quiet_NaN
17hr ago
I agree with your sentiment.
The problem is that making treason stick is hard. Apparently, that charge was not even used against the IRA a lot, even though they were actively fighting the British military. Defecting from the UK to live in some Islamist paradise in Syria does not seem like a central example of treason.
Also, she was 15 when she defected, so you would have to argue in front of juvenile court. The defense would of course claim that she became a victim (at least once she set foot into Daesh-controlled territory) and any crimes she may have committed (if you even have proof of crimes) were simply her trying to survive. So even if you have ironclad evidence that she ratted out some adulteress who was subsequently stoned to death (to pick an entirely fictional example, afaik), that will not get her a decade behind bars, especially once the court takes into account her suffering in freedom and everything.
So politically, I can very well understand why the government tried to find a way around having to deal with her.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime.
Please try that defense for someone accused of being a getaway driver in a bank robbery sometime, see if it flies.
Seriously, Daesh was never a Party to the Geneva Conventions. At best, she would be entitled to the weaker protections of Protocol II, which places limits on judicial proceedings against such persons.
Or one could argue that the laws of war simply do not cover interactions between a government and its citizens, so if the Brits want to hang her for treason, they could have gone right ahead as far as Geneva is concerned.
Personally, I do not like how the Brits have dealt with her. "You have dual nationality, so we can strip you of your British passport without being in breach of the Convention against statelessness. Oh, the Bangladeshi government has announced the intent to execute you if you should ever set foot in your remaining homeland, well, sucks for you I guess." So de facto she is stateless, which seems bad.
A more principled approach would have been for the Brits to indicate a willingness to prosecute her for any and all crimes she may have committed for Daesh, while also allocating funds totaling zero pounds towards facilitating her safe return to the UK.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
So You Want to Win an AAQC This Year…
The most important thing is to hurry up, because 'This Year' is going to last only a few more hours. Luckily, most of the advice also works for 2026, though!
(Sorry, could not resist.)
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I like the government to fund some welfare services, and I generally dislike bureaucracy. I am also fine with some immigration.
Anyone who turns a blind eye to welfare fraud is effectively steering us towards an equilibrium with less welfare spending and more red tape. (And yes, red tape can very much prevent welfare from reaching the needy, because the needy often are not great at jumping through the hoops of bureaucracy.) If the perps are immigrants, it will also foster an anti-immigrant sentiment as surely as thunder follows lightning.
I wish I could blame some Ayn Rand fans who were working as moles to achieve that outcome, but in all likelihood the officials who turned a blind eye were probably SJ people who failed to think of the consequences. After all, Uncle Sam has plenty of money, and if the Somali skim a bit to keep their relatives from starvation, what is the harm?
Except that the taxpayers and voters feel very differently (I imagine). And sending money to a failed state through intransparent channels is not necessarily net positive.
In short, lawfulness is (at least) instrumentally useful. Even if you feel your cause is good, breaking laws to further it will generally generate a backslash. I imagine SBF did not donate a lot of money to EA in 2025.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
…Of course, we can still entertain the hypothesis that all of the above is some interesting ephemera and this final dash of the Chosen Nation towards AGI-powered Rapture and completion of history is the real story of the times. I won't completely discount it, we shall see.
IMO, this is still the operating assumption of the AI race. It is also the only thing which justifies the intensity of the efforts expended by various AI companies.
Normally, when a new field of tech is breached, there is no decisive first-mover advantage, where a technological lead of a year will translate into long-term dominance. History is full of cases (e.g. early home computers (e.g. Apple Macintosh), dot-com boom (e.g. myspace), photovoltaic (e.g. German companies), browser wars) where the forerunners became footnotes in history.
But what OpenAI investors buy is not so much future profits if OpenAI replaces most of the work force, but an investment-proportional solid angle of the light cone if Altman achieves aligned superintelligence (and remains aligned to his investors himself). The presumption is clearly that whoever finishes climbing the rope first will then cut the rope to prevent anyone else from following.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
On the other hand, the prosecution will also want to avoid jurors anchoring on a mid-severe charge.
For example, I would imagine that if you charged a defendant with 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and the case was less than 100% obvious, then the jury would be likely to compromise on the 2nd degree charge. So if you have a good case it might make sense to only charge 1st degree and only leave the options 'convict' or 'acquit' to the jury.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
That really seems silly. Presumably you guys have something like rules for the competition of criminal norms, and how acts which violate different norms should be punished. If A shoots B, you might sentence them for first degree murder, instead of adding murder 1, murder 2, manslaughter, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault, property damage, reckless discharge of a firearm, and noise disturbance.
I suppose that the only reason why a prosecutor would charge two different crimes where one encompasses the other would be that they were unsure if they could get a conviction on the more serious offense. "We are not sure if we can convince the jury of intent to distribute, so let's add simple possession just so we get something."
OTOH, reaching a common verdict may more be about everyone saving face than the verdict making any sense. If juror A insists on intent and juror B insists on acquittal on something and you have no (possibly mildly autistic) juror C who insists on the verdict being self-consistent, it seems like a way to make everyone happy.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Eduardo was appearing for domestic violence and battery charges. (PDF) The story inside the complaint is that one of Flores-Ruiz's roommates/associates texted Ruiz about his loud music in their shared apartment. Flores-Ruiz confronted the roommate which escalated to Eduardo pummeling the roommate in the face at least "30 times." The roommate's girlfriend attempted to intervene and Flores-Ruiz beat her. After he was satisfied with the girlfriend he turned his attention back to the roommate who he began choking. A cousin of the girlfriend appeared and successfully broke up the fight/beating. In the complaint the couple alleged Flores-Ruiz said a this isn't over type statement. The couple went to the hospital where, I'm guessing, they filed a report that led to Eduardo's arrest. I believe these two were present in the Dugan's courtroom on the day in question.
While alternating between the suspects first and last name makes the text less repetitive, this makes it also harder for anyone who has a context window too short to still contain the full name (which you mentioned a few paragraphs earlier) to understand what is going on. "Well, it seems like the Eduardo and Flores-Ruiz guys are both equally at fault here" instead of "per your summary of the charges, that Eduardo Flores-Ruiz guy really seems to be a piece of work".
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games.
As a straight, cis-by-default guy, I have a mild preference for female characters. Not sure if that makes me crypto-trans or something. Here is my reasoning:
- For 3rd person view games: if I have to stare at the ass of my PC for 80 hours, I prefer staring at a female backside.
- Romance-option wise, I am fine with lesbian content, but don't care for gay content. For straight content, I mildly prefer my character being the guy, but for example in BG3 'PC vs NPC party member' is pretty much a distinction without a difference. (Of course, I played a female Lolthsworn Dark Urge necromancer, which is fairly far from my real world persona. The class turned out to be a mistake, I was under the impression that I would get Finger of Death (& WotB) eventually. In 2nd and 3rd ed these were actually useful.)
- I guess my PC gender preference inverts if there is a lot promiscuity going on, for example in Witcher 1, I would prefer playing a slutty Gerald who gets a lot of pussy to a hypothetical slutty Geraldine who gets a ton of cock, possibly with a collection of risque cards of all the guys my PC has fucked. Outside of Witcher 1 and straightforward porn games, this is rarely a dominating concern.
I think that for mainstream games like ME or Cyberpunk, there is enough demand for female main characters that it makes sense to provide both options, even if you have to cast some lines with two sets of pronouns.
I agree with your points on story-writing, though. A thinly veiled allegory for whatever the cause of the day is (no matter the political leaning) rarely makes for an engaging story.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The hypocrisy was the feminists going on about "so long as he keeps abortion legal, I'd strap on the kneepads and give him a blowjob myself". Sexual harassment and power differentials and age gaps are bad - except when it's Our Guy.
Of course, this is similar to how the Christian Right saw Trump. "Sure, he probably has fathered 10x as many abortions as the average man, but if he manages to set the stage for getting Roe vs Wade overturned, that will far outweigh his personal failings."
Nor is either clearly wrong (in their respective value systems). You can either optimize for outcomes or never compromise with sin, but not both. Both of the extremes are bad, either you are constantly turning allies in for jaywalking and never have any impact, or your organization turns the instrumental goal of power-seeking into its terminal goal, with your original goal becoming a mere fig-leaf. Neither sociopaths nor fanatics (who might also be sociopaths just playing the game, of course) are very good at effecting social change, after all.
For what it's worth, since the 2010s, the SJ left has really doubled down on the fanaticism, to the point where they spend half of their energy self-devouring. Of course, you could argue that this applies less to the upper echelons, but "that guy is a sex pest, but he is our guy" is not a message they can communicate to the rank and file.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Everything falls into place if you operate under the assumption that most high level politicians from both parties are pedophile rapists, or at least pedophile rapist adjacent.
So all the fierce fighting between Trump and the Democrats is just kayfabe, then? Harris and Trump were laughing about the electorate seeing them as opponents while raping some kids?
And why would a cabal of kid-fuckers end up in charge, anyhow? Unlike being a lizardman (possibly), being a pedophile does not convey an intrinsic advantage at winning primaries. You could perhaps convince me that being a child-rapist is the kind of dirt which will keep a politician firmly in the hands of his blackmailers, who might therefore favor him over less controllable candidates. But such blackmailers would want to compartmentalize their assets, having them all go to Epstein parties seems terrible opsec.
Or it could be that child rapists pursue political careers at higher rates than baseline because they hope that political influence will shield them from law enforcement. But this would be stupid, because being a politician also means that a lot of people will dig for dirt on you, and they do not know if some elite pedo cabal even exists.
Even more if you consider that even Epstein himself was not into 6yo's, but rather girls at puberty. In any country in which you have extreme poverty, you will also likely find underage prostitution. Plenty of these countries are also corrupt as fuck and will likely have little moral outrage over tourists fucking slum girls. Nobody is running for Congress to fuck 12yo's.
Then there is the fact that such a conspiracy would require some way to disincentivize defectors. Probably one in ten politicians would have a late onset of conscience on their deathbed and be willing to spill the beans to make amends.
Or the thing that they did not make a very good job of covering up Epstein. Do you think every last cop who was investigating him was in the pedo cabal? If not, how did they make sure that none of the cops would leak incriminating videos of senior politicians raping kids, especially once they found out that their case would not go anywhere? Whistleblowers have martyred themselves to get much less juicy stuff out to the public.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Thanks, that is a good point.
(Also, I am pretty sure that compiler developers who use undefined behavior that way to 'optimize' code will go to hell eventually, but that will not help me if I am stuck debugging such a thing.)
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
Assuming that Mary runs on wetware, I think there are different levels of understanding. As a neurologist, Mary could do a PhD on pain receptors, yet she would still experience something new if she got her first kidney stone.
However, that thing would not be knowledge as such, and indeed an experience available to most vertebrates. This seems to be one of the cases where the mystery goes away if you taboo the words "learn" and "experience", and instead talk about "intellectual understanding" and "have the stimuli fed into your animal brain".
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
I am a non-cognitivist, so I am further on board with you than most. IMO, there is no fundamental moral truth which can be found like we found the Higgs, instead moral statements are simply utterances of preferences.
Still, we can very much debate the relative merits of various axiomatic systems in mathematics even though at the end of the day, the Axiom of Choice is not something which will be found to be true or false, ever. a+b=b+a will for example lead to lots of (but by no means all!) fertile lands, while a+b=b+a+1 will not lead anywhere interesting.
Mathematicians can and do debate the merits of various axiomatic systems, rather than being born fully subscribed to ZFC and nothing but ZFC or whatever.
Likewise, few people are 100% utilitarians who can spell out the terms of their utility function, or are 100% Kantians. Debates between people who follow an informal mixture of various moral theories can be fruitful. ("Oh, that theory says [bad thing]. Probably not as good a theory as I thought, then.")
Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap.
I was not aware of this theory, so I looked it up on WP.
Of all the attempts to escape the consequences of the Bell inequality, this seems the most pathetic by a mile. Where the simulation hypothesis assumes that we are inhabiting a video game, superdeterminism basically assumes that we are watching a movie.
Basically
The universe is conspiring to railroad you into only taking the measurements which would not contradict the Bell inequality. That U-238 nucleus whose decay will feed into your random number generator is woo-entangled with both your measurement procedure and the particle you are measuring (because all was one in the Big Bang), and will decay exactly so that the universe can continue to gaslight you about EPR.
This makes homeopathy almost respectable by comparison. Hell, even "Quantum mechanics is a Jewish conspiracy to confuse good Aryan physicists, and every time someone 'confirms' QM what is happening is that Mossad breaks into their lab and manipulates their equipment" seems slightly less bizarre -- and a lot more falsifiable!
Occam's razor says that there are no hidden variables, and if you measure the spin of a particle in superposition, you will find yourself either occupying a world where you (which does not specifically mean a conscious observer, for the saner interpretations) measured up or down with a probability corresponding to the relevant amplitude squared. The universe does not really care if you frame that as Copenhagen or Many Worlds or whatever.
Also, quantum noise seems a poor source of free will. If you have two chatbots, one running on a pseudo-random number generator, and one with access to a QM entropy source, it seems you can well claim that the first chatbot lacks free will because you can independently compute its output, while claiming that the second chatbot has free will just because you do not know what random choices it will make seems silly. There is a reason why some people dream up silly elaborate theories of the brain as a quantum computer. Determinism implies no free will, but indeterminism does not imply free will.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
potentially correlated preferences
Definitely this. Epstein was into very young girls, which likely means he was into innocent virgins, "I did not even realize men could be attracted to me", cute panties with animals printed on them etc.
Anything which signals "I know how to make myself attractive, get laid and have had a lot of sexual experience" would likely not be his kink.
I do not think we can learn a lot from his preferences, especially compared to observing what porn gets produced, which directly tells us the preferences of men who pay for porn, which is still not a great but a much better sample. Empirically, both the "young, cute, innocent" niche and the "oversexed slut" niches exist, plus a ton more besides.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I don't think the current Democrats will waste much time on defending Clinton.
I mean, it is known that he was fucking around. Few Americans would have trusted him with their 16yo daughters even in the '90s. And especially with Hillary gone from the political stage, he serves no purpose for the Democrat party.
"Yes, we ran a sex pest presidential candidate who probably fucked underage girls in coercive settings in 1997. The GOP ran one in 2024, so by all means let's talk about why this is bad."
quiet_NaN
13d ago
It was clear that nothing much would come of it.
If there was solid material evidence that Trump had fucked 13yo's, then the Biden administration would have gone after him. They certainly tried to get him for everything else in the book (some of which was fair, other stuff less so).
Still, Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files, which played well with his base but was an unforced error on his part given how much he hung out with this guy. Likely all the photos of him hanging out with Epstein were already leaked, as was his creepy-as-fuck birthday card.
The Democrats forcing the DOJ to release the files was just them cashing in on that. It was clear that either he would have to release the files with him being in them, or redact everything which mentioned him. Both would harm him, somewhat. Unsurprisingly, he did not want the photos of him and Epstein going through the press again, so he redacted everything. But less than 5% of the electorate is going to take that as "this proves that he did not know Epstein".
quiet_NaN
13d ago
You are correct.
I would still say that in C, under a few circumstances you can depend on a null pointer access crashing, e.g. if all of the following apply:
(1) You are in standard userland where nothing is normally mapped to 0.
(2) You know that your code will not be run in other settings (for example, you are not writing a library).
(3) You are not handling untrusted data.
(4) You are not in a privilege elevated mode (like in the kernel)
Then you can usually count on getting a segmentation violation for null pointer access, so that failing to do
if (!ptr)
abort();
will be of limited badness. (Given all these caveats, it is probably less bad
Compare and contrast with another source of undefined behavior: out-of-bounds array accesses. These will typically not cause segfaults, but will instead silently corrupt program data and flow, often leading to arbitrary code execution if exploited. It is the difference between getting killed from smoking and getting killed from smoking while filling up your gas tank.
Now, you could make the point that anyone treating a segfault as a safety net (instead of ruining one's day as much as one's car airbag firing) should not be programming with raw pointers, and I might even agree. In my defense, my baseline is physicists who self-taught C while programming with ROOT, and most of whom have no business coding in any language unsafer than Python, who still happily use C arrays and for whom a segfault on every third compile is just normal.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
I would argue that while null pointer dereferencing (at least in userspace) is bad, it at least of bounded badness, because it invokes well defined behavior, just like an integer division by zero. You could say that any language with runtime errors (or even any language where you do not have to prove the correctness of your program) qualifies as 'trust me bro', but that is very distinct from a memory-unsafe language.
Central examples of memory troubles, such as use-after-free or out-of-bounds accesses are much more evil because they do not invoke well-defined failure modes. Often, they lead to arbitrary code execution.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Every language in which you can say the compiler/runtime - just trust me bro I know what I am doing will devolve into just trust me bro language. This is why you don't have trust me bro sections.
There is a name for a language which does not have 'just trust me bro' sections. It is Java.
If you want to do anything interesting with hardware or squeeze out optimal performance, you will sometimes end up in situations where you are making assumptions which can not be verified by the compiler, which generally is ill-equipped to verify arbitrary mathematical proofs or parse hardware specifications.
Ideally, a language would allow you to specify hardware behavior and include a theorem verifier which you can use to prove that because two variables are co-prime per your precondition, your divisor can indeed not be zero in the next line. Instead, you have unsafe blocks.
Of course, some lazy programmers will decide that unsafe blocks are the path of least resistance. Probably when C came out, some asm programmers decided that they could code "C" by just using inline assembly for everything. If you want to protect a programmer from harming themselves, you need to place them in a safe padded cell like Java does.
The use case of Rust is when you have someone who is actually willing to work with the borrow-checker and only use unsafe in the places where that is not possible. This will make it much easier to audit the code. Imagine having to verify the stories of two suspects. Suspect "Rust" provides you ironclad, notarized evidence for 90% of his claims, while 10% (the unsafe stuff) is unsupported by evidence. Suspect "C" provides you no evidence for any claims. To make sure that their story checks out on a similar level of confidence, you would likely spend 10x as much work on subject "C" (or possibly more because the unsafe code blocks can interact.)
Btw - both C and C++ are quite memory safe if you don't try to be clever.
For C, that is a ridiculous claim. You might as well say that the Taliban regime is great for women's rights as long as the woman is willing to submit to her husband and not voice controversial opinions.
Sure, there are plenty of programs in C which are obviously sound. But not every problem is easily transformable into such a program. "Don't be clever about memory management" is not actionable advice if you need to share data with indeterminate lifetime between multiple threads any more than "try to be straight and submissive" is actionable advice for an Afghan butch lesbian.
Array accesses in C are memory unsafe as fuck. Unlike for C++ (_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS), the best way to do safe array indexing in C boils down to "wait for clang to implement -fbounds-safety".
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Hey, C combines the power of assembly with the elegance of assembly, as the joke goes.
Python has completely different problems. On the one hand, the duck typing means that erroneous assumptions about types may go undetected for a long time before blowing up in a completely innocent part of the code. (As far as a weakly typed piece of code can be innocent, that is.)
More critically, it is slow. Reading a field of an object, or calling a function defined in some global scope, both require a lookup in a hash maps, where in C they former would be pure pointer arithmetic and the latter would be resolved by the linker (or earlier) and turned into a constant runtime statement.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Don't tell me, tell GWB:
With the exception of non-self-destructing anti-personnel landmines, the United States has landmines available for use worldwide
Still, in that text the duration is given as "as much as 15 days", no idea why WP turned that into two days. In many tactical contexts, "we will just wait for two weeks until the mines explode" is not a feasible option.
I agree that there are many situations where the militarily optimal threat duration of a landmine is "at least as long as the conflict duration".
I do not think that the treaty restricts countries that much at all, after all, plenty of them are simply not signatories. On the other hand, I think a world where a random African country does not stockpile a few million dumb mines which will be indiscriminately deployed in the next civil war and then claim lives over the following decades seems strictly better than the alternative.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Manufacturers of prosthesis, rejoice!
Anti-personnel mines are making a big comeback in Europe, with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty. Poland has now decided to deploy millions of mines on its eastern border. Ukraine is of course in breach of that treaty, but as a non-signatory I do not see that Russia would get to whine about it.
On the one hand, I will concede that the Ottawa Treaty was always lacking support from the superpowers, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention. Of course, the US has its own excuse (WP):
The position of the United States is that the inhumane nature of landmines stems not from whether they are anti-personnel as opposed to anti-vehicle but from their persistence. The United States has unilaterally committed to never using persistent landmines of any kind, whether anti-personnel or anti-vehicle, which they say is a more comprehensive humanitarian measure than the Ottawa Convention. All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours. While the self-destruct mechanism has never failed in more than 65,000 random tests, if self-destruct were to fail the mine will self-deactivate because its battery will run down in two weeks or less.
I do not think that the US argument is without merit, and if they had pushed for a treaty exemption for mines whose design had been approved by international experts so that they explode within 48 hours, that would perhaps not critically weaken Ottawa. The problem is that the military incentives do not lie that way. Obviously there are situations where it will be advantageous for a mine to remain dangerous years after they are placed. And anyone producing short-lived mines can easily switch to producing cheaper long-lived ones by just getting rid of the timer. I wish I could say that I believed that Trump would say "unfortunately, the US unilaterally committed to never use persistent landmines under Clinton, so we will not do that", but realistically he will just say that this was Bad Radical Leftist Democrat policy and ignore it. So "no anti-personnel land mines" seems like the obvious Schelling point for an international agreement. (Anti-vehicle mines are a lesser concern, either they are planted on roads, where they are easily discovered (one way or another), or they are planted offroad, where the chances of civilians triggering them are much slimmer. Lots of kids play in the woods, few kids drive jeeps through the prairie.)
Personally, I would prefer for Poland to start a nuclear weapons program to them relying on landmines.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Only a few months ago Operation Midway Blitz commenced
Holy shit, that is the real name of that operation. It sounds like something a ten year old watching a Marvel movie set in the 2nd world war would come up with after five minutes of thinking. I wonder how many enemy aircraft carriers ICE has sunk so far, and how many illegals they have killed with V2's. And what is the next name in the pipeline? Operation Stalingrad D-Day perhaps? Or will they go straight to Operation Alderaan?
quiet_NaN
16d ago
I think he totally has a filter. If he had made equivalent comments about the Christian Right, he would not have become president. Instead, he is selectively applying his filter based on his IFF system. People and groups who are helpful to the MAGA cause do not get his broadsides, but those who are not get whatever he can come up with in his rants.
This. A suit for libel can destroy your news organization. The bigger the org, the more you are gambling.
Also, it is next to impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that fraud is happening as an individual reporter.
Basically, if you can not compel cooperation, you have no way of meeting that level of proof. Even if you knew that a given child was supposed to go to a daycare, observing their flat and confirming that it does not go to a daycare for a week will not prove a thing, because you see, that was just the one week where the daycare was closed, bad luck.
For a government official, things would look very different.
But if the government is willing to sweep everything under the rug (because the truth would help the detested MAGA racists), then you are out of luck.
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