faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
For reference, from the link, the questions were
- Overall, how do you think each of the following affects people’s ability to be successful where you work (Being white / Being black / Being hispanic / Being asian / Being a man / Being a woman): (Makes it a lot easier to be successful / Makes it a little easier to be successful / Makes it neither easier nor harder to be successful / Makes it a little harder to be successful / Makes it a lot harder to be successful / Not sure / No answer)
- In general, do you think that focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly… (A good thing / A bad thing / Neither good nor bad)
- When it comes to how much attention your company or organization pays to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion, would you say your company or organization pays… (Too much attention / Too little attention / About the right amount of attention / Not sure)
- Regardless of how diverse the place where you work is, how important is it to YOU PERSONALLY to work at a place that… (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
- Regardless of how accessible the place where you work is, how important is it to you personally to work at a place that is accessible for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
- How well do each of the following describe the place where you currently work (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely well / Very well / Somewhat well / Not too well / Not at all well / Not sure / No answer)
- How accessible is the place where you work for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely accessible / Very accessible / Somewhat accessible / Not too accessible / Not at all accessible / Not sure)
- As far as you know, does the company or organization you work for have any of the following (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Yes / No / Not sure)
- What type of impact do you think having each of the following has had where you work (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Very positive / Somewhat positive / Neither positive nor negative / Somewhat negative / Very negative)
- Are you personally a member of an employee affinity group or Employee Resource Group (ERG) – that is, a group created by employees, based on their shared identities or interests such as gender, race, or being a parent?
- In the past year, have you participated in any trainings on diversity, equity or inclusion at work?
- Overall, would you say the diversity, equity or inclusion trainings you have participated in at work have been… (Very helpful / Somewhat helpful / Neither helpful nor unhelpful / Somewhat unhelpful / Very unhelpful)
Who are these 53% of people who think that their mandatory DEI trainings through their employer are helpful? That result makes me pretty doubtful of the results of this survey as a whole.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
- Before 2001, most people had never cared about airplane cockpit security.
- Before 2008, most people had never cared about mortgage-backed securities.
- Before 2020, most people had never cared about coronaviruses.
- Before 2025, most people had never cared about tariffs.
Why is 4 different from the others?
Yeah. I remember there was a big thing a few years back about whether or not leather should be welcome at pride, because pride has become a family thing for some people and there are kids there now. But that's a matter of "should leather be pushed out of a space because kids are entering the space".
But bringing leather into a space that is specifically for young kids is beyond the pale. Enough so that I would expect that even the majority of the queer-and-proud population would be against it.
WTF was the school board even thinking here?
Edit: or am I just being gullible, and the books the school board pushed didn't have leather except in the literal sense that one of the characters in one of the books wore a leather jacket?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
How much of my frustration with these people boils down to a kind of deep-rooted envy, that I must labor while others take their ease, simply because I do not have a gift for grift?
There are about 25,000 GoFundMe fundraisers created per day. My best estimate from scraping GoFundMe is that about half of fundraisers earn exactly $0, and among the remaining half there's a very long tail - perhaps 2,000 fundraisers per year earning $100k+ and 300 per year earning $500k+. Most of those are "little 8 year old Timmy has cancer" not "CW grifting".
Do you also have a deep-rooted envy of lottery winners, because you do not have a gift for sheer dumb luck? Because I'd estimate about 10x as many people make $100k from lotteries than from GoFundMe virality.
It's on the news because it's rare.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
53% of the people in this survey said that their employer-mandated DEI trainings were "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful". That's the baseline against which all numbers in this survey should be judged.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Wait, so he wasn't granted asylum, just a stay of deportation to El Salvador specifically?
If I'm understanding right:
- He applied for asylum from El Salvador in 2019. The immigration judge denied his request for asylum, but granted him "withholding of removal," which specifically prohibited his deportation to El Salvador due to the risk of persecution there
- ICE did not appeal this decision, and he was released.
- The withholding of removal meant he was still removable from the US, just specifically not to El Salvador. The government could have legally deported him to any other country willing to accept him without violating the court order.
- The "administrative error" was that ICE deported him specifically to El Salvador in March 2025 despite being aware of his protection from removal to that country, violating the exact limitation imposed by the court.
- And now the Trump admin is saying "yeah we did the thing we were specifically ordered by the court not to do, but now it's done and even though we could fix it we won't and you can't make us".
- And the Trump admin is probably correct on the "and you can't make us" part, because in the end a court order is a piece of paper and someone still has to enforce said court order.
- This doesn't actually set any legal precedent that this method of deportation is ok though, it just adds to the growing pile of divergences between what the law says agencies must do and how government agencies actually operate in practice.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
Lefties hate Trump for Jan 6
Lefties hated Trump long before Jan 6. Jan 6 was just an opportunity for them to say "see I told you so".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
This seems to me like a fairly usual level of competence from a bolt-on-security-as-a-product or compliance-as-a-service company. Examples:
- CVE-2016-2208: buffer overflow in Symantec Antivirus "This is a remote code execution vulnerability. Because Symantec use a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link is enough to exploit it. [...] On Windows, this results in kernel memory corruption, as the scan engine is loaded into the kernel (wtf!!!), making this a remote ring0 memory corruption vulnerability - this is about as bad as it can possibly get". Basically "send an email with an attachment to pwn someone's computer. They don’t have to open the attachment, as long as they have Norton Antivirus (or anything that uses the Symantec Antivirus Engine) installed".
- CVE-2020-12271: "A SQL injection issue was found in SFOS 17.0, 17.1, 17.5, and 18.0 before 2020-04-25 on Sophos XG Firewall devices, as exploited in the wild in April 2020. [...] A successful attack may have caused remote code execution that exfiltrated usernames and hashed passwords for the local device admin(s), portal admins, and user accounts used for remote access"
- Okta data breach a couple months back: "For several weeks beginning in late September 2023, intruders had access to [Okta's] customer support case management system. That access allowed the hackers to steal authentication tokens from some Okta customers, which the attackers could then use to make changes to customer accounts, such as adding or modifying authorized users."
It's not that it's amateur hour specifically at CrowdStrike. It's the whole industry.
Sure, I buy that the school board just rubber-stamped this book without much thought. That part is not surprising to me. The bit that's surprising to me is that they decided to double down, and then double down again, and continue until they're now showing up in front of the supreme court. This case (edit apr 24: as described in the top-level comment) is a giant gift to social conservatives, at a minimum in the court of public opinion and I expect also in the court of law. So I wonder if the school board just doesn't realize that, of if they do realize that and just don't care - I just have a burning curiosity as to what their thought process was when they decided to escalate to this level.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Excellent post. One thing jumped out at me:
Look at the lead time for something like a modern fighter jet. What's the chance that the guy who originally greenlit the program is still around to be 'accountable' if/when it's actually used in a hot conflict, such that its performance can be assessed against the competition? Do you handicap that assessment at all? He made his decision a decade ago, seeing a certain set of problems that they were trying to solve. A decade or two later, your adversaries have also been developing their own systems. Should he be punished in some way for failing to completely predict how the operating environment would change over decades?
Punishment for failure seems like exactly the wrong way to handle accountability for a project that has a low probability of success. The motivation to reduce a 99% chance of being punished in 20 years to a 95% chance of being punished in 20 years just isn't going to be that large. This is especially true if the people involved are self-selecting into the position - nobody is going to self-select into a position with a near-certainty of punishment in 20 years unless the benefits now outweigh even a certainty of punishment in 20 years, so the punishment just can't be that severe.
Talk about rewarding the guy who made a prescient prediction 20 years ago, on the other hand, and I think the dynamics flip. Going from a 1% chance of collecting a $10M prize in 20 years to a 5% chance of collecting that same prize is substantial and motivational. Think of how hard scientists chasing Nobel prizes work.
Flip the probabilities (i.e. a competent person would have a 99% success rate on a project and an incompetent one would have a 95% success rate) and I think the argument for accountability in the form of punishment makes more sense than accountability in the form of reward. That's sort of how it goes with professional licensing, and it's a pretty solid strategy in that context.
But yeah, "we should abandon accountability" sounds bad and counterintuitive but I think Tyler is right to call out "accountability" in the specific form of punishment for failing to achieve highly uncertain outcomes.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Man, I don't even know. Because "the stock market crashed and a bunch of retirees are mad because that's their nest egg" is, I think, a significant part of the signal Trump is looking at. But the market is considering the impact of tariffs times the probability that Trump actually sticks with them, so if the market stops believing Trump, the market impact of the tariffs stops looking so large, which makes Trump less likely to change his mind, which increases the chance they stick around... feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output?
Yep. That just looked look 100% organic free range human journalist slop to me on first read. TBH even though there are a few suspicious passages it doesn't seem super AI-sloppish to me even when I'm keeping in mind that it has been accused of such.
"Quoted stuff the person didn't say" is a pretty strong tell, but if I watched the talk, why would I also want to read clickbait journalism slop about the talk I just watched?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
I think the problem is that "good job" doesn't mean "not messing up" in the context of these compliance-as-a-service or security-blanket-as-a-service companies. Instead, "good job" is "implement as many features as possible to a level where it's not literally fraud to claim your product has thay feature, and then have a longer checklist of supported features in your product than the competition has so the MBA types choose your product".
CrowdStrike's stock price is only down by about 10% today on one of the highest-impact and highest-profile incidents of this type I've seen. I'm pretty sure their culture of "ship it even if it's janky and broken" has netted them more than a 10% increase in net revenue, so it's probably net positive to have that kind of culture.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
I can't take claims that the Trump admin is trying to decrease the population of illegal immigrants in the US seriously in the absence of any attempts to expand the scope of e-verify.
But focusing on employers through an already-existing program wouldn't let Trump grandstand and vice signal.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Man, if only we had a third branch of government, not just the executive and judicial branches.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
I'd be surprised if the Nobel people would be willing to give him a peace prize.
Of course the Nobel Committee would give Trump a Nobel Peace Prize! They'd be crazy not to, believe me. Nobody has done more for world peace than Donald Trump, not even close. The Abraham Accords? Beautiful peace deal, totally historic, everyone said it couldn't be done. And North Korea? Trump walked right in there, first president ever, and suddenly no more missile tests! The so-called experts - terrible people, by the way - they've been trying and failing for decades, but Trump got it done with his tremendous negotiating skills.
The fact is, Obama got one for doing absolutely nothing! Zero! Trump actually delivered peace, the best peace maybe ever, while bringing our troops home and building the greatest economy in history. The Nobel Committee, they know it, everybody knows it - Donald Trump deserves that prize more than anyone, and when they give it to him, it'll be the biggest, most-watched ceremony ever. Much bigger ratings than Obama's, that I can tell you!
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
It's not that you should care about this dude. It's that you (presumably, given your comment) live in a country with a legal system that primarily makes decisions based on precedent, and "this one weird trick lets the government sidestep due process requirements" is a terrifying precedent to set.
If the "administrative error" argument actually stands up in court, that is.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Have you ever once commented upon — or even just read — a notice of proposed rulemaking on Regulations.gov? Probably not, because you don’t actually care about that stuff, and neither does anyone else in the general public.
I didn't even know that existed - my impression has always been that "contact your congressman" was the appropriate action if you liked or disliked some proposed regulation, and that you learned about upcoming regulations by being an insider / hoping the media surfaced something relevant to your interests.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
For me at least I left because I didn't find the issues of the day terribly interesting - "woke bad" was not wrong but it was tiresome especially when woke was already on the downswing.
Now that we live in interesting times again, it's interesting to come on here and see how the people who have been cheering for Trump to come drain the swamp, fix our budget problems, and Make America Great Again react to the actual methods he's using in the supposed pursuit of that goal, and whether they think America is on track towards being made great.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
If you don't mind me asking, how did you even find this place? This site is a quarantine site to contain the often toxic political discussions that would otherwise happen elsewhere, and the people who enter the quarantine tend to be those of us who enjoy such things for whatever reason. The site isn't really advertised anywhere, and so usually the only people who come here are the proverbial pissing in the water club.
Coming here and complaining that there are too many bad political takes feels like signing up for a poker strategy forum and complaining that they talk about and glorify gambling an unhealthy amount - arguably not wrong, but how did you even get there?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
This year, get your parents the gift of Linux. Conventional wisdom says that for happiness, experiences are better than possessions. I hear Gentoo is an experience.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
Yes. I will die on this hill.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
It sounds like the SIL is legally in the united states. With notarized parental consent letters on both sides and the 2 year old's passport I'd be surprised if there was any major issue in having the SIL pick up the kid and bring her back to the US to dad.
I doubt the notarized consent would be easy to get from mom, but that's because this sounds to me like a custody battle.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
It's unfortunate how strongly the chat interface has caught on over completion-style interfaces. The single most useful LLM tool I use on a daily basis is copilot. It's not useful because it's always right, it's useful because it's sometimes right, and when it's right it's right in about a second. When it's wrong, it's also wrong in about a second, and my brain goes "no that's wrong because X Y Z, it should be such and such instead" and then I can just write the correct thing. But the important thing is that copilot does not break my flow, while tabbing over to a chat interface takes me out of the flow.
I see no particular reason that a copilot for writing couldn't exist, but as far as I can tell it doesn't (unless you count something janky like loom).
But yeah, LLMs are great at the "babble" part of "babble-and-prune":
The stricter and stronger your Prune filter, the higher quality content you stand to produce. But one common bug is related to this: if the quality of your Babble is much lower than that of your Prune, you may end up with nothing to say. Everything you can imagine saying or writing sounds cringey or content-free. Ten minutes after the conversation moves on from that topic, your Babble generator finally returns that witty comeback you were looking for. You'll probably spend your entire evening waiting for an opportunity to force it back in.
And then instead of leveraging that we for whatever reason decided that the way we want to use these things is to train them to imitate professionals in a chat room who are writing with a completely different process (having access to tools which they use before responding, editing their writing before hitting "send", etc).
The "customer service AIs are terrible" thing is I think mostly a separate thing where customer service is a cost center and their goal is usually to make you go away without too much blowback to the business. AI makes it worse, though, because the executives trust an AI CS agent even less than they would trust a low-wage human in that position, and so will give that agent even fewer tools to actually solve your problem. I think the lack of trust makes sense, too, since you're not hiring a bunch of AI CS agents you can fire if they mess up consistently, you're "hiring" a bunch of instances of one agent, so any exploitability is repeatable.
All that said, I expect that for the near future LLMs will be more of a complement than a replacement for humans. But that's not as inspiring goal for the most ambitious AI researchers, and so I think they tend to cluster at companies with the stated goal of replacing humans. And over the much longer term it does seem unlikely that humans are at an optimal ability-to-do-useful-things-per-unit-energy point. So looking at the immediate evidence we see the top AI researchers are going all-in on replacing humans, and over the long term human replacement seems inevitable, and so it's easy to infer "oh the thing that will make humans obsolete is the thing that all these people talking about human obsolescence are working on".
New executive order just dropped.
This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.
So a couple of things
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