domain:themotte.org
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
15hr ago
Amazing. If this is the quality of the criticism on offer then it really drives home that ICE under Homan may be the most effective and accurate government agency in American history - if not world history.
Now, I'm not saying that people should look at this situation and update their priors in the direction of "pleas for pity from immigrants are bad faith lies and you should harden your heart against the sin of unworthy mercy". I'm just saying that movement in that direction would be a reasonable Bayesian response IF Burden were not a malicious troll.
wayfarer
15hr ago
Do you want to explain what you are talking about?
Dean did it better than I would do.
And why a single failure nullifies a career of generally decent reporting?
Because it was utter failure and he seems to be sliding down into rabbit hole of some kind? Also, it is one where I looked into and was really disappointed about quality of their claims. I am less familiar with their earlier work that was supposedly decent/really good.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15hr ago
You gave an effortful and illuminating reply, so I'll do my best to answer your question.
When I say 'normalized', I suppose what I'm after boils down to two points.
-
A consensus that the SSPX is not schismatic and that attending their liturgy and receiving the Eucharist is fine and not illicit. This lets more people attend the TLM in parishes / dioceses that lack one.
-
The ability (built on point number 1) for SSPX clergy to evangelize and catechize. Regardless of one's political opinions regarding the SSPX, their seminarians come out extremely well educated and theologically solid. This cannot necessarily be said about many diocesan seminarians - with the major caveat that the variance across the USA can be quite large. I don't need to recapitulate the how and why of really bad liturgies emerging in the 70s and 80s, but suffice it to say, part of the cause was sub-par seminary training and study for priests of that generation. Although it does seem like the younger generation takes it more seriously, I met a friend-of-a-friend priest in his early thirties who, beer in hand at a wedding, announced he was "really into astrology." I'm not going as far as saying he's heretical or satanic. Quite the opposite - he was "father friendly / youth pastor / acoustic guitar" levels of spiritually flaccid. I wasn't scandalized, I was disappointed that this was a fairly recent product of a seminary.
The SSPX, I believe, has ordained just over 1,000 priests now (USA and rest of the world). That's 1,000 theologically sound clergymen who could be used for a whole variety of projects that require a strong theological foundation.
Regarding your excellent outline of the political realities regarding the SSPX, Vatican, and various groups of bishops, it all makes sense to me and I understand exactly the odd situation of conservative American Bishops. As a country, we always kind of make whatever the 'thing' is into our own, don't we?
Online tradcaths are mostly that - online. If every rando posting DEUS VULT memes would simply go to Mass regularly, we'd probably see some real demographic change across parishes. IRL tradcaths are too busy having big families and experimenting with various levels of crunchy-ness (small scale farming, local produce, raw milk etc. etc.) The theologically rigorous folks I try to spend time with also frame TLM discussion exactly as you did; TC isn't popular and needs to be loosened, but we probably aren't going to revert to Summorum Pontificum. My bet is that we'll get to a spot where any parish that goes to the trouble of requesting approval for a TLM probably gets it from their Bishop unless there are very peculiar circumstances. This would, I hope, lead to more diocesan priests seeking training in the Extraordinary Rite.
It's an odd shill (edit- as in, advertisement/solicitation) that advertises on the Motte with a claim that the Motte is a subject of conversation, but links to an article transcript that doesn't include the word.
Why do you say failure?
https://www.themotte.org/post/2269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348794?context=8#context explains better than I would do
Who do you think blew up the pipeline?
I expect that German conclusion that pipeline was blown up by Ukrainians is correct.
I would bet on Ukrainian state - country at war with Russia, risking far less from detection/failure and far more motivated to do so. And demonstrated both capacity and willingness for some zany schemes that worked.
But I leave some space that it was someone else. But if it was USA then it was not done in way claimed by Seymour Hersh.
And Poland is still more likely than USA, if it was not Ukraine.
The last year and a half really have come across has a throughput increase (scaling up results to input increases, but roughly the same proportions as smaller inputs) rather than compounding advantage. Typically a compounding position of advantage decreases military casualties because you mitigate the ability of the enemy to retaliate. Throughput just increases output gains by increasing input costs, but if you later decrease the input rate the outputs will still correspondingly diminish rather than continue at a steady rate (i.e. coasting to continued success). It's going from spending 3 to 6 in order to receive 8 instead of 4 on the back end. Bigger is better, yeah, but normally success on overmatch would be compounding, such that spending 6 should get you 10 instead.
The Russians can grind on for months and even years yet, but as long as the Ukrainians can match that- and that is the implication of matching the throughput scaling as they have so far- it's not really an enduring advantage if your limiting factor is more economic-political than literal manpower. Given the role Russian recruitment costs have played in the budget, and the tapering factor of early mobilization advantages, Russia is more likely to run out of men it can afford to bribe to volunteer before it conquers the four provinces.
That still leaves mass conscription down the road, but whatever you think of the political costs that Putin demonstratably disliked more than the current system, the political costs will be likely be worse if low-fiscal-cost conscription is scaled after years of volunteers got paid oodles, thus denying the new recruits even the pretense of equivalent bains, and after a war-recession has gotten underway.
I am not the biggest fan of social contract stability theory, and I believe I've said in the past that Putin can shoot down a revolt, but the man is a notorious strategic procrastinator and has a history of deferring this exact sort of choice.
I'm not convinced Hersh has any particular credibility in the eyes of the public as large. There's a reason vouches for his career credibility tend to reach back 20 years or more, rather than since the Bush administration. Even the man's more ardent defenders during the Ukraine story were leaning back to the Vietnam War reputation than his post-9-11 middle east pattern.
At least on a public/policy level, Hersh got dropped like most of the Bush-era anti-war movement when it became clear he was going to make the same sort of claims and accusations against Obama and the Democrats as he did against Bush. The sort of 'we could believe it' credibility that that was leant when he was making various accusations against Bush as a warmonger, or that Reagan was the real villains for Pakistan going nuclear, dried up when he was blaming the Syrian rebels for Assad's gas attacks, and accusing Obama of fabricating the Bin Laden raid. Abu Ghraib was real, but the man made so many unfalsifiable claims, and then claimed other things false, that even his fans tend to mumble mumble over the stuff since 2004.
NewCharlesInCharge
15hr ago
Huh. My expectation was that there was more to the story, not that literally nothing could be corroborated.
Typically the way these play out is the person is going to an appointment with USCIS, it turns out the person already has a deportation order or a felony or something in their past that disqualifies them, and ICE took the opportunity to pick them up and deport them.
Stories like these demonstrate misunderstanding of how these systems work. They are still lumbering bureacracies. There are no Judge Dredds that will unilaterally send you to CECOT. Even if you're not already a green card holder, and the USCIS civil servant conducting your interview decides he doesn't like your face and won't approve your application, it's not straight to deportation. A Notice To Appear is issued, which starts the ball rolling for an Order of Removal.
Even the expansions under Trump to for expedited removal wouldn't apply to the particulars of this "case."
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15hr ago
He also would have been 44 years old at the time, which seemed a little old for a Chilean communist; revolutionary leftism is a game for the young, no? But it turns out it's all fake news; he was probably never an asylee, and he died in his home country of Chile in 2019.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Un-restricting the TLM
TC is too unpopular with the first world bishops, and not really asked for by the Latin American or third world ones, to stick around. That doesn't mean Summorum Pontificum is coming back but it has to get loosened for political reasons.
normalized SSPX relations
What do you mean by 'normalized'.
There is a tendency for conservative Catholics in the Anglosphere to wait eagerly for a big, beautiful deal that isn't coming, and won't be anytime soon, and claim that nothing short of a big, beautiful deal makes any difference. TBH, the conservative American bishops want a big, beautiful deal. But no one else does. The Vatican doesn't particularly want a big, beautiful deal. The bishops in other locations the SSPX is present in don't want a big, beautiful deal(what they do want varies, of course). The liberals don't want a big, beautiful deal. The other Latin mass groups don't particularly care for a big, beautiful deal. The society itself doesn't want a big, beautiful deal. Instead the gradual process of increasingly regular legal status, relations, etc which has been happening since 2007, didn't cease under Francis, and is probably going to continue on roughly the same trajectory makes the society, the Vatican, the French bishops, etc very happy. French bishops don't want to be stuck answering for the society's far right political associations if the French deep state steps up the cordon sanitaire against FN(which the SSPX officially supported since the Jean-Marie le Pen days), and other European bishops are mostly leery of the same situation developing; SSPX leadership has literally been prosecuted for hate speech and this is, well, Europe. But they also don't want to take the risk of a hardline attitude towards the SSPX, and most of them like the flexibility to grant faculties and negotiate with them. The Vatican doesn't want a big, beautiful deal it can be beholden too- especially given the SSPX history of playing hardball- and doesn't want the political blowback of whatever deal might get announced. It also appreciates the SSPX's influence among 'independent/irregular' groups of a traditional persuasion. And the society enjoys the flexibility of not having a formal deal, obviously, but they also don't want the attention of anti-far-right secular politicians, or a blowback from the terms of such a deal, or whatever, and, crucially, they don't envision themselves as a permanent organization. The SSPX's conception of its own future is that it will dissolve itself upon accomplishing its goals of banishing modernism from the church- part of their confidence that this will happen is psychohistory and conspiracy theories about apocalyptic prophecies, of course, but they also see themselves as well on track to accomplish them over a long enough timeframe(and they do not think in terms of years or even decades) by their own metrics. The regular Latin mass groups see the irregularity as an insurance policy for themselves.
Instead everyone gets what they want, except for conservative Americans. The SSPX gets to make steady progress on their plans measured in centuries. The French bishops and liberals get a convenient way to distance themselves from icky right wingers, but without declaring them to be in schism. The Vatican doesn't have to deal with everything a big beautiful deal would entail. The FSSP and ICK(who control the negotiating commissions, either directly or through sympathizers) get their insurance policy. The bishops of persecuted Christians in parts of Asia get society priests to violate local laws for them with plausible deniability(no, I will not provide a source, although SSPX clergy who are appropriately placed will discuss it freely if asked in person). Nobody has to give a particular interpretation of certain passages of Vatican II quasi-official endorsement(this disappoints conservative American bishops, who broadly do not hate VII but also identify the 'hermaneutic of rupture' or 'supercouncil thesis' as a primary problem in the church today. They're also mostly canon lawyers who are used to dealing with a markedly more cliquish and sectarian local church than is the global norm- as I keep pointing out, tradcath is, in the US, one part of a collage of different conservative Catholic movements, all of which would be reckoned as basically concerned with orthodoxy, socially conservative, and highly devout. It might be the biggest but is definitely a top five, and highly religious Catholics in the US are increasingly picky about where they go to mass.). Nobody has to sort out what's going on with the SSPX's associated religious orders, everywhere all at once, or their chapels that local bishops don't like, or whatever.
TIRM
16hr ago
After the attempted shaming heaped upon Romney, they'd be wise to harden their hearts and automatically reject all shaming attempts from their left. It is a weapon wielded too much by Democrats in recent years. Time to deny them it.
I actually agree with your sentiment and the particular statements you just made. But, it has been poisoned due to recent misuse, so get ready for the era of no shame.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
16hr ago
I think you summed it up pretty succinctly, but you forgot the best conspiracy theory angle - Seymour Hersh was deliberately fed a poison pill that bore enough similarities to his other big breaks to convince him to suspend his skepticism, tanking the credibility of the concept in the eyes of the public!
I still don't think that makes him an irredeemable source though.
TIRM
16hr ago
According to the timing of this article, he moved to the US months or maybe a year before Pinochet was out of power after losing that plebiscite. Something like that. Interesting he got to remain for the following 3 decades even though his excuse was immediately made invalid. Also despite the ban on communists. Rules don't apply to this guy.
I hear it's decent at creative writing, but that's sort of a wishy-washy benchmark. Maybe it will become the smut model of choice like R1 was for a while? That's... something at least?
K2 is censored. It refused my prompts to write Evangelion and Nagatoro lemons on the grounds that the characters were underage. I tried Uzaki-chan, since that's a college setting, and it still refused because it didn't want to write smut about copyrighted characters. Then I tried an original story, and it gave me a million excuses before finally writing a non-explicit response.
Okay, so we need a jailbreak. Which is a pain in the ass, but since it's an open source model, at least it won't be patchable. I looked around, and I found Mei Unfettered. I applied it, and... that was not worth the effort. I still had to age up the characters, the prose was more like the obligatory sex scene in a romance novel than a Literotica story, and then there's this gem:
“Condom,” she says, reaching for the nightstand. “Unless you want to explain a post-apocalyptic child support claim.”
You're better off using Grok, jailbroken ChatGPT, and whatever experimental SOTA models get tested in the arena.
Dean
Flairless
16hr ago
I am on record for doubting the US navy could/would attack and seize the shipping vessels of much of the world that would still prefer to trade with China, but I will admit to chuckling at your description.
Seymore Hersh did a long and somewhat fanciful article claiming that the US bombed the Nord Stream Pipeline.
It was sourced to anonymous intelligence sources, but reflected a misunderstanding of how the US government functions (claiming certain parts of the US military did it to avoid the Congressional oversight that is also present under a different channel for the alleged organization, i.e. not avoiding Congressional oversight), operational security (claiming simultaneously that significant parts of the US government couldn't be told but also sharing it with key NATO allies), munition physics (claiming an airdrop of a precision submersible munition rather at altitudes that would break it, rather than lowering off a boat), and planning timelines (the bomb had to be planted during a major NATO exercise, when many NATO witnesses would be present, but detonated months later lest the Russians discover it, rather than use a boat closer to the time), and signal technology (the bomb had to be detonated by a signal from a military aircraft that would be conspicuously flying overhead, rather than a boat sailing through the area). It also relied on falsifiable claims (no NATO aircraft was observed launching from or flying around the places and times he claimed) that were falsified shortly after publication, unfalsifiable claims of vague, unspecified, but undefeatable Russian underwater sensors that would detect the bombs a few months after the bomb was planted but not the months prior, and a someone exaggerated view of the technical requirements of blowing up the pipeline (minimal requirements being professional swimming gear and a commercially available boat).
Whether you believe the US bombed the pipeline or not- and there have been people who insisted with straight faces no one else possibly could have the means or motive to and that even considering anyone other than the Americans was a self-evident waste of time- Hersh's account was an incompetent way to go about it. It was incompetence that treated itself seriously, presenting what it clearly thought was a super-professional and competent means that only the Americans could have achieved. In practice it was more Hollywood fantasy than Tom Clancy technothriller in quality, not least because Hersh had a bizar insistence of using any other method of delivery or initiation for a water-based explosive to a target in the water other than use a boat.
It also was not followed in the months or years since by any supporting revelations by any of the many motivated parties who would happily have the Americans receive the blame. Instead, eventually, Germany put the equivalent of an arrest warrant for Ukrainians. Coincidentally, the same week, the Wall Street Journal published an account blaming the Ukrainians.
(They rented a boat.)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
17hr ago
· Edited 16hr ago
The Department of Homeland Security weighs in
TL;DR: "¿Qué? ¿Quién?"
The family of the individual allegedly told reporters he was handcuffed and taken by federal officers at a green card appointment in Philadelphia. This claim is completely false. There is no record of the man appearing at any green card appointment in or around the area of Philadelphia on June 20, 2025.
Furthermore, ICE has not deported Luis Leon—a Chilean national—to Guatemala, as his family members have said. ICE’s only record of this individual entering the U.S. is in 2015 from Chile under the visa waiver program.
(ICE appears to be denying he was ever a refugee or had a green card!)
And The Morning Call -- the original paper reporting this -- has a new story
A Chilean journalist, Jose Del Pino of Canalo 13, said a doctor at the Guatemala City hospital where Nataly claimed to see her grandfather had no record of him. Additionally, Del Pino said, a man by the same name and date of birth died in Santiago, Chile, in 2019. Chilean citizens are issued national identification numbers and none matches another person with that name and birthday, he said. Del Pino provided a copy of the death certificate to The Morning Call.
Looks like the Count got himself banned over 100% fake news. The story is a hoax, the only bit of reality is the existence of an man named Luis Leon who would be 82 years old if he were still alive.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
Unimpressive sophistry. No one is demanding anyone "airbrush fentanyl from the story."
Shrike
17hr ago
We need to dramatically increase our advanced missile stocks and production capacities. We should probably just buy ships from e.g. South Korea and Japan, because boy did we fuck up there. We should also make Anduril a very valuable company by having enough autonomous capacities to make the Chinese realize that even if our carrier battle groups can be taken out, Taiwan would effectively be a minefield.
Sure. None of these, frankly, seem all that far-fetched.
The best way to deter China is not to have a bunch of missiles in a warehouse. The best way to deter them is making them fear the resolve of the US in defending its friends and allies in the face of risking WWIII.
Look, China can do math. All the "resolve" in the world doesn't do us any good without missiles in the warehouse.
Which is why the question of "will they/won't they" is more important than "just how long will US missile stocks last."
If we are confident nuclear madman theory alone is sufficient to deter China, we don't need to do any of the above. But I don't actually think anyone wants to die in nuclear fire for Kiev or Taipei and as such the threat of a nuclear madman is unlikely to be persuasive and, even if persuasive, unlikely to be consistent in a democratic society (note the difference in Russian foreign policy towards Ukraine after the election of President Biden!) So one concern with the nuclear madman threat is that it will simply result in waiting out the madman. (Another concern is that two can play that game, of course!)
fribble
17hr ago
I loved Agatha Christie as a kid and she's how I learned-and-it-stuck that adults really under estimate kids. I was in the gifted and talented program and my 4th grade teacher still publicly accused me of plagiarism for my book report on one of her books. Not that he ever explained who he thought I was cribbing from, but apparently 8 year olds aren't supposed to be reading and writing coherently. After he quizzed me, right then, in front of the class, he stopped. No apologies were made.
It amuses me that 3? Of my foundational childhood memories involve her books as a critical element.
Shrike
17hr ago
Right.
IMHO, the US Navy could conduct a devastating far blockade of China relatively easily. (That's something that is missed in discussions of superior Chinese shipbuilding: "The PLAN said that the US Navy was seizing all of their cargo vessels and I asked him what he was doing about it and he said he just kept building more ships and I told him it kinda sounded like he was feeding the US free cargo ships and Xi Jinping started crying.")
The main question is if that's actually something that is fast enough to help Taiwan. If they prioritize air and sea denial strategies, their survival becomes more likely.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
17hr ago
Yet AI skeptics tend to make moving the goalposts into the entire sport. I will grant that their objections exist in a range of reasonableness, from genuine dissatisfaction with current approaches to AI, to Gary Marcus's not even wrong nonsense.
I may or may not be an AI skeptic by your definition - I think it's quite likely that 2030 is a real year, and think it's plausible that even 2050 is a real year. But I think there genuinely is something missing from today's LLMs such that current LLMs generally fail to exhibit even the level of fluid intelligence exhibited by the average toddler (but can compensate to a surprising degree by leveraging encyclopedic knowledge).
My sneaking suspicion is that the "missing something" from today's LLMs is just "scale" - we're trying to match the capability of humans with 200M interconnected cortical microcolumns with transformers that only have 30k attention heads (not perfectly isomorphic, you could make the case that the correct analogy is microcolumn : attn head at a particular position, except the microcolumns can each have their own "weights" whereas the same attn head will have the same weights at every position), and we're trying to draw an equivalence between one LLM token and one human word. If you have an LLM agent that forks a new process in every situation in which a human would notice a new thing to track in the back of their mind, and allow each of those forked agents to define some test data and fine-tune / RL on it, I bet that'd look much more impressive (but also cost OOMs more than the current stuff you pay $200/mo for).
This is an interesting concern, and I mean that seriously. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be empirically borne out. LLMs are increasingly better at solving all bugs, not just obvious-to-human ones.
LLMs are increasingly better at solving a particular subset of bugs, which does not perfectly intersect the subset of bugs which humans are good at solving. Concretely, LLMs are much better at solving bugs that require them to know or shallowly infer some particular fact about the way a piece of code is supposed to be written, and fix it in an obvious way, and much much worse at solving bugs that require the solver to build up an internal model of what the code is supposed to be doing and an internal model of what the code actually does and spot (and fix) the difference. A particularly tough category of bug is "user reports this weird behavior" - the usual way a human would try to solve this is to try to figure out how to reproduce the issue in a controlled environment, and then to iteratively validate their expectations once they have figured out how to reproduce the bug. LLMs struggle at both the "figure out a repro case" step and the "iteratively validate assumptions" step.
I don't see this as a major impediment, why can't LLMs come up with new words if needed, assuming there's a need for words at all?
In principle there is no reason LLMs can't come up with new words. There is precedence for the straight-up invention of language among groups of RL agents that start with no communication abilities and are incentivized to develop such abilities. So it's not some secret sauce that only humans have - but it is a secret sauce that LLMs don't seem to have all of yet.
LLMs do have some ingredients of the secret sauce: if you have some nebulous concept and you want to put a name to it, you can usually ask your LLM of choice and it will do a better job than 90% of professional humans who would be making that naming decision. Still, LLMs have a tendency not to actually coin new terms, and to fail to use the newly coined terms fluently in the rare cases that they do coin such a term (which is probably why they don't do it - if coining a new term was effective for problem solving, it would have been chiseled into their cognition by the RLVR process).
In terms of why this happens, Nostalgebraist has an excellent post on how LLMs process text, and how that processing is very different from how humans process text.
With a human, it simply takes a lot longer to read a 400-page book than to read a street sign. And all of that time can be used to think about what one is reading, ask oneself questions about it, flip back to earlier pages to check something, etc. etc. [...] However, if you're a long-context transformer LLM, thinking-time and reading-time are not coupled together like this.
To be more precise, there are 3 different things that one could analogize to "thinking-time" for a transformer, but the claim I just made is true for all of them [...] [It] is true that transformers do more computation in their attention layers when given longer inputs. But all of this extra computation has to be the kind of computation that's parallelizable, meaning it can't be leveraged for stuff like "check earlier pages for mentions of this character name, and then if I find it, do X, whereas if I don't, then think about Y," or whatever. Everything that has that structure, where you have to finish having some thought before having the next (because the latter depends on the result of the former), has to happen across multiple layers (#1), you can't use the extra computation in long-context attention to do it.
So there's a sense in which an LLM can coin a new term, but there's a sense in which it can't "practice" using that new term, and so can't really benefit from developing a cognitive shorthand. You can see the same thing with humans who try to learn all the jargon for a new field at once, before they've really grokked how it all fits together. I've seen it in programming, and I'm positive you've seen it in medicine.
BTW regarding the original point about LLM code introducing bugs - absolutely it does, the bugginess situation has gotten quite a bit worse as everyone tries to please investors by shoving AI this and AI that into every available workflow whether it makes sense to or not. We've developed tools to mitigate human fallibility, and we will develop tools to mitigate AI fallibility, so I am not particularly concerned with that problem over the long term.
TIRM
17hr ago
Thanks for the links, but I seriously doubt learning a second language degrades your primary language abilities. Your brain is indeed not infinite, but it has a lot of space.
Not if he's posturing about how ancient and respectable the system is.
And frankly, I doubt he has any real respect for it beyond immediate utility to himself.
More options
Context Copy link