magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
The left-wing bias in Wikipedia content comes from the community, not the WMF.
I think you may have misunderstood. If WMF dies, then the main ENWP site goes down and stays down. At that point, the policies and bureaucracy of current ENWP are meaningless; someone will build a successor, probably based on one of the mirrors, but they don't need to import those policies and that bureaucracy. This is how to beat network effects if you can't just straight-up steal the network (or brute-force through it); you destroy the functionality of the existing network so that people are available for a replacement.
And it doesn't need a conspiracy - Wikipedia is leftish because most of the people with the time and inclination to edit a free online encyclopedia are leftish.
It already leaned that way, but it got a lot worse during the first Trump Presidency and especially in 2020, as critical mass and enough (perceived) urgency was achieved to do an actual purge. This went up in 2018, and it's treated as policy despite officially not being so (IIRC I've seen it cited in a ban comment). The "lab-leak is misinformation" line from 2020, in particular, saw mass bannings of those who objected, which split mostly across tribal lines. "The rebels rightists have been routed; they're fleeing into the woods."
Until that purge, it was organically fixable if one could recruit enough non-SJWs to the cause. Now, it's not, because the admins would just ban them all once it became obvious that they were such. The bureaucracy implementing the ongoing purge has to be removed or supplanted first.
I used to actually edit Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis; this is what I noticed while there (and why I left).
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
But I don't think a fork would work either. They never do. You'd just get 1,000 witches as editors and the project would turn into Conservapedia. Network effects are powerful.
I did say "extreme" effort. The cases I was thinking of were "USG or something of similar scale funds a mirror" or "WMF taken off the board or crippled".
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Wikipedia's a weird case because as a non-profit you can't just buy it out or give government orders, blocking top-down, and it's quite willing to actively purge rightists attempting to infiltrate so bottom-up seems really hard.
The main vulnerability I can see is that because it's CC-BY-SA, Wikipedia mirrors exist and with (extreme) effort it might be possible for one of them to eclipse the original, rendering the entire bureaucracy toothless.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Neither of those are "contract murder" (well, the second one isn't 100% clear but it doesn't look like one). "Contract murder" (or "contract killing") is working as a hitman - accepting money to kill people you otherwise wouldn't. It's generally considered more depraved than normal murder.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I've spent a good chunk of the last year running it. Speed actually is limiting, unless I were to rent OoMs more compute than what I own (which I'd rather not; it's for a hobby, not a job).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Suggestions for a fast CAS for Linux? I know there's a bunch of good free stuff for Linux that has shoddy/no Windows support.
(Main use-case is arithmetic with nested loops, to sum over cases for a combinatorial problem. Mathematica is ~3x the speed of Maxima on Windows.)
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Uncontroversial (this is the correct spelling, btw), as in "the Mueller report lays out exactly which Russian military units did it on which days".
The Mueller report does not allege that Trump asked for this.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
That only solves the problem if both they want to come and the CPC lets them come. Obviously, by the point of them being explicitly hostages, the CPC wouldn't let them emigrate.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I'm not sure how this relates to my post. I was mostly talking about 2016 wrt Putin helping Trump (the DNC hack being Russian is TTBOMK uncontroversial).
As for propaganda, I'll just say that I've had a couple of instances over the years of mistaking RT for Western conservative thought, whereas this has never happened with Chinese media TTBOMK. And there are incidents that are frankly embarrassing like the Fourteen Demands.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics.
Certainly, they've been trying, but I'm not sure they've been getting anywhere prior to TikTok. Certainly, Russia's had more total success (although Trump probably didn't ask for Russian help, it was given, and it was almost certainly given specifically because Putin wanted to stoke the fires of the culture war).
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I mean, there's the "how sure are you that you are immune to tailored propaganda" issue and there's the "how sure are you that they can't figure out something to blackmail you with" issue. But those aren't the big points. The big points are:
- If the CPC says TikTok will be a malware vector, it will be a malware vector. A state-level malware vector, at that, which means zero-days and probably hardware/firmware backdoors (do you own any computing devices made in Mainland China?).
- You might not care about what the CPC knows about you, but what the CPC knows about the Chinese diaspora matters to you because knowing whether a given expat is toeing the party line is a key part of being able to control him by threatening his family, and you want there to be less enemy agents in the USA (there will be some anyway, but TikTok is more scalable).
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Can you pick out the top one to three posts from Scott that you think are contradicted by his current position on HBD?
This line from "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell":
I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way.
...caused me to update negatively on Scott when I learned of the Christopher Brennan emails (which were sent before it) - not because I disapproved of his private position, but because this implied that line was a pure Denial of Peter.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I'm not sure I understand what's going on here. Why the presumably-fake mod posts?
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
What you mention is a weakness of the movement, but the biggest reason I can see for why it's in retreat is the boring "Elon Musk spent $100,000,000,000 to damage it, and actually managed to hit something important".
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this.
Especially on the Internet, "common sense" isn't so common that relying on it to avoid conflict is wise.
I will quote the literal text of the rules here:
Sometimes this means that you'll feel very silly by adding a bunch of qualifiers (popular ones include "I think", "I believe", and "in my experience") and couching everything in unnecessarily elaborate language. That's OK! Remember, the goal is for people with differing opinions to discuss things; if padding a statement with words helps someone not take it personally, then that's what you should do!
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Edit: an additional and critical counterargument; gay people are not the only people who can contract AIDS and HIV.
They aren't, but because it spreads far more easily from penetrator to penetratee (making women largely dead ends) the most-at-risk population is "people who get fucked by men who got fucked by other men" (i.e. gay/bi men and women who fuck bi men). "GRID" is pointing at something real even if it somewhat overgeneralises.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
Should one, given the tension with the other apparent failure mode being like "courts fine megacorp the statutory maximum of $1m for illegal practice that earns them >$1m per interval between successful court cases in profit"?
The general solution is contempt of court - i.e. the first time you do it, you get "illegal practice, $1m and you're ordered not to do this again", and if you do it a second time, you get "contempt of court, penalty is whatever the hell we want". Contempt of court has very few hard limits because the whole point is to patch this loophole by allowing unlimited escalation in case of defiance; I know the statutory maximum in the USA for individuals is life imprisonment, and for corps it's probably something equally dire.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
But can you explain why accepting 4 million Chinese immigrants next year would be a problem, but at the same time "Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here".
I'm going to take a different tack than @Hoffmeister25, and say "modern Mainland Chinese are a considerably-bigger threat than other East Asians and to some extent even legacy Chinese". Specifically, the PRC actually does maintain a degree of control over its diaspora, particularly those educated there (its internal propaganda is far more effective than its external) and those with hostages close family members there, which poses an obvious NatSec risk in the not-so-unlikely event of crisis; "don't import a large, organised enemy force" is like Rule 1 of immigration policy.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
So Linux Mint runs on most normal hardware (Intel/nVidia/normal SSDs/screens)?
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
You and @FirmWeird do make a solid point. I would note that the dissent against TQ and blank-slate is substantially larger and higher-brow than UFOlogy despite the efforts to stamp it out, but this is a weaker argument than the one I made. Mea culpa.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Okay, I'll try to provide an intuition pump. It's somewhat biologically implausible, and exaggerated, but it might help you understand why people find your reaction bizarre.
There's this big family. They don't exactly look like other people; their mouths are a bit big and they're unusually hairy. There are ugly rumours going around that they're all really low in IQ and have a habit of biting people, but you figure it's probably just prejudice based on their looks.
Then, breaking news: back in 1930 a mad scientist a century ahead of his time experimented on the family's patriarch without his consent and spliced his DNA with wolf genes.
Does this make you believe the rumours are more likely or less likely to be true? And, separate from the question of whether you value liberty over eugenics, do you think that spreading those wolf genes across all of humanity is good or bad?
(I mean, I suppose that given the entire paranormal romance genre I have to admit that a significant chunk of the population finds dangerous half-human hybrids "cool", but still.)
Aside from that, "So Africans are even cooler than I thought?" likely came across as a bit sassy under the circumstances.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
· Edited 19d ago
So I'm boycotting Microsoft, due to user-hostility in the newer versions of Windows, and due to bankrolling the apocalypse OpenAI. The former reason means I'm basically looking at Linux. Recommendations for a noob-friendly distro and "Linux noob manual"? Particular needs include ability to run Wine well and high stability (i.e. few OS crashes), although those sound pretty basic. Low power use would also be nice, although my needs in that regard are quite modest (like, if the OS's hogging over 10% of a current-gen processor, that's bad).
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population.
Really? Could you provide me with some further reading?
Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians)
IIRC, Denisovan admixture is only significant among Austronesians, though East Asians have a tiny amount.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
Point of order: a 10g bullet at 99.99999% c would impact with the power of 480 megatons. I wouldn't want to be at ground zero, but the Earth and even humanity would trundle along just fine.
There are more-ridiculously-overpowered weapons humanity has thought of, though, even discounting "add more nines". The Nicoll-Dyson beam is basically something any civilisation with a Dyson Swarm can just do - specifically, use half the satellites' power beams as a phased-array laser, for a galactic-range beam that burns the atmosphere and oceans off a planet within an hour. There's always the black hole gun; drop a black hole into a star and it goes nova (wiping out everything in the system; space habitats won't save you here). And, of course, there's always the option of actually sending forces (directly or via something analogous to a Commander from Total Annihilation).
Short answer is that actual alien attack in the reasonably-near future is basically a "you die, no save".
Of course, this is not to say that space colonisation is a bad deal from an X-risk perspective! There are lots of risks that becoming multiplanetary removes. Grey goo, ice-nine, terrorist geoengineering, most bioweapons (the exception being intelligent ones), and so on. And, of course, in the limit if we don't leave Earth at some point in the next billion years we all die when the oceans boil. Alien attack is just not one of them.
The one thing I would say is that I'd prefer we colonised, um, almost literally anywhere in the Solar System that isn't Mars. Mars is one of the few places we can check lithopanspermia as a theory, and it's also kind of a shitty choice in general (it's got an atmosphere, but not enough of an atmosphere to block radiation well enough or survive without pressure suits/domes, and the relatively-high gravity prevents easy deep excavation to block radiation that way or easy return to Earth due to the gravity well). Deep cities on asteroids (or even Luna!) and cloud cities on Venus are better ideas; Mars just doesn't have much to recommend it and the Mars-like places in the system to check for lithopanspermia are very few so destroying one just for the meme value seems crazy.
Exactly my point. Who wins the competition of mirrors to become the new default is not obvious.
WP is what it is because of the combination of editors willing to introduce biased SJ takes and administrators/bureaucrats that resolve disputes in their favour (banning anti-SJers who want to remove those takes). The latter class is self-sustaining; it appoints its own replacements (normal editors certainly have practically no power to control it). But a move of venue means a chance to re-initialise that class; those with root access can flip the wheel bit for whomever they choose (WMF could do this too, but they won't).
You can import most of the current editors (and of course the ex-editors who got purged, though finding them all might take some effort) without it winding up in the same place it is now, as long as dispute resolution is not in the hands of the people whose hands it's in now. Some SJW editors will not co-operate with this, certainly, but I think there are enough who would to get a functioning encyclopaedia.
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