lagrangian
11d ago
Dremel
lagrangian
21d ago
the jews are quickly coming to see themselves more as liberals than as jews.
very much the opposite in my social circle. (I'm jewish). There's a lot of "we still don't like Trump, but the left hates Israel, so we'll put up with him" - pithily captured as "Jews went to bed October 6th as Democrats - but woke up Republican"
lagrangian
25d ago
Big fan of caffeine pills. I agree about 200mg being too big. You can buy 100mg or even 40-50mg. Pills exist in many sizes, though at the smaller end, there's more of strips/mints/gums. It's also not hard to cut pills, or even to buy powder and diy some gel caps.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Roth IRA limits are not that high. ~250K currently, with for two-income family - or moderately well earning one-income - is not a lot. Once you hit that, no Roth for you.
Mega-backdoor Roth 401k allows up to 70k/year contributions with no income limit. Your employer has to offer it. FAANG does. It's a normal roth in terms of tax treatment.
When leaving the employer, you can convert to roth IRA with no penalties. Even better, you can leave it as non-roth until leaving the company, again with no penalties (but ofc you pay the income taxes to convert to roth).
lagrangian
1mo ago
Today I had Gemini CLI call the oncall scheduler program with various preference weights, write a python script to compare the outputs, explore different weights on its own, suggest a configuration, and write a message to my team about the proposed change to our official weights.
Step 0 was to convince it that it was incorrect in its assertion that it lacked access to my shell to run the thing in the first place. I ultimately told it to try it and tell me the error.
This is the future. I'm not sure if I hate it or not. We used to just ask each other to swap shifts.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Afaik the main quote was:
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.
I watched a Charlie Kirk video. Gotta say, don't like the guy. I was hoping the vibe would be "patient Mottizen explains things" or "Scott Alexander", but it was much closer to "Steven Crowder." Is he chiller in other videos?
I was particularly galled by the amount of appeals to religion (the resurrection of Christ is the most well documented fact in history, so Christianity is true, so its morals are correct) and abortion is bad.
Even worse, the use of blatantly untrue "facts" that I have trouble believing he could have not fact checked, as much as they were relevant to his soap boxes. E.g. the claim that no abortions are ever medically necessary for the health of the mother. Worse, he slimily hedged by saying this was "according to some gynecologists, I don't know if it's true, but they're experts."
This leaves me, as often, in the weird position of standing on my meta level principles despite their being in conflict with the object level. I dislike Kirk and his methods, but like (many) of his principles. I dislike Kimmel, full stop (I assume - I won't claim to have watched him much. I'm extrapolating from Colbert/Stewart, who are insufferable as of late.). But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe, or worse, on free speech.
lagrangian
1mo ago
I'll take the principled stand here. I don't like cancellation of anyone* for passing remarks online (or in person, but especially online).
*: unless acting in an official capacity for their job, or in a role to which your moral standing is central (pastor, maybe teacher).
This all not withstanding that I'd like at least small employers to be able to fire for literally any/no reason. My objection isn't to the firing itself, but to the random selective enforcement caused by crowd sourcing the firing. In the day of LLMs, do you really want someone programmatically reading social media, cross referencing with Linkedin, and contacting employers?
If leftists genuinely believe that he is harmful to the country, and they'd like to celebrate the cessation of that harm - even by glibly conflating the harm with the man himself - let them.
If some day there is signed a peace treaty for the Culture War, I can imagine nothing sweeter than it reading "we, the undersigned, agree to disagree."
lagrangian
1mo ago
Agreed. I'm not sure I've heard of him before today, and I read here religiously. I absolutely could not have told you anything about him.
I'm not sure how much to trust themotte's search box, or site:themotte.org google searches, but there's not a lot on either prior to today.
The death of woke has been claimed many times. I'm not convinced.
I'm still afraid to admit to being centrist, maybe slightly right thereof, in social settings and certainly in work ones. A bit left of the modal Mottizen (someone, link the song, I've long lost it!). My close friends know, but I'd never casually admit to even a lack of antipathy for Trump in front of new people. And that's all as someone in many ways immune to censorship - I'm relatively old and well established, take me or leave me.
Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?
"Trump? A little grating, but the country's doing fine, I don't mind him." "Trans? I mean...you do you, but you ain't a chick, and stop pushing books into the elementary school curriculum."
lagrangian
2mo ago
High quality, low quantity. Just banflam and I.
lagrangian
2mo ago
In general, the handful of Mottizens I know well enough to share names and faces with have done nothing to disabuse my trust.
+1. We really are a magically small place.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Just the two of us, but feel free to still show up!
lagrangian
2mo ago
Nice!
lagrangian
2mo ago
Is it an open coworking space in addition to the bootcamp? Or what is there to check out here?
-I've never been to an IRL Motte/SSC diaspora meet up but I've always figured you'd have a chance at getting some of the paranoid opsec types with an open invite to some location instead of a direct "lets meet up." Food for thought?
Excellent idea. I will be at Gebhard's Beer Culture in the upper west side, this Saturday (8/30) at 5pm. Happy hour runs until 6. I will stay until at least 7. First round's on me.
I don't know NYC well, so if that's a terrible pick, suggestions are welcome.
I'll be in a black tshirt with shrodinger's cat on it.
Related question: are there any rationalist discords/meetups etc in NYC?
lagrangian
2mo ago
Going to explore New York (city) for a week or two (starting ~now). Any advice on what to do? Anyone around and want to grab a beer?
lagrangian
2mo ago
I can't magic male role models out of nowhere
Is there some variety of tutor/coach you could hire that suits any (special?) interests of his? This is about as close as it gets to magic, if it's an option financially. College students work pretty cheap. Math, piano, programming, personal trainer?
lagrangian
2mo ago
I enjoyed it thoroughly, thanks for posting. I don't think it fits better in any other thread. All the sentences to me are "welp, probably time to kill myself." It's fascinating that they try that hard to tweak the sentences those little bits.
Any suggestions for books to learn more about the modern conflicts in Israel, especially wrt Gaza? I figure that requires some amount of covering history, but my actual objective is to be able to understand the modern state of affairs, rather than to understand history for its own sake. Maybe 2-3 suggestions, to capture a range of political viewpoints.
Podcasts/blogs would be OK too, but I'd rather books.
For bonus points, please describe the political viewpoint of the book (left/right, or pro/anti Israel, etc)
lagrangian
3mo ago
Was there a specific use-case for the highly strict clock synchronization?
It's the underlying magic of Google's Spanner database, allowing it to say fuck the CAP theorem.
lagrangian
3mo ago
For anyone else wondering, this is not about a new assassination attempt. This is about last year's, which was one year ago today (where his ear got clipped).
lagrangian
4mo ago
Why? Writing essays is the most directly applicable skill I learned in school, moreso than AP Computer Science (java) - and I'm a backend java dev. Concise, precise communication is a critical skill. Design docs are super important. (At least to the promotion committee.)
That said, I'd love if we make the essays be on more useful/interesting/self-selected topics, have more persuasive/technical writing, etc.
lagrangian
4mo ago
DM me if you'd like a (free) practice interview + feedback or just general advice. (I'm a FAANG SWE.)
lagrangian
4mo ago
not with Catholic women. I think the issue is my heterodoxy.
Sounds right to me. Either don't bring it up until date two/three, or pick different women (, or find Jesus).
Too like the lightning. It's bad. It almost seems like a good premise, but has no execution. Maybe it'll get better?
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