domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11m ago
Oh, I didn't say I've tried all that. Definitely not the LSD.
Trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
Trying to decapitate the enemy leadership has been a thing for almost as long as total war has. There were hundreds of plots to Hitler, and dozens of Nazi plots to assassinate Churchill and Stalin. The only reason none of these worked is that all parties involved were surrounded by fearsome state security apparatuses, and because infiltrating a dozen commandoes into a foreign country to kill VIP under massive security is pretty hard. Later during the nuclear age, assassinating leaders of major powers became untenable along with all the other aspects of total war.
@erwgv3g34 And it’s pretty ironic that Scott mentions Lincoln, given that Lincoln died as the result of a botched and too-late massive decapition strike against the entire Union leadership structure. The plot was supposed to kill President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Secretary of State William Seward, and Commanding General of the US Army Ulysses Grant. The plot fell apart near the date of its execution for multiple reasons (partially because the plan came together too late to actually win the war) and only Lincoln and Seward needed up being attacked.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
12m ago
Is that more or less than played up the Steele dossier, or reported that Trump commandeered the Beast, or denied the validity of the Biden laptop?
wingdingspringking
14m ago
One interesting implication of all of this (that you hinted when discussing future generations) is that Darwinism is coming back in a big way. Short of some world shattering event occurring (like an AI singularity or nuclear war), it looks like the world will be inherited by two groups.
The first are those who have such a strong drive to reproduce that they overcome all the perverse incentives and still have large numbers of kids. Presumably, if these incentives exist for multiple generations, after a century or two we will have selected for people who will reproduce in spite of pressure to the contrary.
The second are groups that impose strict social mores in such a way that they prevent such incentives from infiltrating their communities. Hasidic Jews and Mennonites still have very large numbers of children, and show no signs of slowing down. These groups have also existed for centuries during periods of massive social change, which lends credence to the idea that they will continue to do so.
All of this brings me to what I consider to be the most lamentable point of this whole discussion; we will never get to see what happens. It sort of feels like watching a movie and leaving right at the climax. Massive technological, social, cultural, and environmental trends all peaking at the same time, and then no resolution. Such a shame.
ThenElection
17m ago
As a bi guy, I've dated both men and women. And it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to get a date with a man than it is with a woman. Quantitatively, my inbound like/match rate online was literally 100x when matching with men (I'd get a number of likes in a day with men that it'd take me almost a year with women).
Sure, a fair bit of that was just casual sex. But even if 75% were just looking for casual sex, that's still an order of magnitude more ease dating men than women.
I suspect this mismatch is that your "average man" encompasses a lot of things that make him substantially above average.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
19m ago
Where does Jung say that Satan needs to be raised into the trinity? I remember reading something about how we need to embrace the divine feminine, but don't remember the Satan part.
In the Red Book, where he says all sorts of weird stuff. It was only released a few years ago so this wasn't common knowledge for most of the period of Jung scholarship. He also basically tried to start a cult, among other things.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
20m ago
I think needing to have "meaning in your life" is largely overrated. Life is largely something you just get through -- nature loved using the stick much more than the carrot.
It seems to differ quite a bit from person to person. For people like me, having no meaning in life is enough to drive you to drink, or far worse. I'd imagine this might also be a semantic issue - you probably have "meaning" in the sense I mean, even if you don't necessarily see it that way. For me meaning is like... motivation to do anything whatsoever. Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
Modern society is extremely cushy in most ways, sanding off the edges of the stick. This is why I see populists as a natural enemy -- they want "burn it all down" for stupid reasons based largely on hallucinations, and they'd take my comfy pillows away in the process.
Perhaps you are typical minding here. The majority of people, it seems, don't have their happiness or satisfaction levels meaningfully raised by material gain. Perhaps there is more to life than creature comforts. I agree that most people are under massive delusions though, it's quite sad.
If I have any life goals, it would be to build something, probably a video game or maybe something with AI. I've made essentially zero progress in that goal, but I have no illusions that the fault lies with anyone other than myself for being excessively lazy.
Why do you want to build something?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
21m ago
It's so much worse than that.
I was just reading an interview with a Ukranian medic and they air drop anti-personnel mines with drones not only do you need to watch the sky, you need to watch your step because there might be a butterfly mine there today that wasn't there yesterday.
It goes on and on
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
24m ago
Sigh. Yes, as I said, I've heard this before. Most nonbelievers or lapsed believers who've made a sincere attempt at belief have. "Read these books. Try meditating. Try prayer. Try fasting. Try LSD." It's always that one thing you haven't tried that will convince you, and if you have tried them, well, you didn't do it right, or you didn't approach it with a truly open mind.
Just curious! Not trying to do a gotcha. I'm impressed you've tried all of that my man. Sad to hear that you didn't have the same experience I had. Not out of like, contemptuous pity or anything but I genuinely do find my life is way better. I wish more folks were able to find more meaning in their lives.
Not that you necessarily did anything wrong. Not sure what to tell you, I'm not an expert on these matters.
I believe it changed your actions. I doubt it really changed your character. Were you a bastard who turned into a nice guy? Or did you just stop swearing and cheating on your wife? I mean, I've heard of people who went from amoral monsters to devout good samaritans after a road to Damascus experience, but it seems pretty rare and most often involves coming off a drug or alcohol addiction, which brings into question whether it was the drugs or the lack of religion making them a bastard before.
Hmm I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "character" here. My conversion did help me overcome some drug and alcohol issues, so perhaps that had something to do with it!
But when it comes to "drugs or lack of religion," and if the religion is the only way to overcome the pull of drugs, how does that invalidate the power of religion?
jkf
27m ago
The OG Macintosh GUI toolkit was absolutely excellent -- a real revelation to a young programmer, and an intro to O-O done right in my case.
A port/replication of the application side of that would be an interesting OS project -- I doubt the codebase is available, but the IP issues (which led Windows down its monstrous path) should be gone by now, and it was extremely well documented.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
30m ago
That is unfortunately true. I wish that such blatant double standards didn't exist, but what can you do.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
31m ago
A bit of both I guess? I'm married, but my wife and I met through OKCupid a decade ago. So there wasn't the need to navigate asking her out on a date, because we met in a way that made it clear what the expectations for the relationship were.
Lizzardspawn
33m ago
It's going to follow the model of Libya and Syria, with bombing campaigns coincided with arming and fomenting a civil war in Iran
I am all on board if this can lead to united Kurdistan. Erbil is probably the only good place to live in the region.
jkf
34m ago
He does say that he doesn't actually bench press these girls, so I'm not sure the mechanics there -- I can certainly lift cooperative average-sized women (or children) off the floor by the waist (from a standing position) without using my legs much.
For a bench-press equivalent, maybe they could wear a belt with side-handles, and crouch over one's chest? It would be about like pressing a large kettle-bell, and no need for the woman to be also capable of a plank or whatever. I'm pretty confident I could lift >200 lbs this way, and I'm not as fit as I used to be -- I get the feeling this is a larger lady than he has in mind?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
34m ago
Sigh. Yes, as I said, I've heard this before. Most nonbelievers or lapsed believers who've made a sincere attempt at belief have. "Read these books. Try meditating. Try prayer. Try fasting. Try LSD." It's always that one thing you haven't tried that will convince you, and if you have tried them, well, you didn't do it right, or you didn't approach it with a truly open mind.
My conversion dramatically changed my own actions and character, in concrete ways.
I believe it changed your actions. I doubt it really changed your character. Were you a bastard who turned into a nice guy? Or did you just stop swearing and cheating on your wife? I mean, I've heard of people who went from amoral monsters to devout good samaritans after a road to Damascus experience, but it seems pretty rare and most often involves coming off a drug or alcohol addiction, which brings into question whether it was the drugs or the lack of religion making them a bastard before
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
42m ago
The existential dread that you've truly wasted the one life you were given on this Earth, and there is no going back.
As opposed to the existential dread that you've wasted the one life you were given by working? And not even for nothing, but to actively fund the destruction of everything that used to give life meaning.
Then you die. Or at least many do.
Everyone does.
gattsuru
44m ago
Most of the common complaints are about minimum memory and CPU footprint; VSCode takes comparable resources to run as far more fully-featured IDEs. But if you've got the specs these are unlikely to actually feel bad, it's just kinda goofy.
The biggest problems are pretty hardware-specific, but they've been pretty bad when they pop up. I've had VSCode pull 16+GB memory (especially bad on an 8GB-RAM system) or peg multiple threads at 100% core utilization just idling, all with the default configuration, no extensions. A lot of it seems very dependent on renderer, especially since it started defaulting to a hardware renderer even on Intel integrated GPUs, but sometimes 'normal' developer workstations with multimonitor configurations have gone really wonky. While a less common use case, I've seen bigger problems with massive files in VSCode than in VisualStudio, Intellij, Android Studio (which isn't great itself!), or NotePad++, sometimes to the point where I had to shutdown the computer because VSCode was capping out CPU utilization so high that I couldn't use the mouse or keyboard.
((I've also had problems with deployments of VSCode, rather than VSCode itself. Which, tbf, usually aren't even the Electron developers faults, but since it includes things like a 40+ GB electron update, it's still worth keeping in mind before committing to VSCode as a day-to-day dev environment.))
VSCode defends itself in many cases by pointing to issues with extensions, and to some extent that's fair: just as it's not the Electron devs fault that a distro screwed up once, it's not VSCoders fault that a random html/css extension can peg a cpu. You can't build a framework that can contain every sufficiently dedicated forkbomb without making it useless. But you're almost certainly going to need some extensions just handle basic compiling and debug functionality. And some of them are pretty bad! My worst experience have been with the Java variants, with high idle CPU utilization across the board, but that's mostly because VSCode is the 'officially supported' tool for FIRST FRC so I see it on a lot of different non-optimized hardware. I don't do much webdev, but the few times I've run into ESLint, even with a minimal ruleset and properly configured (why is apply-rules-on-typing even an option?!) it's been pretty painful.
mildly_obsolete
45m ago
Trump tweeted ‘get out of Tehran now’ and there were immediately massive traffic jams leaving Tehran
What a claim. There were traffic jams leaving the city from day one. And still, the traffic probably did pick up after he made the threat, US & Trump is understood to be slavishly devoted to Israelis, likely to sign off on and aid a nuclear strike on the city.
far less clearly involved in than Ukraine
Direct involvement in air defence, active support in the bombing campaign. This is less than in the first weeks in Ukraine?
I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.
From "What if drone warfare had come first?" by Scott Alexander:
The scene is the Oval Office. Three of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GENERAL HAWKE, GENERAL STEELE, and GENERAL RIPPER, are meeting with THE PRESIDENT. The meeting has been a long and exhausting discussion of drone strikes, and they are reaching the end.
PRESIDENT: I think we only have one more matter left to discuss. As you know, I have recently been worried about the moral cost of our drone war. So many lives lost. So many civilian casualties. I tasked DARPA with coming up with a new type of warfare, one which will end some of the troubling moral quandaries with which we are forced to wrestle every day. I believe General Ripper has been briefed on the results?
HAWKE: Mr. President, once again, I object to this pie-in-the-sky project. Drone warfare was good enough for our ancestors and it is good enough for us. The Romans used surgically precise ballista strikes to assassinate Hannibal without harming the Carthaginian populace. Abraham Lincoln used guided hot-air balloons to knock out top Confederate officials and keep this country united. Literally hundreds of people died in World War I before the British were finally able to kill Kaiser Wilhelm with a carefully-aimed zeppelin. To abandon drone warfare now for some untested new project would be an insult to their memory!
PRESIDENT: General Hawke, I appreciate your concerns, and I promise I will not be overly hasty to embrace these new ideas. But I'd like to hear what General Ripper has to say.
RIPPER: (interjecting) Guys!...Guys! Guys, listen! This is going to be so awesome. Listen to this! We take hundreds of thousands of people...guys, listen!...we take hundreds of thousands of people, give them really really really powerful automatic weapons...this is going to be so awesome...we take hundreds of thousands of people and give them really powerful automatic weapons and put them on planes and give them parachutes and drop them into our enemies' cities and then they just start shooting everything BLAM BLAM BLAM until our enemies run away and we're like HA HA HA HA HA THIS IS OUR CITY NOW and then we win!
STEELE: What the hell, Ripper?
RIPPER: No, listen, this will totally work! We take hundreds of thousands of people. We can use young kids and poor people and minorities, because we don't have to pay them as much. And then we give them really really big weapons. Like, not just the kinds of guns hunters use. Not even the kind of guns we give police. Guns that just NEVER STOP SHOOTING BULLETS! You can just swing them in a big arc and it will leave an arc of bullets everywhere and anyone anywhere in that arc will be dead! It will be SO AWESOME!
HAWKE: Ripper, are you mad?
RIPPER: Guys, think about it! You're Ayatollah Sistani, or Mullah Omar, or one of those motherf@*kers. You're having breakfast in your house one day when WHAM! A hundred thousand American teenagers and minorities RIGHT IN YOUR CITY with guns that never stop shooting bullets! There are bullet holes in your walls and in your gardens and now they're shooting your water supply and your power plant and everything. Do you think you're going to keep having your f@*king breakfast? Or do you think you're going to start waving an American flag and get on board with American policies like, right away?
PRESIDENT: General Ripper, frankly your idea seems at best ill-advised! Just to take one of many objections, we'll never be able to gather a hundred thousand Americans in secret. Ayatollah Sistani will hear about our plan long before we can surprise him.
RIPPER: And what could that motherf@*ker do about it?
STEELE: Well, he could get some Iranian teenagers and minorities, give them these super-guns of yours, and have them lie in wait for our teenagers and minorities outside his house.
RIPPER: Oh my god that would be so awesome! Because we have more technology, so we could have better guns than they do! And we're richer than they are, so we could hire more teenagers and minorities! Right? RIGHT? So everyone would be like BLAM BLAM BLAM with their super-guns and there would be this huge fight and in the end we would win and get that sunavab*tch anyway!
PRESIDENT: (horrified) You realize what you're suggesting is the deaths of dozens of Americans and Iranians, right? Maybe even hundreds!
RIPPER: No, look. It would be okay. Listen to this. We would come up...we would come up with this new philosophy where once a teenager or minority got a super-powerful gun from our enemies, it would be okay if we killed them. Because if we didn't kill them, they might use that gun to shoot us.
HAWKE: But they're only doing that because otherwise we would...I can't believe I have to say this...otherwise we would parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah.
RIPPER: I KNOW RIGHT? We're going to parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah! THEN EVERYTHING'S GOING TO GET BLOWN UP AND IT'S GOING TO BE SO COOL.
STEELE Everything...blown up?
RIPPER: Oh man I totally forgot this part! If we just have the super guns, people might hide inside buildings, right? And then we couldn't shoot them and then the ayatollah wouldn't have to agree to do everything we say. So...ohmigod you guys are going to love this...we take cars, right? And we cover them in armor and put giant caterpillar tracks on the bottom so they can drive over walls and sh*t. And then we put HUMONGOUS GUNS on top of the cars. Guns so big they can BLOW UP WHOLE BUILDINGS. And then we just KEEP BLOWING UP THE CITY until the Ayatollah agrees to do everything we want.
PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Uh, Secret Service? One of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has started acting really weird. Maybe you could stand outside the door and, uh, monitor the situation?
RIPPER: And then! And then we have these planes, right? And we arm them with lots of bombs, and we fly them over enemy cities, and...
HAWKE: Oh, thank goodness. You're starting to see sense and admit that the old ways of drone warfare are right after all.
RIPPER: No, it would be totally different! Because, get this! There would be people in these planes! We'd train them at special schools and whirl them around in centrifuge until they were able to work at 5 g-forces without passing out. Whirl! Whirl! Whirl! And sometimes they'd bomb our enemies, and sometimes our enemies would shoot them down and they'd get captured and we'd have to send in special teams of super-spies to rescue them before they got tortured and told our enemies everything they know!
STEELE That's...horrible!
RIPPER: And instead of trying to only target high-profile enemy leaders? We'd have a special rule that they couldn't target high-profile enemy leaders! They would have to hit power plants and dams and weapons factories and...
PRESIDENT: Weapons factories? Wouldn't those explode if bombed?
RIPPER: OH yeah. HUGE explosion! BOOM! And then when everything had been destroyed from the air, we could send in our hundred thousand teenagers with super guns and they could send in their hundred thousand teenagers with super guns, and we could send in our cars covered in metal with caterpillar treads and they could send in their cars covered in metal in caterpillar treads and then it would be all BLAM BLAM BLAM for WEEKS AND WEEKS and we win would because we would both kill each other and destroy each other's cars but we're bigger so we would have more of them and the Ayatollah would have to agree to do everything we say.
STEELE What if he doesn't?
RIPPER: We could kick him out, and say okay, city, you're part of America now! You're following American laws! You fly the American flag! And then America would be even bigger! And we could take their stuff too, like if there was any oil in the city, then it would be our oil!
PRESIDENT: General Ripper, this is highly unorthodox but I am going to have to relieve you of command effective immediately. This so-called "plan" of DARPA and yourself appears to be no more than the rantings of a deranged and homicidal lunatic. Your request to further develop this new type of warfare is completely denied, and honestly you seem to have so little regard for human life or the rules of warfare that I do not want you anywhere near our nation's drone fleet.
STEELE: Wait, I just realized something. Maybe this isn't about having little regard for human life. Maybe it could even help preserve human life?
PRESIDENT: (skeptically) What do you mean?
STEELE: Think about it. Nowadays, our drone controllers plan strikes from the safety of the Pentagon, never knowing the horrors of warfare, never seeing their victims as real people. But imagine what would happen if we did war Ripper's way?
HAWKE: What would happen?
STEELE: All our teenagers and minorities would see the looks on the faces of their victims as they got shot. Reporters would go into the cities and televise the devastation that our cars with armor and humongous guns had caused. People would come back traumatized, and we'd see them and understand their trauma and with it the trauma of warfare.
PRESIDENT: And?
STEELE: And we'd only need to do it once. Think of the hundreds of people who died in World War I, Mr. President. Think about the waste. If we had done things Ripper's way, the Allies would have encountered the Germans. They would have realized they were human beings just like them. The people in the capitals would have had to think twice about sending their young men off to die just because they wanted to play stupid games with the balance of power. And they would have thought twice. They would have said "No, this is horrible". Instead of those hundreds of zeppelin-related casualties, we would have had both sides pull back from the brink of war, and join together in their common humanity. It would have been a War to End Wars.
HAWKE: It would never have happened that way.
STEELE: No, perhaps not. Perhaps we should go on with our drone strikes as usual. Keep killing hundreds of people. But perhaps one day we will regret not taking hundreds of thousands of teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, arming them with guns, parachuting them into our enemies' cities, and having them shoot things until our enemies agree to do whatever we say. Maybe it will end up being the only truly virtuous mode of warfare, the only one that preserves our inherent humanity.
PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Yes, I'm sorry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seem to have gone insane. Would you mind terribly coming in and escorting them out?
The Secret Service comes in and escorts the Joint Chiefs of Staff out. The President sighs and starts taking care of some paperwork. A few minutes later, MS. WELLS, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, comes in.
WELLS: Mr. President? I'm sorry to disturb you, but a question has come up. I know you authorized free health care for everyone in the nation, but the doctors are wondering whether it's okay if they buy examination tables made of solid gold. Something about it 'adding a touch of class to the clinic'.
PRESIDENT: Sure. Tell them to go ahead. We have more tax money than we know what to do with these days anyway.
hydroacetylene
46m ago
Literally every experienced participant will, if being honest, tell you the same thing.
hydroacetylene
47m ago
Yes, men are not women.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this I disagree with:
and absolutely no second dates!
What's wrong with that?
It indicates something is wrong here. It'd be one thing to not make it past a few dates ever, but to never get a second date means that after the first time someone actually met you at all, they didn't want to see you again. It suggests needing to aim lower when selecting first dates and/or figure out what you're doing wrong on the date.
The bar for wanting a second date for most people, myself included, seems to not be that high. The bar for wanting a third or fourth - much higher. One data point is not that much, so a first date's not necessarily sufficient to know what you think. And, first dates, especially from apps, are often coffee/etc to minimize the awkwardness if it's no good (which is often the case, and that's fine). So, if there's any promise whatsoever, I think people often give it a second chance.
If you're not even getting that second chance, something's wrong. This is in many ways good news: figure out what it is, and fix it. Throw a spreadsheet at the problem, get a trainer, or a shrink, or a stitchfix subscription. Yes, modernity is a shitshow, but the answer isn't giving up.
Finding your spouse is a numbers game. Get to the 'not the one' quickly to move on to the next. You just haven't found her yet.
This I agree with.
roystgnr
47m ago
There’s little glory in pushing the button.
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.
Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button
From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.
why are you ignoring the "illegal" part of the argument?
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