whatihear
5d ago
Would be funny if we started airdropping guano on islands to annex them in order to avoid having to go to Congress for it.
whatihear
5d ago
I would mostly agree. This war is over nukes, terrorism, old grudges and regional power. I do think some Iran hawks are hawks for cultural reasons though. At the object level we are jockeying to make Iran less powerful and more compliant, but how we got there is importantly related to their barbaric culture. Part of why a powerful Iran seems like such a bad thing to me is that I don’t want to live in a world where a culture like theirs can project power.
whatihear
6d ago
Course not. We finished our conquest and settled in behind our comfy double moat so we could switch gears to becoming Leviathan II.
whatihear
6d ago
I actually find some Christian conservatives pretty off putting because of their views on women as well, however, I’m way more comfortable with them than with Muslims because Christianity is a much bigger tent and as far as I can tell the most distasteful Christian attitudes come from weird low church Christians who as far as I can tell are wrong about their religion. Meanwhile, I’ve read the Quran cover to cover and as far as I can tell ISIS is just mostly right about how to interpret their religion. Of course western Muslims lie to themselves and others about how bad it is (they translate “jihad” to “struggle” when translating the Quran which is obvious dishonesty because “jihad” is a word in English too), but the theological grounding for extremism is so strong in Islam that you can’t trust that a population of moderate Muslims won’t swing to extremism at some later date. The Middle East was way more chill about their religion 200 years ago, but the Quran says what it says, and it’s the revealed word of god.
whatihear
6d ago
Maybe the feminist angle is not what most right wingers really hate about Islam, but for me at least it is the main thing. I’m somewhat of a western chauvinist and one of the important ways the west is culturally superior is in how we treat our women. Islam’s treatment of women is barbaric and disgusting in and of itself because women are human beings, but it’s also disgusting to me because of how alien it is to my culture. I’m a basic women-are-people equality feminist (a right wing position these days I’m afraid). Maybe I’m not the modal right winger (I’m not that right wing), but while there could be some people from whom the feminist anti Islam line is bad faith, I assure you that it is a real motivating concern for some of us.
whatihear
6d ago
It’s perfectly possible for dumb people to disagree about policy and to outnumber smart people. Also, since we are talking about the tech right here, the thing about money is very silly. Yes the smart people are very rich in this case.
The point I’m making is that “if you were really smart, you would have power” just is not true in general. Intelligence can help in getting power but it doesn’t always.
whatihear
7d ago
you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.
In a democracy with lots of dumb people in the electorate, that’s not all that hard to explain. The electorate needs to be good enough at gauging authenticity to pick aligned dumb people over misaligned smart people as their rulers. Actually, the electorate doesn’t even need to be dumb, they could just be angry enough that none of the smart ruler options share their values to just say fuck it.
whatihear
8d ago
These sound like companies that will fail
All have been well established and successful to varying degrees. I’ve observed this pattern at FAANG, at unicorns, at established enterprise shops, basically everywhere. The only place that seemed to engage with my open source work was a very early stage startup, so maybe it helps there but for the vast majority of tech jobs it just doesn’t matter.
The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.
Just write a virially successful project with enormous buzz bro. It’s a totally viable career path for average devs to become the Twitter main character for a week and land a job!
Obviously this will work for some people, but that doesn’t mean it will for most.
Sounds like you should change careers.
I’ll hang onto the gig where I get overpaid to write fun little programs until it gets automated away, thanks though. I was talking about barely having the energy to do extra unpaid work for fun on open source stuff. That I do it at all means I’m in the top few percent of professional devs passion wise. Open source work is not normal, and if you think it is you must be way out of touch with most of the industry.
whatihear
8d ago
Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.
If only this were true. I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work in a way that indicates they clicked through the links in my resume and read the well formatted READMEs on the projects I maintain. When I do interviews, the rubrics I’m supposed to work towards don’t have any way to include an assessment of open source work, and other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work. The general sentiment seems to be that evaluating open source work is unfair to people who’ve done their work in corporate environments. I’m sure there are some hiring managers in some companies who can and do use it as a signal, but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill. It’s not terrible advice because it can’t hurt, it’s just not the magic foot in the door some people hope it would be. There’s no magic key if you’re early career, especially these days. I feel bad for the youngsters.
Your networking advice sounds good, but I find it exhausting and I know a lot of great hackers do to (not claiming to be one of them). Building your personal brand is probably great for your career, but I want to write code, not win instagram to get a job. Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.
whatihear
13d ago
What if your family member on food stamps is deliberately suppressing their earning potential in order to do things they consider more fun than use the lucrative degree they have and generally have a more easygoing and enjoyable lifestyle than you (and would even without food stamps)? I have a family member like this, and watching them abuse the system has made me way less supportive of food stamps than I used to be. I’m still probably in favor, but only just barely.
whatihear
15d ago
Yeah people making this their Twitter motto do seem kinda silly to me. It’s just that I read a fair bit of ancient history, and the hard times narrative just seems straightforwardly true for most of human history, especially when there are wide open spaces with lots of grass nearby. It’s pretty lazy of me to be posting without reading why this isn’t supposed to be true for the Romans. I do think they don’t make as good an example as the Chinese, but if I remember my Gibbon it certainly seems to fit the pattern fairly well at least starting with the crisis of the 3rd century. I’ll have to read it in more depth though.
Basically, it just seems like opponents want to act like this never had any explanatory power, instead of taking the much more defensible line that it just doesn’t anymore.
Also, the Brishish empires collapse (and decolonization in general) seems like an example of this playing out in relatively modern times. Europeans empires retreated to their metropoles in the face of previously conquered and much poorer people who were just willing to suffer a lot more. Of this winds up being true in the modern era it will probably look like that, not Cambodia sudden fielding a 7th generation fighter and spanking the USAF.
whatihear
17d ago
It is very telling that all your leading examples are contemporary. An important part of this debate is that things changed when machine guns and airplanes were invented. For most of human history, the horse was the most powerful weapon on the plains, so people who loved by wandering around hanging out with horses and practicing their archery were a major menace to settled society. The modern era has not lasted as long as the Han dynasty, so we should give more time for the thesis to play out, but it seems pretty likely that the whole cycles of history thing was true for most of human history, but now it might not be.
whatihear
23d ago
I’ve heard the opposite. I can’t understand that video, but other sources I can find all claim half a million Ukrainian casualties not dead. This claims 1.2 million Russian casualties, which would make it a bit over 2 Russian casualties per Ukrainian. https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine (and the ratio of those casualties is higher because it’s hard to medivac people on the assault in this war.
There are of course lots of people willing to lie on both sides, so I could be wrong, but it doesn’t really make sense to me that Russians would be taking fewer casualties than the Ukrainians. This is not maneuver warfare. Attacking is brutal under these conditions, and the Russians keep doing it. The side that is deliberately using disposable troops having fewer deaths just doesn’t pass the smell test. Also, the fact that the Ukrainians have been holding the line so long just doesn’t seem plausible if they were taking such bad trades.
You should strongly consider the possibility that you have been consuming propaganda. I know that I have, because all of the information about the war is propaganda. Do a little first principal reasoning about the nature of the war to see what seems reasonable to decide which propaganda to put stock in.
whatihear
23d ago
Fun fact: I came across Brianna Wu on Twitter recently, who was also involved, I guess. Turns out she has always been a fairly likeable, nuanced, low-key trans woman.
Citation needed. She’s recently started playing the reasonable centrist, but she was absolutely a far left progressive extremist during gamer gate. She also still has yet to apologize to Jesse Single for lying about him or own up to her past bad behavior in any real way.
whatihear
23d ago
I agree. They should sit back and use their glide bomb advantage to just pound away. The Russians keep doing it anyway.
whatihear
23d ago
I am concerned. It’s a attritional conflict, so it’s hard to tell which side is hurting worse through the propaganda that both sides are putting out. There is no sign of a general collapse right now. The Russians have recently claimed a series of minor towns taken, but war maps which are based on photographic evidence of the presence of soldiers disagree with Russian high command on where the battle lines are. They’ve also had some recent success with deep penetration of the Ukrainian lines using infiltration tactics, but those positions got pinched off and turned into pockets.
The war is not going well for the Ukrainians, but it’s not going well for the Russians either. I’ve been seeing people confidently asserting that the Russians are winning on here for years now, and it keeps just not happening. Trading at unfavorable ratios to take a few tens of kilometers over multiple years is not winning. In an attritional conflict, it’s losing. The only complicating factor is that the Russians have more people, so they can afford unfavorable ratios.
whatihear
23d ago
Both sides are droning one another’s logistics. This is much harder on the attacking side because going on the assault requires more resources and manpower.
Are you asserting that the Russians are losing fewer men and the Ukrainians?
whatihear
24d ago
The front line has hardly shifted for years. If a literal snail had started where the Russians did it would be halfway across Ukraine by now, and the Russians are nowhere near that. Lately the Russians have started lying about taking objectives at a greater rate because no man’s land is getting wider and wider so they can kinda get away with it. The fact that they are not attacking for the most part does not mean that Ukraine is spent. It’s a deliberate choice to remain on the defensive and win the attritional exchange. If the Russians want to send guys to die on assault, Ukraine is smart to sit in dugouts and pick them off with drones. The win condition for Ukraine is not that they reconquer their territory, it is that Russia gives up. One way to accomplish that is retaking territory to weaken Russian morale, but it probably isn’t the best one. It’s going to take time for the Russian people to sour on the war.
whatihear
24d ago
Ukraines best fortifications are all in the rest of the Donbas, so it is in no way a purely symbolic issue. Also, their whole strategy is to atrit the Russians by playing defense, so every meter of land is valuable because they can make the Russians pay in blood for it. If there was any reason to trust the Russians not to just resume the war after being given the Donbas, the Ukrainians would probably be willing to do that, but there isn’t, so giving it up without a fight is massively unpopular in Ukraine.
whatihear
1mo ago
When boiling water for cooking, the temperature doesn’t matter, just the state of matter. That’s what I mean when I say you don’t think about it day to day. The boiling and freezing point of water as they relate to other temperatures almost never come up. The freezing point does matter a bit, but you never care what temperature your water is boiling at, just that it is doing so. I doubt most people living above sea level even know their normal boiling point it is so inconsequential.
whatihear
1mo ago
It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use. You can make subjective arguments about how relevant that is, but I think those numbers are easier to remember and work with.
The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.
I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.
whatihear
1mo ago
Yeah, but most people will just scroll TikTok and eat slop. When they get bored they will do crime. There are plenty of countries with mass unemployment and it does not appear to cause some great blossoming of culture and spiritual living. A UBI future looks like the crime levels of South Africa, a populace that rapidly forgets what little republican virtue remains, and a resentful productive class that flees abroad or sullenly stops investing.
Keep in mind that ~90% of Iranian missile launchers have been destroyed, so most of what they will be launching from now on are drones, which can be intercepted with much cheaper systems than full on Patriots and would never require a THAAD. I think the main interceptor for shaheds is a relatively cheap air to air missile at this point in the war.
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