DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
14d ago
Childhood nutrition can have strong affects on adult height.
In the 19th century blacks were on average about an inch shorter in height than whites. It's not a thing these days since anti-poverty programs basically closed the gap for the 1930 birth cohort.
But in the 1950s a 40 year old American grew up with smaller black people. They didn't realize that it was nutritional instead of genetic.
It was also an issue for peasants in Europe, not sure on the exact years. European aristocrats visiting the US were shocked to discover that the average man was the same height they were.
DradisPing
14d ago
It's very difficult. Generally the police don't need to reveal anything until they are making submissions to the court.
You might be able to do a public records request for CCTV footage in the area. I know you used to be able to do that in at least some parts of the UK.
DradisPing
19d ago
I met a guy at a meetup who's contracting specialty was using CVS (Concurrent Versioning System). Specifically he specialized in helping out companies who tried to use the branch feature in CVS and had screwed up their repo.
DradisPing
19d ago
Wikipedia had diffs long before that. There were also older source control systems, but they tended to focus on tracking files instead of tracking sets of changes to multiple files.
The Canadian legislation process was pretty archaic back in 2010 or so when I had some direct knowledge.
The House of Commons, the Prime Ministers Office, and the various ministries are all involved in drafting legislation and all have their own completely separate IT systems. Their IT departments disabled all of the collaboration features outside of their individual Microsoft Domain for "security". All collaboration was done by emailing full documents or reading changes over the phone.
So screw ups like this will naturally happen. Of course it's entirely possible that someone did it on purpose.
DradisPing
25d ago
They made the new movies on a crazy timeline. A new movie of the trilogy every two years.
The first final drafts of scripts where due before there was a final cut of the previous movie.
Obviously doing something like that requires careful planning. Naturally they did no planning.
The first movie copied all of the beats of ANH. The second movie is supposed to set up the final conflict of the third movie.
Then Rian Johnson came in for the second and did his own thing. He either ignored or was possibly never aware of some of the things the first movie set up. He killed off The Big Bad / Chessmaster (Snoke) and promoted the Dragon (Kylo Ren) to be the new Big Bad.
Some people liked how it subverted their expectations, but it subverted the arc of the series.
For the third movie they had no villain with a grand plan, no idea where character's stories were supposed to go, and Bob Iger wouldn't budge on the timeline. It had to be out xmas 2019.
DradisPing
25d ago
I keep seeing The Vorkorsigan Saga pop up in recommendations.
I gave the Warrior's Apprentice a shot, but Miles spends so much of it moping around the house not doing anything. Can you recommend one of the other books that's friendlier to someone with a short attention span who isn't that interested in hearing about the main character's family members?
DradisPing
1mo ago
Why is that less convincing to you than a conspiracy theory?
I don't think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory.
I see it as more of an important life lesson. If you want people to care about what you want you'd better make yourself useful first.
Sure, there's a lot more to it. But I don't think anyone really wants to hear me recount USSR geopolitical strategies in the Middle East lead to the Palestinian activist networks in the west.
DradisPing
1mo ago
I think you'll enjoy John Derbyshire's take: https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/05/why-dont-i-care-about-palestinians-john-derbyshire/
DradisPing
1mo ago
But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them?
People are frequently dishonest about their motivations. Often they don't even understand them.
You'll never hear a politician say "I don't really care enough about X to have an opinion, but I think position Y is what voters want." People don't want that kind of honesty.
"god commands us to support Israel" is rhetorically useful because it ends the conversation.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Partially speculation, partially extrapolation from what I've seen in Canada.
Really what I've seen is more organic than how I've presented it... Pro-Israel Jews make it a point to get their kids to volunteer on campaigns or get summer jobs in politics. Some of people they meet end up as future candidates. If they become lawyers then they end up getting phone calls to help out because people know them.
I was trying to give a framework for understanding influence and glossing over some of the details.
People on the Republican judge track don't get involved with small legal troubles of senate nominations or congressional campaigns. The disputes are too small and they don't want to make enemies in the party.
Getting on the bad side of a Republican patronage network (https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/) can tank any future nomination.
edit:
Also I have the sense that it's more acceptable for a lawyer at a prestigious largely Jewish firm to do pro bono work for a pro Israel Republican than it would be for a lawyer at a prestigious non Jewish firm to help a pro life republican.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.
There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.
But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.
To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.
While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.
Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.
However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.
Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.
So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.
There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.
In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.
Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.
So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?
Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.
They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.
It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.
DradisPing
1mo ago
At this moment in the US there are far more people with obesity than with cancer.
DradisPing
1mo ago
What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them?
There's a common religious belief that suffering is holy and morally required. You see this a lot with Catholics in particular. They will lecture people with claims like "quitting smoking using nicotine lozenges isn't really quitting smoking". Somehow results don't count, it's the suffering that's important.
Also in modern society the left expresses purity through diet.
Additionally believing that fat people are gross because they are sick and unhealthy doesn't jive with a lot of modern views. You aren't supposed to be weirded out by people's medical conditions.
So the view that obesity is a moral failing is popular. This has the added effect of letting healthy weight people feel morally superior.
The idea that a medication can safely reduce appetite is jarring. That implies that their feelings of moral superiority were unjustified and kind of immoral.
DradisPing
1mo ago
He knows how to write a compelling screenplay which he can then direct. Most directors can't even do that, so it seems a bit unfair to call out James Cameron specifically.
Avatar would have more of a cultural impact if he worked with some good sci fi writers to do some spinoff novels to expand the world. Unfortunately he wants to do it all himself between his submarine adventures so it's a little more simplistic than is ideal.
DradisPing
1mo ago
America has traditions built around the one drop rule. Spanish has more descriptive terms like octaroon, but they are frowned upon in the US.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Still working on my Minecraft API with MCP for AI integration. I got Dockerization working so I can theoretically deploy it somewhere easily. It's not really ready for that as I haven't bothered adding any security to the API yet.
Previous comments here taught me that I can use different LLMs from VSCode, so I've been having some fun with that.
Going forward I really want to let the AI do building construction, so I've been planning out a component system where it can pass component names, options, and bounding boxes and subcomponents will handle the internal details.
I want it to be similar enough to React that it'll be able to transfer over some of that training. Curious to see if I'll run into limits with the context side.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The Dubai zoo may end up winning all categories.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Don't know your familiarity with coding, but Java isn't a good place to start.
Ok so coding is the part of this project I know, I'm just not super familiar with all of the Java tooling. Unfortunately Java is a necessity for Minecraft mods. The MCP interface stuff is in Python.
Getting a jar file with dependencies into a working Docker container was more of an adventure than I expected.
Do you mean Claude Code ?
Nope, Claude desktop is a thing with MCP support: https://claude.ai/download
Using an IDE with an open project to do things unrelated to that project seemed peculiar so I didn't go down that path. I tried out using the MCP in VSCode and it worked well, although the agent did try to re-write my MCP code when it couldn't initially connect. The downside to Claude desktop was that it didn't let me try other llms.
I wasn't aware of the VSCode support, so that's neat.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So in an effort to update my skills and move in on the AI hype I've been doing a MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration project.
I couldn't think of a useful and functional project to do, so I'm building an api into Minecraft and integrating it with Claude Desktop.
So far it's pretty fun. The limits of Claude have been interesting.
There must of have been a huge amount of work fine tuning models to get them to work with images.
I assumed it would be able to complex shape generation by reading a region into a 3d array and modifying it. Claude seems to have a lot of problems manipulating a big chunk of json data like that.
I asked it to generate a small house in front of me, and this is what it gave me: https://imgur.com/a/CDNKm7K
Also it was behind me. It seems to have a lot of trouble understanding the direction I'm facing. There might be a problem with the data I'm sending.
It seems to handle the more simple tasks I built primitives for well. Creating cuboids of a block type, messaging players, finding players, spawning creatures.
Lately I've been trying to Dockerize it for easy deploy. I'm not all that experienced with Java so it's been an adventure. Or Docker really, there must be easier ways to debug Docker failures than what I've been doing.
I'm looking forward to doing a deploy and terrorizing my friends with AI commands. I see potential for it in twitch streams.
Longer term I'd like to introduce some features for better building generation. I kind of assumed that the currently available tools would be more advanced given how fast everything else seems to move. But after reading up on Model Synthesis and Wave Function Collapse it seems like it'll be a ton of work to get anything working.
I can probably get it to spawn in things from .structure files, but that's much more limited than what I was hoping for.
DradisPing
2mo ago
It is 100% true that Mozart wrote a song entitled "Lick me in the arse" (Leck mich im Arsch).
I like to bring that up in discussions of high culture. I no longer get invited to classy parties.
DradisPing
2mo ago
People online also say that Bohemian Rhapsody is about AIDS. There are just a lot of people really into analysis of lyrics who don't do a lot of research.
Dave Grohl had a great quote about people overanalyzing Nirvana lyrics that went something like "Sometimes Kurt just made up lyrics on the spot to fit the music. I watched him do it."
There's so much nonsense in analyzing fiction / lyrics / poetry, but people are having fun. It just gets annoying when they start lecturing you about media literacy.
DradisPing
2mo ago
I'm looking to read:
"America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights Hardcover – Nov. 23 2020 by Bertram Levine (Author), Grande Lum (Author)"
The DOJ CRS was created by the civil rights act back in the 60s and by statute is immune to most FOIA requests. This is one of the first insights into the organization.
I'd also be interested if anyone has a detailed review or analysis, because I don't think I'll have the time to read it properly.
DradisPing
2mo ago
There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
It's hard to establish exact dates for things this far out, but at a minimum we know that Epstein was dating Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine around the time of his death. It's more likely than not that they knew each other.
It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.
The uterus falling out is ridiculous, but issues with women and long distance running are real.
Australia lowered training standards for the military (slower runs, softer surfaces) due to pelvic stress fractures in female recruits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10332180/
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