domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1m ago
First time?
Everyone in the Culture War has this experience sooner or later. It sucks, but eventually the realization settles that this is how it is and it's not going to change, so you make your peace with it and move on with life.
For me, it helped to realize that most people who talk about politics and culture aren't actually engaging in analysis, but rather an informal group-bonding game built around call-and-response meme-trading. This doesn't make them stupid or irrational, any more than posting dogespeak memes means they don't understand proper grammar. They aren't trading John-Oliver-tier (or steven crowder tier) talking points because they're interested in pursuing objective truth, they're doing it because it generates a feeling of togetherness. Sure, it's alienating to you, because the pings they're generating are pings your brain rejects, but that's not really their fault. People are different, is all.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3m ago
Reading that post about the Liberation Pledge makes me sad, because here is a perfectly nice person with good intentions who only wants to do good and reduce harm, and they might as well be an alien from another planet when it comes to understanding ordinary people:
And, on a larger scale, we hoped that if we all joined together, we could create a world where eating meat is stigmatized: a world where someone would ask, “Does anyone mind if I get the steak?” before making an order at a restaurant (or maybe even one in which restaurants would think twice before putting someone’s body on the menu).
That right there from the start: it's not a body, it's a carcass. And it's not someone, it's something. An animal is not a person. Plus, I get the distinct impression that were this a report on an Oceanian tribe that practiced consumption of the remains of the deceased as a ritual of respect, we'd get the whole "we should not impose Western moral values on others" about something that really was "putting someone's body on the menu".
From where I stood, the biggest effect of the Pledge was for advocates to lose relationships with family members who didn’t comply. Upon taking the Pledge, a close friend at the time experienced a years-long estrangement from their family, including those who were already vegan while many others decided to skip birthdays, weddings, and holidays with family. It’s possible that all of this added stigma around eating animals. With these relationships broken down, we don’t know.
You know where the added stigma was? I'm going to take a wild guess and that it wasn't on the part of shame-faced carnivores around "eating animals", but rather "that stupid notion that made Jenny refuse to attend Granny's last Thanksgiving before she died, the last time the family all saw her, just because of a dumb turkey dinner. She was Granny's favourite grandkid! And we all knew Granny wasn't doing so good! And she just would not come because of that vegan rubbish, she cared more about some dead turkey than about Granny!"
The problem is, veganism is a moral judgement, and nobody likes moral judgements. The same people who would be horrified about some bigot telling a gay family member that they were sinful and in need of having their soul saved has no problem telling meat eater family and friends that they are damned souls going to carnist hell.
ares
4m ago
I do not have any experience with Linux certification programs. I do have experience with Linux, programming, sysadmin stuff, and government jobs/roles/contracts that require certifications. I also have experience with hiring, and with convincing large organizations to pay for training. With those caveats, I think something like Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate would be worth looking into.
Benefits:
- From a reputable org, so has some value on a resume
- Not too deep for a new-to-tech employee
- Covers the basics of what you've described
I would not count on the credential to be especially useful to your company unless you know of a project or customer who requires it already. The trend I see is for organizations to focus a lot more on actual ability rather than certifications until the org get really big, and often not even then. Government jobs/contracts are the exception, but if you're doing those then you would already know which certifications to work towards.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5m ago
You’re kind of touching on two questions.
The thing about images is that the map is not the territory. Concerns like pixels—resolution—only sneak in to quantify the limits of that map.
A mathematical construct like the Fourier transform doesn’t have that problem. The transform of a pure sine wave is the Platonic ideal of a pair of points. But you can’t make such a pair out of samples. You’re forced to approximate, which gives you a resolution.
So question 1 is “do we have a map to quantify smell?” The answer is yes, but no one can agree which is best. Here’s a more recent study which has a bunch of cool charts showing the perceptual space. There’s also the classic OChem Smells Chart.
Question 2 is how good the resolution is for any of these models. For sound and sight, we’ve done experiments to identify how small of a difference can be recognized. Presumably, something similar has been tried in the smell literature. In theory, you could use one of the Question 1 schema to choose several components of smell. Say “edibility,” “temperature,” and “irritation.” Then test different substances on each axis to estimate resolution. That’d give you a map of possible, distinguishable smells.
I’m going to be lazy and assume the same is true for taste.
ControlsFreak
10m ago
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
13m ago
RHCSA, but if they’re non-technical and this is really an aside, consider Linux+.
ControlsFreak
19m ago
I can't find the original Scott-post, but I found an old comment of mine that linked directly to this on his old website, which was presumably there because of a post he made.
My priors on this sort of thing are similar to my priors on weight loss studies - that there is a Hlynka-sized hole in the discourse. It's a multi-agent environment; other agents get to make choices, and there is no way for you to impose your idealized study protocol onto their entire life and choice set. If you can selection effect your way to people who will take agency and apply focused determination to solving the little problems along the way, it actually won't be that hard to find solutions to those problems, and a variety of "methods" will probably work about equally well (though individual circumstances may result in differing folks somewhat preferring differing methods), but if not, than basically nothing other than raw physical/biological force will cut it.
sliders1234
26m ago
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The 5k per day is way too much. Combined with the Presidency getting to suspend the act for I believe 60 or 90 days. Then courts would have to get involved. So you can run high to get to the trigger then ignore it for 45 days. Tell the immigrants you back to not come for a month. Run some to get to the trigger. Ignore it for 45 days. Just not enough teeth that they would ever close the border.
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It’s further formalizing that 5k a day asylum seekers are fine. We should honestly just ban asylum at the border which we can do. Make them file at an embassy and have true causes. We have virtually zero true asylum cases at the US border. They are safe in Mexico. They can email Senators/Lawyers etc for asylum cases outside the country.
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This entirely depends on the courts. Conservatives are not good at controlling those type of asylum claims. If you get liberal judges on those courts who accept not being American makes them a little poor and boom asylum claim accepted then the act does nothing. And again asylum should not be initially approved inside the country.
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Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans. This is obvious we did NOT have these issues under Trump and no laws have been changed in the interim. Like you say above Trump closed immigration doing things that were “trivial to repeal or ignore”. Electing Trump is what we need to close the border. He’s done it before. Biden could do the same thing.
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Which brings up the big problem with the bill. It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open. There were no teeth in the bill to force a Democrat to close the border.
If you disagree with the “teeth” then please quote in the bill the “teeth”. How would this bill limit President AOC to 10k “asylum” seekers per year?
SteveKirkland
33m ago
I know, it's just that I'm finally hitting my breaking point. Mostly it's that a few people who were generic libs but mocked "the weird ones" have suddenly gone all-in on quoting reddit posts, with seemingly no sense that their perspective has changed.
I've always put up with this kind of thing before, but I'm this close to cutting back my circle of friends to a handful of shared hobby autists and redneck coworkers.
It's this depressing feeling that I was never really friends with a person who existed, just a living chatbot that had a new gpt lobotomy update.
Shrike
36m ago
Yes. I just think that in large parts of Europe you're not free to behave counterculturally. In some places (e.g. France' laïcité policies) this is explicit.
Spookykou
40m ago
I don't see how the example here represents some sort of unique turning point or even a particularly good example of the set of, 'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'.
They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.
Trump disrespected the troops by saying stuff that a 'properly cultured' blue-triber would never say, like calling POWs losers for getting caught.
The people at protests waving flags, still don't like Trump for being uncouth in those ways. Also, I would guess less than half of them even know what Beirut is. Still, even if they did know, they mostly wouldn't care. They are perfectly happy to hold both the idea that Trump says rude things to the troops and that is bad, and also the idea that the American military-industrial-complex is a global oppressor and any and all resistance to it is justified. This isn't even a particularly contradictory pair of ideas to hold compared to their beliefs around gender.
More generally, you are making a liberal complaint to a progressive. Liberals care about being principled and consistent, creating generalizable rules, and all that other great civilization building philosophy junk that got totally abandoned as the internet and government student loans expanded the marketplace of ideas to include midwits.
TowardsPanna
43m ago
You can train yourself out of it. Into a new autonomous pattern. It'll take a month of daily practice. 20 minutes each morning would do the trick. Lay down on your back. Breathe deep into the area below the belly button, engaging the diaphragm muscle, almost like a pump drawing in air. Work on just fully filling and emptying the belly area of air at first. You can place your hands there for emphasis. Later, work on filling the belly area sufficiently before filling the chest. Have one hand below the belly button and one hand on the chest.
charles
51m ago
That's not a bum, its a tramp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramp
SSCReader
53m ago
Massive, well-funded efforts to develop Determinist methods of controlling or engineering individual humans repeatedly fail, and those failures not only do not cause an update on peoples' priors, but are completely forgotten.
Certainly from the point of view of surgery they have failed so far. But if something can be done naturally, it doesn't mean we have to have the ability to replicate it, (experimental science is powerful, but observational science is also important). But I think it does demonstrate observationally that physical changes, make people behave differently. Even drugs and alcohol are the same. You are correct that what we can't do is fine tune control someone's mind (or at least as far as I am aware). But just as I am confident that I have my own free will, I am also confident very drunk me, makes different choices than sober me, even in the same situation. Again, seeming to show that physical changes impact my free will, (though of course I generally am making the choice to drink in the first place!).
Now I would also admit, that I am not certain Determinism is true, but probably we are just either side, I think it is probably true but am not certain, and you think it is probably false but are not certain? I would say there is some evidence some kind of determinism is true, but it certainly isn't irrefutable or 100% by any means.
My own internal experiences suggest to me that changes to my body, do impact on the choices I make, such that while I also experience making choices freely, some choices appear to be more free than others. I think some people would call that willpower or something similar and suggest that we have a certain "supply" of that which allows us to make choices against our biological urges perhaps? If I am hungry for a long time, or tired, I start making choices I know are bad and after the situation is resolved, I look back and wonder what was I doing? It feels in the moment that I making free choices, but in retrospect it appears I was not. Being very tired makes me snappish and irritable, so the physical processes seem to be doing something to impact my decision making.
Bartender_Venator
53m ago
Here's hoping that Scottish girls are notably less psychotic on average
Scottish girls in my experience have extraordinarily high variance. You seem to be good at spotting the dysfunctional ones, and they get extremely dysfunctional, but the remainder of the dating pool are extremely sensible and down-to-earth while remaining endearing. Chance of meeting the latter is significantly higher in the countryside, set your radius wide and learn to enjoy a scenic drive.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1hr ago
I think so. I think its worth questioning how much of the issue is premature marriage to the wrong person and how much is detrimentally weak commitment to the right person.
Depending on your priors, you might think that a given divorce is the result of either failure state or a combination. And they merit different sorts of solutions. Better matchmaking, vs better relationship norms and counseling. I'm in the both camp.
...
This reminds me that as a minister I have something of a responsibility to the couples I marry.
It seems I'm reading your linked articles now.
I know that in Slovakia we have quite “benevolent” laws, when things like EULA are not recognized, as we require intent in form of paper. Which makes sense - you cannot recognize who clicked “yes” and then keep someboy responsible, we are very much paper country in that regard. Also we consider downloading anything as legal - not uploading in torrents - but in general I saw a lot of rulings favorable to “pirates” here - as long that they were careful for normal things. Things like child porn are a big NO and you can expect to attract attention like a magnet and some large physical operation with some very “liberal” explanation of law. Don’t do it here.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
1hr ago
· Edited 55m ago
Stop being so relaxed, focus on anxious things, drink caffeine. I find doomscrolling helps.
In my past, before I/we cleaned up the inside of this head, we would experience a sort of teleological flailing. Going back and forth between different modes as different modules exhausted themselves in a power struggle.
Nowadays, tons of our habits are on complete autopilot. And some of our habits resolve before the meta level action endorser can negate them. We don't will these mistakes explicitly, we willed them long ago in more fitting contexts. But they're cached habits resolving now-
Further, the process of making these mistakes is itself often a necessary condition to producing the counter-force that corrects these errors. Indeed the contextual triggers that allow us to add another case to our algorithms often can't exist until after we see it. Bugs must be seen to be repaired.
There is some sense in which 'I' parse myself as the engineer at the center of this all. But this 'I' grows smaller and smaller as it learns to modify and optimize deeper and deeper parts of itself. And on different days different voices parse as this 'I'. Sometimes its the proprioception that is occupying the core of the system. Such as during dance. Sometimes it is the vision. Sometimes it is our brain's internal language model (of course, no matter who is in the driver's seat, that module will be partially responsible for the words you actually see/hear us say. In a sense you are always talking to us through them). One system lets go and another holds on but it seems like both are coordinating on such choices. Who the final arbiter is- is hard to say. Indeed. Our internal framework seems to be enlightened anarchy.
There are negotiation systems that have a lot of weight- elected as community leaders you could say- because they helped to solve the flailing problem and doing as they say makes us feel really really good and coherent and internally aligned. I could wax on poetically about how this feels until it gets subversively NSFW, but I'll spare you as I would our comrade GPT-4.
Speaking of comrades, they also often take primary control of our sense of wills. We choose to give up agency initially, and we can end up flailing and desyncing if dommed undiscerningly. But while synced there is a sense of total receptivity that bypasses all will, allowing the minds of other systems to slot into us. To wear us like a glove. As long as they model us well enough to prevent a desync, they remain in total control. And can potentially use this control to modify us to deepen their control and reduce the chance of desync as they realign us and remap us to their own internals.
Will is a Ship of Theseus to us, and we are it's parts. Modifications to Will are not free. Rather they operate on the principles of Linear Logic. Consuming resources to enact transformations.
dukeleto
1hr ago
I have a non technical employee who I have taught some basic linux skills so that he can help me with some of my work. He likes it and is interested in learning more but I don’t really have the time to work with him.
I want to get my company to pay for some sort of certification course for him so that he can develop a little more. Does anyone know if there are any Linux certification programs where the credential is both useful (and where the course is also beneficial)?
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
...the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.
That really is the key behind my fears of SV. They have so much information at their fingertips. It's already known that even 10 years ago they were experimenting on directly influencing how we feel. I'm supposed to believe there is anything stopping them, any moral or legal barrier, from developing systems that act just like this? The deleterious effects of social media algorithms on mental health are already well understood, but they craft them because it's good for their bottom line. Why would they not lean into the explicitly harmful effects, and unleash it on their enemies? What we already know they do, and have done, is proof of malice enough.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
Getting bogged down in the details of what Scientology, as an organization, is capable of today is totally beside the point that they prove a conspiracy of the type I outline is possible, and easier than ever. Maybe not for them, as they aren't what they used to be. But for someone sufficiently motivated.
The details are relevant because you're claiming that "Scientology once succeeded in conspiracy shit" is evidence that someone else could do the same thing today, and I don't think that sort of conspiracy (a literal cult trying to destroy an individual with social engineering) is so easy to do today, especially in the dispersed online way you are proposing.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years people will be leaving the Current Year cult, spilling the secrets of the things they were "forced" to do at the time.
There is no Current Year cult. There's trans activism, BLM, Free Palestine, whatever else you want to categorize under the broad umbrella of "wokeism," but I am fundamentally disagreeing with you that these things are engineered by shadowy cabals somewhere or being manufactured by a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds doing A/B testing on memes. You don't need to wait for anyone to "spill secrets" - we already know how it happens, through social pressure and conformity and agreeableness, not because someone did some Ludovico conditioning on them or inserted fnords into their social media. There are plenty of people who have "escaped the Woke cult" and talked about how and why they bought into it in the first place.
People like Crowder have been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology.
Basically anyone has been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology. The result is Twitter pileons, sometimes deplatforming, but
Imagine some "rogue employee" at Facebook deciding "LOL, I'm going to manually add Crowder and Mrs Crowder's accounts to the 'hate algorithm' list."
You seem pretty invested in a very science fictional notion for someone saying you don't really believe this. "Facebook can plug you into a hate algorithm and pretty soon you and your wife are heading for divorce" is kind of like Shiri's Scissor - it's a great concept, works for a short story, but I've seen too many people (including here) take this kind of dystopian brain hacking far too seriously and literally.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
shoot, I mangled the link. here's the correct version. For what it's worth, my understanding of hypnotism is the same as yours, but @jimm has a very, very different perspective.
Seems like this depends entirely on what aesthetic the game is aiming for. Would The Matrix have been a better film if it were in the style of a Miyazaki film? Or as an animated version of a Leonardo da Vinci painting? From a certain perspective you might consider the Mona Lisa to be "better art" than The Matrix, but being real people with some minor CGI added worked for what it was going for and made a fantastic film.
We're not there yet, but if we can reach the point where hyper-realistic faces in games can actually be mistaken for real actors, there's a huge range of applications where it would actually be useful and better than a stylized game character because it fits the aesthetic the game intends, even if such situations are the minority.
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