roystgnr
1d ago
"Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them." - Rep. Ilhan Omar
The idea that they should retake Somaliland is actually the most charitable interpretation of that speech; the uncharitable interpretation is that she was suggesting that they should retake all of "Greater Somalia", including parts of modern Ethiopia and Kenya.
roystgnr
1d ago
it has to be really, really bad before the company starts cutting you off
In the software world we call this "missing test coverage". If your safety features don't get tested until any test failure is apocalyptic, you don't actually have safety features. Maybe we should be picking more politically neutral or less politically relevant test cases, but anything is better than nothing.
If you're worried about big society-spanning plagues then those are difficult
If they're pre-existing plagues, then they're difficult-to-impossible. Anything you can get by introducing a few mutations into some virus is at most a few mutations away from a virus that wasn't currently a society-spanning plague. Centuries ago you could have a germ slowly co-evolve with the immune systems of some subset of humanity and then eventually make its way out to devastate a larger immunologically unprepared population, but these days there aren't many subsets of humanity that aren't at most a weekly airplane flight away from the rest of us.
If they're not pre-existing plagues, it's kind of harder to say, isn't it? Gunpowder would have been a pretty awesome capability for a predator to have, but it was impossible to evolve except by the extremely roundabout method of "get intelligence to come up with it". There may be similarly awesome capabilities that are only possible to put into germs in the same way.
I don't want 'suppress info' to be the default response.
Nor do I ... but while I'm libertarian enough to have voted (L) in every presidential election, I'm also pessimistic enough to wonder whether how amenable to my desires the universe really is. Totalitarian suppression of change is itself an existential risk, whether it fails (which historically tends to be a bloody process) or succeeds (in which case a "boot crushing a human sapient face forever" is itself a possible contributor to the Fermi paradox), but the seemingly-obvious solution of "just don't do that" might seem less obvious in a world where a home biolab ends up being a thousand times more dangerous than an airline ticket and a boxcutter were in our world.
roystgnr
3d ago
No, that's the first goal of a government. And Constitutions are the means of achieving that, not just a means, because it's such a complex and difficult-to-evaluate goal that you have to operationalize it in terms of more objective rules; otherwise in practice it stops being a goal and starts being an excuse.
roystgnr
3d ago
The exact quote was, "the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens" ... which is a bit more obviously Orwellian than your paraphrase. Maybe that's just a question of style; as a question of substance, both the original quote and the paraphrase are wrong.
The first duty of the American government is to obey the Constitution.
That's a complicated duty, and far-too-often breached, but at least technically that's the duty that qualifies our leaders to fit the definition of "the American government" rather than for an entry in the wiki for auto-coup. It's not always even a popular duty, though it's generally at least popular enough that "pass an amendment to widen what other duties the government can legally handle" doesn't ever get considered. Many people think violating the Second Amendment would be a good way to protect American citizens from shootings. Most think violating the Tenth Amendment often helpfully protects American citizens from being taken advantage of. Some think violating some combination of the Fourth through Eighth Amendments is a good way to protect American citizens from criminals. A few think violating Art. I election laws could be justified to protect American citizens from bad politicians. Many thought that violating the Assembly Clause was justified to protect American citizens from Covid.
They're all wrong.
Those are all real threats that American citizens deserve some protection from, true, and so are illegal aliens (both in the sense that some are serious criminals and in the sense that all of them do a little bit to undermine the rule of law), but the concept of protection is not a backdoor password to unchecked power, and it it seems pretty transparent that the people who attempt to use it that way are more interested in the power than in the protection.
roystgnr
3d ago
Just general anti-bot stuff, probably, though the desperation for more AI training data probably explains why bots got so ill-behaved a few years back. Our CI server has to hide even open-source logs behind Cloudflare settings harsh enough to block cURL, else the traffic from spiders can bring it to its knees. "Figure out how to get Codex to emulate a full browser" is on my TODO list somewhere...
roystgnr
5d ago
It seems to be a bigger thing than it was when I was a kid, even. Difficulty has increased by roughly one level (school->chapter, chapter->state, state->national, national->good-luck) over the past few decades, and that seems to be well-calibrated to account for how much more intense the competition is.
roystgnr
5d ago
My experience is that kids universally understand this simple concept, and that it takes a calculus teacher to beat such sensible reasoning out of them.
Normally I have a least a tiny bit of sympathy for educational "mainstreaming", but this really is the sort of thing that ought to be handled well before calculus by at least having some geeky books on hand for the faster kids to read while the kids who need review are covering fractions for the fourth time. Maybe most kids can't learn the standard stuff faster without getting stuck completely out of sync with the teachers' lessons, but asides like "infinity as a limit" vs "infinities in cardinal numbers" vs "infinities in ordinal numbers" ought to be written up in a child-friendly presentation somewhere, right?
I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me a month or two ago with the question "is infinity a number". I managed to avoid diving into set theory and losing them, but went through enough of the "things you call numbers today that weren't originally thought of as numbers" (zero, fractions, negatives, irrationals) and "things you'll call numbers later that you don't think of as numbers today" (imaginaries) to get across that names like "number" are a matter of definition.
roystgnr
5d ago
be weary of anyone who does pedophile lite behavior
"wary". Though in the context of serial offenders on two continents with decades of abuses it's an understandable typo.
roystgnr
8d ago
Most of the games my kids like fit your definition but don't really fit your examples. Listing them all anyway, in roughly increasing order of how much I like playing multiplayer games of them:
- Stardew Valley
- Minecraft
- Core Keeper
- Don't Starve Together
- Team Fortress 2, Mann vs Machine
- Project Zomboid
- Wildermyth
Of course the all-time great is one I haven't introduced my kids to, because it really needs closure and if you play it in 40 minute chunks you'll need like a hundred of them: Baldur's Gate 1+2.
If you're curious about any of those let me know and I'll elaborate.
One of my kids likes playing Peak with her friends, but the rest of us haven't tried it yet.
roystgnr
8d ago
I think the key words here are "aimed" and "government agency". Amazon famously didn't make its first annual profit for nearly a decade, but investors were still expecting profit eventually, estimating the likelihood of net profit in the long run, and wouldn't have funded it indefinitely if that expectation ended. A government agency has no such aims and no such limitations, whether or not it does its own production, but at least if it has to procure from among competing third parties there's someone who has an incentive to keep costs down.
roystgnr
9d ago
If the murder rate stays constant, but “rate per potential exposure” gets worse, someone is getting exposed at a higher rate.
Just the opposite. murders / population = murders / exposures * exposures / population. If murder / population is constant while murder / exposures increases then exposures / population, the exposure rate, must be decreasing inversely.
Shouldn’t it be strictly easier to tell which neighborhoods have turned into death traps?
Is it? I know there are sites that give neighborhoods "walkability" scores, but at least the first one I pulled up is only giving a theoretical number based on the mass transit availability, distances to the nearest grocer/cafe/school, etc; I'd have no idea how to find an actual number of people who walk down a particular street (or who drive in a particular area - the only armed robberies I found out about first hand were at a stoplight and in a parking lot) on an average day.
roystgnr
9d ago
nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word
Even before 9/11, "nation building" was enough of a dirty word that popular opposition to that exact phrase helped give the Presidency to ... checks notes ... George W. Bush.
I think Bush did realize that 9/11 gave him ... not a blank check, but a ton of latitude ... but he also realized that he was cashing in that latitude just by reversing his campaign's attitude and launching major foreign wars, and so he was naturally (if mistakenly) reluctant to go all the way and admit that any such war wouldn't actually be worthwhile unless and until we built a non-hostile nation in place of the one the war knocked over. We instead just prayed that the Northern Alliance would step right into the power vacuum and develop such a nation for us, and so instead of sending in your 500,000 troops to rebuild we just sent in ... 5,500? Roughly one person for every 3,500 Afghan people? That sounds like such a tiny force that I'm tempted to look through the wiki history for vandalism, but in any case it was enough to handle the "knocked over" phase of the war admirably; it was only afterward that we should have either left entirely or gone in on rebuilding en masse rather than hoping to get away with the "advisory" gambit alone this time.
roystgnr
9d ago
Source: you made it up and it sounded too good to check.
A couple months ago Elon Musk reposted this tweet including: "Be very, very strict with SNAP, Section 8, and EBT. Force these do-nothings to get up and go to work." This might say questionable things about his thoughtspace or his priorities, but not his money. The net worth of the world's richest man increased by $200 billion last year.
roystgnr
10d ago
I think there's room to ask about whether, even as the crime rate-per-population has gone down dramatically, the rate-per-potential-exposure has been less changed or has gone up. As Scott says, "We’re a safetyist culture"; we avoid risks more than we used to. We also have more attractive alternatives to risks - where I would play sports in the street or at worst play video games in person with the neighborhood kids, my children go to the rock-climbing gym or play networked video games with their friends farther away. I grew up in a residential area where once I got old enough I could walk to a convenience store, perhaps past some sketchy houses; my kids are growing up in a giant suburb where it wouldn't matter if the houses were sketchy because there's nothing they could get to on foot regardless.
On the other hand, the answer might just be "no, the rate-per-potential-exposure has gone down too". Or it might be that this isn't a sufficiently well-defined metric, because in a big country there's always someplace where it's just too dangerous for an innocent person to go and someplace else where it's perfectly safe and there's no obvious way to decide how to weight those places when averaging.
roystgnr
10d ago
Eventually good times are replaced by hard times, and hegemons cease to be hegemons. Thus any prediction of the form "good times make X, X makes hard times" is likely to come true eventually - including the instant case where X is "weak men".
This isn't valid logic. We can infer (after adding an unstated but natural assumption or two) that at least one prediction of that form is (at least sometimes) true, but not that any prediction of that form is sometimes true.
Consider the counterexample: "good times make carnivorous bunny rabbits, carnivorous bunny rabbits make hard times". Not obviously forever false, but not likely (I think - what's Colossal Biosciences working on these days?) to become true, and definitely not entailed by the premises.
roystgnr
10d ago
Meeting new people from all around the world? Being surrounded with proof that you've achieved a goal towards which you've been working your whole life?
I was also going to guess something about beautiful architecture, under the presumption that cities would go all out to show off their artistic skills for these things... but, is it just me, or are most Olympic villages kind of ugly? De gustibus non est disputandum, I know, but the only thumbnail that really caught my eye turned out to be a building from 1881. Hosting the Olympics is famous for entailing economically crushing expenses, so maybe custom-built Olympic villages simply cut every corner they can to try to mitigate that ... but if you're going to take on decades of debt rather than just decline to host, would it be crazy to spring for some bricks and carved stone before the creditors cut you off? I guess constructions like the luge track spend more time on camera than the residences do, but at least nice residences can recoup extra expense as resale value; the luge track, not so much.
roystgnr
15d ago
What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
That might be about right. My oldest started around then, and is still the biggest Star Trek fan among my kids. I thought TNG would be the smoothest introduction (and I may have been right - we've watched a bit of TOS and my daughters find Kirk annoying), but especially when he was around 10, my son thought that TNG was often too boring and sometimes (well, just the Borg episodes, as of Locutus) too scary to be enjoyable. But even my youngest daughter was picking Star Trek episodes for her turn at "movie night" back when she was only 8.
what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch?
We started with but skipped the vast majority of season 1 TNG (just skipping ahead to the best episodes), and honestly the exact watch list wasn't a big deal. Trek of that generation was mostly written to be episodic, with background knowledge helpful for adding nuance but with the most important exposition slipped (or sometimes crammed...) into each individual script. Occasionally an episode will be a 2-parter and you can't possibly skip the first part, occasionally an episode will be a "sequel" to a story like Moriarty or Picard's Flute (but of course in those cases you wouldn't want to skip the first part), but in general each episode stands alone well.
If you want to challenge yourself with some tricky choices, then you move on to Babylon 5. Also kind of a slow start in season 1, but in its case even the slower episodes more often than not packed in some characterization or backstory or foreshadowing or outright arcplot development that makes the later episodes much more enjoyable. We skipped the pilot and maybe half of the first season there, because I didn't want to waste too much of my kids' time if they decided they still didn't like the good parts of the show, and in hindsight (they all liked it) we skipped too much.
To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with.
Could I talk you into the 1950s and late 1940s? That was mostly a previous generation of scientists, but 8 is a great age for most of the Heinlein juveniles.
roystgnr
17d ago
It might be worth looking for exams your kids can sit, if they're learning more regardless, to get some recognition for it. My son studied a bunch of math on his own during Covid, but then was bored silly when all his school would offer him was at his grade level. Fortunately the local University has a Credit-By-Exam process for high school subjects, and a decent Algebra I score was enough to get him jumped to Geometry the next year.
roystgnr
21d ago
Gaines county, Texas
A short while ago, someone made a comment which mentioned that technology and wealth seem to be utterly failing at making us happier, and (IIRC rhetorically) asked who could have foreseen that. I was starting to write up my non-rhetorical response, about how the Mennonite wariness of technology is in part specifically due to their having foreseen the risks of being trapped into dependence on some technologies (and the wealth they bring) which end up decreasing our interdependence on our fellow human beings, which weakens the bonds of community we form, which are far more important to human happiness than material wealth.
And then while doing a few searches to get quotes, I ran across the deaths of Kayley Fehr (a 6 year old Mennonite girl) and Daisy Hildebrand (an 8 year old Mennonite girl).
There's still a lot to be said about the distinction between religious laws (Mennonite communities do not prohibit vaccine use!) and religious culture (Mennonites in West Texas only have something like an 80% measles vaccination rate, well under what's believed to be needed for "herd immunity"), or about the pain of balancing Type I vs Type II errors, but I can't bring myself to write it.
roystgnr
23d ago
Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
It was a decade and a half before Nazi Germany, but the Ruhr Uprising set up a left-wing paramilitary that drove the right-wing paramilitaries of 1920 Germany out of town.
Would Hitler have tolerated this?
The fact that the answer was "no", whereas the Weimar Republic's answer was "well, maybe for a few weeks, tops", was part of the background that let Hitler seize power. Psychologically, fascism is basically what you get when the human sense of disgust goes out of control, and if you want people's disgust reactions to go overboard then the most powerful scenario is a combination of enemies that disgust them and "friends" who normalize going overboard in reaction.
Minnesota is no Ruhr Uprising - the death count is still around "two", not "a thousand" - but it's also not a situation that would have seemed incongruous in Wiemar Germany. It's vastly less significant in scope, but it's not in a different category.
Perhaps what is most different is the bulk of public reaction? The Ruhr Uprising spooked the median German more than its suppression did, and opposition vs support for that suppression was divisive even among leftist factions there. Opposition to current ICE practices, on the other hand, has expanded well past the median American and is still climbing. Some opposition to ICE is still an expression of unthinking disgust, and in particular the sort of anti-border-control protestors who are "reinventing borders from first principles" with Minnesota checkpoints are about as anti-fascist as the "Anti-fascist Protection Rampart" was, but groups becoming fascist while decrying fascism may come out ... weirder ... than historical groups who went fascist deliberately.
roystgnr
24d ago
Can said dinergoths deflect flying furniture one-handed? (famous chair deflection about 1:30 in)
But I actually have no idea whether this 2022 event remains unbeaten because Waffle House violence is actually rare, or just because getting such awesome chair-fu caught on video is rare. Back in my "go to the diner at 1am" days the diner was either a Denny's or a local chain with only a couple franchisees.
roystgnr
24d ago
As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit.
As someone from the US I've got to second this request. I've got 6 24-hour diners from 3 different franchises within a 15 minute drive of my house! Maybe @MollieTheMare is right that it's just a Southern thing now? 3 of those diners are Waffle House.
Maybe the "relatively expensive" qualifier is what's important here? Or maybe not. A quick check says that a big (eggs, bacon, toast, waffle, hashbrowns, but water to drink) breakfast at the closest spot to me would top $15 after tax and tip, and a full but cheap lunch or dinner (I'm assuming you don't get a T-Bone or something) is in the same range. That makes me wince as an old person whose mind recoils at accumulated inflation, but it's still only an hour's wage as a new fast food hire here. It looks like the situation is about the same for the "working poor" as it was a generation ago. This Denny's menu from 2003 shows comparable meals that would be around $7.50 with tax and tip, at a time when fast-food cooks were earning $7.27 per hour.
Or maybe the change was much earlier? My "young person in debt (not poor, just not working during college semesters) going to 24 hour diners" days were a few years before and after 2000, and I didn't notice any skyrocketing prices during that period, but maybe things were much cheaper in the 80s or 50s or something.
95% of party members are too sycophantic to go against the party line, but do be careful to research a bit before casting protest votes, in case your state has one of the other 5%.
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