VoxelVexillologist's profile

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 19d ago

When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?

Sometimes there are reasonable facts behind the complaints, but have you seen the litany of things "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are casually blamed for?

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 20d ago

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like there is no good business reason for an email queue to be 3-4 days steady state.

Your question is reasonable. I've always assumed (without evidence) that "steady state" isn't perfectly steady, and overprovisioning to get to zero backlog constantly would be expensive. Both short-term day-to-day noise and seasonal effects (few warranty claims on snowblowers in July) could make volumes unpredictable, and a couple of days slack would let you schedule shifts based on volume.

Although as Oracle pointed out, it could be a contractual obligation. I've certainly had interactions with, say, insurance where I've been quoted 60 days to evaluate a claim, but gotten a response within a week.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 20d ago

You're not wrong. The self-selection process for the times I've seen it work is likely an essential part of it working at all. Self-actualization is something that requires internal motivation, and can't be forced. But it can be an aspirational picture.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 20d ago

There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards.

When I was younger, I did a fair number of programs that involved getting grouped with other people you didn't know and having to work together. It was also an eye-opener for me. The rural/urban divide was certainly present, but not the only divide: having been raised in a straight-laced, middle-class, white collar household that I thought knew how to do physical labor, the blue collar work-hard-play-hard approach to life wasn't something I expected.

I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness. Not for militaristic reasons (although those aren't completely invalid), but also because being forced to meet and work together with very different Americans would be good for the country as a whole. And there are some useful life skills that some would never pick up otherwise. Even if it's just cutting trails in National Parks/Forests or whatever.

But I'm not sure how I could convince the median voter to go for it: probably half don't trust the country to be left in charge of their kids, and a similar portion think their kids are too good to spend months of their lives on something outside of their worldview.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 24d ago

In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners.

Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 25d ago

US should also try for the 'science->military' feedback loop.

I realize it's not hugely discussed, but isn't this (to some extent) still the case? The US has no shortage of scientists working on military(-ish) technology. Those National Labs all work for the Department of Energy, which, as Rick Perry found out, has surprisingly little to do with energy qua energy, and a lot more to do with nuclear power and defense research. There's also DARPA and similar programs that are more explicitly labeled "defense", and plenty of research grants from the intelligence community and the various services. Even NASA is distinctly defense-adjacent and their funding usually comes with security requirements. And "securing defense supply chains" has been a big reason for funding projects like the CHIPS Act.

It's not exactly a new example, but ARPANET was, for a long time, a defense project, and DARPA was funding a lot of the early self-driving car research. It's hard to see the current picture more clearly (I certainly don't claim to), but there's plenty of reason to hold results like this fairly quietly. I also won't claim that it's done optimally at a good scale, but the idea that science and military aren't linked currently is at least missing some of the forest for the trees.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 25d ago

This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.

I have always drawn a sharp distinction between technical questions and political ones. To me, "Is HBD true?" Is distinctly the former, while most any question about actually applying that knowledge is the latter.

I'm not a strict utilitarian: I think we can and should have guiding principles in how we approach political questions, regardless of the technical merits. I can think of plenty of likely true technical facts that, applied, lead to all kinds of evil: "Replacing retirement and social security with mandatory euthanasia centers increases ~~paperclip production~~ long-term GDP" might be true, but I find any attempt to enact such a policy morally abhorrent. But I also don't think we need to willfully blind ourselves to the idea as a whole to avoid enacting reprehensible policies: we simply make a moral choice not to do evil.

There will be disagreements about the morality of some cases, but I think there is a legitimate (near-)universal consensus that killing people at retirement is wrong. Much of the Culture War seems to revolve around the moral edge cases (abortion, for example) and largely binary views on morality.

In short, I don't think you should need to concern yourself with whether or not population-level statistics apply to you, and in return we as a society should agree to, in general, ignore those statistics (willfully, if necessary) when interacting with individuals on principle. Because that's the egalitarian society I would want to live in.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 26d ago

Plenty of bad behavior happens among the Silicon Valley elite.

As much as I find the statement itself reprehensible, I think there's a kernel of truth in an infamous quote from a former president:

And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

High status lets people (almost exclusively men, in this case) get away with a lot, in part because people are willing to put up with more to be with someone high status: Christian Grey's romance plays don't work for anyone who isn't a hot, young billionaire. The quid pro quo is implicit, and rarely spoken about, although I seem to recall a few blow-ups in recent memory where it seemed part of the drama involved (by deceit or misreading) mistakes about how high-status one party was.

And nobody really complains because it's hard to declare that behavior with "groupies" (for lack of a better word) is categorically non-consensual.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 26d ago

Everyone is free to build their own GNU/Linux distribution

If anything, GNU/Linux is, itself, an example of voting with feet. There's a reason we're not running GNU Hurd for a full GNU stack.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 26d ago

Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story, as did the development discussions that happened in public (though what about e-mail/discord?), but the initial discovery seems like it was entirely separate from any source-diving, and a lot of the attack never had its source available until people began decompiling it.

There isn't any evidence directly supporting this, but I saw a claim that this entire claim of discovery ("slow SSH connections") could easily enough be parallel construction prompted by The Powers That Be (tm) aware of this effort for other reasons -- which range from "we know our adversaries are trying to insert this code" to "we run our own audits but don't want to reveal their details directly". Even in such a situation it's a bit unclear who the parties would be (nation-state intelligence agencies, possibly certain large corporations independent of their respective governments). The obvious claim would be something like "NSA launders data to Microsoft to foil North Korean hacking attempts", but "China foils NSA backdoor attempts" isn't completely implausible either.

That said, I can only imagine that sneaking a backdoor like this into proprietary build systems would be even less likely to be detected: the pool of people inspecting the Windows build system is much smaller than those looking at (or at least able to look at) libxz and it's (arcane, but somewhat industry standard) autoconf scripts.

Also, this is the sort of thing that I have a vested interest in as a long-time personal and professional Linux user. I have the skills ("a very particular set of skills") to follow the details of issues like this, but there isn't yet any organized way to actually contribute them. I'd be willing to spend maybe a few hours a month auditing code and reviewing changes to "boring" system packages, but I'd never think to look at libxz specifically, or to get enough "street cred" for people to actually take any feedback I have seriously. And even then, this particular issue is underhanded enough to be hard to spot even when an expert is looking right at it. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting involved like this?

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1mo ago

to ban free speech at universities

You know, the folks that take umbrage with this (outside of a few truly principled libertarian types) were probably completely fine with the speech banning here, they just disagree on the targets. Free speech absolutism on campus sailed probably a century or so ago. The Obama Administration helpfully defined "sexual harassment" banned for the purposes of Title IX to include "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" including "verbal conduct". Democrats were completely on board with these rulings at the time, and similar ones about racial slurs. But now that Republicans are passing rules that students can't cheer "gas the Jews" (or, admittedly, several more modest phrases that still advocate for ethnic cleansing) and remain in good standing, that is clearly a bridge too far.

I'm not sure anyone is really being principled here, which as someone with centrist-to-principled-libertarian views is rather frustrating.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1mo ago

Amazon is really hard to buy decent clothing from. I've tried buying stretch knit dresses, which is the easiest thing possible to fit, and they were still off and basically unwearable, high waisted for a very short, wide person in that case.

Completely anecdotally, my experience has been the opposite. But I'm looking at menswear, not dresses. In particular, I found a business casual shirt that fit me well in my closet, and I was able to find the exact same brand/size on Amazon. The first one fit, and I've since bought a few extra colors when the price is reduced (I might grump a small amount that even these change slightly over time, and that back pleats on men's shirts seem to be out-of-fashion these days). I've also bought quite a few pairs of jeans in rather the same way, which saves rummaging through the racks at the store to find the right size: there are surprisingly few longer-than-wide pairs of pants at modern American stores, but Amazon always has them in stock. Socks don't have much variation in sizing, either.

In terms of athletic wear, a few years back I bought a pair of running shorts for a good price on a whim from a Chinese brand I hadn't heard of, and they have honestly been some of the best I've used (not a connoisseur). I've since bought a few more (and a couple of other items), and not been disappointed. Sportswear in stores, especially anything sport-specific, is generally comparatively expensive in stores near me.

Admittedly, I can imagine works for me primarily because I'm trying to buy identically-cut garments, which I'd bet only works for male fashion.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1mo ago

Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living.

I think you're right that the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to seriously take up off-grid living, but I think we are seeing a slow shift in the zeitgeist around the margins. Sure, someone who fills Pinterest boards with cottagecore styles and buys a potted plant isn't personally making a huge shift, but I do think from talking to friends and co-workers that we're seeing a bit of a rebound into, for lack of a better term, touching grass: hobbies, IRL social groups, and such. It's less clear to me whether it's countering the broad, growing online-ness of the last two decades, or more specifically the stark digital isolation of 2020 (likely both), but the social status of "being online" has, to my eyes, peaked as of a year or two ago.

The Internet has completed a full cycle from being the exclusive domain of weird academic types, to primarily high-paying tech workers, to everyone's parents, and I wouldn't be surprised if the median (American) internet addict already has or will soon have a lower income than the average American. Admittedly, that's ill-defined: it's hard to escape the Internet completely, but it feels to me like constantly burying one's nose in a phone playing games or watching videos is becoming a low-status behavior. Less so for email, reading books, or texting friends, but I've seen people engaging in analog activities (writing, drawing, photography) get explicit positive reactions.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1mo ago

Rust is clearly the systems language of the future. It can be just as fast as C++ and has a much nicer syntax/doesn't have weird idiosyncracies (ok, the last point is debatable).

I'm not completely sure I buy this vision of the future. Rust has some very good ideas, but there is so much quantity behind legacy C/C++ systems that it has a quality all of its own. And it's not the first time claims like this have been made: I'm old enough to remember Java being sold as "just as fast as C++" and safer (debatably true for some workloads today, less true at the time), but it hasn't displaced C or C++ despite major efforts. And despite the supposed memory safety, I have actually encountered java.lang.NullPointerException in the wild (production code) plenty of times. C# also promised a brave new garbage-collected world. If I were older, I'd probably point to Ada, which was originally developed for the DoD to write safe, modular programs in the late 1970s (IMO an underappreciated language, to be honest) and still gets some use today.

Rust has some good ideas, but fundamentally it seems to be pretty similar to C++ in terms of what the languages want to be. My loose prognostication is that the sheer Borg mass of the C++ ecosystem will learn to interoperate with, embrace, and extend. The C++ committee is clearly steering this direction, and it seems only a matter of time until the base version of the language offers, say, a borrow checker. There has already been plenty of (slow, but steady) motion towards that sort of thing since C++11 (shared_ptr, more recently span). It seems to me only a matter of time before someone posts a patchset for GCC or Clang that adds -Wborrow-checker.

There's something to be said that the current backwards-compatible syntax for modern C++ will get unwieldy, but there has already been public discussion of attempts to make breaking revisions to it: see Sutter's proposal for cppfront. This sort of thing isn't unheard of: early C++ was implemented as a generator for C code. Javascript has all sorts of code compatibility tools, including CoffeeScript, which seems to have fallen out of favor since the ~~JavaScript~~ ECMAScript standards committee decided to start publishing again and making real updates. I just can't see full rewrites in Rust of major application code, but I could find it plausible that the backend object models of the languages will converge until they interoperate fairly seamlessly. Or that C++ absorbs all the good ideas and Rust remains around in a vestigial, nostalgic fashion like Perl or PHP in 2024.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1mo ago

the Dallas-Houston route is well served by commuter flights and luxury buses which puts an upper floor on the price tag for rail tickets.

I've long been wondering whether a better application of HSR wouldn't be to urban centers directly, but to major airports. Ideally, the airport already has transit options into the city available, are generally on the outskirts of town where routing rail travel would be easier, and, while airlines might be unhappy about losing short flights, there are lots of short connections to hubs that could probably be faster by train than an extra connecting flight. Austin and San Antonio to Dallas or Houston, Chicago to Milwaukee, Oklahoma City to Dallas, Phoenix to Tuscon. All these flights are about an hour, and fly more than half a dozen flights daily each way, many of which are, I assume, to take a much longer flight from the larger airport, because driving would take a similar amount of time and solve getting around at the destination.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1mo ago

Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.

This is true of the Detroit motor companies, but I'm not completely comfortable calling that "Japanese automakers defeating American manufacturers": I've known lots of friends and family that drive "import" brands that were wholly built in America. And looking at the job postings for Honda and Toyota, it looks like there are no shortage of design engineering positions around the US either. At one point 30 years ago, it may have seemed imminent that American auto manufacturing would have gone extinct, but looking at it from a 2024 perspective, that conflict seems to fall on different lines: Detroit and its largely rust-belt, union factories versus more recent construction sunbelt at-will manufacturing funded by globalized brands.

I think some of this relates to the economics (and international trade politics) of transporting assembled cars versus franchising a new factories elsewhere, but while there would be some egg-in-the-face for Detroit if BYD, JAC, or Geely start selling lots of cars onto American roads, but if those cars are largely built by American hands and at least partly designed by American engineers, it's conceivably not that different from where we are today. The economics of Chinese Communism probably complicate this somewhat, but, as the kids say, it's complicated and it's not completely unfair to point out that the US government owned a decent chunk of GM for a while. I think it's plausible it could get horse traded by political leaders into a victory for globalism (similar to how the "Japan takes over the world" trope has been negotiated down to seemingly nation-less multinational corporations and occasional infusions of pop-culture), but I wouldn't bet heavily on that outcome today.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 2mo ago

The telecom company's expert testifies that, though it's anecdotally true that higher-end house buyers are "more discerning" and less likely to buy houses near cell towers, the data show that any drop in house prices near the cell tower would be less than one percent.

Although they aren't the prettiest, I bet those same high-end house buyers love to complain about the terrible cell reception in their neighborhood.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 2mo ago

How much does the average Democrat care about Republicans? How much does the average Republican care about Democrats?

I think this is one place where the Internet has severely soured the discourse. I strongly suspect that the median answer in both cases is that they care more than you expect, and that the loud cases you see online aren't truly representative (although I worry they are becoming moreso).

There exists genuine disagreement about how best to care about, say, single-parent families ("encourage marriage"/"throw money at them") with both sides accusing the other of being counterproductive, but as a fairly moderate voter, I don't generally doubt the intent on either side. There are some obvious cases of motivated reasoning -- although it's often hard to tell when one's reasoning is so-motivated. I have friends across the political spectrum, and while the level of empathy I see for others varies, none of them seem to operate purely selfishly (although such people probably exist outside of my set of friends).

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 2mo ago

While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States,

There are some subtleties to this (which aren't terribly relevant to the described incident): my jurisdiction allows parents (or guardians) to provide alcohol to their supervised minor dependents, as well as spouses. Obviously not to whole parties, though.

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