gattsuru
7mo ago
Sorry, I did not take this as an accusation about me, and did not mean to imply any such accusation. I’m more trying to motion about how both performative and genuine surprise at the malefactors on one’s own side is fairly common, and that distinguishing the two can be tricky even for shock or ‘shock’ at an opponent.
gattsuru
7mo ago
There's a lot of information that gets messy when you try to get more than surface-deep into it. There was a big deal about a USAID grant for 45m to Burma/Myanmar scholarships after DOGE tweeted about it, and these are things you can look up!...
But while there's some funny punchlines involved, it doesn't really tell you that much. IIE got the grant -- which is better than some cases, since domestic grantees in some categories can receive anonymity -- but outside of some joking-not-joking CIA links, that doesn't actually mean much. They're 'just' a cutout, and while they've got a lot of staff, their day staff aren't the ones doing most of the actual spending and day-to-day education stuff.
You can kinda piece together a rough outline by seeing who publicly announces that they've gotten onto a grant with similar numbers around the same time, but even a lot of that falls off the internet pretty quick. It's really easy to go full Pepe Silvia, too.
gattsuru
8mo ago
I'm pretty sure I get the joke. What I'm interested in seeing is whether it's a joke in the 'ha ha, I'm going to act the exact opposite of this' sense, or in the 'ha ha, I'm going to be extra wounded if someone notices a pattern' sense.
If you'd rather we spend three posts getting to the point where you can even recognize the "or does this mean anything?" part of my post above, I think that illustrates a lot of why I'd comment the way I did.
gattsuru
8mo ago
If you find a conservative-leaning individual that actually believes the Republican Party and broader right wing is low on people who were likable but turned out to act as though "sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything", please point them to me. I can come up with a pretty wide list of once-loved (among soccons) conservative politicians and speakers that turned out quite willing to sell their movement up a creek, sometimes for embarrassingly few pieces of silver light grift.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Because I’ve looked at your profile page:
yes I’m addicted to downvotes every time I get one it’s like a bump of that sweet smoking gun and yes I’m into BDSM let me get into my St. Andrew’s real quick and then you can call me a troll until your throat hurts.
( I don’t downvote lightly, and this haven’t done so here yet.)
gattsuru
8mo ago
I don't think we know, or can know, what people would do in a vacuum. Your question was how people would react without the Times writing those two articles, not about a world where the Times didn't and hadn't existed as the paper of record for literal lifetimes and spent much of that time both papering over this sort of behavior, and stigmatizing any organization that would report on it.
The Times isn't the only part of that, or even the biggest part, fair. But that just kicks the problem up one level. Whether you call the ecosystem that the Times swims in and creates a conspiracy or prospiracy or The Free Market Modulo All The Law And Gov Funding Involved, it's still a giant machine of giant machines, often heavily coordinated, of which many or most of its components have explicit or not-exactly-vino-veritas recognition of what they're doing and how they're coordinating with other components. The degree to which that might be coordinated or naturally evolved is an interesting question, though one that I think has far more evidence against your position than you'd expect, but it's still besides the point. A machine that evolved fully organically is still a machine that would be fully compatible with :
Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.
So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
A fully headless organization could still produce a million articles about the counter-narrative that had the exact same notes, they could still aim massive amounts of emotional blackmail through every available institution, they could call everyone that disagreed with them maga nazis, they could still ban a ton of people who try to link things.
And that makes it pretty clear that whether or not Jesweez was acting in good faith -- perhaps they haven't seen any mainstream media coverage on this topic, or haven't read any of the actual coverage, or prosaically don't realize the ramifications of the words they're using -- they either don't or shouldn't actually believe their claim that this literally just "a few people you disagree with in a comment section."
gattsuru
8mo ago
Yeah, I've got a small genre of posts just for this sort of stuff, followed by places where the administration swore it wasn't going to do something, waited for the court case to end, and then did it anyway. This was this week, and I didn't even have to go searching for it. There's a million ways to talk about how all of these cases are tots different and there's some line that absolutely wasn't drawn by a Texas Sharpshooter, but the idea that this is terra nova is laughable.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it.
Those are some interestingly selected examples. Let me go grab a big drink of water and -
... are you intentionally trying to channel Darwin levels of being wrong for the engagement, or does this mean anything?
gattsuru
8mo ago
There is another possible outcome. Can you see the one you are missing?
The trouble with making this argument is that at some point you have to actually make the argument, not just snark about it. I don't think you have, and I don't think you can, and I don't think the foremost advocates can or will.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Reddit's going to Reddit whether or not NYT posts that kind of article. Reddit would not Reddit in this way if the NYT posted a front page news article specifically highlighting how this particular claim was not just true, but clearly documented and well-established basic fact. Don't get me wrong, they might do something different, but barring a pretty specific sort of Darwianian troll, most of this type of personality doesn't like to actively invite people to correct them, and despite Reddit-the-org's best efforts the sort of personality who get aroused at the opportunity to post a one-line link debunking someone, regardless of political alignment, is not zero.
The 'prospiracy vs conspiracy' model falls apart when we're talking an organization the size of the Times. These articles have two different bylines, from two different parts of the organization. The people with the bylines weren't the only people involved in writing them, they have layers of editors and fact-checkers, there may have been some level of legal review, supposedly they have a bunch of varied expertise specific to various domains.
The Times is -- at five thousand employees -- on its own an enormous propaganda machine. Not every employee, not even a sizable portion of those employees, is involved in this particular propaganda; there is no explicit 'you must lie this many times per article' metric; many would do the same for free if they had the opportunity. But neither are people unaware of whether they work at the Times, or unaware that the Times misleads and demands that they mislead. Its personnel talk at length about these goals, publicly and privately and in every option in between, both internally to the Times and to many other often sizable organizations that have similar priorities. Whether this falls into some other category of coordination in besides the point.
gattsuru
8mo ago
The New York Times has a recent story, where it summarizes the matter as:
For Mr. Trump’s claims about an Obama-era directive criticizing the F.A.A. for being “too white,” the White House also cited a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal organization on behalf of applicants for air traffic controller positions. The lawsuit accused the agency under the Obama administration of discriminating against them because its hiring practices were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.
And the next day:
In a misleading claim, Mr. Trump insinuated that the administration of President Barack Obama — the first Black president — had stocked the Federal Aviation Administration with people who could not do their jobs.
“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” Mr. Trump said. His administration will be different, he went on. “We want the people that are competent.”
(Asked for details on the “too white” claim, the White House cited a lawsuit filed in 2015 by a conservative legal organization accusing the Obama administration of hiring practices that were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.)
If you want to argue that the Times isn't an enormous propaganda machine... I think you're going to need a lot of evidence. I don't think you can credibly argue that they're just some comments section.
I've put fifty bucks against it, and another fifty bucks against Snow, specifically, being singled out in PBS, NBC, or NPR. I think it'll take longer than his bet to clear, but given the degree of swivel with 'throat-clearing', I wouldn't be surprised if tendentious pieces ends up being enough.
Which is kinda the failure mode for Trace and Amadanb's approach and philosophy. Forget impeachment: the federal House couldn't manage to condemn Lujan Grisham.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
I don't care about sportsball, but I've also seen parents put hundreds of hours and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into their kids' sports, from the not-unreasonable analysis that they can get a pretty sizable college sports scholarship -- and sometimes even bump up a tier or so of college acceptance -- out of it. Even for the genderless STEM outreach program I volunteer for, their ability to bring these numbers plays a more prominent role in the marketing than the actual skill development; for rando sports teams where the skill is 'running into other people', the difference is far greater.
There's an argument that this should change, which I'd probably agree with; there's an argument that this is misguided or bad lottery thinking, which I wish were true but probably is more a systemic thing. ((It's also just one of a few issues that comes up.))
... which a nitpick, but it kinda points to the problem with this sort of analysis. Bulverism is a fun sin, but it's still a sin. It's easy to come up with explanations that your enemies have no real motivations of their own, just motiveless malignancy, but it reals far less often that advocates of the theory would like, and it's often clearly wrong in a way that people that don't advocate for the theory can recognize quickly, even without domain expertise.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Is liberalism dying?
Yes.
You could call those examples trite, and you'd be right. You can make the argument that these are sincere, and I'd have trouble taking you seriously. But they're examples I 'picked' in the sense that I can stumble across them opening my normal web feeds and leaf through a week or two of news and social circles, and I'm selecting them only in the sense that they have a shared theme and I won't dox myself. My posting history has a long array of near-monthly examples, not just of randos, but of things in fields I care about.
I've had software collaborators suddenly wax happily about the time they decked Brendan Eich; the lead dev for a game mod framework I've spent almost a decade around got canned so hard from the project that at least one collaborator got an ultimatum from their job; my desktop environment's lead dev can't submit issues or talk on forum threads for several core libraries. The tumblr ratsphere example of A Good Feminist decided that her book about dismissing perspectives of other people was actually about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups"; the person who introduced Serano as such an example had their significant other drop private messages from Scott into the New York Times doxxing spree.
The STEM outreach group I volunteer for keeps having flareups and schisms because of increasingly tiny culture war stuff, yada yada. A college I've run events for is in the news for overtly discriminating against people who disagree with their politics, and it's only in the news because there's a hilarious amount of documentation, and that's still vague enough that without a direct link it could be in literally any state in the country.
It's not like it's this is just a progressive thing. There's no shortage of conservative overreach already, and I expect that the list is going to get much longer faster than I could write it out.
If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you?
I'd love it if there were a lot more life in liberalism, or the Peace of Westphalia, or whatever you want to call it. As I've said many times, and will say again, we're all ultimately minorities of one, and I'm there a lot sooner than the average person. It's the reason I've even tried to continue conversations with Trace, after it all, or Amadan here.
But the Litany of Grendlin matters. If it's dead, it's not a bad thing to know that it's dead.
If it's a bad thing, what do you propose should be done to stop the bleeding?
If you seek to change the world, change your mind. And then seek to persuade other people, having seen what it took.
These aren't the only ways to get people to follow your interests! That's the problem! Progressives and (especially!) the extremes of the left and right can make a very persuasive argument that many of the biggest political successes of the progressive movement in the last two decades have revolved around non-persuasive approaches, ranging from social shaming to blocking discussion to cancellation to lawfare to literally punching out everybody that disagrees with them nazis. Non-extremists can do it.
I don't think enough conservatives want to persuade. I don't think many, if any, progressives do. I'm not even sure many centrists do.
That's a part of what makes the examples here frustrating, and why I'm linking past discussions with TW where I'm trying to come up with a response to his last twitter discussion that isn't linking to past discussions. It's not moderation that's core to liberalism. It's at least imaginable to have a world where people had very strong and very strongly disagreeing positions, but where we hash that out by words and, where hashing that out either doesn't work or takes a long time to settle, we just live with that.
It doesn't even have to be that libertarian! (although that's easier to imagine).
But we don't. Even among actual moderates.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Asymptomatic transmission is extremely common; if you're in a relationship with someone that has it, you'll probably end up with it within five years. Behavioral mitigation and some medications can reduce that risk somewhat, but because flareups can be subtle and you can transmit the virus weeks before a flareup has visual symptoms, they're not very effective. At the least, there's at least potentially going to be additional times a year where vaginal sex will be something to skip, either for her sake or for yours.
That said, it's extremely common. About half of the population has HSV-1, and about one in five women have HSV-2; much of both groups are unaware, since you can have the virus and be either asymptomatic or have minimal symptoms that are hard to distinguish from non-viral problems.
What extent it matters depends a lot on the person. Cold sores of the mouth are unpleasant, can last a couple weeks (and flareups often come when you're already sick from flu/cold/whatever), and depending on career can be a big deal. Genital sores are less visible, but they're even more offputting when recognized and can be much more painful. Medication can reduce the length of a flareup, but it's pretty expensive from standard stores. There's not much good documentation on secondary negative effects -- there's some evidence of a link from HSV-1 to Alzheimers, for whatever weight you want to put on that -- but it's hard to tell whether that's because no such link exists or because it's just such a pain to study that we don't know.
There's also psychosexual components which I'll not get into more detail, but in short a lot of people have trouble with sex if they get distracted by stuff around it, and that's not great if sex is important for your relationship.
But it's mostly about impact looking forward: if this relationship doesn't work out, it's something that the throwaway may find themselves needing to disclose.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Rust does have normal C++-style unions, though they're a late and fairly controversial addition for the reasons you mention. I'll admit that I've used them occasionally in internal code (especially networking or protocol development, where hardware developers love throwing in 'this next four bytes could be an int or a float' in rev 1.0.1a after you've built your entire reader around structs), but I'd probably ask anyone who used them as an input in an API what they were smoking.
In higher-abstraction languages than C++, that sorta behavior either isn't available and/or forgo the performance and memory-specific benefits for dumb-programmer-safety. TypeScript unions or Java sealed interfaces are doing the same thing at the level of a definition -- it's a field you can put any of a limited number of options in! -- and you'd absolutely never use them for overlapping purposes. On the other hand, C#'s even more limited than Java on that use case, and I come across places it'd make sense to use pretty regularly, so maybe I'm just bitching.
That may be why a lot of their more type-theory focused stuff fell under a different name than the TypeScript-style union types.
I think the Rust enum overload is downstream of a lot of the behaviors you'll see in Java or Kotlin; I've encouraged FIRST students to use similar designs to hold different configuration values for easy toggling of modes or states. Not sure who first made enums that broke from the C(++) limit of one-value-per, but given the amount of C++ code I've seen where enums were used to map various flags intended for bitwise addition, probably a pretty early one.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Late to the party, but as others have said, ClamAV is usually the go-to for Linux antivirus. It's got its limits -- a lot of its use case is for blocking viruses for windows from passing through Linux servers, especially email servers -- but it's pretty reasonable.
rkhunter can be useful in a forensic context or for particularly suspicious situations, but it's not really meant as a day-to-day antivirus. Uploading to VirusTotal for scanning can rarely be useful, though probably not relevant for yarhar'd video games if only due to file size concerns.
Mint does not natively come with a virus scanner, though it should have ClamAV in the app library and from apt-get. I've got mixed feelings about that: a lot of people do run without any and are fine, but the sort of person that needs it most is going to be least likely to install it.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Unfortunately, in many cases the 'legit' version of pirated software will have executables that are modified from their original legal version, either to bypass DRM or for other varying reasons... and this happens at the same stage that it's easiest to inject malicious software.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Some of this is the relatively minimal reporting when they do fuck up in conventional garbage person ways -- hradzka has a few examples that are pretty good evidence of them at least not being fed-employees-rather-than-informants. Where other groups it's hard to find a front-page level story that doesn't at least mention weird psuedoincestual cuckolding or a story that looks like this, here they've got enough message discipline to make good villains rather than Coen Brother Villains, both internally and externally.
It doesn't take a lot of organization-minded people to do that, though it does take a lot of their time and energy (and, conversely, it doesn't take many getting bored to drop a 'functioning' not-awful-people org down). And the difference in news coverage could just be an artifact of the time. But it's weird for it to have happened for this group, and only this group.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Yes, if you aren’t also running Windows on the same computer, SecureBoot is a lot safer. There are some distros that won’t have SecureBoot shims, but they’ll just give you a load error when trying to boot from USB.
gattsuru
8mo ago
For exercise, Beatsaber and its clones are the go-to, but I've also found Rumble (Avatar Earthbending contest) pretty fun if you don't mind pvp.
gattsuru
8mo ago
I expect the short-term is just that the DFL wanted to use the state (and its funds) for Trump Resistance, and expect that 'legitimizing' the state House will get in the way of that. There's a ticking time bomb here -- MN uses biannual budget bills, they start in the July of every odd-numbered year, they're usually /passed/ by mid-May, and in practice this means that the DFL have a lot of leverage near something they really want (with all the fulcrum connotations that proximity means).
That said, Minnesota's politics are unusually fucked. This is from 2022, but it gives you a better idea of exactly how polarized a lot of state is -- and if anything, understates it, since several of the 'closer' red counties are close because of the faults in a politician, rather than much love for blue tribe positions.
In practice, Walz is still governor and will be for years, but certain antics mean that Red politicians are going to play things a lot more aggressively themselves.
gattsuru
8mo ago
A lot of these problems are individually solved -- the Bigscreen Beyond weighs 150 grams, consistent 90hz framerate is the low end of new headsets and 120hz the up-and-coming standard, low-latency wireless video is a (admittedly even dweebier) SpaceX when it comes to doing what a lot of people were calling impossible five years ago, even cheap sensors are vastly improved and hardware sensor fusion is the default option -- and there's incoming tech that'll merge most of these.
(Long battery life + wireless + ultralightweight is, admittedly, hard)
The intermediate trouble is that the people interested in the current tech are a tiny community, they're near-invisible to outsiders while what portals into the world are available give a poor or actively misleading grasp on the state of current tech, and the minimum cost of buyin for a not-awful experience ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
The bigger problem for Meta, specifically, is that even if they get past all that, it's not clear how they make money off it. There are business models for VR that make sense, for better or worse -- but none of them make sense for Meta; they're either things Meta are actively bad at, have competitors that are eating their lunch with Meta's own hardware, or could easily have a million competitors in three years.
Been absolutely swamped between work and volunteer work, but on the hobbyist side, finally got in rev0.2 of a carrier board for this thing, along with a used pair of these. I was holding off on hope for the L9s (release date: soon), but given some of the issues rev 0.1 hit and the amount of other work needed to glue these two things together, it's probably best to try at a smaller scale first anyway.
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