VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9hr ago
Does anyone today other than the US, Russia, and China? Aerial refueling can extend multirole fighter ranges (Israel v. Iran for example), but it's not the most effective from what I can tell.
Airplanes from 1939 stand little chance today, except in quantities: I doubt even today's USAF could fully suppress a few thousand-bomber raids. Nobody has that number of missiles that I'm aware of.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I suppose I could just go to mass and LARP, but that's sacrilegious
Is it? I've never been Catholic (have considered, at least), but all the high church traditions I'm familiar with are very sympathetic to doubt. The biblical story of doubting Thomas doesn't condemn Thomas for it, for example.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Note that "good" for progressives is very much a moving target, and that previously-good things sometimes become "bad". Not usually overnight, but see how "ending the drug war" was going to solve all our drug problems two decades ago, and compare to today when many municipalities and states have effectively unilaterally withdrawn from it. This has led to excesses that we hear a lot about today, and the vibe, from what I can tell, is shifting towards "maybe letting all this chaos happen in cities hasn't been compassionate" and even "the trains and busses should be safe and run on time". A century ago, progressivism was pushing Prohibition, because alcohol was "bad", although given cultural shifts in drinking before/after, I'm not sure I can easily judge that, honestly.
To be a bit generous, the worst excesses here seem to happen in areas for which there seems to be no good answer: it's nice to think that restricting the police will reduce violence and let drug addicts hold down jobs. But it's also naive to think that will wholesale fix our problems. And a lot of the excesses seem to be assumptions that going harder on the "nice" idea will fix it, when we're well beyond the diminishing point of return: "more school funding" when our failing schools already have 2-3x the per capita budget of the rest.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I'm not convinced of it's accuracy, but "the left proposes changes, not all good, and the right resists them, especially the worst ones" as a framework wouldn't be completely unworkable. Lots of continuous improvement sorts of systems work this way. We try things, and adopt them more widely when they work, and revert them when they don't. Our willingness to try things varies over time. To use a car analogy, not every model year improves over the last in every way, but most consumers probably prefer a 2026 Western (or even Chinese) model over an unchanged 50-year-old Lada design built this year.
It's not my favorite model, but I am not really in favor of letting either side of the CW declare moral victory.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
now is the time to think seriously about going back to Reddit
I'd actually disagree with this. Reddit has recently ended login-free read access to the site. And it has lots of AI content filtering going on beyond terrible subreddit moderators. I see more than a few "removed by reddit" posts (for some reason, the posts sometimes get filtered after being viewable for a bit) with thought crimes like failing to use the latest TikTok filter euphemisms for violence ("unalive", "grape", etc) or daring to link to local news sites mentioning these things.
Now feels, if anything, a more dangerous time to move back: coordinating the move was difficult enough, but for the frog to jump back into the warming water would be a bad choice.
If anything, the declining amount of commentary seems to me downstream of an uneasy détente in the Culture War: there is just less drama to talk about. Normies seem tired of extreme takes right and left, and we're maybe begrudgingly coming around to the old "don't talk politics and religion in polite company" rules.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Most full-size residential fridge units have auto-defrost circuits. I'm not aware of having to run one manually before: it's probably not meant to be manually controlled like that. The little ones generally need to be taken outside to thaw occasionally. I believe heat pumps for HVAC need auto-defrost too.
Buy and configure a single main operational server, have the hardware send regular updates there,
Depending on the way the corporate network is setup, you might need one of these at each location: does a grocery chain have a corporate-wide VPN already? I assume not because then you could avoid this whole situation by never exposing the hardware to the Internet. Even then, locking down odd hardware in a subnet would be a good choice.
It's often said that the "S" in IoT stands for security, and it's not really wrong, but the way we define "security" does manage to be difficult to implement on embedded devices. "Oh just use TLS" isn't trivial: most configurations there will need certs that get updated regularly. Do you even trust your CA to remain on the approved lists indefinitely? Will your choice of RSA-4096 still be acceptable for the life of the unit (say, 50 years)? What's your plan for post-quantum cryptography on a device built in 2003?
Your fridge also suddenly needs a good clock source to check the certificate time limits: now you need to set that on the device, potentially every time it loses power. NTP works, but isn't foolproof or even secure in most deployments. These things aren't trivial, unfortunately.
In practice, a large, long-lived SSH key signed by corporate would work fine, but none of the normal tech stack is really setup for this today unless your users like command lines. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's not in the normal wheelhouse for technicians who specialize in wrenches.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I share your ethical concerns about MAID, but in this case "botched" meant "patient didn't die" in the same way the execution failed.
I have no clue if the medications used are even the same.
While I listen to some of what they say, I expect that the average Rationalist is about as rational as the average Objectivist is objective. Which is to say not worthy of much trust on its own. I listen to Rand stans sometimes too, but never blindly.
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