pigeonburger
1yr ago
Question for any war nerds: why are dummy drones and dummy vehicles not being used in Ukraine? Shouldn’t these be a feasible way of wasting enemy resources and determining their location?
I was under the impression that both sides use decoys, yes?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/tu-95-decoys-are-being-painted-on-russian-air-bases-apron
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I usually put on a playlist of TV shows or youtube videos to fall asleep to. When it's TV shows, I like Star Trek TOS, when it's youtube videos, it's usually either someone commenting on or commenting on highlights of a playthrough of a game. There's a specific kind of content that work best; something I'm at least somewhat curious about, to attract my attention over my own thinking, but I'm not interested enough to fight sleepiness to watch/listen.
It works great. I'm usually falling asleep within 10 minutes, and if I ever wake up during the night, I start watching the video and usually fall right back to sleep.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think the may there means "we have the option to", not "maybe we will". Consider how they follow with "We will take this step imminently, unless..."
Certainly sounds like a promise that they will leave unless their demands are met.
From the latest news, it seems it's now over 500 employees that are pledging to leave for Microsoft with Sam if the board doesn't immediately rehire Sam and resign, so I think it's safe to say Microsoft has that lightning pretty well bottled if they want it. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1726600151027073374#m
Assuming the board does it, the question that remains is for Microsoft. Is having essentially full control of OpenAI's human capital without a non-profit meddling worth potentially losing access to its current IP, and some initial friction as these employees work to replicate everything they can inside of Microsoft.
*EDIT: I'm saying potentially, because I can easily see the non-profit just deciding it's too late and that their current structure is just not workable. Tell all the employees to move to Microsoft, dissolve the OpenAI for-profit and sell all the IP to Microsoft (or just sell the for-profit for Microsoft to run as a subsidiary) and give the money to some other AI safety orgs or to "worker re-training" orgs, etc...
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
That quote refers to situations where someone is spending money in the hope that a market correction is incoming. I'm not spending money, I'm accumulating it.
Why not?
Because that is in no one's interest.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
It breaks the gentlemen's agreement that a pseudonym you encounter for the first time online is a blank slate.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
As someone who would much prefer Trump to the currently proposed alternatives, I still find there's something obscene and beyond-the-pale cringe in depicting him heroically. Like this https://i.redd.it/ruirh33uzx911.jpg (warning, reddit link, may include redditors' opinions in comments)
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Well, 2013 here. https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2013-05-14 https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2013-05-22
The bad webcomics wiki has the best examples https://badwebcomicswiki.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Sinfest
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I myself find it quite annoying when a link to a pornographic game walkthrough takes me to Google Docs.
Oh yeah, that is the worse! O... Or so I hear, of course it has never happened to me since I would never open such a document.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
And I think the fully-generalized-counterargument to tearing down any Chesterton's fence that's starting to emerge is that if you allow even one fence to be torn down even with good reason, its tearing down will be used as a fully-generalized-argument to tear down every fence.
The example I can think of being gay acceptance/rights/marriage. There are good reasons I think to believe the fence that were holding them back was obsolete: wealth and technology is such a force multiplier that our societies are no longer in a demographic race against their neighbors, so we can afford to let off the natalism and hostility to pairings that don't lead to births. But that opening was then used to argue that ANY social objection to any orientation, sexual identity, etc... is Wrong and Bigoted.
Honestly I'm at a loss as for what to do. I guess the solution is to personally calmly keep evaluating fences and not let myself be influenced by the whims of the era, but I admit I do understand why conservatism-minded people are worried about cedeing any ground at all anymore; each time they do the bulldozers go on a rampage.
Honestly I'm not really that surprised. It's the result of taking extremely sincere feminism and running it through the wringer that have been the last 8 years of so. Ishida went hyper-feminist during Gamergate, insufferably so; the comic went from trying (with limited success, but not entirely without success) to make an adult Calvin & Hobbes, to non-stop preaching. Then mainstream feminism was told "shut up, it's trans people's time now", and those who didn't toe the line were thrown in the TERF pit. There's essentially two reactions to being thrown in the TERF pit, with a spectrum in between them: 1) compartimentalize the trans stuff as being the only thing the mainstream liberal order is wrong on, but keep every other belief intact, or 2) question everything.
Ishida went closer to 2). I think he still compartimentalize the feminism as the one thing the liberal order is right on, but he went hard on the other side for everything else.
I think the comic is still annoyingly preachy and cringy though, just red colored cringe instead of blue colored cringe.
Ultimately my heuristic for being quite certain the situation will improve is an extremely simplified model, I guess you could call it entitlement, but I think it's justified:
Right now I cannot afford to buy a decent home anywhere that people would want to live. There are millions of home where I live. My household income is upper middle class. If you distribute these homes starting at the top and working your way down there should be more than enough to reach me and others like me on the totem pole.
Whatever exact mechanisms will apply to get there, people in my salary situation are supposed to be able to own homes. The market will have to correct and make it possible for me to buy a home because a second home is not worth as much to people higher than me than my first home will be to me, and people below me will not have the means to beat me on the market.
tl;dr : There are homes all over the place, maybe not for everyone but at least for everyone from the upper to the middle-middle class. If I, in the upper-middle class, cannot afford to buy one now, who can? They're not gonna remain empty.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Sorry if this is off-topic, but could I ask for a little courtesy with regards to Google Docs/Drive (and other sites that will automatically use an existing account)? Clicking on a shortened/obscured link and immediately seeing it going to Google and being opened on a personal, non-pseudonymous Google account was a bad surprise. I don't think right now Drive owners can see who has their drive opened on publically shared documents but that's the kind of thing that could change anytime from Google
Just asking to either not shorten/obscure Google Drive/Docs link, or to add a warning so people who don't want to risk associating real-names with pseudonyms know to open in Private Mode.
I guess for many people of my generation and younger, sure it's an experience, but it's one you can't interrupt and that locks you out of other experiences to some extent. That kind of committment is scary.
They don't know if they want it or not because they haven't experienced the light version of it of taking care of younger siblings / extended family that used to be the norm, and by the time they realize they aren't really going to live out their jet-setting/big city sitcom fantasy anyway they are late, sometimes too late, to pivot to parenthood.
Yes, I think they mention Avada Kedavra being unblockable in the books, but if I recall the rationale for it being Unforgiveable is that you have to truly wish the person you aim it at to die. If I recall the rationale for Imperio being Unforgiveable is that you have to want to dominate the target. Sure, those rationales make sense on their own, but what are we expecting to happen to someone if you aim Confringo (Blasting Curse) at them? It's essentially shooting a bazooka at someone. Surely you're shooting it hoping it won't be blocked, so what are you hoping for? For them to only lightly explode to bits and not die? Somehow there's no moral event horizon being crossed in the game if you shoot it at all human and human-equivalent sentient beings. In the books, I don't remember the good guys casually casting deadly spells in combat, to avoid this hypocrisy.
Maybe moral norms were different in the 19th century. I guess it would have been boring if the only spells you could cast in combat were stupefy and expelliarmus.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I had fun roleplaying a bit and making my own personal cannon. I unlocked the killing spell, and never used it on anything smarter than a Troll. It was a little silly that the killing spell got treated so badly, but I created a literal mountain of bodies without the killing spell.
There's a huge bit of hypocrisy in the way that you can learn an explosion spell and routinely aim it directly at people and that's not unforgiveable. But the Imperio spell, which (if the game allowed it) could be used to force an enemy you would otherwise be forced to kill to surrender is an Unforgiveable Curse.
Meta-trends can also break immersion. If you watch 10 films all with race swapped leads and each on their own works just fine, but you know that the studio heads made big noise about race swapping for the sake of it, about representation, and about making Hollywood less white, etc, you might still have your immersion broken by the clear politics behind the trend, even if each one works self contained.
Ultimately that's what makes it intolerable for me. I don't have a problem with one adaptation doing "what if we tried changing the race of characters in this to challenge their expectations?" But now the entirety of culture seems to be about racism. Every single recent show or movie it seems, if somehow they can't make it all about racism, they will at least try to fit in a subplot or even just a line to remind you of it. Recently I watched The Nun 2, a horror movie about a spooky Nun-impersonating demon happening in 1950s France. What does racism have to do with it? It makes no goddamn sense why, but in this one the main character's sidekick is a an afro-american girl who was sent to a convent, all just so they could fit in a line about how it was better for her to become a nun out in Europe than be black in america. For the rest of the movie, all the things her character does could have been done by other characters.
I mean the typical suspicion is that this has become necessary to secure funding or to be allowed to have a chance to win an award, but it's so damn transparent; it breaks immersion entirely. At this point, it's so overdone, even if it were done with innocent intent, I will resent it. And it's hard to believe it's done with innocent intent, because it would be hard for one not to notice just how oversaturated every aspect of culture is with this message already.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
This makes me remember how I had an epiphany recently about the different nature of horror for men and women when watching Rosemary's Baby. Watching it, it became clear to me that it was written to be horror for women: the terrifying part is not the satanism and all that, it's the main character not being believed, having her concerns dismissed and ignored.
Then, thinking about what is horror distinctly for men, it was clear and obvious: watching helpless while watching loved ones suffer/die. With emphasis on the helplessness. I think this is why descriptions like that sequence you and Walterodim mention affect men so strongly. Helplessness is the central nerve of horror in men, and failure to protect loved ones is its strongest stimuli.
Sure, but something is not unfalsifiable because the data doesn't exist to falsify it, but because there is no way to devise an experiment that would falsify it.
*EDIT: It would theoretically be possible to make a experiment that isolates upbringing, sex and "trans-ness", so it's not unfalsifiable. It is not, for instance, possible to make an experiment that can disprove the existence of a god that is omnipotent (which includes the ability to decieve and make it appear like he doesn't exist), so the existence of an omnipotent god is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Yes, it's unlikely there's enough quality data on it out there right now, but it is at least in theory falsifiable.
But as you point out that is unlikely to sway her, she's already hinting she would retreat to an actually unfalsifiable argument: that there is an internal state of gender independant of sex AND behavior known only to oneself.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Doesn't seem unfalsifiable to me: just find statistics on boys who were brought up as girls (or vice-versa) but never actually claimed themselves to be trans or the other gender once they had agency in the matter.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
It's not because of how mean it would be to the Muslims, it's because of how it would provide fuel to the narrative that Israel is an aparteid state.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Because the world doesn't want politically motivated encyclopedias, it wants accurate, unbiaised, apolitical ones. Of course, Wikipedia isn't that, but that is current only known to the extremely online centrists and conservatives/right-wingers. The move is not to make an explicitely political one as it will be rightfully ignored, it's to continue to raise awareness that Wikipedia is not accurate, unbiaised and apolitical.
And in the realm of sexual sociopolitics, I'm rather skeptical that the progressives considered the conservatives to be people mostly on the same page and with similar ideas about what "victory" looked like, just with different ways to get there.
If you zoom out far enough, sons and daughters living happy fulfilling lives is what everyone is after. At least, for people who invest themselves into social policy making with impacts on that kind of timescale. There isn't really any personal gain to be made, the people who pushed the changes that led to the current environment are by now too old to personally benefit from it.
My point is not that the colonel who cannot ever manage to implement his strategy is worthy, but that it's a fair complaint if another person ostensibly working for the same objective is actively making things worse for no other reason than to not see him succeed. If the other colonel really was shooting his country's troops in the back, pointing it out to the brass is not pitiful whining, it should be investigated and that colonel arrested and tried for treason. If, in progressives' mind, conservatives are making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives, they should make that case to the population as best they can so that the population rightly shuns conservatism. It's not argument I can see them making convincingly, but they absolutely should try it if they truly believe that conservatives are that nasty and petty.
You'll pick up on the terminology as you read the series. Very fun read, I hope you enjoy it!
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