VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
make the evidence-based call.
It isn't always evidence that is the deciding factor. To point to another hot-button issue, I don't trust doctors to decide "when is abortion murder?", because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically).
IMO we've reached a point in the technology adoption curve where the hard piece to build such a competitor is not programming. Acquiring and keeping a critical mass of users while dodging politically-charged lawfare (copyrighted content, criminal activity, pornography) seems like the real missing piece. And the users are probably more difficult than the lawfare.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.
I'm not itching for the chance here, but I'd be very surprised if Western R&D isn't cooking up mostly-autonomous, short-range anti-drone weapons (lasers, small caliber guns) that they intend to strap to pretty much everything bigger than a jeep. I imagine that modern electronics manufacturing could build a miniature CIWS for not too much more than the drone it's targeting: the RF and compute electronics to do this are much more ubiquitous than they were when the original technology was deployed on ships.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Not all areas have need for basements: if you're not digging to get below the frost line (warmer climates), soil is shallow, or the water table is near the surface (the entire Gulf coast), a basement is really expensive to build as an option, and they aren't very common choices. I'll keep my garage.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries.
For added fun, you'll need to be careful doing this because lithium battery chemistries have a tendency to spontaneously combust when exposed to oxygen.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
In states with closed primaries (like Pennsylvania), there are plenty of reasons to register as a member of a party you don't really agree with completely to vote in the primary. As a voter in an open primary state, I tend to choose which primary to vote in to maximize the volume from my vote, not because I consider myself a member of a partisan group.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I find eye contact uncomfortable so I mostly avoid it
I hear this sort of thing brought up a lot as a sign of autism, and maybe it is in higher doses, but from generic people-watching and life experience, most people don't make eye contact most of the time. Eye contact does happen in platonic and romantic interaction, but excessive eye contact is off-putting in its own way (creepy). It's up there with how people generally don't directly face each other when talking, but more obliquely. IMO it's important to make sure we compare ourselves to real, normal people rather than exceptions or movie characters.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I suspect this is very true in the modal case. I've known a couple of exceptions that are self-motivated enough to make remote work effective. And I'd buy that it can be better for very deep work requiring intense concentration and few distractions for those that can manage it in those circumstances. But I will also admit that I feel at least a bit less productive on those times when I do get to work from home.
But I also know people that are being forced back into the office to hot-desk and work with distributed teams, so they aren't really getting the benefit of in-person discussions, which IMO have a much higher bandwidth than video chats.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Supposedly these were all pagers bought by Hezbollah and distributed to their operators? Sounds like the most targeted strike, with the least collateral damage, that I've ever heard of or could ever imagine.
Even if it's not killing these operators, consistently maiming them seems like an obvious way to prevent them from blending into the civilian population. If I were Israel planning a ground invasion of Lebanon, temporarily injuring my unwitting enemies is great, but being able to filter out those with hip injuries for additional screening or capture seems a potentially-existential threat for such an organization.
But I can't speak to whether a ground invasion is actually likely, and I haven't been following the region very closely in the last few weeks.
The annexation of Texas was largely downstream of first Spain, then newly-independent Mexico encouraging Americans to colonize the mostly-unoccupied-except-Native-Americans region (land grants happened elsewhere in the American West as well). For reasons involving language/culture barriers, a proto-fascist dictatorship, and, yes, slavery, Texas declared and won it's independence from Mexico, puttered along as a recognized independent state for a decade before US annexation, and the actual Mexican American war kicked off over the exact borders of Texas.
I don't see that many parallels here. Did Ukraine encourage Russian settlement in Crimea/Donetsk? I don't think the Spanish Empire fits in the place of the USSR here. And the US was actually pretty reluctant to annex Texas at the time because it would change the antebellum balance of slave and free states. Texas had formal relations with other major powers, and there was some discussion with the British about border guarantees as an alternative to American annexation, although IMO the close ties there probably made that a non-starter.
I see a little bit of what you are suggesting, but I think it plays almost equally well in reverse: with independence from Spain the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western ideals were invited into the region, setting up an inevitable conflict with caudillo Santa Anna Putin in ways that lost Mexico the Russian sphere of influence huge swaths of territory and riches in ways that might have been salvageable. Was Texas independence, or the broader Mexican Cession, truly inevitable? Maybe, but Santa Anna didn't seem particularly interested in keeping them (edit: except by force), and Texas wasn't even the only rebellious Mexican province in 1835.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Credentialism isn't what is stopping diggers from working fake email jobs.
IMO "fake email jobs" is a bit of a Russell's conjugation: "I have an important role keeping [industry] moving, you work remote as a middle-manager, and that guy over there has a fake email job." Not to say that all such jobs are useful, but I'd bet there'd be a fair bit of disagreement about whether any specific role qualified. People often don't have good visibility into what other departments are doing, and I'd bet nobody considers their job this way, but absolutely does sneer at, say, the accounting department ("it's all just a spreadsheet anyway") or purchasing.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I have known a few white collar engineering types who have told me they're paid (well) hourly. I assume it's just a bookkeeping thing, but I believe they may have been in states that mandate overtime hourly pay anyway. I don't think it'd take a huge incentive to make that more universal.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
its job is to categorize existing glyphs into the Unicode format.
Now you have me imagining an alternate world in which people instead resorted to sending Unicode characters for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Squatting man, beetle, eye, eye.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Weren't a relatively large chunk of victims in the Holocaust, especially early in the war, basically rounded up and shot? The death camps were, IIRC, a fairly late addition, and even then many of the deaths were from forced labor and disease.
Which isn't to say that the death camps didn't exist, just that "The Holocaust" is a much broader event than just gas chambers. And also isn't to suggest that deaths from bullets or starvation are somehow more morally excusable.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
But I do try to wear the dressiest shoes that are comfortable throughout the day.
As someone who mostly wears retired running shoes (Altra, not New Balance, and generally more muted colors), do you have any recommendations for finding durable, comfortable, and good-looking shoes?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
My wife, but I believe her when she says she was taking them as directed, even at the same time daily. She wasn't very excited by the unexpected news (although we are both, in hindsight, glad to have the little one), and I was there when she was taking them pretty often.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Pill wise. I know zero people that have gotten pregnant on it unless "oops" I missed a few.
I can personally vouch that "99.9% effective when taken as directed" is not, in fact, 100%. If you take the word of an anonymous Internet stranger.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I could see myself doing that if it was already in written form. If you asked me verbally, or I looked somewhere else, it would be verbal, though.
Definitely an interesting exercise.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
In part, that's pretty funny, but I'm not exactly sure how my brain answers that question. I think by spelling it out loud in my head (even though I would parse it as a single token while reading or listening), but I could imagine someone more visually-oriented might describe something like what you're saying. The mind is weird, man.
How does your brain answer the question?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Blocking federal student loans for students (let's limit it to not-yet-admitted students to avoid tearjerking stories) would probably be hugely detrimental to the academic rankings of any institution, even Harvard.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I can't speak to experience, but I've often wondered how the cultural milieu on the Internet differs for non-Anglophones. English as the default seems ubiquitous enough culturally that it seems like a bit of a "fish describing water" question to ask what everyone else sees.
Is the, say, Francophone Internet (or culture more broadly) quite as, um, gestures broadly at The Internet frenetic and self-hating? That alone seems like it might make people happier.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
In my experience, I don't think you're wrong that bringing up abortion in campaign ads is a bad strategy. But I will say that the loudest pro-life voices I've encountered in life have been women, mostly Catholic ones. I believe the stats bear out that women tend to have much stronger opinions on the issue (in both directions!) than men. I think one thing the left gets wrong is assuming that pro-life advocacy is primarily male-coded, even if the politicians in question tend to be men.
In some ways, I think it's funny that we've made a full cycle from "those geese belong to your feudal lord" to various democratic revolutions, all the way back to "you can't eat those geese because of the treaty on migratory birds your duly-elected representatives approved generations ago".
Not endorsing any particular side there, just observing.
From what I can gather, the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea: "we can make these kids lives better by bringing them up assimilated with Western education and values." And several prominent Native Americans were at least loosely supportive of the idea (Charles Curtis, Vice President of the US during the Hoover administration comes to mind).
It strikes me as very similar to the far-left/communist meme about who gets to educate your children. And I think even now there would be support for it among progressives as long as you make sure it's for children of the right "undesirables."
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