roystgnr
2hr ago
I definitely worded that poorly, and you haven't written anything here I strongly disagree with.
But I think there's a steelman here that's at least worth some sympathy (albeit not agreement) in the bigger scandals. At least the little people caught up in these scandals really do seem to think the problem is just "one bad apple" who made "one mistake". Even victims often believe that they're alone! Until word leaks up to more central authorities, nobody is thinking about trading off The Noble Cause versus Justice; they're thinking about trading off The Noble Cause Everywhere And Everywhen versus Punishment After The Fact In Just This One Case. It's not like they can do anything that will cause that kid to be unmolested, right? All they can do is to try to avoid compounding the damage, and as long as they keep an eye on that "one bad apple", there won't be any further damage done! This is also one of the reasons why these sorts of stories end up breaking all at once: when each story goes public, then people who know about another story start to worry that maybe it's not just two bad apples and/or two mistakes, start to see the systemic problems that allowed multiple perps to get away with it and/or allowed one perp to get away with it repeatedly, and finally start to reconsider whether they made the right or wrong call. Then you get a chain reaction and everything finally comes out all at once.
to follow a Cause without skeptically analyzing the forces that would lead you to being convinced by the Cause is something I'd consider unambiguously ignoble
I'm pretty sure this criterion makes the median human being ignoble, if not a supermajority of us. I'm still not exactly disagreeing, but I'd suggest that the world is a better-understood (and in the end a better) place when we think of nobility as a continuum rather than a binary.
roystgnr
7hr ago
It doesn't even have to be a religious (including leftist-"religious" or other ideological) leader; whenever you have some group with motivations and ability to deny or cover up allegations, that group ends up attracting the sort of people who want to do things they'll need to deny or cover up.
Being part of any sacrosanct Noble Cause can do it, if the cause's actually-noble followers are afraid that making ignoble leaders' transgressions public would unfairly reflect badly on the Cause - this works if the Cause includes an "ultimate truth", but it also shows up in non-profits, charitable organizations, environmentalist organizations, police organizations... Even a mundane worry like "we don't want to scare kids away from the Boy Scouts just because of this one bad apple" can do it, for a while.
The inverse of power can be a form of power, if it attracts internal or especially external sympathy. Any group that feels marginalized has bad incentives, when members feel like other members' transgressions might unfairly reflect badly on them - there are cases among racial minorities, political factions, some religious groups where the abusers aren't among the leadership, some sexual orientations and kinks.
This is probably one reason why religious cults are such dangers; even if they're not showing any of they typical cult warning signs, any small religious group gets "feels marginalized" from being outnumbered by non-believers and gets "Noble Cause" from its religion, and so is doubly attractive for abusers.
roystgnr
3d ago
I played a bunch of Railroad Tycoon 2 (it got a Linux port back in the pre-Steam-Deck days when that really meant something), but
roystgnr
3d ago
First thing to do if you haven't already is load the BIOS and reset the configuration.
Another reply pointed out, "Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this."
But they are the sort of thing that a geek who wanted to squeeze out a little more performance (speaking from experience) might be tempted to turn on, so IMHO the first thing to do is to load the BIOS and record (even if just with a few photos) the configuration, just to make sure there aren't any weird settings like RAID striping that might be necessary to read the drives but might be lost in a reset.
roystgnr
6d ago
Heh; was that joke intentional? There's a tiny bit of plutonium in the area, and maybe a touch of strontium and/or americium, but at least they swear that the migration of The Hexavalent Chromium Plume is mostly under control and is still a quarter mile away from the nearest county groundwater well, minimum.
Seriously, though, even if some of modern "we will track every nanogram" society's kids aren't being perfectly protected from all of the sins of their "let's just dump shit in a hole in the ground" forefathers, I don't think a few ppb is going to be crippling the minds of double-digit percentages of kids who would otherwise be taking calculus. I guess it's just numbers. Something like half the county works directly for the Labs and a bit over a third of those are masters-degree-or-PhD researchers, but maybe that's enough to make sure LAHS offers a lot of AP classes yet not enough to make sure all the kids are the type who will take them up on the offer.
I love the canyons nearby, so a decade or so ago I briefly considered going to work out there, to try to give my kids some more academic competition while still only having to pay middle-of-nowhere housing prices. Looks like I was overselling it to myself.
roystgnr
6d ago
You can make a strong argument that invention is a subset of discovery.
I'd agree, but since having more distinct words is more useful than having fewer, I'd like to be able to say it's a proper subset, in which case there would have to be such a thing as a discovery which isn't also an invention. Then we'd be back to having a reasonable question to ask: once we fix a definition of what makes a discovery also an "invention", which mathematical discoveries are inventions and which aren't?
Could we classify non-invention-discoveries as distinct from invention-discoveries because the latter were created to solve problems and the former weren't? The laws of physics include ways to convert sound waves into electrical signals via a piezoelectric sensor, and that was an "invention" because telephones were awesome, but the same laws include ways to convert audible sound waves into seismic waves via amplifiers and a giant ground-thumping piston, and that was a "discovery" not worth noting because actually doing that would suck.
What's weird about mathematics is that so many of our pure "discoveries" keep getting hijacked and finding important applications later. Maybe some of that is selection bias, because if someone comes up with a neat mathematical game with no use cases then we only teach everyone about it if it's either closely related to something with use cases or really cool in some way or both? Maybe there are whole fields of "alien mathematicses" that we just never get into because they're really completely disconnected from anything useful?
But often even when we try to just "discover" interesting-but-useless math it turns out we're not very good at avoiding coming up with useful ideas. A couple of my favorite quotes are ironic in this way:
"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world." - G. H. Hardy, inventor (discoverer?) of math which turned out to be fundamental to population genetics and quantum physics.
Was Hardy an inventor? He certainly wasn't trying to be, but that didn't stop his discoveries from at least being the load-bearing components of inventive ideas.
"No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years." - G. H. Hardy again, in "A Mathematician's Apology", written at the same time that secret number theory research was becoming a decisive factor in World War II via code-making and code-breaking, and secret relativistic physics research was leading to the atom bomb.
roystgnr
6d ago
commit a violent offense and never leave prison
That would fall to "hard cases make bad law" in no time flat.
The first one that comes to mind: although personally I'm a big First Amendment fan, and I don't think there should even be a "fighting words" exception, I also think there should be room for some leniency toward people who are triggered by some types of "fighting words". "Talk shit and the guy who punches you will get arrested and maybe serve some time" would be justice enough and wouldn't set up as many bad incentives as "Talk shit to a guy and take a punch and you can see him put away for life" would.
Also: this only works if you can first solve the problem of bad DAs ... but if you could then that alone would already greatly reduce the problem. If you've got a garbage DA who might consider dismissing felony charge after felony charge after felony charge before each of their beneficiaries finally hospitalizes and/or kills a victim, they'll just be even more likely to dismiss charges when they know the consequences of not doing so are even harsher. He was just about to turn his life around!
roystgnr
6d ago
I applaud you (I think my only AP credits may have been Calc AB and BC, because IIRC my otherwise-pretty-good high school didn't yet offer anything else, and I wasn't awesome enough to lobby to fix that), and that's a reasonable theory, but I'd doubt it applies to LAHS: 22 AP Classes (or 23 now, since the AP people added Precalculus), offered at a school with only like 1200 students.
Sorry for the late reply.
A drive enclosure might actually solve your problem here! To be safe from weird RAID (or logical volume, I guess) issues, the trick is just that you don't want to try to mount any filesystems on the drive directly, you want to make a copy of the raw drive image, and then you can experiment with copies at leisure without risking any overeager software doing anything to screw up the original. I'd personally take the image from a system with a Linux "rescue" distribution, to avoid anything trying to be "user-friendly" by auto-mounting filesystems and auto-"repairing" anything that doesn't mount cleanly, but you could prevent such "repairs" even more surely by using an enclosure with a hardware write-protection switch.
Once you've got backups I wouldn't worry at all about the original hardware. Digital memories are irreplaceable and get more valuable with age; computer hardware depreciates fast.
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