domain:mgautreau.substack.com
I did not have direct experience with Katrina, but Bayou Renaissance Man's Katrina Postmortem is a document I've gone back and referred to a few times as part of my natural disaster prep. Lots of great information about social considerations instead of just physical prep, after-action "shell shock", etc.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
5d ago
I'm not a psychiatrist, but this has what is coloquially called "BPD chick energy" all over it.
Yep. 'I hate you! Don't leave me!' is the best description of BPD I've seen. She seems to keep trying to drag him back into her orbit, but when he expresses any romantic interest she gets upset and pushes him away. Weird.
haroldbkny
5d ago
I just looked it up in the dictionary. It means "To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary".
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
5d ago
Instead, I blocked her on everything and will ignore her going forwards.
Excellent. This is the most sane response considering the context.
She is vomiting her crazy onto you and seeing if you will tolerate it. Don't.
I hail from Kuala Lumpur, but am currently living in Sydney.
Dunno if there's anyone else in this city on this forum, but I have never been attracted to these kinds of Mottizen meetups anyway; I'm awkward as shit around unfamiliar people and would probably make a fool of myself.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
5d ago
So apologies again to you (and @HereAndGone) but I've been both busy and ill and unable to respond. Hopefully tomorrow.
But can I just take a moment to appreciate how much fun it is to have detractors? For my book? Whom I might hope to rebut?
Good times.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
They say that dose makes the poison. Sure, a cup of coffee is great, but we couldn't survive on coffee berries alone. This isn't a problem for humans because we have such a variety of calorie sources, but it would be one of we were bug-sized and trying to survive off a single plant (be it jalapeños, coffee, tobacco, or even raw white potatoes).
FD4280
5d ago
Small inland US town. Lived in big cities most of my life; can’t stand them for more than a few days at a time anymore.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
That said, I was contrasting with Trump who seems to be going after people on student visas,
You seem to be doing this thing repeatedly, where you take a specific case, throw out what makes it specific and declare the hollow husk support for your argument. Trump is not just going after "people", Trump specifically is going after people who are involved in criminal mischief, and not just any mischief, but in violent support of foreign terrorist organizations and publicly calling for a violent uprising on US soil. Student visa is not a "get out of jail free" card, and revoking such visas for individuals that commit violence and call for insurrection in the US is a legitimate measure. If they hate US so much, they should be in some other place they'd hate less. Trump never made any move against people who are not involved in such criminal acts, and never objected to the concept of student visas in general.
I extrapolate from that that Trump is acting on vibes of "there are too many non-Americans staying in America, get them out."
That's a completely false and libelous statement, and you should be ashamed of proclaiming it, contrary to all known facts, but I don't expect you to be.
The woke professor has no control over or in with the woke CEO or vice versa. All they do is see on the news
Congratulations, you found the coordinating node! What you generously called "the news" is the propaganda organization whose sole purpose is to instruct the woke CEO and the woke professor what they are supposed to be outraged about now. And those organizations have been witnessed many times to push literally identical message all over the networks.
You mention the banks, but right now there's a protest over Visa/Mastercard cutting off porn video games. That notably includes LGBT games.
That's really weak. Banks have been scared of porn for decades, and it's not some kind of political anti-gay move you are trying to present it. If that's all you got, you are really scrapping the bottom. The processors are scared of any kind of porn, gay, hetero, Christian, Muslim, whatever it be - they won't touch it. That has been like that since forever. On the contrary, there was recent push to debank any outlets to do with guns (I personally closed all my accounts with Citi because of it, something that is being rolled back now btw), which is clearly politically coded, even more precisely - woke coded. And even more recently they started to debank people personally, for political activities. I hope it will now stop, but it happened. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if Visa/MC stop being dumb prudes (and invest in some proper fraud prevention) and embrace the lucrative world of porn. But this example - and especially trying to link it with gay stuff - is super weak sauce.
Non-state colleges are not government-adjacent institutions
Most of them are very dependant of govenrment funds and government loans, even those who are formally private. The amount of woke pushed by the governemnt through the colleges, either directly, or by just dangling money in front of their noses, is gigantic.
NGOs are also private organizations.
Formally, yes. Huge amount of leftist NGOs, however, are financed by taxpayer money and often created with that explicit purposes. A lot of local money allocated to various programs - homeless, drugs, migrants, poor, etc. - are allocated to NGOs. Have you ever heard of "GONGO"? That's what most of those leftist networks are, either officially or factually.
And Trump is treating every interaction point with the government as a stick (such as cutting off international students from a university)
Universities that insist on violating the law and discriminate on race, for example, deserve a lot of stick. In fact, I am unhappy how little stick Trump is giving them for being such a bunch of unrepentant racists.
as if the government could one day decide that your tax return is based on your political beliefs and this would be totally acceptable if the correct side was behind it.
Are you new to this whole thing? We had whole huge scandal where IRS was doing this - it was deciding which organizations to allow tax-exempt status and which not, by political beliefs, and then somehow all the evidence for this turned out to be on some hard disk, that had misteriously failed... Your "can't even happen, it's ridiculous" scenarios are my "already happened and everybody on the left cheered it" scenarios.
I was objecting to "cities destroyed" which is quite obviously false
I said "burned down", not "destroyed", but yes, it was somewhat exaggerated - never the whole city was burned, just parts of some. But for me, presonally, a lot of cities were effectively destroyed - there are a number of cities to which I previously gladly went - and even considered living there - and now have to avoid, because they turned into shitholes. San Francisco, Portland, parts of LA, etc. That's my problem, of course - and thousands of other people who feel the same.
As for the minimizing it, nobody likes to admit the bad.
When the whole movement endorses the outbreak of violence, and fuels it, and incites it, and says absolutely wild things like "in the middle of raging pandemic, we must lock people up in their homes and arrest people for surfing on the beach alone, but mass protests are completely fine because that's what the science says" - then it's way beyond just "nobody likes to admit mistakes". It's somebody likes to make the mistakes way, way worse abd double - no, throusand-fold - down on them. And keeps insisting those weren't mistakes but the righteous deeds.
I don't even remember most of the things you're referring to
You know, willful ignorance is not as strong argument as you may believe it to be. Maybe watching "the news" does not make you as informed as you may think? Maybe "the news" are not telling you something that they don't want you to know, and you should lookup up beyond them if you want to be informed? Provided that you indeed want to be informed, and not just reassured your side is good and all is good, of course.
I see the same thing when the right says Jan 6th was just some people walking around and Babbitt was a victim
Babbit was definitely a victim, especially if you apply the same criteria as the left had been applying to other cases. But even by any sane criteria, there was absolutely no need to kill her. As for other Jan 6 participants, there definitely were some violent ones - at the same level we see at any leftist protest where they regularly and routinely clash with the police. Since this was pretty much the only case where the right did what the left by then has been doing for several years (including occupying government buildings, and not for minutes, but for days, and sometimes burning them down) - they blew it up absolutely out of proportion - including falsely claiming the protestors killed policemen - in an explicit effort to diminish the mayhem their side has caused and deligitimize any claims from the right. They had a lot of success in that - the treatment that Jan 6 protestors got - even those who did not do anything violent - has been horrendous and ruined any semblance of respect that FBI by then had. That is one more illustration of how awfully skewed the political life in the US has become - the left does something hundreds of times, no consequences, the right does it once - it's an historical event and Congress enacts a live TV drama, orchestrated by Hollywood producers, to make sure nobody ever forgets that, and everybody who is even minimally connected gets the book thrown at them. There's a huge difference.
what I am talking about is the tendency of the right to turn around and say they are righteous in whatever they do to oppose the left.
THe right never did even a tenth of what the left has been doing recently. However, when the right did have the power, when they did bad things - like censorship - they were wrong. They don't hold that power anymore, and haven't been holding it for a couple of generations at least. If they ever hold it again, and try to use it again for evil - like, I don't know, ban porn or something - then it would be righteous to oppose them. It's not the problem that is currently has any real importance.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
SVN of course had a diff merge mechanism, and one person checking out a file didn't prevent others from working on it. The checkout happened in your local copy of the central repo. When you committed, your changes are immediately sent to the central repo and you must resolve any conflicts at that time.
The difference with git is the diverging histories you mention - subversion does not allow you to have a chain of commits that diverge from the central repo that you plan to reconcile later. It has to be reconciled at every commit.
Do you think there’s more southerners that west coast people? That’s the interesting question for me; I’m technically a southerner but like most people in the south I know the major urban areas are still super blue tribe & full of transplants and strivers.
Hicklibs are the most militant recent converts of the blue tribe, they might as well be their own weird third thing.
The ratsphere is super west coast but since this is TheMotte I’d suppose that the cultural core of SlateStarCodex would be underrepresented rather than over. We are exiles, after all.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Not New York! Not Philadelphia! """Proud""" to be New J*rsey! (electronic riff) New J*rsey One-Oh-One Point Five!
WhateverHappenedToNorman
5d ago
nobody gets to buy coca leaves to chew for their mild buzz.
Only tangentially related, but in South America people still chew coca leaves as a home remedy for altitude sickness.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
Middle of nowhere, northern Utah here.
Llama Scout 4? Mistral Small 3? GPT-5 mini? Haiku 3.5? 4o mini?
These are weak, small and bad. Use Grok 4 or Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro or full GPT-5 as midrange models. Or maybe Kimi or Deepseek R1 if you're cheap. They're giving the latter models away for free and they're still better than Facebook's crap LLMs. Plus R1 is a thinking model.
R1's final answer (after a fair bit of thought):
A planet is a celestial body that:
Orbits the Sun.
Is in hydrostatic equilibrium (meaning it is nearly spherical due to its own gravity).
Has a diameter greater than 2,350 kilometers.
This definition includes the eight classical planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and Pluto, because all of these bodies have diameters exceeding 2,350 km. It excludes all other known dwarf planets and Kuiper Belt objects, such as Eris (diameter 2,326 km), Haumea (1,560 km), Makemake (1,430 km), and Ceres (940 km), as their diameters are below this threshold.
I'd say that's a good answer, it's still essentially arbitrary but slightly less so than the eccentricity angle GPT-5 came up with.
Also, with regard to LLMs not often admitting ignorance, GPT-5 did this at one point, prompting even Elon to admit that's a good feature. The strongest ones are more capable generally. https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1957703475720044844/photo/1
Skulldrinker
5d ago
I'm sorry, what? Did a Mormon sneak in here?
I guess it's a win for capitalism because the people that were spending $1000/month on weed ten years ago can get by spending significantly less now?
Re: coca leaves, on a distantly related note I was at some sweat lodge recently and some guy offered people a puff from his home grown tobacco (in his hand carved pipe, of course) and the uptake was like 5 out of 6 people. I'm very certain if he had handed out a pack of Marlboros he would have had 0 takers.
So... maybe chewing coca leaves has room to come back too?
I'd be as shocked if not more so getting the weight of an M240 replacements to less than fifteen pounds.
The M250 is the replacement for the M240, and it does weigh just under 15 pounds, with the suppressor. Which is kind of downright miraculous when you think about it, considering the weight of the companion rifle. That's far lighter than any other MMG system on the market, competitive or beating nearly every LMG (assuming the M250's suppressor is detached), lighter than even the M60E6 is, and is only a couple pounds heavier than the full-size Knights Armament LAMG is.
The M7 makes more sense in a context where it's merely the companion "because we had to" to the M250- and the M7 is so incredibly heavy that there's only a couple of pounds between it and the machine gun. It's the same calculus the Stoner 63 suffered from: if the machine gun and the rifle are basically the same weight, why would you ever take the rifle?
It's also worth noting that there haven't really been any reported issues with the M250, but then again, the M250 also seems to be a clean-sheet design where the M7 is wearing literal pounds of legacy baggage. There's zero reason that gun needs to match an AR-10's footprint outside of "muh training"- it makes it more expensive to manufacture, and it turns it into a worse rifle (the forend on the M7 is absolute garbage) than it should by all rights be.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
5d ago
Australian, living in Bendigo (in Victoria, pop ~110k).
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
5d ago
There is a surprising number of southerners.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
Heartland. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and have never lived in a major city.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5d ago
This makes me mildly curious about the geographic breakdown of this place; although I know we have several desi & European poasters, I assumed like 80% of the people here are American or live in the US.
Are there more east coasters or west coasters, southerners or heartlanders?
That alway remained mysterious to me, although I assumed the west coat was more common due to the ratsphere influence.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I want to call this out to OP. We don't know what happened, we don't know if you did anything wrong - but you report a lot of problems like this and adjacent to this so it is worth being careful, much more careful.
Maybe it's something about the way you look or talk and it's total SJW nonsense. Maybe you use words that should be fine but freaks girls out. Who knows, but you have had a few problems and you'll be much safer if you try and be a bit more careful.
Sorry but you should try and protect yourself.
AvocadoPanic
5d ago
My local library uses Libby, it's in the CW MARS system.
What's your take on it's performance so far, in that regard? It seems to have taken quite a bit of time for it to pick up speed during launch, just with 16 tonnes of the dummy payload. It's hard to imagine it taking off with double that, let alone the 100 tonnes they're targeting.
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