domain:city-journal.org
Thoroughlygruntled
7m ago
Letter of Marque is one of my favorites. The privateer crew are so fun and colorful.
07mk
8m ago
Especially since policy can always change. You don't wanna say something will happen only for the underlying causes to disappear underneath your claim.
Hedging oneself with careful verbiage about one's predictions about the future (which I hear are quite hard to get right) is indeed good practice. However, this argument doesn't make that case. Because there's nothing wrong or shameful or embarrassing or negative at all about saying that something will happen if [underlying cause] holds true. This is a positive claim about cause and effect which could be proven false if the underlying cause continues to hold but that thing doesn't happen. Unlike saying something could happen, which is really just a nothing statement that is almost entirely unfalsifiable.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9m ago
Right, I think I addressed that in the longer paragraph above. At least as I remember it, the dismissal of Epstein being Israeli intel did implicitly rely on dismissing the joint probability of the entire theory. If there is in fact a positive correlation between "Israeli intel" and "pedo coverup conspiracy", the conditional evidence flow actually almost appears to reverse - rather than having "Epstein is Israeli intel & there was a pedo coverup conspiracy in his case" being especially unlikely because the two components are individually unlikely (or even more unlikely, if conspiracy theorists are posited to succumb to their usual temptation to see all conspiracy tropes the moment they catch a whiff of one), we now have P(Israeli intel | pedo coverup conspiracy) and P(pedo coverup conspiracy | Israeli intel) both greatly increased over the baseline probabilities, and evidence of either one also amounts to evidence of the other.
faceh
9m ago
Thankfully there are plenty of options for LED lighting, so in my personal use I lean heavily on red.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
9m ago
If I did, it was only because people here wanted me to share actual sources about my claims regarding HIV and monkeypox prevalence. Oh dear, I think you're right.
Thoroughlygruntled
10m ago
I just started reading Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword, a revisionist history of the origins of Islam and how the Quranic narrative evolved over the course of the 7th-9th centuries. I haven't gotten into the really juicy stuff yet, but so far it's been a fascinating look into how the conflict between Rome and Persia set the stage for the rise of Islam.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
14m ago
or as a result of it
Which is then further complicated by statistics intentionally erasing the distinction between "getting laid was the participant's explicit intention" (and she made the mistake of disclosing it after the fact, or was pressured into such a confession), "had to put out for lodging/food", and "got far more than they bargained for".
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
16m ago
So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing?
Nothing.
Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?
No.
All memes aside, I would very much like for the crash retrieval program to be real, although I recognize that the probability of it actually being real is meager.
The simulation masters have been teasing the alien reveal for almost a decade now, almost as much as they've been hinting at a WWIII/Nuclear exchange arc. I'm hoping it happens during Trump's term, at least.
More seriously, I think it is important to track these things and try to identify them, and interacting with them would be cool as hell, but I'm coming around to the idea that we're (currently) alone in the universe, and probably because we're one of the first true intelligent species to reach a point where we can really think about extraterrestrial life in a serious way.
IF these interstellar objects are sent by other intelligent civilizations then they're probably intended to kill us. And if so the tech difference is probably sufficient that we can't do anything about it.
Incidentally, this is just another reason why not mucking about with our civilization and bootstrapping some off-planet industry is a good idea.
Some days it feels strange that there's not more agreement on the following:
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We absolutely have the tech to get into space and establish a presence there, if not full colonies.
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There are literal gigatons of resources in space that we could make use of, to say nothing of energy.
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Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is out there in space. Whatever you really care about or want, there's more of it out there.
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Humanity has no compelling reason to stay on this one planet until we get wiped out by something.
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THEREFORE, we should be removing every possible barrier, bureaucratic, economic, or otherwise, to getting our space industries to commercial viability.
It can be a competition, sure, but stop mucking about with environmental reviews and such that are pure deadweight loss.
But then I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards
Compared to what we're doing with our efforts to improve conditions on earth. Which involve depleting whole national treasuries in first world countries to keep third world countries afloat, failing at that, then opening up the floodgates to allow their citizens into the first world countries directly, without considering the second-order impacts this has on sustaining advanced industries like spaceflight. And other things.
Also depleting said treasuries to keep some of the most nonproductive, anti-civilization native citizens comfortable, for minimal perceptible gain. This isn't even a racial point, this is just a "questioning of national/international priorities" point.
Although I'm aggressively libertarian, I could be convinced to become a single-issue voter for whatever politician or party made it their platform that they would drop all corporate taxes on any company in the "space travel and industry" space to zero, protect such companies against all threats to their ability to operate, and oppose, with (sanctioned) violence if necessary, anybody who is either directly or indirectly attempting to keep humans stuck on this rock in the name of, e.g. 'social justice,' 'environmentalism' 'equality,' 'tradition,' 'religious objection,' '
Simply put, I have literally never heard a viable moral objection to humanity becoming a multi-planet, let alone multi-stellar civilization, and unless the whole of humanity actively agrees that we really shouldn't do it, I think there's a moral imperative to get out there ASAP.
Oh, and, incidentally, This means I kind of have to support Trump to some degree. And oppose the Dems, because they're the ones trying to hamstring Elon Musk and SpaceX.
This doesn't mean I think Trump's a good guy, or that Dems are evil, but right now it is actually 'impossible' for me to imagine a future where we have a booming space industry if the Democrats gain control of the FedGov.
Sorry for the screed. But it is relevant because it actually BARELY FACKIN' MATTERS if we can detect these interesting objects hurtling through space if we lack the capability to reach out and touch them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19m ago
There's a certain primal appeal to fighting, absolutely, but I also feel like combat sports s&c is pretty unsophisticated or downright goofy compared to more specialized events because, well, perfectly optimized s&c isn't all that important relative to skills training.
Definitely, the skill training is a far bigger aspect of the sport, but if we're talking spherical cows here I think that given equal skill, optimizing for pure fitness MMA provides the best single-event test for general fitness, because it punishes any lack or specialization in a way that other sports don't. What you perceive as "goofy" is in my mind more like "optimized for achieving balance across multiple domains of fitness." The specialized marathon runner can use more "sophisticated" methods because he has absolutely no need to optimize for upper body strength. The rock climber has no need to worry about his legs and may actively seek to shrink them. The MMA fighter must balance everything, any lack can be exploited, while maintaining a precise weight.
More generally, it occurs to me that the word "fit" by its etymology and other meanings pretty strongly implies specificity--fit for something or other.
Sure, and that's an important consideration, Pogacar doesn't stay up at night upset about his upper body strength. But it's also obviously the case that optimizing fitness for a given activity A produces different levels of fitness for B and C; and in turn optimizing for B will produce different levels of A and B, and similarly for C to B and A. We can ask how good A practitioners are at B and C and vice versa, and call that a general level of fitness.
So hypothetically, let's say we can (for some reason) only recommend a single exercise goal to someone. A is pure cardio, training for a marathon. B is pure strength training, 1rm back squat. C is the 5 minute SFG I snatch test.
How would you describe the property of C: that it makes you better at B and A, relative to how much A makes you better at B and C or B makes you better at C and A? When you say you are suspicious of general fitness, are you saying such a property doesn't exist, that it's impossible to describe, or that it never matters to anyone? Because it does seem to me like such a property exists, that it is at least theoretically possible to describe (though easily goodhart'd by something like a Fran Time), and that it does matter to a lot of people, myself among them.
birb_cromble
22m ago
I wouldn't discount the entire title, but a bad PM fits the "fake email job"-shaped hole so well that it might as well be made for it.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
27m ago
This is awakening me to a sort of Gell-Mann amnesia effect: if the LLMs are this wrong and this stubborn in areas where I can test its output, where else is it wrong? Can I trust it in the rough analysis of a legal situation? In a summary of the literature on global warming? In pulling crime stats? I'm inclined to think it shouldn't be trusted for anything not either harmless or directly verifiable.
Angela Collier has a video about "vibe physics" that talks about this in some detail. In the section I linked to she discusses how crackpot physics emails have changes since the advent of LLMs. People will add caveats about how they talked to this or that LLM about their theory and the LLM told them it made sense. She'll point out in reply how LLMs will just agree with whatever you say and tend to make stuff up. And then the people sending the email will... agree with her! They'll talk about how the LLM made simple mistakes when talking about the physics the emailer does understand. But obviously once the discussion has gotten to physics the emailer doesn't understand the LLM is much more intelligent and accurate! It turns out having the kind of meta-cognition to think "If this process produced incorrect outcomes for things I do understand, maybe it will also produce incorrect outcomes for things I don't understand" is basically a fucking super power.
Thoroughlygruntled
29m ago
You can pry my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands. That people don't know how to use them properly only means we need to teach English composition better.
johnfabian
31m ago
A much more frustrating element of SecureSignals' writing is that he will often make some passing mention of some supposed ironclad consensus that exists on this one niche topic, that requires no sourcing or validation (after all, it is the consensus!).
He will then of proceed to conspicuously deny universally agreed-upon facts.
yofuckreddit
31m ago
I understand there's a culture of letting your kids do whatever they want. I see it every day. It doesn't make it right and more importantly doesn't transfer responsibility to someone else.
yofuckreddit
33m ago
I don't find this convincing at all. The parents failing here are elder millennials with a smattering of young gen Xers: digital natives. They're being lazy and stupid, and they should know better after being on the Internet at similar ages as their kids.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
40m ago
Mostly monitoring the situation and fixing the odd bug that pops up. Things are pretty stable, so I've been plotting my next move.
Not gonna lie, the main reason this project got as far as it did is using the old nitter+miniflux setup daily, the thought of returning to Twitter, or even just plain old Nitter is unfathomable to me at this point, and it's been driving me to power through until I got something usable. While there's a whole bunch of basic features I should add to make it reasonably usable to anyone who isn't me, the thought of working on them instantly sends me into a comma. OTOH, I've found myself more and more frustrated with Substack, and thinking that it sure would be nice to be able to follow all the people from there on the same app I use to keep track of Twitter. Importing articles would be easy enough, but I think I'm more interested in the "Notes", but the prospect of integrating them was daunting. Cursory searches revealed no alternative Substack readers that I could raid for code, so I thought it would take forever to figure out how to deal with their API... until I actually looked at it. Turns out you can literally just fetch Notes with curl, so I won't have to worry about reverse-engineering their authentication process, unless I'll want to implement fetching paid content.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
DenpaEnthusiast
51m ago
If you put the sentence "Ohio law states that you may not loiter less than three get away from a pubic building." into Google docs, it will correct "get" to "feet", and "pubic" to "public". This has been the case for around 15 years.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
52m ago
I'm in much more agreement with "80% of work is done by 20% of employees" (although I think it's a larger share than 20%)
I disagreed strongly with "most office work is fake email jobs"
"Many employees don't work at full capacity" =/= "many employees have fake jobs"
The shorts would be against whatever companies you think are wasting large sums of money paying people to do nothing, as presumably they're very liable to be disrupted by companies with more competitive cost structures
aldomilyar
53m ago
Personally my view on the white collar replacement thing is more that AI can replicate most of the beige do-nothing-particular existing that defines a huge chunk of the white collar economy for far less per head. I don't think that AI's necessarily gonna launch a new frontier, but there's so much essentially complete dead-weight in the white collar economy and that might be a catalyst towards rationalization.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
53m ago
There was a local case recently where a 15 year old runaway became a Qanon cause celebre, with the parents and the local whackadoodles accusing random local families of being child traffickers and having kidnapped her.
She turned up a few weeks later in the deep south with a 20 year old boyfriend.
Obsession with some kind of Pennsylvania Pizzagate distracted from any actual effort of finding her, to say nothing of the harm done to those accused in public of child trafficking.
Eetan
55m ago
Israeli-born citizens should not be allowed to be attorney generals. Or they should recuse themselves in any case involving Israelis. Or Jews. Or they shouldn't be allowed to be government officials. Or lawyers. Or something.
If, hypothetically, 95% of Italian-American community supported the Mafia, would be Italian-American prosecutor or judge dealing with organized crime case seen as impartial?
rae
55m ago
You can get 10-20 tokens/s with CPU only inference as long as you have at least 32GB of RAM. You can offload some layers to your GPU and get probably 30-40 tokens/s? Of course, a 3090 gives you >100t/s but it’s still only $800, I’d consider that mid-range compared to a $2k+ 5090.
Swapping from the SSS is only necessary if you’re running huge 100B+ models without enough RAM.
Rov_Scam
55m ago
But this isn't a criminal court, I do consider repeated claims, even by Epstein himself, of being related to intelligence to be significant evidence even if it wouldn't be allowed in a criminal court.
The alleged Acosta quote isn't merely hearsay. If an individual who heard the quote went on the record and said he personally heard Acosta say that, then it would be hearsay, and would be entitled to a certain amount of weight, less than if Acosta went on the record himself, but still a decent amount, regardless of admissibility in court. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an unnamed "Senior Administration official" who told a journalist that Acosta said that, and we don't even know if the official in question even heard the quote themself or is merely repeating a rumor. That is, at minimum, double hearsay with an anonymous intermediary. It's the kind of thing that is only to be believed by someone who is already motivated to believe it.
Go back and read my writeup from a couple weeks ago on what actually happened in DOJ during the initial Epstein investigation, and explain to me how him being an intelligence asset or whatever fits in. At what point was Acosta told to "leave it alone"? How does a guilty plea involving jail time and sex offender registration equate to leaving it alone? Why were Epstein's attorneys so dissatisfied with the deal that they spent nearly a year trying to get out of it after it was signed? Why didn't senior DOJ officials in Washington side with Epstein when he referred the matter for departmental review? If Epstein had dirt and was pissed at the government for prosecuting him, why didn't he use it during the near decade between his release and rearrest, during which time he was the subject of numerous lawsuits?
There's an extensive record of the initial Epstein deal and if no one inserting wild conspiracy theories about Epstein getting off easy because he was a Mossad agent has done the basic work of familiarizing themself with that record. Instead they start from the premise that Epstein was involved in intelligence and work backward, ignoring anything that doesn't support their theory. Not doing so is like writing about European economic development in the second half of the 20th century without knowing about WWII.
Usually, the buyer has to eat the difference. The seller gets to collect the money.
On the individual level, if you're the director who wanted to put a feather in his cap about how he's a forward-thinker pushing the company forward, you end up with egg on your face. So, before it happens, you mandate that all employees have to use AI. Then, once that goal of token consumption is hit, you declare victory and get a sweet bonus before jumping ship to another company to help modernize their processes by integrating AI based on your success in the first company.
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