xablor
6mo ago
I'm actually a little surprised that someone hasn't tried to displace him to cash in on his silliness with an aggressive article like "Sit Down Mr Macgregor, It's Time to Stop Talking". Maybe there's enough grifting niches out there that there's no need to usurp an incumbent, just set up your own pitch next door? Maybe it's unexpectedly high risk and an attacker needs to build a network of allies before making an attempt? Maybe it's just too much work to thoroughly compile a list of failures and mistakes - there was that one guy who became "the global expert on Moldbug", with more than enough material to discredit his theories, and he didn't make a move. Maybe it's easy to take someone down, but uncertain that you'll be the one to pick up the freed niche.
Presumably there's people willing to say a message - they may even believe it! - and people who want that message said, and a finite budget allocated to getting those things said. Or maybe there's a finite amount of attention in the world to hear the mess. In either case it seems like, assuming there's an equilibrium to disrupt by discrediting someone already in the ecosystem, there's money to be made. So why hasn't someone made a move? What are the dynamics of this grift economy?
xablor
7mo ago
"The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra", and I hate myself a little more with every page I turn. I'm going to complete it, because I want the knowledge and the skills, but the process constantly rubs my nose in my lack of bandwidth in onboarding even basic definitions, much less keeping abstract structures in my head well enough to even see their implications, much less their interactions.
Related, and secondarily, a video course in convex optimization (is that out of scope? If you lot can brag about classic literature I figure it's on to brag about forcing myself through technical content.) I won't detail it except to say it's humbling; playlist at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8WsPW41L6l7rviIGvIkY0-jn-tM3YSNi if you're curious.
I've rediscovered the US's official congressional record, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crec . For whatever reason it's compiled as being distinct from the hearing transcripts, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/chrg . It's a weird mix of infuriating and humbling, seeing the egoistic grandstanding around things as subtle and varied as the BUILDER act, substantially modifying the National Environmental Policy Act, and as tiny and high-context as tribal treaties from the 1800s interacting with permitting to add a convenience store to a reservation casino. Something about the scale of impact vs the scale of the people involved? These aren't great souls, whether in Congress or the experts they bring to testify, and they're largely not able to make sweeping impacts due to the combined momentum of history, lobbies, budgets, and a few hundred Congressional cats to be herded.
I just wanted to see Jamie Tucker say "shitter" on the record, man.
xablor
7mo ago
There really aren't ANY apps that just pass the API costs on to users? It's been months, surely that's enough time to figure out an instrumentation layer and a payments provider integration.
xablor
8mo ago
You might be encouraged by recent work in current-gen small modular reactors. Oak Ridge National Labs is standing up 6 of them, a few efforts got approved to start construction, and the US military is obviously interested given their focus on expeditionary logistics.
xablor
8mo ago
Off-the-cuff gradualist proposal to play with, and maybe be an existence proof: fedgov only guarantees 95% of a loan balance, measured as an amount of approved loan principle. Or whatever amount is needed to see a signal emerge (is part of your point that the minimum amount to see that is too large to be viable?). This paired with, I dunno, earmarks for grants for some of those who are impacted, to add palatability to lefty opposition and keep incentives straight for borrowers.
What doesn't work there?
xablor
6mo ago
You can't control a process if you can't measure its parameters and outcomes. Record yourself during interactions and review later, if you have warning. Maybe jot down notes about encounters that you feel went especially well or poorly?
xablor
1yr ago
I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.
I've casually found:
xablor
1yr ago
Is this a game for people with compromised shoulders? If I can't do an overhead press without subluxing, will driving stress that failure point again?
xablor
1yr ago
"Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development: Coq'art: The Calculus of Inductive Constructions", and it's kicking my ass to a humbling degree. I'm spending, conservatively, 15 minutes per page, in chapter /one/. I don't know if I'm dumber since I was in undergrad, or if this is my true info onboarding rate and I did undergrad wrong, or what, but this isn't boosting my ego at frigging all.
xablor
2d ago
Hm. Proposal: bare links thread exists, but it's only one bare link per day, first come first served? Small-N bare links per day, first come first served? I don't know how easy bot integration would be so it doesn't weigh down the server.
I'd imagined that the site would be diplomatically (edit: and militarily) privileged somehow, so that the US could operate and secure the site, and quietly have a standing plan to irreparably scram the plant and make the equipment useless in case of being overrun. My ignorance shows in lack of details, I'm afraid.
Iran, for the use case of providing nuclear power without exposing nuclear tech to a hostile power. The various countries in and including South Africa, for sponsoring stability and prosperity, since Warographics tells me they've been notably incompetent and corrupt in administering their domestic infrastructure in the last decade and might welcome some foreign investment slash paternalism.
xablor
8mo ago
Can we add an iterator over new comments since the last time a user loaded a thread? They have their own unique CSS class, looks like, so the server-side logic already exists to detect them. This might even be doable purely as a client-side bit of JS.
xablor
1yr ago
I bet the Naltrexone is prescribed daily? You might consider using it per the Sinclair method (protocol when you're defending it to your doc), where you dose an hour before drinking. This blocks the reward from drinking more intensely and more precisely than once-a-day dosing.
xablor
1yr ago
That was my thought, yeah. Some style of Derringer-style action with a captive spring-loaded blade or piston, which is what drove the small handful of pierced tires between visiting a human.
xablor
4mo ago
What prevents the client state from building sufficient capacity to not rely on the foreign plant? It's economically unfavorable while they can't get their shit together, sure, but that just means hard, not impossible or actively prevented. Or is your thought that the nuclear plant would be operated at a loss and price out other sources to cause dependency?
xablor
8mo ago
What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want?
Did you actually read the (offhanded, I admit) proposal? It was short. It involved creating a state-level capacity to locate disenfranchised (read: poor, illegal, disabled, low-executive) people and extend state services to them. Inside five years it'll be the premier way to access lumpenproles to buy votes from them. What compromise is possibly better than actually, actively, implementing your opposition's agenda for them?
EDIT: You reacted to it, so you must have. I am confused.
xablor
1yr ago
Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?
For numbers, let's say:
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the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)
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the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user
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the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight
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the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user
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the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.
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the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.
This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.
Factors I can think of offhand:
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This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined
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This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator
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This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user
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The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed
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Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?
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Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?
xablor
6mo ago
claims to want contrast; immediately rules out backlit full-color LCD displays
claims to want speed; indicates preference for a display tech with second-long rewrites
What gives? What are you reacting to to call these your needs? This smells like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem .
That said I used a commodity offering from Sony back when they offered them; they're closing their eReader line down, so it's moot-ish.
xablor
8mo ago
Because ‘voting accessibility programs’ are just funding for democrat political machines
I mean. Yes? That's the point, to give both sides part of what they want. Democrats want funding for democrat political machines.
tighter requirements for voter authorization are totally off the table for democrats
This I'm more ignorant on. There really aren't any minority sub-parties that don't care about the topic that can't be peeled off?
Personal bugbear: Superior Labrum, Anterior to Posterior. The labrum is a bowl of cartilage that provides passive stabilization of the shoulder joint, which in humans is significantly less structurally sound in exchange for a greater movement envelope. The labrum can be torn by heavy exertion at the edges of the envelope or by the proximal head being driven through the labrum, as in holding your arms rigid during a car crash.
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