full of excellent one-liners like the following:
Give a man fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Les caught Akhan's eye. They exchanged a very brief glance which was nevertheless modulated with a considerable amount of information, beginning with the sheer galactic-sized embarrassment of having parents and working up from there.
Thunder rolled. It rolled a six.
Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.
Against all rationality, his hair ached.
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!
HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
To call Rincewind's understanding of magic atrocious left no word to describe his practical application of it
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I like to go on walks with my kids. The other day we were walking back from church when we crossed paths with a couple of middle aged men walking their dog. As soon as my 3yo saw them, he shouted as loud as he could, "Gay! Gay! Daddy, look, a gaaaaayyyyyyy!!!"
Gay means "dog" in Korean. We're a pasty white American family, but I'm learning Korean with my kids because of some work I do with North Korea. Oops. At least he's not saying the words "you", "I", or "because"... they all sound just like nigga.
When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?
I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.
For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)
So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:
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It has to be safe to stop.
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There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)
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There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)
I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?
I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
It's a blast for the adults too! We occasionally play a game called "hurricane" where I jump cannonballs onto the roof/walls and shake the ship from the outside. 30 minutes of that is a full body workout better than anything I've ever done at the gym... I'll be sore for days after...
When we need to clean it, I'll throw a gallon of bubble juice in. There's air leaking out through seams all over (this is intentionally how they are designed), and this leads to instant bubbles everywhere. Like 3 foot high foam pits covering the floor.
The thing weighs ~500 pounds. (The box it came in says 900lbs, but that includes a trolley and blower.) I can move it by myself, but only barely, and it takes about an hour to pack/unpack. So it mostly stays in the backyard and I use a tarp to cover it when its deflated and not in use. During the hottest months of the summer I usually put it in the garage to make a bit more space in the backyard to play.
We once had a rat eat a giant hole in the bounce house (1 square foot, plus a lot of smaller punctures). Surprisingly, it still stays pretty well inflated with the hole, but it was an easy patch job.
I also have the blower setup about 50 feet away from the bounce house and use ducting to move the air from the blower to the bounce house. It makes the operation essentially silent.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
Four years ago I bought a bounce house. A proper commercial grade bounce house. It's shaped like a pirate ship, 35 ft long, 15 ft wide, has a poop deck, a slide, a mast that can be climbed up, and a bunch of fake cannons.
I paid $1000 to get it used off craigslist, and it's the best investment I've ever made.
I've got 4 young kids: 7, 4, 3, and 2 years old. Right now, they're all jumping around and getting their energy out and happy to play together without daddy. It gives me a chance to cook dinner and write this real quick note. And they'll actually sleep tonight :)
It's pretty obvious that using a pile of linear algebra gives the best outcome for loans, and literally every bank in the word has been doing this for >30 years. The more old fashioned banks have just been using a person to enter the data into the linear algebra.
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