quiet_NaN
27d ago
What I would like to propose is to regulate payment processors in a similar way as ISPs. Either they become common carriers, which means that they are required to do business with any to-their-best-knowledge legal endeavor (and open themselves up to court cases if they refuse) and are shielded from liability, or they remain free to pick their customers and will remain fully liable for any damages causally downstream from their transactions ("What do you mean, you did not know that the car rental agency would lend a car to someone who might run over some kid? You decided to do business with them.")
Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks? I am sure that the US government would have loved to lean on the ISPs to get them to voluntarily stop routing to their website. Fortunately for us, this was not a realistic option without causing a big stink. On the other hand, going to the credit card processors and telling them "Did you notice that you are barely making any money from processing transactions with Wikileaks, but on the other hand irritate us quite a lot by it?" was enough to convince them that it was not worth it.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
This Guardian article is a work of art as a culture war artifact.
The story: a Danish data scientist, Pallesen, who claimed that former Harvard president Gay had made "very basic" data errors in her PhD, a claim which was quoted by right wing activist Rufo.
But now the fearless investigators of the Guardian have uncovered that Pallensen also co-authored a paper called "Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans" regarding the Ashkenazi, which was published by some people on the right fringe outside Respectable Academia. Some are into eugenics and "race science". Also they cited an 'antisemitic ' psychologist.
Of course, Pallesen promptly disavowed that paper when questioned by the Guardian.
Where to even start.
"Cite" in the title makes an especially bad verb in an academic context because you can generally not control who cites you. "Scientist who criticized Gay's thesis" would be more on point.
Then there is this whole five degrees of separation thing.
- Kevin MacDonald is a retired academic who did 'antisemitic publications'. (Let's take the Guardians word for that.)
- His papers get cited by Kirkegaard et al.
- One of Kirkegaard's co-authors is Pallesen. (Too bad that he promptly distanced himself from the paper.)
- Pallesen helped Rufo oust Gay.
- Rufo is "a major ally of Ron DeSantis".
- Therefore DeSantis is an evil racist, or something?
While both icky, there is an actual difference between eugenics and "race science" (or HBD or whatever). Eugenics is prescriptive and describes the belief that society should coordinate to affect their gene frequencies. This can go from "let's use CRISPR to fix hereditary diseases" to "kill all the kids with a disfavored eye color". This is completely separate from the claim that there are group differences between human subpopulations caused by genetic differences, which is trivially true for physical characteristics and icky for mental stuff.
My personal view is that most social science is unsound even when it is completely apolitical. If you add politics, be they woke or far-right, I fully expect the conclusions to be whatever the politics say they should be. In respected academia, genetic differences in intelligence are already a third rail. If you publish on racial genetic differences in intelligence, that will end your career faster than putting "I will increase grades for sexual favors" in your e-mail footer. The "fringe" researchers are of course also motivated by politics. So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society. (From what I remember of Scott's (who is Jewish and thus smarter than me) opinion, I would bet 75% on there being a significant (say, at least five IQ points average) genetic advantage for Ashkenazi.)
Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.
Finally and foremost, the character of Mr. Pallesen is utterly irrelevant to his claims. He is not the only data scientist, so we don't have to -- and should not -- rely on his testimony exclusively. In the worlds where there is a problem with data science in Gay's PhD, I would not expect that someone who specializes in Intersectionality points it out, thereby -- in the Guardians words -- 'helping oust school’s first Black president'. In worlds where there is no such problem, I would expect that dozens of woke data scientists would jump at the chance to call bullshit on the claims.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.
They acknowledge that there have been unambiguous incidents of antisemitism.
Then there are gems like this:
“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Of course, if issue one is "a work of literature containing rape" and issue two is "an Israeli student encountering protesters who say stuff like 'Zionists don’t deserve to live', I have my own ideas which of these I would classify as "making one feel uncomfortable" versus "making one feel genuinely unsafe".
Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.
[...]
Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value. This is not uncommon, after all, many things we do are mostly for the signaling value. My own position that Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties while they crush Hamas is probably something a majority of US voters could get behind, but boy is it lackluster from a signaling point of view. A student protester expressing this opinion would not get any respect for their bravery from their peers. On the other hand, calling for an intifada might be utterly devastating to the aims of the protests, but it will earn the one expressing it a lot of respect for being so brave and likely get them laid.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The guardian on Assange and Biden considering to drop the charges.
Should Biden decide to drop the Assange prosecution it would bring him into line with the previous Democratic administration of Barack Obama. It held back from charging the WikiLeaks founder for fear of infringing freedom of the press rights under the first amendment.
The 18 charges against him were ultimately brought under the presidency of Donald Trump.
To my surprise, this is actually a take echoed by Glenn Greenwood:
So Obama ended eight years in office without indicting Assange or WikiLeaks. Everything regarding Assange’s possible indictment changed only at the start of the Trump administration. Beginning in early 2017, the most reactionary Trump officials were determined to do what the Obama DOJ refused to do: indict Assange in connection with publication of the Manning documents.
The facts go like this:
- In 2010, Assange fled from Sweden to the UK because he was concerned that his prosecution for some alleged sex crimes was a pretext for extraditing him to the US.
- In 2012 he took asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK, citing the same concerns.
- In May 2017 the Swedish prosecutors dropped their charges
- In April 2017 the Trump DOJ announced that they wanted to prosecute Assange
- In 2019 he was arrested in the embassy and has been mostly greenlighted for extradition to the US by now.
The Guardian/Greenwood narrative would have to go like this:
- When Assange stated that he was afraid that Sweden would extradite him to the US in 2010, he was a poor delusional paranoid, because the Obama DOJ valued freedom of the press and all that. None of the prosecution he faced until 2017 was anything different than what any random citizen of Australia accused of similar crimes would have faced.
- When the evil Trump DOJ took over, they promptly decided to prosecute Assange, suddenly turning his paranoid delusions into reality and putting pressure on the UK to extradite him for his Wikileaks work.
- When Joe Biden took over, he just forgot to stop his DOJ from further prosecuting Assange.
My narrative would go something like this:
- Assange was right that the US was out to get since 2010. The sex crime allegations were played up for political reasons. Sweden would have totally extradited him to the US. The DOJ simply kept their mouths shut because there was no advantage for them to admit they intended to prosecute him while he was out of their reach, and playing the freedom of the press champion made Assange look like a paranoid fool.
- When the Swedes finally dropped their charges, Assange was still wanted in the UK for skipping bail. For some reason (probably something internal, possibly related to the administration change) the US decided to finally put their cards on the table instead of waiting until he was in UK custody.
- After Biden took over in 2021 he did not drop the prosecution because getting hold of Assange had been a goal of the US (especially the intelligence community) since 2010, not a partisan Trump pet project.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed.
Our moral intuitions differ on this a lot. I am not per se against actions whose only purpose is to depress the enemies utility function. If the only move you have is to break into Hitler's villa and destroy all his paintings just to piss him off, I will not hold it against you if you do that.
But when you target third parties such as civilians, reality is typically more complex than that, because they are not only terms in the utility function of the enemy, but also of other's utility functions, such as their own or mine.
In my mind, there is a ton of difference between accepting some collateral damage and intentionally targeting civilians. If Hamas targeted IDF bases with their rockets but accepted the possibility that they might miss and blow up a school instead, or if the IDF decides to blow up 50 people to get one Hamas commander, that can still be viewed as evil because it assigns so little utility to the civilians, but it is very different from expressing a preference for killing civilians, as Hamas did on Oct 7.
If Hamas had targeted shot IDF personnel without offering surrender, I would not have liked this either, but I would also have recognized that there was some military utility to their action.
Instead, they elected to go after civilians. Intentionally. As I have written elsewhere:
Hamas leadership know that they their organization will never defeat Israel militarily. Their best chance to achieving their dream of wiping Israel from the map is a broad alliance of Arab countries who defeat Israel together. The way they get there is public Muslim outrage at Israel. And the best way to generate such outrage is dead Palestinian kids. In my opinion, their attacks were militarily completely pointless, but served the important strategic goal of getting Israel to bomb Gaza down. This will likely throw a wrench into Israel's diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with its Arab neighbors.
In short, the Gazan war is not an acceptable price for Hamas to pay for their day of impotent vengeance on Oct 7, but the motivation for Oct 7 was to get Bibi to blow up a lot of Gazan kids.
I firmly believe that an organization acting like this should be wiped from the face of the earth.
On a broader scale, the problem with the Palestinians is that they don't know how to lose.
Wikipedia has this helpful list. The overall effect is reminiscent of that black knight scene in Monty python: "You have destroyed our ability to fight you in the open? No matter, we can still do suicide bombings. You have walled in Gaza? No matter, we can still fire rockets".
Israel is evidently not incompatible with continued Palestinian existence, so absent a road to victory, resisting them seems counter-productive.
Sometimes it is better to accept accept a peace which feels unjust than fight on forever. When the Alsace became French in 1945 again, a lot of the German-speaking people living there were probably not happy about it. But somehow, the proud tradition of fighting a war every few decades about that region was never revived. It surely helped that nationalist fervor was depleted a bit on the German side after the Nazis, but I still consider this an outcome vastly better for everyone than the alternatives.
"They're both justified to continue murdering each other"
From where I stand, this seems a totally bizarre statement. If two sides fight about a thing, then whatever metric you use to decide who is right and what you would consider a fair distribution of the land or whatever, the rightfulness of all sides summed up has to be less than unity. Only if you optimized for conflict instead of post-conflict outcomes could you prefer both sides to fight each other.
In summary, I am not pro-Bibi, but I am really anti-Hamas. After Oct 7, Hamas needs to be crushed, and as Biden has not volunteered, it falls to the IDF to do the job. I don't think that the way the IDF wages this war is actually all that great, and I am very concerned that nobody has a plan to offer the Gazans a credible alternative. I also think that Israel should destroy the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and arrest the settlers who destroyed that Gazan aid convoy on charges of attempted murder.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Given the effectiveness of missile interception, I think it is hard to argue with the results. From Israel's point of view, the Iranian regime already hates them maximally and is kept in check purely by military consideration, not a lack of desire to wipe Israel of the map.
Purely military speaking, trading two generals plus change against a random civilian is a tit-for-tat game that Israel wins. There is also the costs of attack and defense to consider, which might be more favorable to Iran (launching a rocket is way easier than intercepting one), but on a scale of a few hundred missiles this is a minor concern.
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
We're damn lucky things cooled down so fast, but again - what the hell was Israel hoping to achieve by this?
I think you are right that killing the generals in the embassy might have been a bad move for Israel because of tail-heavy risks. They put Iran in a spot where the decision makers felt they had to retaliate not for military reasons but just to remain credible to their own peers. If they had killed a few hundred Israelis instead, then that would have put Israel in exactly the same spot, resulting in a war which both sides would lose.
I think it comes down to what a general is worth, militarily speaking. If Persia had managed to kill Alexander 'the Great' early on, history would have gone quite differently, but we are not in the antique any more. Instead of depending on having a king who is by chance a military genius, meritocratic systems common in the modern world should churn out a reliable stream of competent generals. From my gut feeling, modern militaries do not depend on a genius who sees a weakness during battle and exploits it in a way which nobody has ever thought of before but more on skilled but replaceable craftspersons employing their craft. You do not need Alan Turing to build Amazon, after all.
So killing two generals seems more of a papercut than a decisive blow, and Israel's actions can be likened to climbing a wall free solo: the fact that it went well for them this time does not make it any less foolish.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
From the article, it is clear that the rate of both men and women being murdered by intimate partners has decreased by a factor of about two since the 1990s.
To be sure, of the 0.45 Non-Indigenous women killed per 100k, 0.32 are killed by an intimate partner, who is very likely to be male. I am not sure what could be done about that, though. Encourage more women to join gangs so that they are more likely to be killed in gang warfare, like presumably the males (for whom the murder rate is twice as high, but only with a small fraction being perpetrated by intimate partners)?
In general, the price we pay for freedom is that sometimes people elect to do bad stuff with it. In theory, we could save a few women's lives by outlawing heterosexual relationships or locking up all men. In practice, that would not be worth it on a QALY basis.
If being murdered is among the ten leading causes of death, then we could consider talking about an epidemic. Traffic deaths are between four and five per 100k. We should roughly care five times as much about that than we care about murders (which should still not be a lot).
Also, Indigenous women are murdered at six times the rate of their non-Indigenous peers!!111 Should the intersectionist woke crowd be all over that fact?
quiet_NaN
12d ago
From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president. While there are certainly mid-level bureaucrats who would do everything legal in their power to thwart his preferred policies (and some might even risk their job by going beyond that), I think the rest of DC pretending that Trump does not exist will not be an option. For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that? If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
We already had four years of Trump. He was not my favorite president, but contrary to predictions from the left he turned out not to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I don't think he would build death camps in his second presidency. It would not be the end of the world.
On the other hand, democracy in the US had (with one notable exception) been a great success in avoiding conflicts being resolved by force of arms. Even if Trump's supporters would idly stand by while the executive defected, the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Trump's second term would not be about replacing the constitution with the Fuehrerprinzip. If he gets the EC votes, he may get out of legal troubles which may or may not have been politically motivated in the first place. This will not be the end of the world any more than Nixon getting pardoned about Watergate was the end of the world.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I am not sure that government providing long detailed lists of how to do security is going to help anyone.
My solution would be to simply make vendors liable for damages caused by security flaws of their devices, up to say 10 times the sticker price. Or impose a fine per vulnerable unit per day. An authentication bypass for a cloud-enabled webcam might cost 10% per day it is known for an exploit which allows recording if the fact that the camera is recording is visible from an LED, or 30% if the camera-on LED can be bypassed.
In Germany, the BSI is a federal agency tasked with enhancing computer security (except for when they are tasked with breaking computer security). The gist I get from German IT blogger fefe is that most of their security recommendations serve more to cover the backside of the company than actually prevent incidents. 'We were running two different anti-virus programs plus a Cisco Firewall, and our Windows+ActiveDirectory network was still compromised by ransomware. This simply shows the immense criminal energy of our attackers, we are the victims here!"
Again, laws should not try to specify the process, they should specify the outcomes. In this case, minimizing the time a device is exploitable.
Ensure software integrity
In practice, this will mean Tivotization. Personally, I am following the philosophy of "if you did not install the operating system, it is not your device". Owning a mobile phone is a lot of hassle. First you pick a vendor which supports OEM unlocks at all, then you find out that their dreadful unlocking process does not actually work, send the phone back, order a phone from a different vendor, request the unlock code, wait a week and finally unlock it. Give me a PC with a legacy boot option or a RasPi any day instead.
On the other hand, if it is no longer possible to sell Rasbian in the UK, I will consider that a win. "Let us just put a default user+password usable via fucking ssh on the image, YOLO" is so far from any responsible security mindset that I can hardly fathom it.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
I would contest that probability. From my understanding, there is no confirmed case of a plush octopus used to signal antisemitism.
Basically anything can be a dog whistle. If there was a pound note or anything related to money in the background, they would claim that it was related to claims that the Jews controlled global finance. If it was a plush wolf, people would point out that the Nazis named lot of things after wolves. If it was a German Shepard plushy, that is obviously a reference to Hitler's dog. A goblin is /obviously/ just a stereotype of a Jewish person, so a Harry Potter book would be Problematic. Gas stoves are dog whistles for pro Holocaust positions. The signs in the photo were not written in Fraktur, just like the Nazis got rid of Fraktur. They are also written in English, a Germanic (!) language. Of course, England expelled the Jews at some point, so this is a clear call for the Jews to be expelled from both the UK and Israel. Any visible number which contains the digit sequence 18 or 88 is also antisemitic.
If Greta had placed her plushy on a globe, then I would concede that there is a significant probability that this is meant as a homage to Nazi caricatures. As it is, the octopus is the most unobjectionable part of the picture.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Propellantless propulsion flies in the face of the conservation of momentum. This is a law which is baked in the current Physics theories, including the standard model and general relativity.
From a theoretical perspective, it follows from the Lagrange function being independent under certain coordinate transformations with Noether's theorem.
The steelman version of this propellantless propulsion would be the claim that of course momentum is conserved, there are just previously undetected particles or fields which carry momentum. Just like a plane can accelerate while staying at the same height without violating the conservation of momentum by transferring some momentum to the air with a propeller, a spacecraft might do the same. Of course, the particles could not be reacting with anything else (like satellites or these fancy detectors we use for dark matter search), otherwise they would have been found long ago. A fundamental part of the universe being discovered by chance through an commercially interesting engineering application seems unlikely -- it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works. (By contrast, my priors for observing complex systems exhibiting unexpected behaviors which will surprise physicists are much more relaxed, high temperature (that is, liquid nitrogen) superconductors were a total surprise, and the early experiments with heavier-than-air flight probably took place before we had any idea how a plane is generating lift.)
The priors for that would at least be slightly higher than "Archangel Uriel personally pushes the spacecraft forward", but still lower than for room temperature superconductors or even room temperature fusion.
The best way to convince the world that the "emdrive" works would be to put one in LEO in a cubesat. Even if you can only generate a very moderate thrust from solar power, the ability to create that thrust continuously will integrate to a tremendous delta v. A year at a thousandths of Earth surface acceleration would work out to 309km/s delta-v. Within three years, your spacecraft would pass Voyager 1 in distance. Humans have some capabilities to track satellites, so we could check easily enough.
quiet_NaN
27d ago
Another day, another Guardian article.
Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
“Some of them had their hands tied, which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations,” she said.
[...] Medics working for Doctors Without Borders described how Israeli forces attacked Nasser hospital in late January before withdrawing a month later, leaving the facility unable to function.
I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.
Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.
Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.
Also:
[...] Shamdasani said her office was working on corroborating Palestinian officials’ reports that hundreds of bodies had been found at the site.
So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.
Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.
More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Well, if Nils Melzer's account cited above is correct (which I think it is), then the Swedish prosecution likely singled him out for reasons of his Wikileaks work. This does not have to be the CIA pulling strings, it could simply be that prosecutors like the attention they get from bringing cases against famous people.
I do not believe that one should always be on the side of the law as a citizen. If you know that Saudi Arabia is investigating you for blasphemy and the UAE want you for public indecency after a paparazzi took a photo of you urinating in the desert, it can be reasonable to skip bail in the UAE, thereby committing a purely apolitical crime.
I think that spending a year in the embassy has a similar life quality adjustment cost as spending a year in British or Swedish prison. I think I would rather spend a year in Swedish prison than two years stuck in the embassy. So by my reckoning, Assange time in the embassy paid plenty for any crimes he might have committed in Sweden and skipping bail in the UK.
I agree with you that Assange is kind of a prima donna who thinks he is special, but in my opinion the fact that the DOJ opened a case against him shows that he kinda is special, even if he is less special than he thinks he is.
Sorry Julian, but this isn’t a negotiation, you’re under arrest, get in the police car.
The reason that a traffic stop arrest is not a negotiation is that all the power of the facts and the law is in the hand of the cops. If you manage to run over a sovereign border then suddenly this is not the case any more, so it totally becomes a negotiation.
Cops come to you with an search warrant? No negotiation. Cops want to search your property for a fugitive without a warrant? Negotiate or GTFO.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I don't get why a campus should want to police free speech at all.
I mean obviously don't hand out benefits and special considerations to known hate groups, but if it is legal to stand at an intersection with a sign of "from the river to the sea" or (equivalently) "kill all the men/women/trans/Jews/Muslims/gingers", I see no reason to forbid them on campus.
Also, it is nice to know that for all their differences, the wokes and the GOP can at least agree on some things (i.e. fuck free speech).
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think there is a difference between parodying celebrities and random people. By definition celebrities are in the media, which means that they have a much better opportunity to show that they are not actually slurping embryos or being controlled by satan or whatever else South Park claims. This does not mean that any parody of them is morally acceptable. Being a cop accused of murder (or whatever the current state of affairs is) is very different from being Jeff Bezos. Parodying the former is kicking down, not up.
I don't watch L&O, but from the description it seems like there they are painting a boring, very black-and-white (is that phrasing still PC?) picture. Rapist cannibal zombie Nazis vs the heroes. I generally prefer my TV shows to have shades of grey in them (BSG, GoT, The Expanse come to mind).
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Of course there is a big difference here - modern progressive censorship and propaganda is not(at least not directly state-based) it emerges from a self organizing space of intellectuals who are very close to each other ideologically, but this is not very important to me personally if the outcome in the media that we consume is the same.
I think it makes a world of a difference. Contrary to common belief, Netflix, Disney and Marvel is not an exhaustive list of the cultural palette available in the western world. While it is true that the big productions cater to the wokes, you have also access to countless hours of movies which were made in the last century and are not particularly woke by modern standards. It is not like TNG is blacklisted because it does not have enough openly gay characters. Even in recent and big productions, I think that there are quite a few which are not terribly filled with woke ideas. I don't think there was a very high concentration of gay characters or racial justice themes in either "The Man in the High Castle" or "Game of Thrones". I don't think either got Cancelled over not being on message enough.
Personally, I can deal with some catering to the wokes just fine. Season one of "The Last of Us" had this rather sentimental gay couple episode, but I don't think I would have liked it better if it was a straight couple. "American Gods" had that "Vulcan's town of cracy gun nuts" episode, which basically hit you over the head with their political message, but whatever.
For award-winning SF&F literature, I think nowadays you earn points by being good and by being woke. The implication there is that among award winners, there could be a negative statistical correlation between being woke and being good. All else being equal, I would thus rather read the book whose Wikipedia "critical reception" section does not mention it being praised for racial justice or LGBT themes in the first sentence, even though I have enjoyed stories with non-binary main characters before.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper
While I do not think that ASI in this century is overly likely, I do not think that the present AI boom is over. It could be that we will look back on 2024 in a decade deep in the next AI winter and say "this was peak AI, we tried for a few years to throw more hardware at the LLMs had little to show for it with exponentially increasing costs"
But even then, the equilibrium with today's AI technology will transform our work lives at least as much as the digital revolution. Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.
It used to be, human brains had cornered the market on general purpose neural networks. If it was to complicated to train a dog to do it (which would be another human job) you used a human.
AI does not have to become a better writer than Scott Alexander or a better narrator than Eneasz or a good programmer to put a good portion out of the population out of a job.
Perhaps we will find other niches because we have greater adaptability (i.e. require far less training) and have good manual dexterity and tend not to freak customers out. Or perhaps we will simply not return to the state where the vast majority of the adult population works. In which case governments may decide to pay people off to keep them from burning all the robots. Post-scarcity is a scale, and from the viewpoint of history we are already moving along that scale, even if we do not have a free Mars rocket for everyone and may never have.
And with regard to the paperclip maximizer, I feel it is premature to declare victory. If neural networks ever reach the same level of maturity as plumbing, where the pipes are generally the same way they were four decades ago, then you can tell us doomers that we should calm down because obviously nothing is going to happen any time soon.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The idea is that people can generally vote with their feet.
Everyone is free to build their own GNU/Linux distribution. Or fork Linux. Or gcc.
Of course, upstream is generally a good Schelling point, so a project has to have some serious issues before a fork succeeds. But in general, this is not a monarchy, but more like a wisdom of the crowds thing.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
My takeaways:
- Security is hard.
- Binary blobs are bad. Ideally, there should not be binary blobs in the working directory during compilation of distribution packages. Test cases should be run with no write permission towards stuff which goes into the distribution package. Binary blobs which should be shipped in the package (e.g. images, sounds) should be added by the build process using a distribution-wide mechanism after the package specific stuff (makefile etc) has finished executing. Paranoid distributors might want to add low levels of noise to images and sound files to disincentive hiding executable code in them.
- Attack surface should be minimized for daemons which listen on network ports. This means loading only the libraries which are absolutely required. A compromised xz library should result in being exploitable whenever you unpack xz, not whenever you run sshd.
- The anonymity of github makes supply chain attacks by nation state actors less costly. Sure, you can get an agent into Google, but this is certainly much more difficult than just having your attack team maintain a plausible volunteer git account.
- Of course, if you can coerce your citizens who are already established open source volunteers, this is a cheap way to get around any requirements for meatspace identities. I think that in the Western world, coercion should not work too well, if the NSA puts CSAM on the computer of a senior linux dev and then tries to blackmail them with it, the chances of this backfiring are too high to make it sustainable. (Of course, if they have real dirt on some dev (say Reiser-level), then the NSA could well coerce them to apply some evil commits in exchange for their legal troubles going away. Still, the median developer probably does not have literal skeletons in the closet.) By contrast, the median developer in the PRC might be more vulnerable to coercion by the state.
- An automated way to compare the memory dumps of processes with the source code which purportedly defined them seems generally helpful. Preferably, these should not be open source, but be run by various big institutions (Google, Microsoft, NSA) internally, so attackers will have a harder time learning how to bypass them.
- Having persistent pseudonymous identities with some PKI authentification over multiple platforms would be desirable because it raises costs to attack. An anonymous comment on debian costs the attacker nothing, while burning an identity which has enough open source backstory to take some time to create will hurt.
Some more comments on the OP:
But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.
I think there is a big difference. Rolling out your own crypto is a big no-no because they are hard to get right, and any mistakes likely leave you vulnerable.
Rolling out your own compression is much less evil: there is certainly some potential for arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but not more than with handling any other file parsing. With regard to generally reinventing the wheel versus loading wheels from a zillion different libraries, each of them with their own dependency chains, there is probably some reasonable middle ground. For something like sshd which sits on a security boundary, the obvious way in retrospect to add systemd logging would be to implement the interface from the scratch instead of including a bloated libsystemd.
and may not even recognize xz as a file extension
Data point: As some casual linux user, I recognize the xz file extension. Before last week, the main thing I could have told you about it was that it was a compression commonly used for tar files, the third one I am aware of after gz and bz2. GNU tar wants -J when handling xz. I would have guessed that the fact that it de-facto replaced bz2 is likely due to the fact that it is better on at least some metrics, but have no clue how the xz algorithm works in particular.
On the plus side, the fact that the attackers stayed in userspace instead of having /usr/bin/sshd load some kernel model seems to indicate that a stealthy compromise of the kernel is hard? Yay for NSA's SELinux?
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
While the main reasons for the direct neighbors were already mentioned (Muslim Brotherhood, civil war, attacks on Israel which invite reprisals), for the bigger well established, oil-rich Muslim countries further away from Israel, one reason might be that they see the Gazans as a welcome thorn in Israels side. You would think that the Iranian or Qatari leadership, if they really cared about that Palestinians being subjected to "war crimes", the first thing they would do would be to open their borders to refugees. Instead, they sponsor Hamas.
quiet_NaN
13hr ago
I am by no means an expert on medieval Japan, but I wonder how a samurai would make a good playable character in an AC game. Climbing along some facade to kill an enemy leader (which is a good part of what tends to fill AC games) does not sound very samurai-like. In fact, it sounds positively ninja-like.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
In the eyes of the west, there are only 3 major civilizations - Abrahamic, Chinese and Indian. African and Native American cultures get a lot of praise, but only because they are considered to be ideologically harmless. The west sees Chinese and Indian civilizations as threats.
I think your model how the west sees the world is wrong. Lumping Canada, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, Afghanistan, and Columbia the category "Abrahamic" and contrasting it with China and India (with much of the rest of SE Asia and Africa missing) is not how I see the world.
The way I would lump together countries would be based on the block nomenclature originating in the cold war. The west (which is ironically a term you used, instead of saying "in the eyes of the Abrahamic countries") are countries which are somewhat capitalistic, prosperous, and typically liberal democraties. This includes NATO, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and so on. (Turkey falls on the borderline, IMO.) The east are Putin's Russia and China, not necessarily in that order. The Muslim countries were kind of seen as a useful category after 9/11, even though they are inhomogeneous (Turkey, Qatar and Afghanistan are much more different from each other than Sweden and Taiwan, IMO.) The rest (which can include some or most Muslim countries) are the countries which are typically too poor to be a military threat to the established order and are sometimes useful to exploit for their cheap labor and natural resources. Some are kind of allied to the West (often in the 'their dictator is a SOB, but he is our SOB' way). If they are lucky, they enjoy some form of democracy and/or economic growth which will mean we will eventually count them among the west, if they are unlucky they are Somalia, Haiti or North Korea.
India is different from the rest of the 'rest' in that it is English-speaking, democratic, has some nukes (which they point at Pakistan, the west does not care either way) a huge population (which mostly won't by iPhones or European cars, though), a large land mass (which probably comes with some important natural resources) and (to my knowledge) a few excellent universities plus plenty of universities below the western standard.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
The Guardian would clearly prefer for Israel to stop further military interventions. I am used to the Guardian being somewhat partisan, but still surprised by this level of one-sidedness. The alternative to an invasion of Gaza is the status quo. Hamas stays in power while Israel forbids the import of anything which could be used to craft weapons, thus severely limiting the quality of life inside the strip. Hamas continues to fire rockets, Israel continues to respond with airstrikes.
I think an occupation of Gaza (while obviously the thing Hamas wants Israel to attempt) might be preferable in the long run for the surviving Gazans. Gaza is not Afghanistan, size-wise. Instead of having an open air prison run by the most homicidal inmates, turn it into an panopticon. For those who would rather die than live under occupation, grant them their wish when they try anything. Be culturally sensitive by limiting the freedom of speech to levels customary in Iran or Saudi Arabia: imprison anyone who advocates violence against Israel. Don't let people starve, don't kill civilians when you can avoid it. Invest. If, a generation down the road, a huge majority is in favor of peaceful relations with Israel, give them self-determination.
It is less clear how such an occupation might benefit the Interests of Israel (or any other state), though. Winning the war against Hamas will take a huge toll both in IDF lives and bad PR (pictures of dead kids), and the occupation will likely be a drain on resources for decades. And then there is a decent chance that the moment you retreat, Hamas is back in power. The alternative of just continuing low intensity air strikes indefinitely (even the Guardian can hardly run stories about innocent airstrike victims for years) and otherwise fortify your border.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men
From the context of 'manhood initiation rituals', I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female? I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man. I mean, if you are a medieval woman encountering an adolescent male Scandinavian in the woods, and notice that he bears the signs of a fully initiated viking warrior, that should probably be cause for more concern, not less.
The causal chain might go like this:
- Claim 1: Modern dating is frustrating for a lot of people, compared to patriarchal mating strategies.
- Claim 2: For women, this manifests as being more worried about rape in a dating context.
- Claim 3: This generalizes to being more worried about rape in general, hence the preference for the bear.
The patriarchal vetting process / manhood initiation clearly varied from society from society, Apache, Jane-Austin-England, ancient Rome, fucking Sparta and Aztec all did their own thing. If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")
I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they? They men were probably more concerned with political implications or making sure that the husband was not some wimp who would get himself killed in the first battle, leaving the woman a penniless widow.
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
Meta: I find the ability of authors to delete top level posts annoying.
Ideally, the edit history of a comment should be visible, as it is on Wikipedia or github.
It is okay to change your mind, but transparency is good. So just prepend the original with "I have changed my mind and now believe that ..." and mark the original comment as strike-through.
Asynchronous text based communication is not ephemeral, it is permanent. If you don't like this, discuss with people in discord voice chats (or so-called "bars" in meatspace) instead.
If you delete or heavily edit a comment you rob all of the replies of context, making the motte less readable. I have a hard time viewing this as part of a good faith discussion.
As a workaround, I will start liberally quoting the comments I reply to, perhaps in full. Ideally, I would use some sort of spoiler tag which starts collapsed, but I did not find much in the way of documentation on the markup elements supported by the rDrama software.
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