domain:lesswrong.com
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
From the "waffles" link:
noted race scientist Scott Siskind
Wow, Meredith really knows how to win the hearts and minds of her readers.
Actually, that article is full of money quotes.
Data work doesn't really count either, of course: it's too close to science, and science as a concept is feminine and obviously not technical.
Especially computer science! Felt really awkward being the only guy in a lecture with 400 people. But it got better when I studied physics, there were typically a few other men in the room. </sarcasm>
this is why Linus Torvalds, despite having some serious issues, is not beyond redemption, whereas Raymond and Stallman have fallen into perdition: Torvalds was motivated first and foremost by wanting a working open-source kernel, whereas Stallman and Raymond started with the ideology, and this is why Hurd still doesn't work
Glad to know that Torvalds is not beyond redemption, hope does not get more than a few years of sensitivity classes.
Also, ESR and RMS had different ideologies, with ESR favoring 'open source' for practical reasons while RMS free software movement started from the dogma that closed source software.
Also, while what Torvalds accomplished is super impressive, to reduce Stallman's impact to "haha, Hurd" seems plain wrong to me. That guy build fucking GNU, after all. And you would think that given the gist of the article ("knowing arcane runes is overrated"), she would appreciate that RMS founded the organization which invented copyleft, which is very much an active ingredient in much of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Sure, ESR is less impressive than the other two, but he did sell F/OSS to the suits (wait is that term elitist?) and writes NTPsec, which seems a lot more useful than what Meredith is doing.
we have to fight through a massive pile of Venture Capitalist money and the likes of Curtis Yarvin to do this.
Oh no. Not only Musk and Thiel with their billions of dollars, but the final boss battle will be moldbug. How can they possibly hope to survive?
Sorry for being a bit emotional, but that text really pulled my strings.
Very charitably, she is not entirely wrong. Gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping is bad. Long ago, a decade or so after I started programming C, I gave Python a try. Today I use it when I find it appropriate. I no longer consider it absurd to have programming languages which are usable by people who do not understand how pointers work.
Still, I think a huge part of what outsiders consider elitist in computer nerd and hacker culture is mostly striving for excellence. Outsiders often are "I don't care how it looks or what it does, as long as it (superficially) works". This is anathema to any craftsperson who takes pride in their craft.
Nobody (I think) goes to a meeting of a Poetry society and reads their poem and then goes "well, it was grammatically correct, and it conveyed how I felt about my cat dying, so if you do not like it, you are just a bunch of elitist pricks."
Apart from some minor technical details, there is no difference between the skill of a brain surgeon and someone who once tried to butcher a rabbit, after all.
My final observation is that the insistence on stuff being as simple as humanly possible is exactly what placed the left-leaning ex-Twitter users in their present conflict with Bluesky.
During the exodus from Twitter, there were two different main destinations: Bluesky (theoretically an open protocol, de facto a single platform), and Mastodon (an actual decentralized system, where different servers can have different content policies while their users can still engage with each other). Naturally, the anti-tech left moved to Bluesky, because it was slightly more convenient. If they had listened to the hackers, they would have told them that placing the people who write the software in charge of the servers (and thus content moderation) is generally a bad idea, and that it is worth the increased complexity to avoid such a situation.
Now they find that they have merely moved from one golden cage to another one, and that the developers of that one are also not as much into censoring speech as they are.
Spookykou
11hr ago
I have never heard of Bessie Coleman before today educated in the public school system of Texas, and learning who she is, I think she is not worth celebrating or learning about.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
11hr ago
I’m nearly certain that I’m the only person here that has actually been to a REE processing plant.
I think you're less unique than you think; most of us have been on 4chan at least once.
veqq
11hr ago
Everyone's focused on rare-earths themselves, but the issue's that this restriction applies to any product with them like motors and batteries - which China truly leads in price and capability.
sulla
12hr ago
In all seriousness, I have no idea how you'd teach a man more interested in beards and shoulders to love tits and ass instead.
Men are very imprintable sexually, you just need to make then orgasm to the “correct” images, thoughts, and experiences enough times, in addition to removing whatever sexual hangups they have towards women.
With this in mind, it’s pretty obvious why Christian conversion therapy doesn’t work.
Look at that! A Mottezin (Mottezen? Mottizen?)in the wild! Could be my first time seeing the actual visage of anyone here.
The guy Paul Scharre's constant rapport-seeking rise in intonation was distracting so I ended up reading the transcript, but thanks for the vid!
Rex
12hr ago
I’m nearly certain that I’m the only person here that has actually been to a REE processing plant. And while I don’t work in that industry, I’m adjacent to it.
I kind of think people are blowing this out of proportion. It will be painful for some. I doubt 99.9% of people notice. For reasons stated below.
2D3D
12hr ago
On the contrary, I believe that it is the fact that dicks don't actually need to be cut off that is the cause of the modern trans movements problems. Autogynephiliacs like Andrea Long Chu get to pretend they're one of the girls while openly discussing how much they want their dicks to be shoved into lesbians. The celebration of the dicked in the realm of the dickless is the precise shear point that drives many LGB and ACTUAL T people away from the Queer+ crowd.
As such I openly proclaim myself an obligate trans maximalist. Are you trans? Great! Heres some painkillers and a knife. Chop it off and live your life as the woman your dysphoria say you are! It is a costless exercise for dysphorics because the penis is a reminder of their eternal trauma for being in the wrong body, PER THEIR OWN STATEMENTS.
A man wants to be socialized and go into girls spaces? Then fucking BE a 'social girl'. Be the girliest fucking femboy, giggling at boys and wearing thigh highs and spreading bussy to get topped by Chad. But don't pretend singing Golden from memory and dreaming of eat pray loving through your dissatisfied thirties means you get the womens-reserved corner spot. Game devs in the west exploded in female representation, but only because men got to pretend to be women without needing any effort other than growing hair long.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
If I’m going to use hard cash to buy smut, it’s going to be in singles.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12hr ago
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
Hm, interesting. I get an intense sense of aggression from that stare, far more than I've ever gotten from any other youtube personality I've ever watched.
I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
Hm, I guess you could see that in some of his clips, but I've enjoyed his longform lectures quite a bit, where he just sounds like a confident professor than a scold. Politics are the worst thing that ever happened to Peterson, and he would have been much better off as a person just remaining quiet about Canadian law and being a quirky psychology professor a little bit too into Jungian archetypes. He was much better as an academic than a surrogate father.
I think there are leftists with the same sort of aggression that appeal to young leftist viewers; intensity appeals to politically-inclined people. And I know of a lot of right-wing influencers with a softer style. But just like Twitter rewards clapbacks, the algorithms reward intensity and anger.
2D3D
12hr ago
What I find fascinating is Nate Silvers total excommunication from the Left because he dared challenge the orthodoxy about polling favoring eternal progressivism, and his polling baby has been butchered into an ABC-owned politics focused The View with slightly less irritating panelists. David Shor nearly got excommunicated as well because he dared suggest that violent protests like the Floyd riots weren't helpful. Shor genuflected and abased himself by saying his findings were harmful, Silver stood his ground. It is unsurprising that Silver maintains a grudge against his moralizing peers.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Everyone learned about Bessie Coleman in school and a negligible number of people think she’s not worth celebrating/learning about.
2D3D
12hr ago
Blue tribers hedge so they can retreat and use tone defense. 'I was never aggressive and I never actually said that thing so your hostility is proof of your intellectual inferiority in being unable to muster a defense on the grounds of discussion'. That is why two liberal debate shows seem like people taking turns to smugly condescend to each other (or to others) rather than two people having an argument on the same topic. Just watch any Ezra Klein video to see that in action.
anti_dan
12hr ago
Well the question is whether the court will indeed slap them down right now.
My point is that if you adopt the medical board framing, you basically give away the cow to anyone who wants it.
anti_dan
12hr ago
Its not absurd. This profession is people talking in a room. The state, under the guise of medicine, is regulating the content of those words.
veqq
12hr ago
Yes. But I bought a 14 room place for $20k. There's a central courtyard ringed by various rooms, one side's dilapidated but the others are ok. I put garage doors on the street facing rooms and rent them out to small businesses.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12hr ago
Nah. It’s mämmi and we embrace it.
2D3D
12hr ago
Rare earth refining is a regulatory issue on heavy metal contamination for groundwater and waste disposal, which is itself critical to even perform the refining in the first place due to the circular recycling of outputs to generate usable high purity rare earths. You can't just Abundance permitwaive your way to rare earth mastery, you need a whole ecosystem of internal processes to even get something useful to begin with. Rare earths are a definitional misnomer because the elements are everywhere, but what IS rare is the critical processing mass necessary to even get something usable for modern high end technology.
I think what is highly underappreciated is how differentiated rare earth streams actually are. A single refiner can't actually just take in any raw material and convert it to intermediate rare earths, it requires significant chemical injection at many stages of the industrial separation process before it can be refined for intermediate stage. Rare earths is actually a humongously heterogenous process, so institutional knowledge is not 1-1 transferrable across different types of rare earths. Thats not to include all the corrosion effects that happen at transportation stages between facilities which require networked facilities with clear logistics between them. Chinese investments in clean tech and workers safety isn't because they valued human life, its because the usable material at the end of the process is useless if Wangs wang is inside the smelter. This is why you can't do either western permitwaiving or third world bodywasting to get a REE facility spun up at all, let alone quickly or economically viably.
What makes Chinas REE export ban so troubling is that China isn't actually losing out that much economically from it - as OP stated, REE isn't actually that expensive on a unit cost basis. However for receiving so little direct pain this causes huge downstream problems for other manufacturers elsewhere. This is frankly a repeat of the recycling debacle which ended the economic viability of shipping recyclable materials to China for processing, except the economic effects are more directly felt.
Stockpiling for rare earths is also a dead end. End output metals like neodynium etc are oxygen and moisture sensitive, so stockpiling is normally in terms of intermediate products... which still need refiners after that. WW2 saw fighter engines produced by the thousand, but honestly the more relevant example is WW1, where phosphate import restrictions forced Germany to develop the Haber process to continue arms manufacturing. I'm sure there are smart dicks at DARPA who are trying to find materials that can overcome REE or other foreign dependencies, but if it turns out chips and magnets really are only manufacturable in certain locations and reshoring is impossible then honestly the world can turn really ugly really fast.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13hr ago
We had a $1,000 bill, it had Grover Cleveland's face on it. We also used to have a $5,000 bill (James Madison) and a $10,000 bill (Salmon P. Chase, the Treasury Secretary that introduced the modern day banknote). They were all made to be used by big banks to facilitate interbank transactions, and in the 1960s they were discontinued because we didn't need to move bills around to move money between banks anymore. I wonder how difficult it would be to bring them back?
quiet_NaN
13hr ago
Obviously the broadcast spectrum is in limited supply and has to be regulated somehow. In times when the number of channels which could be transmitted were sharply limited, I can also see why the government wanted some control over content rather than leasing frequencies to the highest bidder.
This is also where public service broadcasters (like the BBC in the UK or ARD in Germany) come from: if you only can carry one or two radio or TV stations, then letting some private company transmit would give them a lot of power over public opinion. On the other hand, you also do not want the broadcaster to be beholden to the government. Hence these semi-independent structures which are funded through (often unpopular) mandatory fees payed by the citizens. By contrast, there was never a bottleneck with newspapers, because any kiosk could easily stock dozens of them.
While a whopping 16% of Americans still get their TV signal OTA (in Germany, the number is 3%), the state of the art technology to get video to the consumer is the internet. 90% of US households have broadband internet access. The only thing left for the regulators to do is to enforce some basic net neutrality (i.e. consumers pay for bandwidth, their ISPs does not get to bully content providers for preferential treatment) and let the court system handle illegal content.
All this OTA and cable stuff with complex rules around it, as well as European mandatory fee broadcasters and licensing requirements for streamers feels incredible archaic to me. Like squabbling over government mandates related to horse-drawn mail coaches when cars and the interstate network exist.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
Oh, i missed that, although I'm not sure it matters to my thoughts on it.
Hieronymus
13hr ago
At one point I hoped that open source, decentralized social media would be more resistant to censorship. Apparently some of its pioneers had the same dream. It seems crazy naïve now.
Thirteen years in Californian K-12 and I've never heard of this woman in my life.
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