domain:x.com
mildly_obsolete
1hr ago
Trump tweeted ‘get out of Tehran now’ and there were immediately massive traffic jams leaving Tehran
What a claim. There were traffic jams leaving the city from day one. And still, the traffic probably did pick up after he made the threat, US & Trump is understood to be slavishly devoted to Israelis, likely to sign off on and aid a nuclear strike on the city.
far less clearly involved in than Ukraine
Direct involvement in air defence, active support in the bombing campaign. This is less than in the first weeks in Ukraine?
I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.
From "What if drone warfare had come first?" by Scott Alexander:
The scene is the Oval Office. Three of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GENERAL HAWKE, GENERAL STEELE, and GENERAL RIPPER, are meeting with THE PRESIDENT. The meeting has been a long and exhausting discussion of drone strikes, and they are reaching the end.
PRESIDENT: I think we only have one more matter left to discuss. As you know, I have recently been worried about the moral cost of our drone war. So many lives lost. So many civilian casualties. I tasked DARPA with coming up with a new type of warfare, one which will end some of the troubling moral quandaries with which we are forced to wrestle every day. I believe General Ripper has been briefed on the results?
HAWKE: Mr. President, once again, I object to this pie-in-the-sky project. Drone warfare was good enough for our ancestors and it is good enough for us. The Romans used surgically precise ballista strikes to assassinate Hannibal without harming the Carthaginian populace. Abraham Lincoln used guided hot-air balloons to knock out top Confederate officials and keep this country united. Literally hundreds of people died in World War I before the British were finally able to kill Kaiser Wilhelm with a carefully-aimed zeppelin. To abandon drone warfare now for some untested new project would be an insult to their memory!
PRESIDENT: General Hawke, I appreciate your concerns, and I promise I will not be overly hasty to embrace these new ideas. But I'd like to hear what General Ripper has to say.
RIPPER: (interjecting) Guys!...Guys! Guys, listen! This is going to be so awesome. Listen to this! We take hundreds of thousands of people...guys, listen!...we take hundreds of thousands of people, give them really really really powerful automatic weapons...this is going to be so awesome...we take hundreds of thousands of people and give them really powerful automatic weapons and put them on planes and give them parachutes and drop them into our enemies' cities and then they just start shooting everything BLAM BLAM BLAM until our enemies run away and we're like HA HA HA HA HA THIS IS OUR CITY NOW and then we win!
STEELE: What the hell, Ripper?
RIPPER: No, listen, this will totally work! We take hundreds of thousands of people. We can use young kids and poor people and minorities, because we don't have to pay them as much. And then we give them really really big weapons. Like, not just the kinds of guns hunters use. Not even the kind of guns we give police. Guns that just NEVER STOP SHOOTING BULLETS! You can just swing them in a big arc and it will leave an arc of bullets everywhere and anyone anywhere in that arc will be dead! It will be SO AWESOME!
HAWKE: Ripper, are you mad?
RIPPER: Guys, think about it! You're Ayatollah Sistani, or Mullah Omar, or one of those motherf@*kers. You're having breakfast in your house one day when WHAM! A hundred thousand American teenagers and minorities RIGHT IN YOUR CITY with guns that never stop shooting bullets! There are bullet holes in your walls and in your gardens and now they're shooting your water supply and your power plant and everything. Do you think you're going to keep having your f@*king breakfast? Or do you think you're going to start waving an American flag and get on board with American policies like, right away?
PRESIDENT: General Ripper, frankly your idea seems at best ill-advised! Just to take one of many objections, we'll never be able to gather a hundred thousand Americans in secret. Ayatollah Sistani will hear about our plan long before we can surprise him.
RIPPER: And what could that motherf@*ker do about it?
STEELE: Well, he could get some Iranian teenagers and minorities, give them these super-guns of yours, and have them lie in wait for our teenagers and minorities outside his house.
RIPPER: Oh my god that would be so awesome! Because we have more technology, so we could have better guns than they do! And we're richer than they are, so we could hire more teenagers and minorities! Right? RIGHT? So everyone would be like BLAM BLAM BLAM with their super-guns and there would be this huge fight and in the end we would win and get that sunavab*tch anyway!
PRESIDENT: (horrified) You realize what you're suggesting is the deaths of dozens of Americans and Iranians, right? Maybe even hundreds!
RIPPER: No, look. It would be okay. Listen to this. We would come up...we would come up with this new philosophy where once a teenager or minority got a super-powerful gun from our enemies, it would be okay if we killed them. Because if we didn't kill them, they might use that gun to shoot us.
HAWKE: But they're only doing that because otherwise we would...I can't believe I have to say this...otherwise we would parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah.
RIPPER: I KNOW RIGHT? We're going to parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah! THEN EVERYTHING'S GOING TO GET BLOWN UP AND IT'S GOING TO BE SO COOL.
STEELE Everything...blown up?
RIPPER: Oh man I totally forgot this part! If we just have the super guns, people might hide inside buildings, right? And then we couldn't shoot them and then the ayatollah wouldn't have to agree to do everything we say. So...ohmigod you guys are going to love this...we take cars, right? And we cover them in armor and put giant caterpillar tracks on the bottom so they can drive over walls and sh*t. And then we put HUMONGOUS GUNS on top of the cars. Guns so big they can BLOW UP WHOLE BUILDINGS. And then we just KEEP BLOWING UP THE CITY until the Ayatollah agrees to do everything we want.
PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Uh, Secret Service? One of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has started acting really weird. Maybe you could stand outside the door and, uh, monitor the situation?
RIPPER: And then! And then we have these planes, right? And we arm them with lots of bombs, and we fly them over enemy cities, and...
HAWKE: Oh, thank goodness. You're starting to see sense and admit that the old ways of drone warfare are right after all.
RIPPER: No, it would be totally different! Because, get this! There would be people in these planes! We'd train them at special schools and whirl them around in centrifuge until they were able to work at 5 g-forces without passing out. Whirl! Whirl! Whirl! And sometimes they'd bomb our enemies, and sometimes our enemies would shoot them down and they'd get captured and we'd have to send in special teams of super-spies to rescue them before they got tortured and told our enemies everything they know!
STEELE That's...horrible!
RIPPER: And instead of trying to only target high-profile enemy leaders? We'd have a special rule that they couldn't target high-profile enemy leaders! They would have to hit power plants and dams and weapons factories and...
PRESIDENT: Weapons factories? Wouldn't those explode if bombed?
RIPPER: OH yeah. HUGE explosion! BOOM! And then when everything had been destroyed from the air, we could send in our hundred thousand teenagers with super guns and they could send in their hundred thousand teenagers with super guns, and we could send in our cars covered in metal with caterpillar treads and they could send in their cars covered in metal in caterpillar treads and then it would be all BLAM BLAM BLAM for WEEKS AND WEEKS and we win would because we would both kill each other and destroy each other's cars but we're bigger so we would have more of them and the Ayatollah would have to agree to do everything we say.
STEELE What if he doesn't?
RIPPER: We could kick him out, and say okay, city, you're part of America now! You're following American laws! You fly the American flag! And then America would be even bigger! And we could take their stuff too, like if there was any oil in the city, then it would be our oil!
PRESIDENT: General Ripper, this is highly unorthodox but I am going to have to relieve you of command effective immediately. This so-called "plan" of DARPA and yourself appears to be no more than the rantings of a deranged and homicidal lunatic. Your request to further develop this new type of warfare is completely denied, and honestly you seem to have so little regard for human life or the rules of warfare that I do not want you anywhere near our nation's drone fleet.
STEELE: Wait, I just realized something. Maybe this isn't about having little regard for human life. Maybe it could even help preserve human life?
PRESIDENT: (skeptically) What do you mean?
STEELE: Think about it. Nowadays, our drone controllers plan strikes from the safety of the Pentagon, never knowing the horrors of warfare, never seeing their victims as real people. But imagine what would happen if we did war Ripper's way?
HAWKE: What would happen?
STEELE: All our teenagers and minorities would see the looks on the faces of their victims as they got shot. Reporters would go into the cities and televise the devastation that our cars with armor and humongous guns had caused. People would come back traumatized, and we'd see them and understand their trauma and with it the trauma of warfare.
PRESIDENT: And?
STEELE: And we'd only need to do it once. Think of the hundreds of people who died in World War I, Mr. President. Think about the waste. If we had done things Ripper's way, the Allies would have encountered the Germans. They would have realized they were human beings just like them. The people in the capitals would have had to think twice about sending their young men off to die just because they wanted to play stupid games with the balance of power. And they would have thought twice. They would have said "No, this is horrible". Instead of those hundreds of zeppelin-related casualties, we would have had both sides pull back from the brink of war, and join together in their common humanity. It would have been a War to End Wars.
HAWKE: It would never have happened that way.
STEELE: No, perhaps not. Perhaps we should go on with our drone strikes as usual. Keep killing hundreds of people. But perhaps one day we will regret not taking hundreds of thousands of teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, arming them with guns, parachuting them into our enemies' cities, and having them shoot things until our enemies agree to do whatever we say. Maybe it will end up being the only truly virtuous mode of warfare, the only one that preserves our inherent humanity.
PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Yes, I'm sorry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seem to have gone insane. Would you mind terribly coming in and escorting them out?
The Secret Service comes in and escorts the Joint Chiefs of Staff out. The President sighs and starts taking care of some paperwork. A few minutes later, MS. WELLS, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, comes in.
WELLS: Mr. President? I'm sorry to disturb you, but a question has come up. I know you authorized free health care for everyone in the nation, but the doctors are wondering whether it's okay if they buy examination tables made of solid gold. Something about it 'adding a touch of class to the clinic'.
PRESIDENT: Sure. Tell them to go ahead. We have more tax money than we know what to do with these days anyway.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Literally every experienced participant will, if being honest, tell you the same thing.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Yes, men are not women.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this I disagree with:
and absolutely no second dates!
What's wrong with that?
It indicates something is wrong here. It'd be one thing to not make it past a few dates ever, but to never get a second date means that after the first time someone actually met you at all, they didn't want to see you again. It suggests needing to aim lower when selecting first dates and/or figure out what you're doing wrong on the date.
The bar for wanting a second date for most people, myself included, seems to not be that high. The bar for wanting a third or fourth - much higher. One data point is not that much, so a first date's not necessarily sufficient to know what you think. And, first dates, especially from apps, are often coffee/etc to minimize the awkwardness if it's no good (which is often the case, and that's fine). So, if there's any promise whatsoever, I think people often give it a second chance.
If you're not even getting that second chance, something's wrong. This is in many ways good news: figure out what it is, and fix it. Throw a spreadsheet at the problem, get a trainer, or a shrink, or a stitchfix subscription. Yes, modernity is a shitshow, but the answer isn't giving up.
Finding your spouse is a numbers game. Get to the 'not the one' quickly to move on to the next. You just haven't found her yet.
This I agree with.
roystgnr
1hr ago
There’s little glory in pushing the button.
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.
Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button
From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
So far, nothing has really clicked with me I've tried Reverend Insanity, Cradle, Worth the Candle, and a few others.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
I can't remember where, but some (reputable) news org said Israel wanted to kill the Ayatollah, but Trump told them no. Iran is at a weak point now, but their most important nuclear research facility is underground and Israel doesn't have bunker-buster bombs. Regime change through internal uprisings is all the Israelis can really hope for if the US doesn't get involved, and hostile action doesn't have a great track record of getting that to happen (rally round the flag effect usually dominates). If the US does get involved, they'll want the US to blow up the facilities they can't reach.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
There are priests who are good at this and priests who are bad at this, IME.
Obviously if you ask your priest how to get laid on a first date he will answer ‘dont’. But the better ones are fine people to listen to. Few of them are popular on the internet.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?
Anyone who's been paying attention to defense issues in the past few years will point you in one direction: drones, drones, drones. They're going to be omnipresent in basically every serious conflict going forward. From what I've read about troops in Ukraine, they make things absolutely miserable. They're nearly silent killers with the panopticon effect -- it feels like they're always watching, even when they aren't. You get out of your trench for 5 minutes to take a leak, and bam, now your leg is blown off. You're bleeding out on the dirt hoping for medical evac, but the medics don't want to come because who knows if another drone could be on the way. So you lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness while in a puddle of your own piss. Maybe you live, maybe you don't.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1hr ago
Jazzhands
1hr ago
Then he's not mentioned again in the New Testament where he's this unseen dark mirror of Jesus.
What?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%204%3A1-11&version=NKJV
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. 3 Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
4 But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ ”
5 Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written:
‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’
and,
‘In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
7 Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not [a]tempt the Lord your God.’ ”
8 Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
10 Then Jesus said to him, [b]“Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ ”
11 Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I have heard that women are far too picky many times- but when the complainant is herself a woman, the complaint is usually ‘ok, men don’t act like protagonists in a romance novel, because men are real people and not fictional characters’ and not ‘ok there are only so many 6’5 self made millionaires to go around’.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Unmarriageable women in the olden days were a dime a dozen, though- after the convents became selective those who weren’t taken care of by a male relative worked as servants, in textiles(the word ‘spinster’ has a completely literal meaning as well as its other one), as prostitutes, etc.
ArtVandelay
1hr ago
Your parish and your priest sound a lot like mine. Mind sharing a bit more about it? DM me if you don't want to post personal stuff publicly.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Yeah, mental deterioration is something I also fear. I'm mostly fine living in solitude, but I do have fears of tail-risks involving medical episodes that could be fixed by just having someone to call an ambulance or tell me I've lost it.
I'm checking into a hotel and euthanizing myself with the strongest poison I can get my hands on.
These are strong words to say when you're young, and I've heard this sentiment from many people, but I've seen very few actually follow through.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
What I found more interesting was Trump tweeted ‘get out of Tehran now’ and there were immediately massive traffic jams leaving Tehran.
That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.
ArtVandelay
1hr ago
And yes, I know the objection: ask your priest! The rules can be changed! Economia!
Gee, thanks. I always wanted to be a charity case, a special exception, because I don’t want to be moaning on the floor of the parish hall on Easter Sunday because I was finally able to eat a cheeseburger. This also understandably raises questions of moral inconsistency and clerical power.
It's not about being a charity case. It's a pastoral approach that is completely in keeping with Christology in general (God became Man, a particular Man, so that we could be come god) and the EO emphasis on the Persons of the Trinity (and Their particularity) compared to the emphasis on the Unity of the Trinity in the West. You might want to argue against this theology, but it's completely internally consistent. Seeing the Particular as a manifestation of the Ultimate and Universal is the name of the game, and clergy applying this to the personal needs and stations of their flock is the rule, not the "special exception." If that looks like morally inconsistent from the point of view of western theology, all I can say is that maybe western theology is wrong and in any case, Christians are not worshippers of Immanuel Kant.
I believe the Western approach, of mandating a low minimum and permitting more intense asceticism as spiritual directors and the Spirit himself guides, is a more human and fruitful approach. It sets up people to succeed, not to fail. And it remains open to sanctity in lay life, in a way I think E. Orthodoxy struggles to do.
What you described here is exactly the way my parish is run. It's an Orthodox Church in America parish in a major US city on the East Coast, if that matters.
NewCharlesInCharge
1hr ago
I’m reminded of the young men marching off to the Great War, excited at the prospect of winning glory, and finding a meat grinder.
There’s little glory in pushing the button. Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button, but it’s still of a different kind than a hoplite would have experienced.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Monarchies were just the dictatorships of old.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
I think needing to have "meaning in your life" is largely overrated. Life is largely something you just get through -- nature loved using the stick much more than the carrot. Modern society is extremely cushy in most ways, sanding off the edges of the stick. This is why I see populists as a natural enemy -- they want "burn it all down" for stupid reasons based largely on hallucinations, and they'd take my comfy pillows away in the process.
If I have any life goals, it would be to build something, probably a video game or maybe something with AI. I've made essentially zero progress in that goal, but I have no illusions that the fault lies with anyone other than myself for being excessively lazy.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
‘Monarchies’
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Israel is absolutely trying to topple the regime, Netenyahu has made this very clear.
He's said it, but he hasn't done it. I don't believe that Trump would be scrupulous of them doing so... or that the Israelis would actually ask if they thought it would work.
Netenyahu has made this very clear. Reporting is that Israel had a window to assassinate the Ayatollah but was vetoed by Trump, with Israelis claiming it would end the conflict.
"Reporting". Anyway, it wouldn't end the conflict, there's plenty of Ayatollahs to take his place.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1hr ago
And even if you're healthy, what happens if you get Alzheimer's? You wouldn't even know it, and eventually you'd either freeze to death trying to walk to work or get in a car accident if you still drive.
I have never been in a romantic relationship and furthermore have no friends or loved ones, and the very day I become conscious of physical or mental deterioration, I'm checking into a hotel and euthanizing myself with the strongest poison I can get my hands on.
Most of the common complaints are about minimum memory and CPU footprint; VSCode takes comparable resources to run as far more fully-featured IDEs. But if you've got the specs these are unlikely to actually feel bad, it's just kinda goofy.
The biggest problems are pretty hardware-specific, but they've been pretty bad when they pop up. I've had VSCode pull 16+GB memory (especially bad on an 8GB-RAM system) or peg multiple threads at 100% core utilization just idling, all with the default configuration, no extensions. A lot of it seems very dependent on renderer, especially since it started defaulting to a hardware renderer even on Intel integrated GPUs, but sometimes 'normal' developer workstations with multimonitor configurations have gone really wonky. While a less common use case, I've seen bigger problems with massive files in VSCode than in VisualStudio, Intellij, Android Studio (which isn't great itself!), or NotePad++, sometimes to the point where I had to shutdown the computer because VSCode was capping out CPU utilization so high that I couldn't use the mouse or keyboard.
((I've also had problems with deployments of VSCode, rather than VSCode itself. Which, tbf, usually aren't even the Electron developers faults, but since it includes things like a 40+ GB electron update, it's still worth keeping in mind before committing to VSCode as a day-to-day dev environment.))
VSCode defends itself in many cases by pointing to issues with extensions, and to some extent that's fair: just as it's not the Electron devs fault that a distro screwed up once, it's not VSCoders fault that a random html/css extension can peg a cpu. You can't build a framework that can contain every sufficiently dedicated forkbomb without making it useless. But you're almost certainly going to need some extensions just handle basic compiling and debug functionality. And some of them are pretty bad! My worst experience have been with the Java variants, with high idle CPU utilization across the board, but that's mostly because VSCode is the 'officially supported' tool for FIRST FRC so I see it on a lot of different non-optimized hardware. I don't do much webdev, but the few times I've run into ESLint, even with a minimal ruleset and properly configured (why is apply-rules-on-typing even an option?!) it's been pretty painful.
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