Shakes
5d ago
Rust is an interesting programming language, because it perfected the nanny-state compiler. Rust is infamously difficult to get to compile if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can spam .unwrap() and unsafe and write unsafe code, but it requires you to at least actively choose to accept these flaws as opposed to passively letting them by accidentally.
If AI is going to write code, I think Rust is actually going to point the way toward the future. AI can make writing code very easy but introduces all sorts of potential zero-day bugs and faults. Rust actually solves much of this because many bugs the AI could write in other languages are not even valid Rust. The future of programming languages belongs to whoever develops an even more restrictive and advanced compiler that eliminates whole categories of AI errors from running. (A superset of python or typescript would be very appealing here.)
Shakes
11d ago
I’ve always thought of this in terms of the “yes Chad” jpg meme. There’s no caricature or attack that can’t be defeated by more or less saying “yes”.
“You’re a communist who hates America!”
“Yes”
“You’re a holocaust denier who thinks the Jews are running the world”
“Yes”
Etc. etc. It works because we’ve lost consensus about what things we’re supposed to believe as a nation.
Shakes
12d ago
Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.
That’s not even a conspiracy theory, let alone a contradiction. Both of those things do indeed happen. (They don’t even need happen from the same immigrants, although that also happens.)
If you wanted a right-coded conspiracy to balance out your selection you could have just referenced Q.
Shakes
17d ago
The essay was bad in a totally representative way, almost all college essays are that bad. That being admitted it’s probable the instructor did discriminate in giving her a zero, although probably it was fairly benign. (“This dumb Christian argument has no merit” not “I hate Christians mark it zero”.)
That said universities started this game by systematically discriminating against conservatives in academia for generations. Academe as the last holdout of genuine Marxism in the West was a joke in the Reagan years. I have brilliant family members who were personally discriminated against in their academic careers for being conservative. I don’t suppose that counts as evidence to anybody with their heads in the sand, but it seems obvious to say that that’s what happened in academia over and over again. It’s not as though conservatives just woke up one day and said, “we’re stupid, we hate those liebruls and their funny learning ways.”
But time is slow and I don’t expect this to percolate into much of a show of force immediately. Conservatives abandoned academia as it turned on them — there wasn’t much fighting back. It will take more time for that attitude to change. If we get a Vance administration that’s when I would expect to start seeing big national fights over collegiate discrimination.
Shakes
19d ago
After a court ruled that SNAP benefits could be withheld, he not only appealed the decision, but said he wanted the states who had paid benefits to return the money.
Well, no. SNAP ran out of money because Congress didn’t allocate any. A judge ordered Trump to pay SNAP anyways. “With what money?” Trump asked the judge for guidance. “Pay it,” the judge ordered, without any guidance. At the time the shutdown negotiation ended the admin was being ordered to take the money from school lunch programs.
Maybe your interpretation is how the public actually interprets this issue, because who really cares about the minutiae of rogue judges when Trump’s face is right there. But that is an interpretation, it’s not a neutral statement of fact, and in taking one party side it’s likely that something close to half of the electorate disagrees with you.
I think your post here is riddled with such interpretation errors. That’s fine, I guess, we don’t have to have the same opinions here, but I suspect this kind of analysis would have predicted 10 of the last 5 Democratic victories.
Shakes
19d ago
This is my fault for not elaborating a point in the first place, but if I had it would have been something like: OP doesn’t make much of an analysis at all except looking at two different numbers and drawing a trend. I don’t think that’s very credible.
You can elaborate a larger case for why Trump and the Republicans are doomed by adding more numbers. But I think any serious political analysis has to come back to acknowledging our limitations in looking at the numbers because — well because the election is a year from now. A year’s worth of time has to pass.
Shakes
19d ago
Trump is unique in that 1) he literally cannot
Trump is not our first lame-duck president. Lame duck presidents do care about winning midterms and mandates and successors.
his brand is about aggressively not giving a fuck (about you)
Trump’s brand includes “They’re after you I’m just in the way” and “Kamala is for they/them I’m for you”.
Thinking that Trump cares what (you) think is absolute tomfoolery and if anyone wants to attempt to defend that point I'd love to see them try
This is ridiculous, come on. If Trump didn’t care about any of this he would have stayed in his Tower circa 2015 or he could have run on some sort of Conservacon platform.
You wrote this as if in an attitude of just-telling-the-truth as though everyone has to give it to you. But this is a basic failure to have a theory of mine for Trump, or of American politics over the last ten years at all. Is Trump faking it every time he calls a grieving widow? When he gets up on stage and channels the crowd? When he says controversial things to defend his base that no single other politician was willing to represent?
Trump obviously trivially cares or we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.
Shakes
20d ago
I wanted to write some brilliant cutting metaphor about the futility of reducing everything to one number, but I think I’ll just copy-paste this tweet:
https://x.com/sethjlevy/status/1996203702034870491?s=46
TN 07 is an R +10 district.
Trump won it by 22 in 2024 but that was an unusually high outcome for that district.
In 2018, a very popular Republican Senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn won it by less that 1%.
Shakes
20d ago
How is either of those a “fix everything” button Trump is refusing to push? One requires Congress, which makes it extremely unlikely. The other is just some idea. I admit I don’t even know much about it. Can Trump withdraw unilaterally? Would this erode his political capital? Does it actually do anything? How much time does it take to draft up the provisions to withdraw? How high should this be on the Presidents agenda relative to the ten thousand other policy items competing for his attention? Are there better uses of his time? How well-understood and well-known is this policy fix?
Or is withdrawing from a UN migration treaty really just the one idea that fixes everything with no cost and zero downside that Trump and his team know all about but are refusing to do because they’ve betrayed us all or are lazy or don’t know how to govern?
I get it, I want more too, but this is watching the President accelerate in real time and complaining he hasn’t reached top speed, while every faction not aligned with Trump is trying to slam on the breaks.
Shakes
20d ago
This is just an argument for never voting, and being cynical and dejected, and feeling smug about it because you can always be right. Trump doesn’t listen to his voters? That’s pretty patently false
Shakes
20d ago
That sounded too good to be true and it was.
Within the realm of the possible this is one of the most dramatic federal turnarounds in generations.
Ten years ago presumed Republican frontrunner Jeb Bush called illegal immigration an act of love. Now the president is openly talking about remigration. Come on, if you think this is a good thing, this “betrayed again” eeyore attitude is just a bad model of politics. Trump is mainstreaming mass deportations. Not a single other American politician comes anywhere close. Do you really want to complain that it’s not good enough? Because if you have the option to help row the boat and instead get out your signs wailing “THE END IS NEAR” that says more about you than Trump.
Trump is using BBB to amass the largest deportation force in American history. Net migration is down. H1B restrictions. Benefits shut down. Remittances taxed. It’s not as though Trump is refusing to push the “fix everything” button. These are extremely controversial policies that are facing concerted pushback and lawfare. Trump’s new travel ban is even trying to deny citizenship ceremonies to new immigrants who have otherwise qualified. So, what? Let’s blackpill because we want to be going 88mph and Trump has only taken us from 0 to 50?
Shakes
21d ago
Who’s going to prosecute? Everyone is treating Trump attacking the autopen as more ridiculous than the autopen itself
Shakes
21d ago
I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.
Military technology does not lend itself to a sources-cited I-make-my-claims you-make-yours open debate. So I’m not sure I have much to add here in the good nature of this forum. But I can tell you that you are completely wrong. I can’t really convince you of that when again we’re talking about military secrets. So it would be easier if you said you don’t trust Trump, or the government in general if you prefer, because then we’ve reduced the argument to its real essence. Otherwise I can’t say very much productively, because our priors about US military capabilities are wildly far apart.
If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well.
Well, that’s not really what I’m concerned about, because this isn’t really about whether you as an individual are arguing in good faith. (And I assume you are.)
This story doesn’t just fall out of the sky and then journalists put on their truth suits and we sit around debating what it all means. Every phase of these stories are political and carry political connotations. “War crime?” Nobody in the public knows what that means or how important that is, so someone has to pick a few pieces of context to give that meaning. “Anonymous sources?” Someone has to stake some credibility asserting that these people are telling the truth, not those other people making denials. “Fishermen” Now we need part of this story to deny Trump’s / Hegseth’s determination that these are narcoterrorists, because the story is a non-story if it’s accepted on Trump’s terms.
Every part of this story involves relying on assumptions made by people acting out of political motives. Moreover, many of these political actors don’t care when we do it in Ukraine, supported the Iraq War, allowed millions of illegal immigrants at the border, etc. Many of these same journalists and senators pushed hoaxes about Trump and Russia, Kavanaugh, January 6 and 2020, Corona, etc. Why should I take them at their word?
So no this isn’t about your good faith as an individual. I’m calling bad faith on the entire media complex that reifies this as a story I have to care about, as though I’m somehow a hypocrite if I don’t jump through exactly the right rhetorical proofs while denying that Hegseth did anything wrong. Especially today, a day later, as the New York Times reports that WaPo got the story wrong, I feel increasingly good about my priors and attitude toward the latest anti-Trump hoax.
Candace Owen’s is reporting today that the French government is trying to have her killed. Should we kick France out of NATO? Is Israel behind it? Actually it’s ok to just call that one bullshit
Shakes
21d ago
This is no longer a moral argument but a political argument. At that point, it’s more parsimonious to admit this is just another anti-Trump hoax. That is, none of this press coverage exists as an organic natural concern about what’s best for America’s interests in the world. Those are just arguments made up to get the sexy “war crimes” headline into the news right as Mark Kelly is calling for soldiers to be prosecuted.
Shakes
21d ago
The “laws of war” aren’t real and don’t apply to terrorists. This kind of bloviating about moral principle might work on the DC politicians who read the Washington Post, but we here simply don’t have to participate in this. We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. The purpose of a military is to kill people. We’re not playing these nice legal lawyer games where we can’t kill our enemies or else they win. We don’t have to care about the latest high-level inflammatory anonymous “sources familiar with say” nonsense story about how Trump is doing this evil evil thing that was normal until five minutes ago.
My position is that it didn’t happen and it’s a good thing if it did.
Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...
If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.
Shakes
23d ago
What if I drug the president and lock him in a wheelchair so me and five aides can run a shadow presidency? What does historical precedent say about the case where I keep the president in a back room and you aren’t allowed to see him? Am I a hypocrite if I think that’s different from a secretary lying?
Shakes
24d ago
Overall, I feel like this is kind of a misplay from Trump - I think that it guarantees that the next Democrat administration will do the same to his executive orders and pardons.
Biden already did that. Biden’s first months were spent canceling even good or anodyne Trump orders. That’s how we got a crisis at the border and the Afghan deal changing. They undid Trump’s order about creating a statue garden.
In theory, Biden, or an authorized spokesperson for him, could outright state that all pardons/executive orders were done on his behest;
Maybe you don’t understand the issue here.
The issue is not that Joe Biden didn’t check all his boxes and dot his eyes when filling out paperwork so now Trump has the excuse.
The issue is that there is good proof Biden didn’t himself actually issue the orders signed under his name.
What makes an executive order or pardon valid? Well, it’s issued by the President. That’s how that works.
I, the poster Shakes, could issue an executive order banning tuna on toast. Who cares? Nobody, I’m not the president.
I could sign Joe Biden’s name on the executive order banning tuna on toast. Who cares? I’m not the president.
What if I sign my executive order from the Oval Office? And I use a Joe Biden’s name? And Joe Biden is taking a nap?
It is alleged that scores of presidential decisions were made by presidential aides acting without presidential authority. Because Joe Biden was obviously going senile in the Oval Office. (The official story is Biden just decided to sign an order dropping out of the 2024 race one day. The official story is Biden was diagnosed with this rare slow-growing cancer only after his term ended.)
Republicans in the House are actively investigating the possibility that Biden staffers sold pardons to anyone willing to pay the bribe. Are those valid pardons merely because someone stamped Biden’s signature on them while he was taking a nap?
So it’s not impressive if you suggest that, to diffuse this crisis, Biden could have one of his aides issue a denial…
Shakes
28d ago
Because I think Trump is right. James Comey lied before Congress and he knew Russiagate was a sham.
Shakes
28d ago
What you are describing is the inadequacy of Republicans in Congress, which is the exact failure of leadership that created the opportunity for Trump’s election in the first place.
Shakes
28d ago
This is like a form of gaslighting, where the actions of Trump’s enemies are reconfigured as Trump’s fault. No, these things don’t happen haphazardly, people worked hard to make them happen.
Shakes
28d ago
This is all political. Competence has nothing to do with it. There is no threshold at which procedural pretexts stop being invented. It’s as if you said, “Muhammad Ali should be fighting, not getting punched. Amateur hour!”
That’s why you would invent a superset, to add type-checks and other context checks. You throw all your existing python that your non-technical professors and data scientists and math majors worked out. Then as you generate new “scrython” code you are reasonably confident it isn’t creating more problems to solve later. That code will be rigorously defined and checked by a linter which will constrain the universe of possible AI errors.
I don’t think this is the only way to add guardrails around AI but eventually someone will have to do something like this. The sheer volume of python written and being written means AI will be asked to write python for a long time to come.
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