domain:pedestrianobservations.com
TIRM
10m ago
Israel is continuing to oppress Christians
Can we please proactively provide evidence for inflammatory claims? Or at least a clear explanation of what manner of oppression is occurring?
I know public proselytizing is illegal in Israel. I suppose the claimed oppression is something far harsher than that.
Laura Ingalls Wilder would be amazing. I basically grew up with her Little House book series (the first proper novel sized book I ever read was her Little House in the Big Woods). A few years ago I read the recently published Pioneer Girl which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who wants to get a good idea of what it was like living in the then desolate American Midwest in the 1870s.
I even spent a fair amount of time cataloging her family tree and learning about them from other sources on the internet. For instance Charles Ingalls was a Freemason, which was of course good to see. I'd have liked to have had the chance to meet some of her descendants today but unfortunately the whole line has died out, even including her sisters' descendants.
wemptronics
18m ago
Such individuals are often consumed by powerful manias to the point of self-ruin, or else they become condemned to inaction, paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties they have placed upon themselves.
What names come to mind?
gattsuru
26m ago
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be? ... Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution.
Immigration is the duh example, and I'd expect that we'll continue to see a parade of real and imagined oversteps by the Trump admin, along with real and imagined bad behaviors by protestors or state governments in response.
On this side, I think you're going to see trans stuff become much more prominent, quickly. Republicans see a lot of options as 80-20 issues, and a large part of the Dem activist branch isn't willing to Sister Souljah even the clearest nutjobs. But a lot of the political activists have very strong opinions and/or investments in this matter, they've got a massive amount of logistical and big corp support, and there's a lot of things that look like low-hanging fruit to social conservatives that are either hard problems or unacceptable compromises to even moderate Dems.
From the other direction, I expect that we'll have a Mass Casuality Gun Incident (a la Los Vegas) or targeted assassination (... that Dems care about, a la Giffords), and gun control will show up as a major political discussion again. There's a lot of Dems and self-described moderates that are absolutely sure they've got a vast majority of the population on their side, here, and they just need the right salience/terms, and while some of that reflects badly-run poll manipulation and huffing their own farts, it genuinely is a space that a lot of Republicans shoot their own feet.
In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
Serious domestic infrastructure attacks by a coordinated and uncaught adversary. We've seen them in warfront environments, a few nutjobs using them for publicity, and a few dry runs (aka Metcalf) by uncaught (and thus presumably serious) actors, and maybe some arguable cases (aka Florida Oranges), but there's Moore's Law of Mad Science reasons to suspect it to hit in the next ten years. It's bad when 'someone kills dozens at multiple subway stations and gets away with it' is the optimistic version of the problem, but the pessimistic one is much worse, and either version will have obvious direct culture war ramifications as increasingly broad conspiracy theories drop. More critically, it will also have a ton of 'obvious' and wildly contradictory solutions with large-scale impact on the innocent.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
26m ago
Scott once noticed that the best place in the middle east to be an Arab outside the oil rich states is Israel. Smart Palestinians should be arguing to the world that the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.
Bartender_Venator
31m ago
In Classical philosophy, this question is generally framed as "should the philosopher engage in political life", where he can maximally help his city but at the cost of cultivating wisdom. The simple answer is generally no, because the best way the wise man can help others is making them wiser, and some of those he teaches will go out and help the city themselves (and much better than if they didn't have his teaching).
Much appreciated! I'll take you up on that and DM you if I ever need a serious talk, but I'm quite all right for the time being. I'm not worried about dying per se, but the original surgery was very much Not Fun for various reasons (I woke up during the operation) and I'd like to avoid being in that position again if I can.
Something like an Apple Watch with ECG tracking might be good just for the peace of mind. I told my dad to get one
Very useful in some ways, surprisingly un-useful in others. It lets you have a look and get an idea of what is 'normal' and what is 'not normal' on a moment to moment basis. It's less useful in that many conditions produce the same biomarkers. For example, low heart rate variability can either be a sign of relaxation and recovery (good, go and get some exercise) or your body desperately trying to relax and activating the parasympathetic nervous system after serious exertion (maybe not good, you need to relax and not do anything strenuous). Low stress just before you wake can be a sign that you're well-rested (good) or that you're very tired and your alarm woke you in the middle of a sleep cycle (less good). And so on.
Ideally sensors are a good way to sort through the psychological chaff such as excess stoicism or excess hypochondria/anxiety and get a good idea about what's actually going on with people, but it doesn't seem to work that way. There also seems to be a dearth of individual high-detail studies, just very specific medical studies on unusual cohorts or vast field surveys.
I'm sorry, I had to laugh. This is a good reminder that patients are not made alike
I imagine this comes up a lot :) But for certain types of people saying 'I would love to do X with you but the doctor says I can't because of Y, what a joyless bastard he/she is amirite?' can be much easier than saying 'I'd like to do X but it makes me nervous'. I don't know how you'd go about finding which patient responds to which approach except through experience and stereotyping, but I bet it has a big payoff especially if you ever go private.
Bartender_Venator
36m ago
I can't say anything about Parker and Stone, but the creators of The Office (US) were big DFW fans and wrote in a lot of references to his work.
Bartender_Venator
40m ago
So many German books on the Hohenstaufen I will never be able to read... Oh well, I don't really need to, considering that Kantorowicz's Frederick II is an entirely true and accurate portrayal of just how great he was.
knob
1hr ago
The reason to believe that paying so much gets you a good CEO is that companies that want to continue existing care about costs, and so if large compensation packages for CEOs didn't attract good CEOs, market forces would pressure them to offer lower compensation. So the fact that we continue to see successful companies pay CEOs a ton is reason to believe.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Immigration enforcement/concern about trump authoritarianism(real or not, people are worried about it).
ulyssessword
1hr ago
No significant amount of aid. The claim I've heard is that there's enough to serve as a fig leaf and no more. By any fair assessment it's an anti-Israel activist project instead of a direct humanitarian one.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
In the long term, is that distinct from (2)? IIRC South Africa has had long-term white emigration that at some point starts to look like the "suitcase" option there, or sometimes worse. There was even that drama earlier this year when the current US administration looked to consider it as ethnic-cleansing-adjacent.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
Abiah Folger, Benjamin Franklin’s mother. She had ten children.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
Because that someone will just get killed and replaced with someone else who values killing Jews over everything else.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
Would you agree that, even if in general CEO pay is not a major expense on their companies, there are particular cases where it could be, and Musk at Tesla is one of those examples? And it's interesting that he wa able to get it past the board and all sorts of normal shareholder protections, to the point where it required a court ruling to stop it. It's not some perfect elegant self-maintaining system.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration? Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
What was stopping him before?
Domestic political pressure to bring home as many live hostages as possible.
Yes, Israel had been accused of callousness from without, and Bibi doesn’t seem to care (see e.g. his “super Sparta” remarks). However, his legitimacy and that of his coalition are hanging by a thread and so he is sensitive to political considerations from within.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
To be clear, if I was dictator of the US, and I decided not to do a maximum troll answer(let’s have $5 bills assigned to have Margaret Sanger or Phyllis Schafly at random…), I’d probably do Elizabeth Ann Seton and send the first run as bonuses to schoolteachers.
Bessie Coleman simply seems like an answer that makes everyone happy.
gattsuru
1hr ago
If you're doing TCP, even small amounts of latency can have bizarre impact when you're dealing with relatively large bandwidth compared to the underlying MTU size, window size and buffer size (and if going past the local broadcast domain, packet size, though getting any nontrivial IPv6 layout to support >65k packets is basically impossible for anyone not FAANG-sized). I can't say with much confidence without knowing a lot about the specific systems, and might not be able to say even with, but I've absolutely seen this sort of behavior caused by the receiving device taking 'too long' (eg, 10ms) to tell the sender that it was ready for more data, and increasing MTU size and sliding window size drastically reduced the gap.
benmmurphy
1hr ago
it could also be you have a bunch of bad options for the TCP connection. tho, i suspect iperf would should have good defaults. a common problem with TCP application is not setting TCP_NODELAY and be a cause of extra latency. the golang language automatically sets this option but i'm sure a lot of languages/libraries do not set it. you can also have problems between userspace and kernelspace (but maybe not at this speed?). like if you can only shift 200 Mbps between the kernel and userspace because of syscall overhead on a single thread and in the multiple stream case you are using multiple threads then maybe that is why the performance improves. also, if you are using multiple streams you are going to have a much larger max receive window. there is some kind of receive buffer configuration (tcp_rmem?) that controls how large the receive buffer is and the thus the receive window. its possible this is not large enough and so using 10x connections means you effectively now have 10x the max receive window. also, there is tcp_wmem configuration that controls the write buffer in a similar way. cloudflare has an article on optimizing tcp_rmem https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/ which shows their production configuration.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
I don't think that the way Marx is treated is all that out of the ordinary compared to how other canonical historical philosophers are treated (and you can find other historical thinkers who have a bigger cult of personality, like Lacan imo). I think the locus of emotional investment is more in the cause of socialism itself rather than Marx as a person.
The particular attention paid to Marx's writings and Marx as a person may seem strange to people with a STEM background, where primary historical sources are never read by anyone except dedicated historians. But that's simply how things are done in philosophy. If you want to do serious scholarly or intellectual work using X thinker’s ideas, then you're expected to read what X actually wrote.
No one treats Marx's thought as an infallible edifice which can never be criticized or amended. The Frankfurt school thought that Marxism had to be supplemented with psychoanalysis and cultural criticism in order to address some of its blind spots. Wokes are intrinsically suspicious of Marx because he was white and male. Etc.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
you can just choose not to invest in companies that you think overpay their executives.
Well, I can't, because I'm not a finance genius who has devoted my life to picking stocks. My money is mostly in simple index funds, because (a) that's what everyone assured me was the smart thing to do and (b) those are simple and convenient for me to use as a regular person. My company 401k plan never offered me a "basically the S&P 500, but avoid stocks that overpay their executives" fund. Most other normal stockholders are in the same situation as me. I don't even get a chance to vote on proxy votes, since my share votes are handled by the index fund managers. And even when I did own individual stocks in the past, and I got a proxy vote as a regular stock holder, my vote was so small (a few shares out of billions at a blue chip company) that it didn't seem worthwhile to even mail it in. I had less power to influence them as a stockholder than I do to influence the US government as a voter, and that's a pretty low bar.
And most other players can't do this sort of thing either. Rich people might have their money tied up in stock for the company they worked for. Finance managers have to convince the rich people they work for that they're doing a safe, normal strategy. Hedge funds have to follow rules that mitigate risk for their institution. And most people just aren't interested in this sort of thing.
Ok, in principle there's room for some young Warren Buffet type to make his name by finding these companies, shorting them, and outperforming the market. But only to the extent that their excess compensation takes away from every other factor going on, and his efforts to short the stock would be countered by everyone else shovelling money into it. As long as the executives keep it below a few percent, it would be hard to notice.
But think about how far this has gone. It's no longer "the executives deserve this much money because it's what's best for the company." It's "they can pocket hundreds of millions without hurting the company in a way that anyone steps in to stop them." You could make the same argument for how a retail cashier could get away with stealing money out of the till, or how a middle manager could get away with embezzling from the accounting department, but for them it's illegal and there are protections in place to stop that sort of thing.
All of this to say- the market is not some omniscient, perfect entity. It's mostly efficient, but there are still plenty of efficiencies. I think there's a tendency among shape-rotator type people to assume that it's perfectly efficient because that makes for a much more elegant argument, but the reality is a lot more messy.
Also this:
It's the shareholders who are getting cheated here, not the general public or the employees
I would argue that the executives, especially the CEOs, are being disengenuous here. They're not just some shmuck working behind the scenes, they act as the public face of the company, for both its employees and the general public. Their personal life reflects on the company just like a politician's personal life reflects on his country. When the CEO tries to make himself seem like a moral paragon when he's obviously just there to grab as much cash out of the company as he can get away with, that's going to demoralize every single employee and tank their performance far beyond the actual cash impact of his salary.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
The solutions usually require relatively simple debugging steps that build off of basic foundational knowledge, but the LLMs don't have the ability to reason through this foundational knowledge well, and I don't expect the transformer architecture to ever get that reasoning ability.
That is one of my big skeptic points with LLMs. They don't (and can't) reason, they are producing what is likely to be correct based on their training data. When having this discussion with my boss he argued "they know everything about networking", and I don't see how they can be accurately said to know anything at all. They can't even be counted on to reliably reproduce the training data (source: have witnessed many such failures), let alone stuff that follows from the training data but isn't in it. Maybe we will get there (after all, cutting edge research is improving almost by definition), but we aren't there yet.
Thanks for the story, as well. I hadn't considered an explanation like that so I'll have to take a look at that if we ever want to dig deep and find the root cause.
It would be nice if it was the social media digital id thing all the five eyes countries are currently doing to try to ensnare the US and enforce their social media policies.
More options
Context Copy link