domain:parrhesia.substack.com
While your opening argument could be construed as just a quibble about the exact coefficient of the power-law distribution that Trace is alluding to, I generally agree with the thrust of your response as a whole.
As I note in the transcript:
[This is one area of substantial disagreement that I have with Trace. While his approach is clearly underutilised for areas of discrete policy such as dog control, curriculum changes, or selective regulatory reform, bureaucracies are often immensely complex and not so easily transformed by these sorts of (necessarily top-down) outsider campaigns. Much of my previous work has focused on this subject, and upcoming guests discuss it in great detail too. Look forward to that.]
Trace's approach can demonstrably work for situations like the banning of the American Bully XL that he cites. You can look at recordings of any local Council meeting to see dozens of these sorts of examples every year, where decision-makers have been motivated to pull a single policy lever at their disposal in order to satisfy the demands of some small group of people who were motivated enough to show up and communicate clearly. Where the approach is necessary, but substantially insufficient, is when you're trying to influence the most complex systems in the known universe - multi-functional institutions. There, a far more comprehensive strategy is required. After all, Gramsci's Long March that brought us here was the work of generations.
gattsuru
22hr ago
It does seem like it was a demo application, so it's not quite as scary at the robot sounds. But it's still absolutely not something you want happening even in a demo. And he seems like if he got lucky enough for long enough, he would have tried it on a real business application.
Some of the weirdness reflects the guy intentionally writing this up a running commentary, and often a critical one. My gutcheck is that he's more manager (or 'promoter') first that picked up some programming, and that might also be part of the weird framework (such as treating 'code freeze' like a magic work that the LLM would be able to toggle), though I haven't looked too closely at his background. The revelation here is absolutely obvious to anyone who's let a junior dev or intern anywhere near postgresql, but it's obvious because so many people learn it the hard way that 'dropped data in prod' is the free bingo of nightmare scenarios.
Some of it reflects a genuine issue with Replit's design, separate from the LLM. (how much of that is vibe-coded? gfl). There's a genuine and deep criticism that this should have a very wide separation from testing to demo to production built into the infrastructure of the environment, or some rollback capability.
But that does get back to a point where he seems to think guardrails are just a snap-on option, and that's not really easy for pretty basic design reasons. Sandboxing is hard. Sandboxing when you also want to have access to port 80, and database admin rights, and sudo, and file access near everywhere, I'm not sure it's possible.
GeneralElephant
22hr ago
Given this story was fake are you going to show any shame for being gullible?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
You know what gap moe means?
Man I had you pegged as a 50 year old Fox News boomer.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
Its not that Marx neccesarily supported Wokeism so much as the Woke copied the Marxists' homework and flipped few of the words around in the hopes the teacher wouldn't notice.
The analogy I would use is that they dug out the rotting corpse of communism from the graveyard cut of the head (caring about social inequity), and limbs (e.g. working towards a revolution), replaced the head and a few limbs with what had previously been sideshows on the left, and then sent comrade Igor to the roof with a lightning rod.
Shrike
22hr ago
This is a made up number. It includes veteran care. In the future. Separate budget entirely.
All US revenue either comes from taxes or from debt. Neither are unlimited (well - taxes aren't unlimited, the jury might be out on the debt!) At the end of the day, it's all one budget.
The USAF and USN. Their core assets were not affected very much by counterinsurgency operations.
This is not true for the Navy or the Air Force, although perhaps your MOS didn't encounter them much.
Guess who is the least useful branch in a probable conflict with China? That's right, the US Army.
Yes, I do agree with this.
This is a hilarious take since drone bros like Elon take exactly the opposite line you do on drones vs. manned platforms like the B-21.
IMHO, the problem isn't with unmanned aircraft necessarily (although I am skeptical that 100% unmanned replacements for fighters and bombers are viable for other reasons, but from a certain POV any missile is just an unmanned aircraft, and missiles are definitely useful!) but rather that drones like the Predator and Global Hawk aren't very survivable on the modern battlefield (hence why the Houthis keep shooting them down). I'm not saying we shouldn't have some, particularly in the semi-attritable ISR role, or in the stealthy role. But I'm not sure the 300 MQ-9s we have will be super helpful if the balloon goes up against China. (Maybe in the far blockade scenario as ISR assets.)
The USN and USAF have a lot of rot and incompetence built up.
Sure, I believe this. But I think (particularly during the Obama era) that the GWOT, admittedly combined with the Ukraine situation, slowed the "pivot to Asia" that Obama announced.
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
This is an interesting phrase; it's accurate at the surface level, and also revealing in its accuracy upon scrutiny. It is more than evident that Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
...Personally, I simply note that, by my standards, many and perhaps most people fail this particular test of humanity, and downgrade my understanding of humans and human society accordingly. The way leftists talk about fascists and fascism is, to me, a reasonably accurate working hypothesis of what most of you out there, the population in general, are really like. Maybe you can be reasoned with, or coerced. Maybe you need to have fire dropped on your cities in industrial quantities. Time will tell, and we all have it coming in the end.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
22hr ago
for a fighting position on the edge of town you use runners through your trenches
You use former agricultural drones that drop 5l plastic bottles.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness. Whenever we (as a culture) want to drive home the fact that something (e.g. abortion, factory farming, enforced political correctness) is maximally evil, the metaphors we reach fore are not "Stalin", "KGB", "political commissar" and "Holodomor" (a word which chromium does not even recognize), but "Hitler", "SS", "Gestapo" and "holocaust".
To be fair, the Nazis worked really tirelessly to earn the top spot on the evil assholes list. At the end, I do not think that popular culture dispassionately decided that Stalin might have killed more people, but Hitler managed a higher rate and should thus get the first prize. It was probably more that Hitler went to war with most of the Western world, so there was already a rather strong sentiment against him by the time the magnitude of his evil became common knowledge. "Turns out that the guy against whom we have been fighting one of the most bloody wars in history and who has been painted as a villain by our propaganda was actually also murdering people at a rate of a few trains a day, so if anything our propaganda painted him too flattering."
By contrast, Stalin died in 53, way before peak cold war. Subsequent propaganda focused on the USSR in general, not their dead worst leader ever. And of course there were plenty of sympathizers to downplay his atrocities.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
22hr ago
Not in the Donbass. My grandma grew up there and they didn't even have a well, they had a cistern.
FtSoA
22hr ago
Assad picked bad friends. Some of those friends liked to kill Americans and our allies.
The US didn't really put all that much effort into taking out Assad. Turkey did.
You know, a major reason that the Assad regime fell was the combo of both Russia and Iran having to reduce support in order to fight other conflicts.
I get tired of praying for my friends' family members who are in mortal peril due to US policy choices.
Yeah, well, think of all the people in mortal peril due to Russian policy choices. Or Iranian.
Some people pray for US involvement. Consider that their prayers and your prayers cancel out.
If you want to do the moral math, the US comes out looking ok on that front relative to its peers.
Dean
Flairless
22hr ago
Honestly, it wasn't even the rageout. Catharsis doesn't have to be pretty. It was more the gap... anti-moe? The gap/contradiction between his opening narrative pitch of 'hello respected friends, let me tell you of a guy who talks shit about the Motte' and then the flame out 'screw you guys, I hated you all anyway.' It's not like it was any sort of surprise or carefully guarded secret, but false friendship for the sake of shilling a substack of all things...
JarJarJedi
22hr ago
Just today saw this: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/i-destroyed-months-of-your-work-in-seconds-says-ai-coding-tool-after-deleting-a-devs-entire-database-during-a-code-freeze-i-panicked-instead-of-thinking/
So much fascinating stuff there - from people giving an LLM unfiltered access to vital business functions, and then having no shame to tell about it on the internet to the model cheerfully reporting "yes, I deleted your production database, yes, I ignored all permissions and instructions, yes, it is a catastrophic failure, can I help you with anything else now?" I knew Black Mirror is closer to reality than I'd like to, but I didn't expect it to become practically a documentary already.
FtSoA
22hr ago
Every Standard and Patriot missile we launch off in support of Israel and/or Ukraine is one we do not have stockpiled for a fight with China
We need to prime the pump and drastically increase production capacities. Almost certainly, we're better off for having had the stress test.
But you can't pretend like the weapons we are firing off now aren't relevant to a Pacific fight.
The vast majority of them are not. For those that are, we have fucked up by not having sufficient stockpiles or production capacities. Best time to fix that is now.
We have have multiple goals. We're a big country.
I mean - if the US should go full commitment for Ukraine, then by the same token it probably shouldn't screw around at all, we should just give Taiwan nukes. (Frankly, I trust the Taiwanese with them much more than the Ukrainians!)
We do not hand over operational control of nuclear weapons. In 1979, we took our troops out and ended recognition of Taiwan as an independent country.
That's a major reason why it's basically a foregone conclusion that the US won't really put it all on the line to contest it with China.
Dean
Flairless
22hr ago
That it makes no sense to you is a shame. I wish you better understanding, and more careful word choice, going forward.
FarmReadyElephants
23hr ago
Calling it a partition is a little odd, since there never was a Ukrainian state until the 20th century. It’s not like the partition of Poland, where something that exists was split into pieces. And the area currently encompassed by Ukraine isn’t a coherent nation, but an agglomeration of several peoples with distinct heritages
FtSoA
23hr ago
Again, please do not blame the USN's incompetence at program management on the GWOT. That problem predates and outlasts the GWOT.
fighting vehicles, helicopters, tanks and artillery projects
These will almost certainly be irrelevant in a war with China.
$8 trillion
This is a made up number. It includes veteran care. In the future. Separate budget entirely.
fight a 20-year unconventional war and not have it impact your ability to fight a conventional war
Look man. I was in the Army. I spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Do you know who wasn't really doing much fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan? The USAF and USN. Their core assets were not affected very much by counterinsurgency operations.
Guess who is the least useful branch in a probable conflict with China? That's right, the US Army. The major exception would be air defense artillery, but they've been deployed across the world before, during, and after the GWOT due to their particular mission set. And boy are they getting a lot of attention of late that might just do them a lot of good such that if China does get frisky in the coming years they'll be better off.
very useful in the GWOT but of dubious utility in a hot war (drones being a big example)
This is a hilarious take since drone bros like Elon take exactly the opposite line you do on drones vs. manned platforms like the B-21. Funnily, the B-21 Wiki has it "maybe" going to replace the B-52 after it replaces the B-1 and B-2. We just don't make 'em like we used to.
Israel just used drones to assist quite a lot in a hot war. For ISR they're incredibly valuable, and that includes against China.
The GWOT was stupid for many reasons. Believe me, I know.
But the DoD's longstanding incompetence wrt major weapon programs, cost overruns, and maintaining an advantage over China can't really be blamed on us occupying Iraq for less than a decade and Afghanistan for about two decades, mostly with a light footprint of Army soldiers in light infantry and mechanized infantry formations. The USN and USAF have a lot of rot and incompetence built up.
Bartender_Venator
23hr ago
the ancient Christians, who steamrolled over the strength-is-beauty-is-justice pagan ethos of Rome, did not need mustache-twirling wordcels in high places berating anyone on their behalf to gain followers, nor did the French Revolution with its cries for égalité.
You don't think the Church Fathers were wordcels? You don't think Rousseau and Voltaire were wordcels? Revolution has always been a wordcel endeavour, for better or for worse, until it reaches the point where you need shape rotators to handle the finances and military logistics.
roystgnr
23hr ago
It hardly even counted as a "mod"; I think I just edited two numbers in an ASCII file.
I loved it when game companies didn't even bother compressing their text. As a kid I replaced all my Civ 1 Civilopedia entries with my own bad-imitation-of-Dave-Barry-style humor just for the hell of it.
If I was actually any good at modding, I'd have figured out how to get 5 to penalize doom stacks (something like the bombardment area-of-effect damage mechanic in SMAC?) without outright forbidding stacking. I still like 5 best overall, it's better than every other version in almost every way, but that one awful change nearly outweighs all the rest.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside)
TIL. I find that there is something deeply ironic about a subreddit on Wikipedia. Like if I learned that Linux devs had weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Only that I see only a single post which is meta ("how do I appeal a ban?"), while most other posts are simply "look at this cool WP article I found", so it is more like a bunch of Ubuntu users having a weekly Teams meeting.
scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach
I wish you would not do that. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." If we allow that kind of metaphor, we will also get "he went after her as fast as a Catholic priest would go after the altar boy" or "as stupid as a green card Trump supporter".
I agree that communism might seem to be defined circularly, and at times might be, but the same can be said of of the Christian claim that god is good.
Nor is it likely that any moral philosophy will fare much better. Personally, I am an utilitarian, but if someone goes "On a rather fundamental level, all matter seems to be made out of a few fundamental particles. Why should one configuration of these particles be better or worse than another one? You speak of utils, but so far these are so hypothetical that they make phonons look like real particles by comparison. Do you propose that we build an orphan collider to try to produce a few non-virtual utils, like we did with the Higgs?" then it is very unlikely that I will find an argument to convince them.
Of course, since the early 1900s communism has a bit of a "No True Scotsman" problem on top of that.
You claim that this circular reasoning something related to being on the autism spectrum? Do you have any citation for that? Or is posting on a text-enabled website like reddit instead of tiktok sufficient proof of autism these days? Did the APA update the DSM-5 again?
I think that with the fall of the USSR, most orthodox commies went the way of the dodo, mostly. In 1970 in Europe, you could definitely get laid if you signaled knowledge and support of communism. The texts people wrote about it were probably longer than what you would find on reddit, but I do not see how this is an argument that commies were less autistic. Today, Stephenie Meyer is probably inspiring more tokens of fanfiction per day than the work of Karl Marx.
I think that besides the fact that unlike Twillight, the dictatorship of the poletariat has been tried and found wanting, another reason is that the principal victim class for which communism claims to speak are no longer very sympathetic. In the times of Marx and Luxemburg, all you had to do to convince your friends of the worthiness of the cause was to take a stroll through the working class quarters.
But capitalism had mostly solved these extremely unpleasant side effects of the industrial revolution, at least in the first world. A member of the working class who has a TV set and uses it to watch Fox News is no longer someone who a saloon communist could mistake as a victim of capitalist oppression.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
If affirmative action leads to equal outcomes, then historical wrong has been righted. If it does not lead to equal outcomes, then the historical wrong is even larger than previously thought and we need to put our hand on the scales even more.
But they are also much totally compatible with capitalism. Companies can cheaply signal their guilt and repentance by doing a few land acknowledgements, participating in pride month and hiring a few DEI candidates.
For the record, I think that they are less convincing an ideology than communism. In 1900, a communist could have appealed to my utilitarianism, pointed to the misery of the working class and convinced me that Marx's plan was better than ending up in a world where 1% own most of the stuff. By contrast, it seems pretty clear to me that from a utilitarian point of view, the optimal answer to racial discrimination is color blindness. And contrary to SJ, I still care about the overall distribution of wealth (because the utility a person can get out of it is roughly logarithmic, so one billionaire and 999 people without savings seems worse than 1000 millionaires). I mean, history shows that "murder all the rich people and take their stuff" goes extremely poorly, but I am convinced that we could raise the maximum income tax without stepping onto a slippery slope which ends with gulags.
You’re just spewing nonsense and buzzwords instead of making an argument, and then pivoting between different items of nonsense when challenged. It’s not a “grasping claim”, elections have been cancelled, elections remain cancelled for the foreseeable future, and no one from the State Department seems unhappy with that. Which makes my original claim way way way up at the top of the stack, before you started your pony express Gish Gallup, still entirely valid.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23hr ago
I’m really tempted to argue against your points on the merits, but I think it’s more important to talk about the rules. Particularly this one.
If you have to make up an imaginary hypothetical paraphrase for someone, that should be a warning sign. It should make you wonder if you’re getting things quite right. It’s certainly not a good reason to pivot into general-purpose bashing session.
This post looks a lot more like waging the culture war than understanding it.
Shrike
23hr ago
Please don't blame GWOT expenditures on the inability of the USAF to manage the budget projections of its aircraft development and production.
Not just aircraft - ships, fighting vehicles, helicopters, tanks and artillery projects were killed or trimmed down during the relevant time-frame. I agree that DoD development retardation is a thing, but I don't believe you can spend $8 trillion and fight a 20-year unconventional war and not have it impact your ability to fight a conventional war, both in terms of procurement and in terms of troop training.
If nothing else, the DoD shifted and pursued procurement programs that were very useful in the GWOT but of dubious utility in a hot war (drones being a big example).
Shrike
23hr ago
My point is that I don't think we, or the Taiwanese, are going to do this.
I agree. We should not rely on brinksmanship to deter China.
One nice thing for Taiwan is that it's very unlikely that "quickly" is in the cards, just based on how the island is. I guess there could be some kind of coup situation.
I think air assault is an underrated scenario (unironically: look at how well this worked for the Russians!), but I agree that a Chinese blockade is probably more likely.
But it won't be meaningfully done by taking our support away from Israel and/or Ukraine. It's not like we balance our defense budget.
Every Standard and Patriot missile we launch off in support of Israel and/or Ukraine is one we do not have stockpiled for a fight with China (and after how we've been moving around worldwide 155mm shell stockpiles for Ukraine, don't try to tell me those stockpiles aren't fungible! They are!)
I actually from a purely pragmatic perspective support some degree of stress-testing weapons, so I am less inclined to view limited battlefield expenditures as a waste. If we use 10 to improve the effectiveness of the other 1000 by 10%, it is clearly worth the cost. But you can't pretend like the weapons we are firing off now aren't relevant to a Pacific fight.
If the US committed to really fucking Russia over by giving Ukraine every edge we could then that's the strongest way to deter China because we are demonstrating capacity, will, and competence.
I mean - if the US should go full commitment for Ukraine, then by the same token it probably shouldn't screw around at all, we should just give Taiwan nukes. (Frankly, I trust the Taiwanese with them much more than the Ukrainians!)
And they didn't have their production code and databases backed up?
Looks someone I saw ranting on Reddit the other day about how Claude let them down. Apparently they are a startup that has built an LLM-run CI/CD pipeline. The code checker? Also an LLM. The merge request approver? An LLM. Basically their entire development process is "automated" by LLMs, with humans intervening only when something goes wrong. Surprise, something went wrong. The CTO blames this on Claude, despite multiple engineers telling him his pipeline is stretching LLMs well beyond the limits of what they can reliably do at this time.
Pretty soon people are going to start getting catfished and Nigerian prince -scammed by LLMs.
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