dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
21d ago
It's not hard to imagine a world in which Israel's air campaign culminates eventually as they run low on munitions and a deal of some flavor is worked out.
I do not know why we wouldn't continue funding Israel to keep doing decapitation strikes on Iran leadership and maintain air superiority. This is incredible edge at incredible ROI.
Requires no ground invasion and civilian deaths are minimized. I would contribute to this GoFundMe.
Eventually, either Iran ruling committee #133 decides to surrender or the central government looks like a pathetic clown show and the nation disintegrates.
I wonder what kind of pitch deck the Kurds are circulating right now.
In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property"
We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.
Sure fine whatever. But even these are not absolute, and can be pierced if justified.
this digital cache of self-produced child pornography is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice.
We throw, and threaten to throw, teenagers in jail all the time over this. It is probably good that they take steps to defend themselves if they're going to engage in this activity to avoid the current environment of societal overreaction; the entire point of "rights" is to limit the damage society can do when (not if) it overreacts (the flip side of the coin being "ticking time bomb plots", but I'm willing to trade the lives lost in those for the ones saved due to them not committing suicide any more over this).
By "self-produced child pornography" I did not mean teenagers recording themselves over Snapshot. I meant something more like an adult recording a child that they have prisoner in their closet that they raped periodically before murdering and disappearing them. The child is now gone without a trace but authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.
The overwhelming majority of murders worldwide in the 20th century were perpetrated in an organized fashion by governments targeting their own citizens (organized mobs using simple demographic criteria make up most of the rest); the impulse to make one a harder target against those is only natural. Proponents of this approach can point to things like census records being burned to stop an angry invading force from determining which people were going to the concentration camps and which were not. The Germans are well-acquainted with this; being that they have committed the overwhelming majority of murder on the European continent in the last 100 years probably has something to do with that.
These atrocities were committed by dictatorships, yes?
When I say people with these worries are Qanon-adjacent. this is what I mean. Invocation of living in fascist Germany or the Khmer Rouge to describe the need to rigorously defend your privacy living in the United States in 2024. Yes, if you live in a totalitarian dictatorship, or one that's rapidly becoming one, sure fine privacy seems pretty important! To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late. IMO this is a persecution fear very distantly tethered to Earth.
I submit that privacy warriors are just another shade of culture warrior, and it's a kind of warfare with bipartisan appeal.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Might still happen! (I didn't want to explain why I think crypto is dumb in my top-post)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Like, you scoff at impenetrable end to end encryption. But the realities of the internet are that any back-door or security flaw that allows end to end encryption to be penetrated exposes literally everything to literally everyone.
[...]
Not so with anything on the internet. Either it's impenetrable, even to legitimate law enforcement (but especially illegitimate law enforcement), or virtually every criminal on Earth already has access to it. There is very little in between.
This is grandiose. On Facebook without E2E encryption (but with TLS), your messages are only exposed to Facebook and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility. Adding E2E encrypted messaging with a law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case, even if that key is ultimately compromised.
Then you decide to stan for cloud computers. Because a friend of yours is an idiot and didn't fix his NAS when it had a problem. But the fact of the matter is, the cloud is still only someone else's computer. And they can revoke access to your data just as capriciously as a RAID array might fail.
Somehow it never occurs to people making this argument that it's trivial to make off-site backups from cloud providers, if you're that worried about them revoking access.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
On the other hand... Japan surrendered to the US! How were the Japanese able to swallow their pride in the face of total nuclear annihilation and decide that bending their knee to the West and adopting all of their customs was better than going down in a blaze of glory? But yet the Palestinians find this utterly unthinkable?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4mo ago
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
I would continue to provide intelligence sharing, weapons, economic aid. I would not involve our own military. Continue to strike as many deals as possible to economically isolate Russia as well.
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
Slowly and annoyingly bleed out Russian resources until they get exhausted and go home. No grand last stand. No obvious red lines crossed. Just endless quagmire for Russia, enormous cost for no lasting progress. Make it crystal clear that there's a rules based order and if you just cross boundaries in a war of conquest we will not make it easy.
A world where we didn't defend Ukraine is a lot more volatile. I contend that our willingness to simply surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban because we got bored is likely what contributed to the Ukraine invasion. I'm sure Putin thought he's nowhere near as fucked up as the Taliban, surely the US won't mind if he retakes Ukraine.
Oops.
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
If this causes WW3 and we all die in nuclear armageddon I would say it was a bad idea. But to some degree it would be unavoidable if Russia is that suicidal and that expansionist.
lol
I have to admit I was pro marijuana legalization when the only people I knew who did it were me and my nerdy Internet friends. It was like some quiet patrician indulgence.
Then I moved to a place where it's been legal for decades and people in the rest of the country moved to almost entirely because it was legal there and I'm ready to turn into a Reagan Republican wrt weed.
I could probably say this about a lot of topics. The Beatles? Great music and I enjoyed listening to them. And I'm ready to never hear a Beatles song ever again and talking about the Beatles should be a ticket for a first offense. Beatles fans ruin me on the Beatles.
I could imagine being gay. Even living in a Chelsea high rise with a rotation of young twinks and staying up until 8am at chemsex or circuit parties. Seems fine. But spending any time walking around in the Castro makes me want gayness criminalized.
I'm in favor of a lot of progressive ideas until I realize how unlike the median progressive I actually am
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4mo ago
I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me.
Yes.
Are you single? Have you considered a sham marriage to an American woman (or man)? I've seen that work fairly well.
New Swedish twin study just dropped[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10274991/
Maybe exercising doesn't matter all that much?
Results
We identified four classes of long-term LTPA: sedentary, moderately active, active and highly active. Although biological ageing was accelerated in sedentary and highly active classes, after adjusting for other lifestyle-related factors, the associations mainly attenuated. Physically active classes had a maximum 7% lower risk of total mortality over the sedentary class, but this association was consistent only in the short term and could largely be accounted for by familial factors. LTPA exhibited less favourable associations when prevalent diseases were exclusion criteria rather than covariate.
Conclusion
Being active may reflect a healthy phenotype instead of causally reducing mortality.
I both want this to be true (because it would be a relief, in a way) but also don't (because it means your mortality isn't really modifiable by exercise). Any good analyses/critiques available?
- On Jun 5th 2023. So not that new.
So! There's a tiny chance I'll be booted out of the US because 5 decades ago my parents were illegal immigrants and the SCOTUS might agree they were foreign invaders, thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.
Meanwhile, right-wing nativist Chuds in my parents' country have decided they think bloodline-based citizenship is the actual menace and are taking steps towards ending it.
I don't really want to live in the old country, but to add insult to injury it's narrowly possible I'll lose residency in the US while my kids become ineligible for residence in the old country and navigating that sounds really unpleasant.
This is really speculative of course. But for peace of mind, are there any decent countries that I can buy a citizenship in? Either cash money or via "investment"? The obvious contenders like Cyprus and Portugal seem to have scaled back the enticements recently.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2mo ago
I have a 7 year old. He's never played a video game outside of a DIY version of online chess against me.
I notice a lot of kids play Minecraft. I've never played it. This is a little odd since the entire reason I have a career is because I wanted to get into game development and learned to program C.
I would like to expose him to video games since I believe they have upside, but I'm pretty worried modern games are crack and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.
He has an excellent attention span right now and we play a lot of card (MTG) and board games (Catan Jr) and I don't want to ruin that. Other families say once their kids play video games they stop caring about all of that other stuff and see their attention spans go to shit.
We homeschool him so he's not exactly surrounded by other kids trying to relate to him re: games but it's only a matter of time.
It's a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library.
It's actually a strap-on. And neither of the characters finds it sexy. The scene is meant to be awkward.
Confused teens not even knowing how to fuck might be gross but it doesn't strike me as erotica.
One thing I miss about taking the subway to work is that I don't read 1-2 books a week anymore.
And some writers have written books that have changed my whole way of thinking.
But one thing that bothers me about reading books is that for something I have spent an incredible amount of time on, I have forgetten most of them and they're still rather cumbersome to refer back to. Despite drowning in information technology, books are kind of crappy. Additionally, a ton of books could have been an interesting blog post series but they've been puffed up and watered down to fill a 300 page book with a dumb title.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7mo ago
Given that he's smart and tech savvy, I'm rather surprised he didn't use a kamikaze drone. Using a drone for a political assassination in the US would have been a lot more game changing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7mo ago
Thanks for the reply!
In general, reading about this is fascinating to me. It sounds like an arms race and like providers can get an edge if they have research and analytics firms (or departments) staying on top of this stuff and helping them route through each company's bureaucracy.
Another common thing that happens is that insurance companies will randomly deny things. If I bother to schedule an appeal they will usaully decide to cover, but they know we are busy so if they randomly deny a good number of things will be dropped. Especially cheap drugs - sometimes it's easier to send the patient to Walmart and cash pay than fight the insurance company. I have a limited amount of time. They abuse this. When they do decide to fight your "peer to peer" review is generally with someone in another specialty who retired 40 years ago and has no idea what the actual standard of care is.
This sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen so I'm surprised they do it, but maybe I'm naive about the wheels of justice.
Now everybody does this stuff but somehow United is appreciably worse.
Are they better or worse than Medicaid?
Few providers in my area take Medicaid, and the ones that do have very long waits to see. I understand it's because they have pitifully low reimbursements but also have high claims denial rates.
I don't really believe your claim from first principles, aside from the fact that building any housing at all moves the needle slightly towards making you a place more aligned with building overall.
I don't have any data to argue against you with though, so take that for what it's worth.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11mo ago
I don't think this is too apocalyptic, probably most computers will be fixed by Monday.
But you bet your ass that everyone lost a lot of money today and that it may take weeks (or months) for some businesses to get back to the black.
Does anyone disagree with me that the amount of value destroyed by this failed patch outweighs all of the economic value CrowdStrike has ever provided? Imagine working at a company that would have been better off never existing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
What would you have done differently if you were elected PM of Israel on 10/8?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14d ago
I'm not defending it as an inalienable right.
We did seem to feel a little differently about it decades ago, though, when we had labor shortages, low public entitlements, and loved rubbing it in the faces of communists that people were desperate to leave their nations for ours.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4mo ago
... what are you working on?
I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.
Labor done in 2025 will be so much less leveraged than labor done in 2026, and so on.
So... what's the Elon deficit reduction strategy here? Get like 5-10% of the government to resign, maybe fire another 5-10%, then go to congress and say look we can spend 10-20% less on salaries, go ahead and pass a reduced budget through reconciliation?
This actually sounds not too crazy.
Hopefully losing 10-20% of the work force doesn't cause a corresponding 10-20% reduction in government revenues but... it's kind of hard to see how it would.
EDIT: maybe something's wrong with me but I consider this topic fun and not weighty which is why I posted it here in the Friday thread. Seems like it has created a more typical CW thread discussion. My bad.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Usually when I run into someone who pooh-poohs those tools, they're the sort of person who wants to write their own epic genius 1337 codegolf in-house tool that has zero documentation, is full of idiosyncracies, and will become someone else's pain in the ass when they leave the company in a year.
To use a toy example, discussing one aspect: lets say you have an app that needs to be up all of the time. A simple solution is to set up the app on one box and a standby on the next box. If it goes down, you simply respond and assess and confirm yes, the primary is down. Lets start the standby.
People absolutely cannot resist looking at this and saying well why do that when you can have the standby take over automatically. And yes I get it that's a reasonable desire. And yes, you can do that, but that model is so much more complicated and difficult to get right. There are frameworks now that help with this, but the cost of setting up an app now is still an order of magnitude higher if you want this kind of automation.
Unfortunately, the modern distributed computing environment is organized around the idea that everything needs to be as high availability as Google search or YouTube. This is the default way of standing up an app.
Maybe your business has one big bread and butter app that needs this, and by all means go ahead, but businesses also have like 100x as many apps that are just support or bean counting tools that absolutely don't need this that you kind of get pulled into setting up the same way. It becomes so difficult to set up an app that teams lose the vocabulary of even proposing that as a solution to small problems.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Well, as bad as this is for Ukraine, I think the best outcome for the world is for Russia to be stuck in a frustrating, endless simmering war in Ukraine that's just a black hole for resources that they neither win nor lose that falls out of the news.
I believe the US knows handing Russia a resounding defeat means they're at risk of launching nukes so they go down in a blaze of glory. But if it's just an endless frozen super boring conflict? The heroic "last stand" time never arrives.
Could you (or someone) expand on this? Why would a quasi-dictator be likely to lose his position/life over a failed war?
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