VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19d ago
Sadly, I'm not sure these two statements are necessarily at odds in 2026.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
20d ago
images of the absolute spiderwebs of spent drone fiberoptic cables covering forests and fields and towns
Are those bare fibers plastic or glass? Given the optimization for weight, I assume they're not that strong as fibers go, but I guess I don't have a good sense of how either would break down over time given the odd shape.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars
As someone peripherally close to this field, I think there is a categorical distinction between a self-driving car tuned to drive against random road occurrences and an adversarial model that is actively looking for weaknesses and forcing the worst decisionmaking situations. As a concrete example, self driving cars of today probably don't worry about murals of tunnels adjacent to roadways (Roadrunner style): it's not a common occurrence. But in war you'd absolutely want your self-driving tank to not drive into such traps, and you'd expect your enemy to mass deploy paint to make it happen all at once.
A bunch of traffic cones on hoods seems able to stop Waymos, for example.
How many "unanimous" rulings have happened because one or two Karens made up their minds and then hen-pecked everyone else into agreeing with them using social tactics instead of logic and reason?
Isn't this dynamic just the plot of Twelve Angry Men? It's not strictly bad in the context it's played in, nor is it necessarily gendered.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
It's worth noting there has also been the additional "end of history" meme where people seem to broadly think "wars requiring a draft" are a thing left behind in last century. Obviously there are examples like Ukraine even today, but I don't think the modal Western man realistically fears being called up by the draft board. And I'd like to think that such fear would be misplaced --- obviously the ending there is not yet written --- and it seems drones may fill a large fraction of that role going forward (see Ukraine).
In that context, specifically, "but men have the draft" seems a hard-to-win equality argument.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly,
This seems like the start of an argument to means test Social Security, which has historically been a very unpopular argument. But it may be one that has to be made, absent Fully Automated Gay Space Communism happening within my lifetime.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up".
Maybe not at your school, but Harvard (hardly a no-name example) currently awards something like 85% of its grades as 'A's. It's gotten bad enough that the faculty plan on capping the number of 'A' grades handed out starting next year, which has spilled a nontrivial amount of ink in arguments back and forth. Yale is also considering similar actions.
I don't think it's quite universal (it seems more an issue at top-tier schools), but it is often acknowledged as a problem.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
Iran's drone and missile arsenal doesn't depend on the power plants and oil refineries.
Not in the short term, certainly, but it would impact the long-term economics of a future regime pretty negatively. IIRC Iraq didn't manage to fully rebuild its damaged infrastructure from 1991 until after 2003. Missile factories require power and raw materials.
But actually destroying it isn't cheaply or quickly reversible, and makes a friendly future regime less plausible.
Even if they don't get killed after surrendering, they would probably get Maduroed, their lives as they knew them over.
If anything, it seems the Trump doctrine is more flexible with this than the Bush era: the rest of that regime is still running Venezuela, with the, uh, implication leading to some foreign policy changes, not "we're bringing democracy and planning elections".
And honestly the changes being requested don't sound that onerous to me: stop funding proxies and instability in the region, stop enrichment, and probably tone down the rhetoric on US/IL and internal jackboots, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Not saying it's an easy ask, but it doesn't seem to include "submit to international war crimes/human rights trials".
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
in a scenario where banking and payment infrastructure is shut down entirely, what problems am I trying to solve with cash?
I think this is a worthwhile question: I don't use cash often, but a few times I've needed to settle up things like group meals ("no split checks", ugh) it's often a hassle to deal with change since nobody has much. Can't pay $27 with just twenties, but people aren't ready to round to the twenty. Few carry enough smaller bills to break a twenty. We usually end up doing Venmo or whatever.
Not sure what to suggest, honestly.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
Barrel-aged spirits are a classic example: scotches are not infrequently in that age range.
On the other hand, I've heard a lot of people in the business remark that it makes starting costs pretty overwhelming. At best you can start selling gin and vodka, or reselling out-of-house product while you wait for yours to age. Depending on jurisdiction you get to pay inventory/property tax on it too while you wait.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
The rest is just a slow grind towards bureaucratic inertia and shipping pace has fallen off several cliffs.
It has been my observation that engineering productivity often scales sub-linearly with team size. Coordination between developers isn't zero-overhead, but it can still be "faster" (to market) overall than a small, dedicated team.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
IIRC there is a good amount of data suggesting that engineering teams have shrunk substantially in the last few generations: with computers (spreadsheets, CFD/FEM, digital control systems) product development from bridges to aircraft is at least abstractly more productive. Gone are the days of big rooms of draftsmen, in are a couple of CAD technicians (and they're better about answering "will it fit?" questions), and the parts themselves are getting optimized and closer-packed. Compare a car engine bay from the 60s to today, where there is almost no free space left (does make maintenance a pain sometimes, though), and efficiency is hugely up.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
Isn't that loosely true of everything following from division of labor? We get more out of farmland when we ascend the technology ladder and start building cars and tractors, not when we maximize the number of field hands.
There seems to be some assumption of "big AI central planning", when adapting existing (market) distributed consensus mechanisms is a possible, and maybe even more plausible, route. Maybe we need hundreds of agents (previously human) compiling The Beige Book regularly and distributing it, not a single Five Year Plan from a hallucinating AI.
I think I'm going to have to come up with some jokes to associate people making these claims with the University of Oklahoma, or the state more broadly.
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