benmmurphy
5mo ago
i think giving any kind of attention to the shooters increases the probability of future shootings. i think there is very strong evidence that a similar thing happens with suicides. i'm not sure how big of an impact it is or if its worth the trade off to suppress such things but in a free society it is difficult to suppress such things.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
don't mess with chicken or pork when it comes to cooking
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Even if the petitioners win is it going to meaningfully impact what the government can do or are they just going to find work arounds like in the affirmative action decision. Presumably, the government is allowed to write to a newspaper and say I disagree with this OpEd/article here is our opinion on the matter as long as they make no demands or threats. Now if the courts say to the government you are not allowed to make requests for censorship then the government has the option to just ping the social media companies saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X our opinion is Y". Certainly, this is an improvement but maybe the end result ends up being the same with social media companies assuming there is some kind of implicit threat or demand. Though, I think some of the requests were already using a dodge around explicit censorship. For example they were saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X and this appears to violate your terms of service". So not explicitly asking them to censor BillyBob but bringing to the attention of the company that BillyBob may have been violating the terms of service for the social media site. If the court comes up with something to prevent this then maybe it will also be a solution to other work arounds the government might come up with.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
The argument seems to be meritocracy is not possible because some people are going to be 'losers' in the system. Even if there wasn't race to coordinate around the 'losers' in the system could coordinate around a measure like IQ. Maybe the general argument is correct but I don't see a strong reason why race should be treated in a special way.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
coincidentally massie is talking about the pipe bomb on his twitter again: https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1750114583476404350 and 5 days ago blaze media are claiming the person who found the pipe bomb at the DNC was a plains clothes capitol police officer.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
it seems to me that this kind of mass attack will always succeed to some extent. maybe it was made worse in this particular situation for a bunch of reasons but even if everything went right for the israelis i think hamas would have had some kind of success. unless you have some kind of massive DMZ and large permanent deployment of troops an enemy will always be able to surge at a critical point and have some short term success.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
Seems a bit like positivism/normativism. This is the current state of the world I think the optimal behaviour is X is not endorsing the current state of the world.
this is actually true. i know there is a third party framework that is installed in a lot of popular apps in iOS that could be used to deliver zero day exploits targeted at individual users. one of the co-founders of the company had a senior position in the DoD. the only reason i don't think this is such a big deal is because anyone who has access to such exploits could probably just find/buy exploits for safari in order to deliver it so the infrastructure is not that useful. also, i'm not sure how it is deployed at customer sites. the framework interacts with software running under the customer's control but i'm not sure if the software is capable of calling back home or not. it could be that the software is run completely firewalled off in the customer's data center in which case it would be difficult to use as an attack vector because the 'attacks' would need to be pushed as software updates.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
Also, there is a new motion in the FBI Seth Rich FOIA case from the plaintiff that seems to make the claim that the FBI covered up Seth Rich's involvement in the email leak.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txed.197917/gov.uscourts.txed.197917.92.0.pdf
Previously from the FBI:
https://twitter.com/Ty_Clevenger/status/1601780110117703680
https://lawflog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2022.12.09-FBI-reply.pdf
benmmurphy
1yr ago
SoS claimed there was 10,200 petition sheets. i'm sure after they have finished properly reviewing all the signatures they will find the missing ones that weren't part of the initial count.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
ubiquitous TLS + ESNI/ECH does make it harder to perform some forms of censorship. for example if someone controlling the network wants to ban you from a particular site hosted on cloudflare or another CDN then they will need to ban ESNI/ECH connections to the whole of the CDN. more people using TLS/etc increases the collateral damage from certain blocking technologies.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
68% of elite ivy league graduates support banning private air conditioning and non-essential travel to fight climate change? I just do not believe that, there's clearly something wrong with the poll.
i think this is a reasonable possibility. i've heard it claimed there is a strong social desirability bias when answering surveys and the 'correct' thing to do is to fight climate change. just because they answered positively in a survey doesn't mean they would actually support the policies if it came to a vote. the cheating question is very weird and I suspect somehow they worded the question without explicitly saying cheating and claimed they question meant cheating in their summary.
that's the cheekiness of the opinion. how or why would trump appeal a decision that went in his favour even if the opinion derided him? the original petitions have filed an appeal but i'm not sure if the higher court will just address whether the 14th amendment applies to Trump or whether he engaged in insurrection or not. presumably, if the higher court did find the 14th amendment applied it would eventually have to also make a finding on the free speech issue if Trump pushed it but i'm not sure if this would be done at the same time or not.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
i thought this was referred to as 'mood affiliation' in some circles but i'm not sure if that's the right term. maybe it's just confirmation bias. see: https://www.econlib.org/mood-affiliation-or-confirming-evidence/
benmmurphy
6mo ago
it is a problem because you can always find someone who is associated with cause X but also has unsavory opinion Y. of course it seems like its fine to use these tactics to smear other causes.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
Yud seemed to say LLMs could play chess and therefore could reason. However, the games I've see it play it has tried to make illegal moves which seems to indicate its just pattern matching and the pattern matching breaks down in some spots. of course maybe reasoning is just pattern matching and the LLMs aren't good at it yet or the LLM hasn't been trained on enough chess games. i guess chess players would also say chess is heavily about pattern matching but it also involves some kind of explicit reasoning to double check lines.
This could just be a result of incompetence. My experience from reporting security issues is that people don't do root cause analysis. So if you report security X they are just going to fix issue X they are not going to grep the codebase to see if issue X is repeated. So its quite possible that someone reported an issue where chat GPT made some argument saying black people were bad. The developer 'fixed' this issue but didn't enumerate all the races to ensure that chat GPT didn't say X race was bad. It's very obvious if chat GPT responds to some prompt about X race in a bad way that you should also check if chat GPT responds to Y race in a bad way for same prompt. But your average jira code slave is just resolving tickets in the most efficient way possible so you end up with this weirdness.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
that's kind of a weak man. they are going to say that blacks can't succeed with AA because of the systematic racism and that is why they need affirmative action. not because of something intrinsic to blacks but rather something that society is doing to blacks.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
Maybe HR in some of these tech companies are acting more like a concierge for the other workers. That could explain their high numbers.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
There is another problem which is they are effectively claiming Trump is disqualified from office if he was elected. But they cannot know this because it would be possible for the house and senate to remove this disqualification before he began serving. Whether Trump is disqualified or not at the point in time that he would assume office is currently unknown. This would be similar to Colorado not allowing someone on the Primary who was aged 34 years and 11 months because they are not currently qualified even though they would be qualified at the point that they serve. Maybe there is Colorado case law where they already do this which would be strange but I assume cases would be decided allowing a person of such age onto the Primary ballot. The age issue is a stronger argument because we know someone will age whereas Trump’s situation is unknown but I think it is a compelling argument.
benmmurphy
8mo ago
sam brinton must have read the alt-text on that comic
i guess it depends on what you mean by rates. if you compare the ratio ([W rapes W] / [W rapes B]) against ([B rapes B] / [B rapes W]) then you would expect the ratios to be out of whack. but if you compare (W rapes B) against (B rapes W) then these should be the same numerically because it takes 2 to tango so the ratios in the final equations are the same but just ordered differently. but i guess if you doing something like dividing (W rapes B) and (B rapes W) by population numbers of the offender (or victim) then you are going to get ratios that are out of whack because the numerators should be the same but will have different denominators. but i'm not sure what the justification for doing this division would be...
A worked example:
Using this population ratio:
A: 3/4
B: 1/4
Where the population is made of of 50% rapists who rape from the population randomly:
A_r: 3/8
B_r: 1/8
A_r_A: 3/8 * 3/4 = 9/32
A_r_B: 3/8 * 1/4 = 3/32
B_r_A: 1/8 * 3/4 = 3/32
B_r_B: 1/8 * 1/4 = 1/32
BrA is 3x more likely than BrB
whereas
ArB is 3x less likely than ArA
but A_r_B == B_r_A
benmmurphy
1mo ago
There is a nice culture war troll angle with some parts of the Rust programming language community being associated with leftist political drama. Rust is a popular safe language that solves most memory safety issues and some thread safety issues. I can see someone authoring a bait piece about taking my 'freedumb' to use C++ from my cold dead hands and forcing me to use communist Rust.
If they used the term 'reverse racism' then I think that is weird to begin with. There is a category 'racism' and then there are subcategories 'racism against X from Y' and 'racism against Y from X' which I assume is what they want to discuss. I would answer false because the statement doesn't make any sense and nonsense statements are false. If you try and argue the statement is true then you arguing with one arm tied behind your back because you are already accepting the main premise behind the 'false' argument. I don't see why 'racism against X from Y' should be privileged linguistically so that there is a normal 'racism' and a 'reverse racism'. I think it is just lazy on their part to use the term 'racism' when they really mean 'racism by the majority group in a country' or something similar. surprisingly, it can be difficult to know what they mean if they don't explicitly say it.
there is a big difference between messing about on a different continent and messing about next door.
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