PokerPirate
11mo ago
On May 1st, 1946, a South Korean guerilla tried to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Kim was speaking at a political rally in Pyongyang when the White Shirt guerilla threw a grenade on stage. Kim's bodyguard---the young soviet officer Yakov Novichenko---caught the grenade and threw it away. Novichenko was seriously mutilated by the grenade blast, but Kim survived the incident without injury.
The recent assassination attempt against Trump reminded me of this story, and I wanted to share it with themotte for two reasons:
-
It's just a great story, and one that I wish were more widely known. For me, it helps shed light on why the North Koreans felt like they "needed" to start the Korean War and invade the South in 1950. (I only know about Novichenko because of my time living in North Korea, where a North Korean army officer told me to look him up.)
-
I feel like there should somehow be a meme connecting these two assassination attempts and the Trump/Kim summit, but I'm not enough of a meme-warrior to figure out how to do it. Maybe one of you all can pull it off?
PokerPirate
11mo ago
Tangential, but wtf? I can't believe this has been hidden in theschism for years. Have you written about your experiences in this role beyond your polite request to resume academic exchange? I assume we haven't resumed it.
There's:
- a travelog at mailto:https://guest:trip-to-pust@izbicki.me/pust/
- a description of how I got NK students to contribute to open source software: https://izbicki.me/blog/teaching-open-source-in-north-korea.html
- and how I helped fix the North Korean's official KCNA webpage at: https://izbicki.me/blog/fixing-north-korea-kcna-webpage.html
I have more fun stories I'd like to share but either haven't gotten around to it or have been asked by the "state department" not to.
You lay out some good points with the Soviets in that post, re: collapse and nukes. Academics can provide a basis for further collaboration. Do you think there are any risks associated with academic exchange with geopolitical rivals and adversaries?
With major powers like China/Russia, I think there's some risk (but the way the FBI/military talk about the risk is way overblown). With a much smaller country like North Korea that is super isolated, I think there's basically no risk.
PokerPirate
11mo ago
even though they have a history of cyberattacks and crypto scams? I don't know why you think there's no risk, or any benefit, in freely helping them increase their IT skills.
Eh... I think the cyberattacks/crypto scams are blown way out of proportion. Literally every country on earth does this. For some reason, however, it's only used as an excuse to block exchanges with North Korea and not with countries like Israel.
Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations. I have a pretty good sense of what types of training contribute to hacking capabilities and can ensure that the academic exchanges stay far away from that material.
it frees up their state resources to work on other, more black-hat stuff
I disagree. For example:
-
Albert Einstein was part of an enemy state in WWI. This led to his theory of relativity being ignored by the outside world because a Good American (TM) wouldn't support German physics. If non-Germans had paid more attention to Einstein, then we would have understood relativity ~10 years earlier, and the whole world would be better off because of it. Ignoring Einstein did not result in increased capabilities of the German war machine, and I think was clearly a mistake in hindsight. Who knows what types of Einsteins are living in North Korea right now that we don't even know about because we don't want to support North Korean science?
-
Above I give two examples of the work I did in North Korea that resulted in North Korean programmers being assigned peaceful tasks (contributing to open source software and fixing the KCNA webpage) that they would not have otherwise completed. If these exchanges hadn't been happening, then those programmers would have been assigned other tasks (possibly military related) instead. I personally know several American machine learning researchers who have benefited from the pull requests, and several government analysts who rely on the improved KCNA website to perform their jobs.
There's a lot more examples of why I think this work is a net-benefit in the /r/theschism link above. If you disagree with any of those particulars, I'd love to learn why.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
What are the all-time best movies / shows for kids to watch?
This Christmas, I watched the Home Alone series with my kids (6yo, 3yo, 2yo, 1yo). The movies are fantastic. They keep the kids engaged with humor, and they provide valuable lessons on family (you might think they're a pain, but they're still wonderful), independence (kids can accomplish a lot of things that adults can't and they should be encouraged to try), some seemingly bad people are good (the shovel guy/pigeon lady are scary at first but turn out to be great people in the end), and some seemingly good people are bad (the thieves dress up as cops and trick a lot of adults).
I want to find other similar movies to watch with my kids that are fun and full of great lessons. Does themotte have any recommendations?
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:
-
It has to be safe to stop.
-
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.)
-
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
1yr ago
The Menorah is a minor religious symbol and does not hold the same status in Judaism as the cross does in Christianity. The Torah is probably about as important to Jews as the cross is to Christians, and the Torah is not regularly displayed in public spaces.
It's true that Menorahs on public grounds have always been culture war, but I think everything else in your post is gross exaggeration.
PokerPirate
2yr ago
Are these 3d printed guns remotely useful in combat? I can't imagine any plastic parts---let alone printed plastic---standing up to the pressures/temperatures created when firing a bullet. And AK47s are already dirt cheap.
I could see a 3d printed gun being useful for an easily concealable, single-shot assassination weapon, but that's not what a jungle guerrilla needs.
PokerPirate
26d ago
Parenting win?
My 3yo has a tough life. He's got two older brothers (4, 7) and all the neighbor kids are older. The 3yo is big enough to want to play with them all, but small enough that he's not quite capable of understanding their games or communicating his thoughts. So the neighbor kids end up picking on him a lot, calling him "poop boy", taking his toys, and other misc mischief. Because they're not my kids, I can't do too much to stop the neighbor kids from being jerks. I've managed to convince the older brothers that they have some sort of brotherly-responsibility to stick up for their sibling, but there's also only so much they can do.
The 3yo is tough and violent. He's been stung by bees ~5 times over the past year, and each time he shouts "die bee", grabs the nearest rock, and smashes the bee to death several times before running over to me/mom crying that he needs a band-aid. So he's pretty good at standing up for himself when the big kids are mean by trying to punch them / throw toys / etc. I'm proud of him for sticking up for himself, but we've been trying to work with him on helping him control his violence.
We found a new tool to keep his violence in check this week.
At the beginning of the week, one of the big kids came over and dumped a bucket of water on 3yo's head when he was playing nicely by himself. I had the idea that we could get revenge by using the hose. We setup an ambush for big-neighbor-kid around the corner of the garage, and 3yo got big-kid right in the face at point blank range. The shadenfreude was great. Big-neighbor-kid learned a valuable lesson about why other people don't like getting water dumped on them and not to mess with my 3yo. 3yo now is the only one with permission to use the hose, and everyone talks about how they shouldn't mess with him anymore. 3yo also has a lot more confidence interacting with both the neighbors and his brothers, and there's been much less hitting and throwing of rocks.
Overall I feel good about how this played out, but I have some questions about what this is teaching my kids about violence. I'm a committed pacifist (in the style of the Amish), and I'm trying to raise the kids to also be pacifists. The hose-to-the-face is obviously less violent than throwing rocks: there's no potential for lasting injury, and it's not nearly as "escalatory" since the big-neighbor-kid already used water as a "weapon". But there was still lots of "evil" in 3yo's heart. He clearly wanted revenge and specifically aimed for the big-neighbor-kid's face so as to cause maximum damage.
So the lesson here wasn't perfect, but I do think it was at least "directionally correct". One common failure mode of pacifism is to become a doormat for other people to run over you---basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting this failure mode---and I don't want to instill this failure mode into my children.
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.
I maintain a git repo about the "programmer dialect of English" that I use to teach my computer science/data science students how to not sound like a n00b/PHB. It's niche, but many people here are likely to fit into the niche.
The document goes over phonology / lexicon / grammar / discourse differences in programmer English vs American standard English, but to give you all a taste, here's the top of the phonology section:
-
RAG (as in retrieval augmented generation with LLMs) is pronounced "rag" not "R-A-G".
NOTE: The word "rag" has only one sylable and is faster/easier to pronounce than the 3-sylable "R-A-G". The practice of pronouncing abbreviations as acronyms stems from the programmer's desire for efficiency in all things.
-
ICLR (a famous machine learning conference) is pronounced "I clear".
-
PNG is pronounced "ping" and not "pee-en-gee". This pronunciation is specified in the standard.
The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.
PokerPirate
28d ago
It strikes me that I've also seen a lot of marriages turn to divorces in the 2015-2020 time frame. I've always just assumed I was in that "season of life" where my friends get divorced because we're all in our 30s and that's just what people in their 30s do these days.
You seem to suggest a radicalization -> divorce pipeline, but I wonder if the reverse is more true? People ruin their relationships and this leads them to a political radicalization as a way to find their true family / identity. I can think of at least a couple of cases in my own life where I've always assumed the later direction was more true.
In any event, this is an excellent example of a certain type of post on the motte that I really enjoy: I can't say I learned any useful facts reading your requiem, but I do certainly view the world in a slightly different way now, and that's quite useful.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I'm trying to challenge your statement:
And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature.
I don't see how you can argue that a "traditional Christmas display" (such as the angels/trumpets linked in the OP, or the still common nativity scenes) is "fully secularized" while a Menorah is not. My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity, and I'd even argue it is much more minor than something like the nativity.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults.
You're overstating the importance of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medical research.
As a famous parody of your point, this 2003 study found that no RCTs had been done of parachute use when jumping out of airplanes and concluded that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that parachutes are effective. As a follow up, this 2018 study did implement a RCT for parachute use when jumping from airplanes and concluded that parachutes do not in fact prevent injury. (Participants jumped from an airplane on the ground.)
Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease. Recognizing this relationship has led to a lot of good medical progress both for the populationis affected by AIDs and those not affected by AIDs (by for example keeping HIV out of blood transfusions to prevent the spread of AIDs).
I happen to also be skeptical of the benefits of transition. But your explanation of the science is not good here and at best leading you to the "right belief for the wrong reason".
PokerPirate
29d ago
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.
PokerPirate
1mo 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
1yr ago
the progressive faction ... weighed down by outsized responsibility for the sex abuse scandal(s)
Could you enlighten the heathen among us why the progressive faction has outsized responsibility for priests molesting children?
PokerPirate
1mo 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
2mo 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 :)
Two days ago, my 4 year old shouted "belly flop" and then jumped face first from our porch step onto the sidewalk below. The results were predictably gruesome. The main injury was three large gashes in his lips where he bit through the lip, but blood also gushed out of his nose and (more lightly) from his forehead, knees, and elbows.
This is one of my favorite events to happen so far as a father. (And I actually mean that literally.) It perfectly captures for me the idea of just how stupid/innocent kids are (and presumably I once was). I'm also really proud of the little guy for taking his injury in stride. There was lots of crying for 30 minutes or so, but once we got him cleaned up and bandaged, he was back outside playing with his brothers again. He's been showing off his injuries to all his little kid friends and making sure they know not to belly flop in the sidewalk too.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
FWIW your point seems obvious to me about the US. There have been 14 US presidents since WWII, and 8 of them have military experience.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I used to work at a 3 letter agency hiding my identity on the internet. Two points jump out to me from your post:
-
I don't think your change of MAC address caused you this hastle. The MAC address is a physical layer id and won't get transferred beyond your router in the TCP/IP packets. Something you install (like a game) could use the MAC address to uniquely identify you, but I don't see how something like gmail could do that. Is there some sort of new javascript black magic that lets gmail access the MAC address? It seems much more likely to me that you triggered additional "security" measures via some other path.
-
Your burner phones also uniquely identify you. If two phones are in the same location (or connected to the same wifi networks) for extended periods of time, the borg can link them together as belonging to the same person pretty easily. These burners are probably a waste of money unless you are literally throwing them on a train after buying them and using them once.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.
Unfortunately, Trump instituted a travel ban to North Korea in 2017 (and Biden has kept the ban in place), so I haven't been back. I still have regular zoom calls with the faculty/students there. Some examples of successes that have come from this work are facilitating only open source contributions from North Koreans and helping North Koreans fix their internet infrastructure. But this sort of work is obviously much harder without being able to go in person, and these days I have much less insight to what the average North Korean thinks.
In my opinion, "no longer pursuing reconciliation with the south" is a huge deal. This pursuit of reconciliation was one of the main pillars of legitimacy for the Kim regime. Whenever I talked to a North Korean about their country, they always brought up that they want reunification. Literally on every street corner in Pyongyang were maps of a unified Korea and propaganda posters saying things like "We want to hug our brothers in the South". So I am very curious how this will be spun for the domestic audience.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Ehh... I think you have a bit too much of a "soldier climbing over the top at the Somme" notion of physical courage. The other examples [1] of physical courage in the prompt don't have nearly the chance of resulting in a "cheap" death, but are still associated with physical courage. I think a more poignant military-adjacent take is that all these examples of physical courage can be explained away by "training" your body to react a certain way in the face of danger so that you don't need courage in the moment. For example:
-
Fire fighters practice running into burning buildings everyday. This may seem scary to an outsider, but after you've learned to do it safely, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You rarely see firefighters meaningfully risk their lives for strangers, and the captain would certainly scold them for breaking protocol afterward if they do.
-
Steelworkers don't start on their first day 10 stories up. They've been slowly building the building floor by floor, so that by the time they're 10 stories up, they're confident in their balance. And any violations of safety protocol are going to get them quickly fired.
-
The underdog boxer and the mugged man standing up for themselves are certainly putting themselves in real danger. But it's not the sort of danger that results in a "cheap death" so much as potentially very painful and longterm injuries. I'm sure that most people who do this also have trained for it in someway, but I can't know for sure.
-
The mother has trained her mind/body for years through countless small acts of service to her children in order to value their lives above her own. "Mundane" sacrifices like waking up for years at midnight, then 2am, then 4am to feed a baby and change it's diaper make throwing your body infront of fallen debris a no brainer. These mundane sacrifices don't seem at the surface to be too related to physical courage, but I definitely think they end up resulting in actions that seem physically courageous.
[1]: for reference, I'm referring to
The courage exercised by a soldier climbing over the top at the Somme, by a firefighter running into a burning building, by a rock climber attempting a difficult route with shaky fall protection, by an underdog boxer stepping into the ring in a fight against the odds, by a steelworker calmly welding ten stories in the air, by a man refusing to give his wallet to a mugger wielding a knife, by a mother using her own body to shield her children from falling debris.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I'm a US citizen and I have no idea what you're talking about. I'd love it if someone would give a writeup.
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American. American's do this so much that there are thousands of memes making fun of us for it. So I see getting bent that a Somali-American calls herself Somali as just a thinly veiled boo outgroup.
More options
Context Copy link