roystgnr
1yr ago
a definite step backwards, further from ideal society.
It's a definite step backwards in one particularly constrained sense. For two societies with "willingness to carry knives as a function of threat level" fixed while "threat level" can vary (the distinction you might see if you looked at correlations between similar cultures without knife restrictions), certainly more willingness to carry knives means there must be more threats and more danger and so is further from ideal. But, for two societies with "threat level" fixed while "ability to carry knives" varies (the distinction you see when you're able to decide on knife laws for the law-abiding but you can't so easily reduce criminality), being unable to defend yourself increases the danger from every threat, whereas more knife carrying means there's more deterrence and less repeat offense and so is closer to ideal.
Every now and then the idea is floated that many of our problems can be traced to STEM nerds who won't study enough humanities, but personally I'd also feel safer about our political trajectory if I knew our humanities-nerd overlords all had had an intuitive understanding of partial derivatives with different constrained variables...
Lacking that, any other analogy feels more hand-wavy. Would a society with more people getting chemotherapy be a step forwards or a step backwards? It's impossible to say without more information - it might be a higher incidence of cancer, or it might be the same population of cancer victims but more of them getting treated. But even if we've been traveling down the "more cancer, less ideal" direction on that manifold, even if we're right to be saddened by the expanding cancer wards, to thereby conclude that we should crack down on those damn oncologists would still be a big mistake.
roystgnr
1yr ago
between Muslim and Hindu cricket fans
And at least one Sikh was reported attacked, too.
Their kirpan appears to remain exempt from UK bans, even in the latest passed bill. So there's some respect for tradition there; at least, a half-millennium-old tradition with staunch British defenders is still respected, even if a millennium-old tradition without is not ... which actually seems like a sensible distinction, even if it's sad to notice.
The jerkass culture warrior in me often wants to insist that we no longer use the word "Anglo-Saxon" to refer to the UK portion of that ethnicity, but replace it with something to better reflect that so many of the Seaxe people's descendants can no longer carry a Seax to pull out for would-be robbers. I'd also propose suggested replacement names, but I fear even apophasis is close to crossing a too-jerkass-for-The-Motte line...
roystgnr
1yr ago
I'd like to see what the cost premium for "state of the art". Skimming the web I see that there are heat pumps that start to struggle below 40F, some 25, some 15, and I'm sure nobody's deliberately buying the crummy models to spite their electric bill, so there must be some kind of tradeoffs.
I had a house with a heat pump, and it worked fabulously through 95% of each of our mild winters ... right up until the temperature was freezing enough, at which point our options were "turn off the heat" or "auxilliary heat" ... which the manual said works via resistance heating, but my bills suggested that Aux Heat simply sets dollar bills on fire until the house is warm. More seriously, it looks like you can get around the problem with a lower-temperature refrigerant and a freeze-proofed outdoor unit, but is that a few hundred extra dollars per house or a few thousand or what?
roystgnr
1yr ago
Portable indoor combustion is surprisingly dangerous for emergencies; IIRC when I've looked into cold-wave death totals it's turned out that maybe 1 person froze to death and 100 people asphyxiated themselves from inadequately ventilated CO while keeping warm. Plus, although 95% sounded like hyperbole it was if anything an underestimate; burning dollars one or maybe two days every year or two was cheaper than buying a backup system would have been.
Not my problem any more; I'm now living with gas for heat (which is fine) as a marginal decision on top of getting a house with gas for cooking (which is fantastic).
IMHO it's a good idea, not just an entertaining one. Clear advertising for TheMotte terrifies me, because I'm afraid the "evaporative cooling" metaphor applies to condensation too. Advertising that requires someone to be curious enough to search for the meaning of a random phrase and competent enough to find it (e.g. with Google I get relevant results iff I think to wrap the phrase in quotes) isn't a high bar but it's better than nothing.
Edit: oh, and as a third advantage, searching for that phrase brings me first to thethread, and reading that feels likely to draw users who fit with what this place would like to be. Most other forms of advertising would bring me directly here, and reading random selections here are ... not always as much of a draw to thoughtful potential users, to put it politely, and probably more prone to starting a vicious "evaporative" cycle, to consider it theoretically.
roystgnr
1yr ago
People assume that height is correlated with skill, but the best basketball players tend to not be the tallest
Those propositions do not contradict each other.
roystgnr
1yr ago
If I can do banking from my phone, why can't I vote from my phone?
Because the secret ballot makes the latter much much harder to audit. If malware does a MITM attack on your banking app you'll eventually notice the bad transactions and malware guy will get hunted down like a dog. If you're able to review voting transactions after-the-fact, though, then your boss or husband or union leader or whoever can pressure you can review them with you, to make sure you voted the "right" way. So we strive to prevent that ... but in doing so we badly undercut our ability to detect all sorts of attacks.
IIRC there are ways around this with crypto systems that let you "verify" a vote for anyone but only you know which is the true verification, but then human error becomes a factor if you want to know whether an attack really occurred.
roystgnr
1yr ago
First they came for the defectors? This is fine.
If your state ever gets to the point where people are so desperate to leave that the government starts going to extremes to discourage it, it's time to leave anyway, while the penalty is merely robbery, before the next "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall" goes up. "You're worthless and so I want to make it hard for you to leave me" is a self-contradictory claim. It's only a popular claim because the first part is a too-often-effective lie that abusive relationship partners use as a control tactic. But even when the best time to escape escalating abuse has already passed, the second-best time is "as soon as possible".
roystgnr
1yr ago
One proposed mechanism I saw online about 5 years ago was the claim that, throughout history, men underfed women in their patriarchal society, resulting in women being undernourished and thus weaker than men on average and in the extremes. It seemed to subscribe to a Lamarkian-esque view of evolution except descent along sex instead of actual parentage, and also seemed pretty ahistorical with respect to the level of nutrition people used to get in the past. I wish I had saved it somewhere, because it was a really fascinating and deranged idea
Ooh, ooh (raises hand). Was it from Charlie Stross? I didn't bring that to The Motte's attention until last year, but you might have first seen it in the wild.
and I recall it being passed around approvingly within my circles.
And now I'm wondering if it wasn't Stross, but rather you saw the same idea independently invented elsewhere. Even on his own blog, full of left-wing fans, Stross was getting pushback, and about the closest thing he got to approval was the idea that, if we see sexual selection when women insist on marrying taller husbands, that might not quite be the same as women being underfed but it still ought to count as patriarchy too.
roystgnr
1yr ago
There was no source for it I was able to hunt down, but I'd really love to find out that the half-recollected factoid about Piraha children being able to learn the arithmetic their parents never could (that I read here recently) turns out to really be true. The common first-world adult inability to grok distributions reminds me of nothing more than the typical Piraha adult inability to work with numbers, and yet if there's hope for their future generations then maybe there's hope for ours too.
roystgnr
1yr ago
where do you think the incel community would be placed in the future Star Trek paints?
As I recall, mostly on the holodeck at first, mostly in counseling later.
It seems attractive only because, being fantasy entertainment, it doesn't have to deal with the tough reality.
This is fair.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Prune juice. Soccer, until he accidentally head butted a kid to death.
I'd also definitely watch Worf: Origins. I'd want any wokeness to be "natural" to the plot rather than forced, but "refugee from stereotypically violent/hostile culture turns out to be honorable/awesome person" is kind of a freebie there.
roystgnr
1yr ago
roystgnr
1yr ago
Some chemical weapons are easily created (see: people inadvertently gassing themselves at home by mixing the wrong cleaning supplies), some chemical weapons are very costly to the targets (Novichok lethal doses are supposedly fractions of milligrams), but are there any that are equally easily created (in volumes useful for war) and costly?
roystgnr
1yr ago
There was more than just a little improvement in the Renaissance state of the art, though. Perspective drawing, for the most extreme example, is probably the innovation that gives a painting enough verisimilitude in my eyes for me to really focus on what the painter was trying to depict without being distracted by the obvious flaw of distortions in the depiction.
As an aside, perspective also is a nice counterexample to the "image AIs were just trained on our work, that makes it plagiarism!" theory I see floating around. AI might be producing copyright-infringing works, but learning from other artists' works isn't proof of that. That's just how art works, which is why principles like one-point perspective went undiscovered for millennia only to then see universal uptake within a generation. Renaissance artists didn't all just suddenly get smarter at once (consider the delay before two-point perspective was discovered...), they were all learning from each other's works.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Are there really still left-wing tankies out there who are now in support of this invasion?
All of the Putin apologists I run across myself are right-wing. They have the same "the enemy of my globalizing enemy is my friend" justifications as a left-wing tankie would typically have had back when it was Hungarian blood greasing the treads, but these ones are clear that the type of globalization pissing them off is mostly LGBTQ+ ideology rather than capitalist ideology. (To be clear, most right-wingers aren't neo-tankies, and most left-wing thought I read from the Cold War wasn't by tankies, it's just that the exceptions were pretty one-sided in each case)
I don't know what to think of it, but I find it fascinating. I've barely gotten used to political principles "switching sides" in one direction, with left-wing beliefs like "people should be judged as individuals, 'blind' to their demographics", "electronic voting machines are an unacceptably insecure way to tally elections", or "people should be able to get and keep jobs regardless of their personal politics" that still seem smart today but that (sometimes after brief universal support, sometimes directly) changed to have right-wing valence. "Russian authoritarianism and oppression is bad" might be the first good right-wing idea I've seen move the opposite way ...
roystgnr
1yr ago
Presumably he's not talking about Lend-Lease enabling the 1939 invasions (plural; Hitler got half and Stalin got half) to happen, but rather enabling the invaded lands' retention afterwards. (Wikipedia says the parts incorporated into the USSR had something like 10M people, and of course the parts dominated by the USSR had everybody else) Without Lend-Lease we might easily imagine a world in which the USSR was too weak to be in any shape to race the other Allies to Berlin (or at least too weak to be able to afford a pause along the way waiting for Poles to get slaughtered, and too weak to object if we decided afterwards to let Poland return to the status quo ante bellum (because that's the natural Schelling point to discourage wars of conquest) rather than to the Potsdam agreement borders (because we were sick of war and because FDR was an idiot who played his hunch).
I'm not endorsing that theory, though. Alternate history is tricky, wishful thinking is easy. I don't see any reason why the good "USSR too weak without support, Poland freed half a century earlier" outcome would necessarily be much more likely than e.g. the atrocious "USSR way too weak without support, Nazis lock down Poland for years or decades longer and expel or kill tens of millions of Poles" outcome.
roystgnr
1yr ago
IIRC it varies from school to school, but at least for final exams and PhD quals it's common for there to be an official file of old exams with professors' answers that students can get copies of, and at places where that isn't the case, I think it's quite common for there to be an unofficial file of graded+returned exams maintained by clubs or Greek societies.
But the natural way to study those old files is to start at n=1 and work backward, and by the time you're confident in your ability to answer the last 5 years worth of questions you're probably confident enough to stop there. The "try to solve exam questions from n years ago" advice is more about n=20 or n=50 than n=2 or n=5. In that case there might be much more of a cumulative change, and in cases where that's so, the only good counterargument I know of is the one @Kevin_P points out above.
roystgnr
1yr ago
That ... is actually really interesting. The manufacturing process doesn't take state-level support. (this assumes China's bans aren't just "bans", but while I'm sure they're not crying their eyes out over the West getting ironic payback for the Opium Wars, I don't think the OD crisis here is a CCP op either) The lethal dose isn't nearly as low as state-of-the-art organophosphates but it's still in the milligrams range. ... Looks like the biggest issue may be that skin absorption ranges from less dangerous to much less dangerous than ingestion? To get fentanyl or carfentanil airborne you want a dry powder, but to get it to absorb quickly enough through skin to be dangerous it needs to be moist. I can't find any research about whether it penetrates skin when moistened by oil (or anything else that I'd expect could be finely aerosolized without just evaporating) ... maybe that's for the best. Do we know how Russia weaponized it in Chechnya? Might have been easier to make it useful against indoor targets whose ventilation is controlled by the attacker, might simply be that a research team working for a few years could implement ideas that I can't even imagine in a few minutes.
Since I don't know much about either drug, maybe my quick searches this morning are misleading me. In particular, I'm reading that, while carfentanil is 100x more potent a narcotic than fentanyl, the lethal doses are around the same ... so why the hell is anyone still making fentanyl? I know, drug kingpins aren't noted for their overwhelming concern for human life, but killing your customers does still cut short future revenue, and even if it didn't you'd think the relative ease of smuggling 100x less volume to achieve the same potency would pay for any extra difficulty in manufacturing.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Crippling GPUs works very well in one context I've seen: FP64. Games don't use it so manufacturers don't get dinged for having lousy performance with it, and engineers/mathematicians/scientists won't flinch at paying through the nose for "professional" GPGPU cards, so with a few exceptions (Titan Black, Radeon VII, and even those were high-end) you get a pittance of FP64 support on consumer cards.
But there's a very well-delineated difference between 32-bit and 64-bit floats. What's the clear technical difference between "bad ML models, which we want to keep away from hobbyists" and "good ML models, which everybody's going to be throwing into their game engines as fast as studios can train them"? The difficulty of slowing down "bad" algorithms but not "good" ones was effectively the problem with crypto rate limiting, (which only brought the cards down to 50% speed and only worked on some crypto types and was quickly foiled via driver or BIOS changes), not any special societal support for cryptocurrency. Compare DRM, which despite massive political and economic support gets broken over and over again because from a technical standpoint the problem statement is almost a self-contradiction.
roystgnr
1yr ago
the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces.
Hey, we're reading too, you know! I should totally report this. /s
Disclaimer: I prefer a usage-determined mix (basically the clang-format UseTab: ForIndentation behavior), but until everybody's auto-formatting is smart enough to understand "tabs are for program flow indentation, spaces after the same number of tabs are for alignment of statements wrapped onto subsequent lines", using spaces alone seems to be the safest way for a big project to not require constant formatting fixes or look scrambled when moved between different authors' editors with different tab sizes. Plus, even when everybody's on board with a mix, you can still end up with different line wrap locations from different tab size preferences.
roystgnr
1yr ago
I get this sort of thing from a few video+streaming sites these days. Tweaking video gamma settings with https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-image-control-new-g/mdoelcifdkcimkdbfkjjnedabmjlkokc fixes it on my web browser, but I'm not sure what you'd do about it if you're using an app on a (already properly adjusted) TV.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Internal reports say they have three major problems, but for some reason the reports only finished describing two of them.
roystgnr
1yr ago
why make the effort to drag both Sweden and Denmark into this? The obvious reason is to make the investigation harder by making it cross-national, I guess.
Adding a resistor in parallel lowers the resistance, it doesn't increase it.
Assuming for the sake of argument that cross-national investigation is hard, the safest strategy is to commit crimes in the single jurisdiction A with the worst investigators, for probability pA of getting caught. Adding any additional jurisdiction B with an independent chance of catching you makes your risk 1-(1-pA)(1-pB), strictly larger.
"Your prices are too high! They're charging half as much across the street!"
"So why don't you buy from across the street?"
"They're out of stock."
"Ah; then when I run out of stock, I promise to start charging a third as much!"
It's generally agreed that the guy out of stock, with an effective price of infinity, is a good guy, while the guy "price gouging" is a bad guy, and the only sense I can make of that is to interpret it under the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. How else could it make sense that, if I drive a truck full of generators into a hurricane zone to resell at a markup, they might just be confiscated when I'm arrested for being so awful, while if I sit on my butt refusing to sell generators to blackout victims at any price somehow I'm still a good guy? I fear human ethics only evolved to deal with around a Dunbar number's worth of tribe mates, a situation where basically everybody's family, everybody you give and receive with has an obligation to sacrifice for you if you fall under hard times and vice-versa, and rationing can be done by explicitly considering every single individual's need for a particular good ... which means our ethics don't work out so well in cases where there are orders of magnitude more people to potentially trade with, trying to enforce charity or insurance based on implicit cultural understandings without contracts or at least government programs can backfire horribly, and our only scaleable rationing mechanism is pricing.
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