pbmonster
3d ago
How cringey is the first-person narration?
I had already forgotten that it's first person. Flipped through it again, I think it's well done.
pbmonster
4d ago
A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do
I've just finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by Parker. Loved it, fits your genre perfectly, and it was a nice first for me in that it's in a fantasy universe, but there's no magic or monsters. It's a quick read.
There's also an interesting subtheme of the meaning of duty and loyalty - the protagonist defending empire, even though empire is of course fundamentally unjust, even to the protagonist personally.
Electrification is all well and good (clean air!) but why go to such a great effort in steel and cement?
Steel is 7% of global CO2 emissions, cement is 6%. And both are actually easier to electrify than agriculture, ocean shipping and jet flight - each also single digit percentage points of global emissions.
So if we stop short of steel and cement, we're so very much short of Everything, we might as well just give up and accept that global warming will be a continuous process that only stops after human civilization ends. I'm not yet willing to accept doomerism of that kind, I'd much rather build great things - which needs more steel and cement, meaning we need to electrify it in the field as soon as it begins to be cost competitive.
Just build more nuclear plants when we need more energy, keep them running 95% of the time and then switch over to fusion power.
I share your frustrations, but I've been waiting for a reform of nuclear regulations for decades now. It's not going to happen, middling public support and close to zero political will across the aisle. We just can't do it, and now it's too late. Even regulatory nuclear revolution followed by a Manhattan project 2.0 would not make nuclear in any way relevant in the west. The timelines are too long and renewables+batteries have full industrial momentum now.
France, South Korea and China had the political will 30 years ago, and thus have momentum now, but nobody else does.
But they've been saying this for ages. It hasn't happened.
It has happened for everybody who bought solar cells. Investments in rooftop solar amortize in 5-10 years, after that it's pure profit/free power.
The rest will follow with cheap batteries. Technologically, we could roll out vehicle to grid today, and connect several TWh of batteries to the grid. Grid scale batteries are economical today, you just need to wait in the grid interconnection queue for a year or two until you can get your GW connections approved. It's happening right now, and it will only get faster from here. The price is right now, and shortly the full force of capitalism will do the rest.
Consumer prices might not follow, of course. Lots of monopolies, stupid regulations, lots of new investments...
pbmonster
5d ago
This leads to a situation where both literal and free translations of compositions that draws from these classical elements often loses both some nuance and undertones of the original phrasing (if the translator isn't incredibly liberal with their word count), and almost always loses the lyrical quality of the text.
I fully agree. For me personally, this means the translator - especially of works for which classical translations already exist - should not even attempt to replicate the classical elements, the nuance and undertone, but attempt to create a text with a lyrical quality all on its own.
I'd almost always prefer a more free/liberal translation, and things like word count don't matter to me at all.
For some reason, translations like that exist for ancient Greek and more modern Russian literary works, but often not for Chinese.
pbmonster
5d ago
Green hydrogen isn't even a thing, surely most physicists could tell you the concept is a fantasy.
I disagree. I'm a proponent of the Electrify Everything movement, and I'm convinced it's going to be cheaper for 90% of the economy than burning fossil fuels is, within two decades.
You want green hydrogen for two things: blast furnaces for virgin steel (steel from iron ore, not from scrap) and cement kilns for concrete. Both processes will be difficult to electrify without hydrogen. The rest of what you're saying is true, of course. You only ever store hydrogen if you have access to a subterran salt cavern - because then its economical to run the electrolyzers when electricity is cheap, and make steel/cement 24/7. In all other cases, you just make the hydrogen on demand, and you throttle down production if electricity gets temporarily expensive.
If you have a truly gigantic salt cavern (those exist) and most countries in the west continue to refuse reforming their nuclear regulations, you might be doing seasonal energy storage on the side. Because in a future grid without nuclear, the renewables will need to be at least 30% overbuilt, which means you have zero cost electricity for months. In that case, adding a few GW of gas turbines or fuel cells to your steel/concrete plant might be worth it, even if you only run them during the yearly dunkelflaute.
pbmonster
6d ago
Spanish is probably a better choice anyway.
Depends on why you learn it! Pro Spanish:
-
Talking to people in the west? No use in learning Chinese, they all will be much better at English than you could realistically get at Chinese. Especially in the US, this is not true for many Spanish speakers.
-
Career opportunities? Little use in learning Chinese, because again, there's already hundreds of millions of people who are better at English and Chinese than you could ever get.
-
Travel? Both the Spanish and Chinese speaking world are beautiful, and the people living there mostly don't speak English. But learning Chinese to travel is frustrating: even after years of effort, you won't understand people in most Chinese speaking regions. The dialects are tough.
-
You'll acquire a new, fully functional language in a fraction of the time when you chose Spanish. Like, by a factor of 10.
Pro Chinese:
- While Spanish has some great literature and film, it's not even close to Chinese. Also, I found Spanish-English translations to be mostly enjoyable, but I absolutely hate Chinese-English translations. Maybe the languages/culture are to different. Maybe the style of translation differs, and Chinese translators mostly refuse to translate in a free/dynamic equivalence style.
pbmonster
7d ago
when they’re discussing adversaries who have more hacking capability than stone-age Yemenis, they stick to more secure channels.
This is not how institutional OPSEC works. You need everybody to follow the rules, always. You can't just back-door your own system for "low-threat" scenarios, and have your users decide for themselves what "low-threat" is.
Ad-hoc decisions about the technological threat of a specific actor by people not qualified to do so leads to own-goals like Trump accidentally leaking the US spy satellite capabilities on Twitter. Sure, he was "only" talking about Iran, but the very same satellites also cross over China.
How many planes did the Houthis manage to shoot down due to this “failure of OPSEC”? Zero.
Have you noticed that America's adversaries are not all nomadic camel herders with temporary access to Iranian missiles?
When the top ranks of the US government all conduct their business using some app on their private phones (as I assume they all do, the carelessness to invite a journalist by accident suggests group creation on signal is an every day rote task for them), it's basically guaranteed that foreign adversaries have access to much of that information.
At the very least Israel has enough expertise (via NSO Group's Pegasus) to have rootkit access to arbitrary smartphones. I'm 100% confident China has similar capabilities, and Russia and Iran might not be far behind (snatching the physical phone is always a realistic low-tech option, though). I have low trust in the EUs capabilities, but honestly, they might just be able to buy the tech as SAS. iOS and Android are extremely vulnerable, period.
And this is absolutely catastrophic, even if not a single aircraft is shot down - ever. Imagine going into negotiations with an adversary that knows your true goals and what arguments support them, and what pain points you want to mitigate.
I would also like to point out that anyone who condemns this “security breach” without in the same breath condemning Hillary’s e-mail server is double-standards-ing HARD. It’s OK when Dems do it?
Of course not! She was grilled for months on that, and for many good reasons. Might have cost her the election, even (probably not).
pbmonster
8d ago
“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.
So the argument we're going with is "OPSEC is for suckers who can't even make it into... the police?" Uninspired trolling.
Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?
Yes. Emails are messages, and they are instant. Easy to lock down access, easy to encrypt with code 100% under your control. Decentralized, robust, fail-safe. Add rudimentary mailing lists if you need your "groups" organized, done. Millions of people have conducted complex discussions like that for decades.
pbmonster
9d ago
Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.
The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.
pbmonster
9d ago
It's like a pop song on the page.
Worse, it's like bad rap music. The old hiphop head inside me went "whack" several times while reading, even before I knew what point you wanted to make.
Is turning a few screws and running Linux (or pirated Win 10 LTS/cracked Win 11) an option? I'd personally get an old Thinkpad X270.
Small, compact, robust, really good keyboard, long battery life. All around high quality, those were $2000+ when they were new (and they are below $200 now).
It's also the first model that has USB-C charging, and the last model to still have upgradable RAM (so I'd max that out). And I'd probably put in a new SSD, new battery (if the previous owner used it much). Maybe get a SIM for it, so you don't have to tether if you want internet on the go.
But honestly, you probably don't even need to open it up if you mostly do Word. Most corporate leasing models (and many used X270s will be from that category) never ran on their batteries, and text processing doesn't need 32GB memory and a fast SSD.
pbmonster
13d ago
Image quality is largely a red herring.
I disagree. I'd call full page images in an A4 photo book and 14"-20" framed pictures a "standard use case" for high quality photos. If I take my DSLR in medium-challenging lighting conditions, a large number of shots won't have the image quality to be printed at those dimensions. Sharpness/blurriness, insufficient exposure, ISO-noise, ect. will be a problem in a percentage of shots - and often, in the most interesting shots, of course.
pbmonster
14d ago
Sure. The funny thing is there a whole lot of Amish, Mennonites and other off-the-grid communities that don't generally bother to get birth certificates - or any other government documents. They would have a hard time formally proving their status.
They almost always have a large community vouching for each other, but that's pretty informal evidence...
pbmonster
15d ago
Interesting, that's not my experience at all! I've had good "text game" with many women who turned out to be bad dates, or who turned out to be good dates but absolutely not wife material.
In my experience, there's absolutely no way around meeting and talking/interacting if you want to know if you have potential. The AI would need to watch those meetings, and be trained on data like that.
pbmonster
15d ago
It could be that you and I are just using too much load on slow exercises
I suspect this might be the culprit. How/when are you hurting yourself on slow controlled movements? Are you pushing reps to failure (or close to it)? Are you sure your form was still good when you injured yourself?
I'm only doing slow and controlled now, and my injury rate has been much better. But I stop (and reduce weight before continuing) the moment I feel my form slipping, which happens far earlier than failing a rep.
pbmonster
15d ago
My assumption is that an AI would be extremely good at this - if it had the training data. Far better than a person could be without meeting the candidate.
The problem is the training data. I haven't gone on nearly enough good and bad dates to show the AI what I like and what I don't like. So I can't let the AI choose my wife. Yet I knew I had found her when I first met her.
pbmonster
15d ago
An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which,
Same for dating, in theory
The problem - a little more so in the case of dating, but not much - is that people/employers don't know what they want. Some might think they do, but they don't.
In the end, it's all vibes. "They know it then they see it", and they especially know what they don't want when they see it.
The AI won't help with that, at least not until it has a good training set of people who vibed in the past.
For casual snapshots of groups of friends etc. phones are great.
To be honest, I mostly take photos of my kids, and sometimes of people climbing/skiing. Both situations can have challenging lighting and object that don't stop moving around. The phone software has been absolutely amazing at eliminating motion blur and/or underexposed images, something I've previously struggled with even at 1/120s. And yeah, I often miss having the tele lens, but I've gotten used to moving in to take the shot - or with having a shot of nice landscape that has some action in it.
Most importantly, the ergonomics of taking photos on a phone are shit tier compared to any halfway decent camera that has a viewfinder and where the body has been designed for the task of taking photos.
True. Getting a phone with a hardware shutter button is absolutely essential. The rest can't be helped, I think.
I've gone the other direction and bought a real camera a while ago. I got fed up with the overcooked processing phones do.
I know what you mean. The good thing is you can turn that off - either feature by feature, or all of it. Or use an alternative camera app if you want to set exposure and ISO yourself (and those apps aways only produce traditional stills), export un-edited stills from the short videos the main camera app takes before it starts AI-editing them, or tell it do AI-slopification by default but also always save RAW images. At least that's the state of the art on Google Phones.
Luckily there have been good lightweight mirrorless cameras on the market for over a decade.
I'm sure for many use-cases a modern mirrorless takes far superior pictures, especially when used by a experienced photographer. But the AI has been amazing for normies.
pbmonster
15d ago
It's good enough to tell similar but distinct varieties of flowers apart too.
In my experience, Google Lens generally can't, but apps like Flora Incognita (which instructs you to take images of the leaves, the flower, the stem, the bark, ect.) can. Flora Incognita also tells you a certainty percentage, which is really helpful.
In my garden, Google Lens has an almost comical inability to distinguish my carrots from yarrow - and it won't warn you that it's less than 50% sure. If you only feed it flower pictures, flora Incognita has trouble as well, but tells you it's less than 40% sure until you take pictures of the leaves and stem.
pbmonster
16d ago
I have barely changed how I use a smartphone since I bought my very first over a decade ago
I have the same feeling. But for me, something else changed: the phone takes on more and more additional duties. Within the last two hardware generations, I've completely stopped bringing my DSLR camera and my outdoor GPS unit (for mountaineering).
Modern smartphone camera sensors and lenses are decent (when compared to compact cameras), and modern camera software is - frankly - completely insane. The combination of the two now easily beats my skill level on a DSLR camera that has orders of magnitude more sensor area, lens diameter and aperture diameter. I'm generally a software skeptic (progress in software development over the last 10 years has resulted in very little "real" value being created), but camera software amazes me. Instead of taking a still image, phones now always capture a short video instead and distill the final image in post - a mostly automatic process that results in sharp, correctly lighted and color balanced shot.
Replacing the GPS unit was more trivial. OLED displays are more readable in the sun, the GPS chips got a bit faster, and again, the quality of the software/data got orders of magnitude better (the free offline geo-data available today is vastly better than the commercial data of a few years ago). Route planning and terrain analysis also got so much better. Used to take a PC and skill and experience, now everybody can do it on the phone with 30 minutes of instructions. Also, if you have the right smartwatch, you won't be taking a device out of your pocket at all anymore.
pbmonster
20d ago
Is this true? Perhaps my perspective is skewed by living in San Diego
Probably, it's the location I would expect to look the best in that respect.
I personally know dozens of people who are fully fluent (in the sense of being able to competently converse about a wide range of topics) in both Spanish and English. When it comes to second-generation Latinos in most parts of the country, or at least in the Southwest, my perception is that bilingual fluency is actually very high.
In my experience, many of those people actually can't e.g. do their standard white-collar job in their second language. If you want to have a country with dual national languages (as opposed to making Mexico an imperial possession as someone suggested below), you need a lot of people who can do that well, since a lot of national/federal institutions need to be run in both languages.
At least you would need those people, traditionally. A lot of that might shortly be superfluous, since language models work well across languages and federal institutions might be a thing of the past!
But just imagine being in the Army, and working alongside an integrated Mexican auxiliary battalion - or integrating US special forces into a Mexican-led theater. You'd really want at least everybody above O-2 being bilingual. Messing around with interpreters under fire is pretty much unacceptable.
pbmonster
21d ago
I agree Mexico is the much tastier target. In my personal assessment, Mexico is more culturally compatible with the US than Canada.
That's an... interesting proposition. To start, how do you expect the language integration to work out? Just have dual national languages? National languages on the state level? How do you feel about Spanish slowly (or not so slowly) creeping north, possibly displacing English in the southwestern states within a few decades?
Language is extremely important for the national consciousness. And unfortunately, both the old stock and the new citizens don't exactly have a great history/culture of bilingualism. The number of people being actually fully fluent in both languages is currently extremely low (when compared to existing countries with multiple national languages).
My prediction is you'd have independence movements solely based on language, and quickly.
Sure, but unlike the Suez, there's mountains/hills in Tehuantepec. Hundreds of feet of elevation difference, a canal would need many dozens of locks, maybe hundreds.
I can see a high capacity rail line, but digging a canal to rival the one in Panama is madness - especially as long as the one in Panama exists, and acts as economic competition.
Is that clear? The enemy certainly is competent, and good-enough to [SPOILERS IN ROT13] erpehvg gur rzcver'f sbervta nhkvyvnel yrtvbaf, juvpu cerfhznoyl jbhyq unir znal ernfbaf gb fgnl yblny. Naq fher, gur rarzl vf fgenvtug hc trabmvqny, ohg gung'f abg greevoyl bhgfvqr gur beqvanel jura n pvgl erfvfgf n fvrtr.
Naq orfvqrf fjvgpuvat fvqrf, gur ratvarref jbhyq nyjnlf unir unq gur bcgvbaf gb whfg qrfreg, inavfuvat habccbfrq vagb gur avtug, fryyvat gurve uvtu-inyhr fxvyyf gb jubrire cnlrq zbfg. Ohg gurl qrpvqrq gb qrsraq rzcver vafgrnq. [\SPOILERS IN ROT13].
Is there a better way to do spoilers on TheMotte?
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