roystgnr
1d ago
Lots of suggestions already for Manhattans. Good show, everyone! I'll just add that, if you're making them yourself, you can get a lot of variety out of the same basic recipe by just trying different bitters or by adding dashes of different liqueurs like Maraschino or Cherry Heering.
If you're making your own cocktails, though, the must-have is the weeski, both because it's a great cocktail (though my personal recipe uses only 1.5oz whiskey, and usually .75oz Cointreau) and because its name is too stupid to repeat in public.
roystgnr
1d ago
I've only ever seen a 1:1 Godfather recipe, and only tried that once or twice. I didn't think it was even good enough to try tweaking. But 1:4 and 1:8 aren't small tweaks; they sound like they might be worth another look. Thanks!
roystgnr
1d ago
25% of all women's dating profiles have ACAB in them to this day.
Citation needed? Sorry to be annoying; usually when I see an unsupported claim that looks like hyperbole I'll try to be the change I want to see in the world and find references myself rather than just asking for them, or even do the sample counting myself if I have to ... but I'm happily married and "I swear I only downloaded that dating app to tally statistics! Statistics!!" is the sort of idiot plot that I wouldn't even want to watch in a sitcom.
roystgnr
3d ago
This seemed so implausible to me that I went and hunted for accurate sources ... and found references for both claims. So... wow.
I'm also not usually a fan of the "child with a gun", but even stopped clocks get to be right twice a day. "I just really do question whether or not they'll come to [our rescue]" seems to be a reasonable concern, if not about intentions (Germany did stick it out in Afghanistan for decades), then at least about recent capabilities vs peer adversaries. They're in an at least an order of magnitude better shape now, and still improving, but is that because they've fixed the root problems or just because they got tired of being repeatedly embarrassed by leaks to the press?
roystgnr
3d ago
followed the correct procedures
But is that what happened in Uvalde?
Two months before Tuesday's mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead, the Uvalde school district hosted an all-day training session for local police and other school-based law enforcement officers focused on "active shooter response."
"First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm's way," according to a lengthy course description posted online by the Texas agency that developed the training. "Time is the number-one enemy during active shooter response. ... The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone."
The excuse for ignoring all that was that the cops supposedly thought the shooter was barricaded in there alone, not with children, hence they were in no rush to assault the shooter and were free to assault the kids' parents instead.
roystgnr
3d ago
some deep analysis of why Greenland
Currently the president is repeatedly confusing Greenland with Iceland while the White House press secretary blatantly lies about it.
The lying actually bothers me a lot more than the word mixup; smart people who are surrounded with such levels of sycophancy are basically detaching from reality. If this kind of mistake can't even be admitted, how can more serious mistakes be corrected? The answer to "why Greenland" may be as simple as the answer to "why does the speaker start shrieking when you point its own microphone at it": because in a systems analysis sense, excessive positive feedback can lead to insane outputs.
the Trump modeling is so calcified
Yes, I fear that's a likely explanation.
in the discussion
Oh. Well, yeah, that too, but with better reason and less-adverse consequences.
roystgnr
4d ago
The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.
It's a shame that series of books ends its coverage in 411BC. Dramatic irony like that deserves its payoff.
roystgnr
4d ago
One of the standard dilemmas of censorship is that the censors can't just publish a detailed list of what people can't publish without defeating the whole point. You have to come up with broader and/or more-opaque rules that encompass but avoid revealing the narrower rules you really care about, and there's no rule less revealing than "just ask and we'll tell you if it's forbidden". The public has to be kept uninformed about what the public is being kept uninformed about.
roystgnr
4d ago
LaTeX sets hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, minus sings representing negation, and minus signs representing subtraction as five different characters.
Does it use different characters for negation vs subtraction? I thought it was the same character but with different kerning.
roystgnr
6d ago
This was an excellent explanation, thank you.
One side note:
too inconvenient to be preferred for empirical models
Piecewise-rational functions are very popular for two big categories of empirical model: anything where the true behavior can have asymptotically-polynomial singularities, and CAD models. Being able to do sharp corners and spectral approximation refinement and exact conic sections all with the same backend is a very useful trick.
This is irrelevant to your points, though; even when working with NURBS, polynomial long division doesn't really come up.
"good RPG" combined with "preferably much less" than 100 hours is a much harder ask than it should be.
Have you tried Disco: Elysium? You can complete it in under a few dozen hours, and much of the writing in it is excellent. The devs are literal "give thanks to Marx and Engels" communists, so I was ready for at least the political half of the writing to be trash, but they're at least amusingly self-aware communists. It's also clearly "adult stuff", at least as far as entertainment goes (though it's not "adult entertainment" - man, the euphemism treadmill sucks), so it would be less likely to trigger your "I'm being childish" aversions the way otherwise excellent RPGs like Chrono Trigger or even Planescape: Torment might.
No one else I could find from there is over here on themotte. Was anyone else there for the inception of the culture war threads?
I can't find any Culture War thread comments from myself until December, but I was at least posting in threads that we'd recognize today as too culture-war-adjacent to escape containment, as well as in Culture War stuff pre-CWT.
roystgnr
7d ago
AMD64 (as if that tells you anything about the instruction set)
Was there a second 64-bit instruction set invented by AMD?
roystgnr
7d ago
The Mandalorian (Okay)
Yeah, but as an average of Good seasons and a Bad one, with the latter more recent and with it's biggest problem being the sense that they're out of good new ideas and are having to wring out old ones. Hence the upcoming movie that nobody cares about - it may turn out to be awesome, but I wouldn't recommend going on opening night to check.
roystgnr
7d ago
The Louisiana Purchase is usually cited among Jefferson's claims to fame. But "bought a quarter of the country for a song" is impressive in a way that historically-standard conquests usually aren't; Polk isn't given much reverence for Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
roystgnr
9d ago
What's your preferred genre(s)? What's your tolerances for the newest "hope you spent $600 on a GPU recently" and for the oldest "just enough pixels to jog your imagination" games? How many hours of play time are you looking to spend?
My favorite games of all time are probably Portal, Deus Ex, and Star Control 2. Honorable mentions to Outer Wilds, Civilization (especially 4 and 5), Skyrim, Kerbal Space Program, (Telltale's) The Walking Dead, and Baldur's Gate.
Oh, but for
I was hoping for subjective descriptions of fun, interesting gaming sessions people have had recently.
I think I'm stuck. "Fun, interesting" and "recently" make Outer Wilds a shoo-in (I literally bought a Steam Deck dock and bluetooth controller solely so that when I recommended it to my kids I could watch them play on the big screen), but no self-respecting Outer Wilds player would describe Outer Wilds to someone else! Half the fun is encountering everything for the first time and trying to figure out how it all works and what it's all about.
roystgnr
9d ago
Efficient long division
Wait - you value this, but not polynomial division? They're both things you can just ask the computer to do for you instead, but at least polynomial division requires you to hunt down a computer algebra system; long division capability come pre-installed on every phone.
roystgnr
9d ago
IMHO it's not one of the best things he's written in recent years (I'd put Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know above it, for the research), but it is his best writing in recent years.
roystgnr
11d ago
Ah, but the catch is that using the SAT directly still looks too suspicious for an employer to do, so you have to use the whole college degree instead. That could be an even better filter (assuming you keep track of which colleges still use the SAT) because it includes a measure of conscientiousness, but it's also a vastly more expensive filter, and the mix of "do they have a high enough IQ, and can they afford tuition plus four years' opportunity cost" might have a bigger disparate impact than IQ alone.
roystgnr
11d ago
Nobody gets 2 weeks off specifically in August, but even new hires typically get 10 days of paid vacation, as counted separate from paid sick leave, per year; total PTO for all working Americans averages around 24 days per year. That includes Christmas vacation time, but pending a big chunk of the remainder for a summer vacation (though more often July than August) is pretty popular.
On the other hand, we don't use all our leave. The majority of Americans report unused PTO days in any given year, an average of 6+ per person. That kind of resonates with that commercial, as well as with my own experiences. I got a nice check for unused vacation days when leaving my last job, and these days my vacation planning is constrained by a rule preventing me from rolling over more than some maximum (7 weeks?) of leave days from year to year, so I end up "burning" some on 3-day weekends when I can't drop work for a week or more at a time.
roystgnr
12d ago
It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard.
Your backyard may vary. Rabbits and mice sneak under my fences easily, which I think explains why, although I can get tomato plants to grow like giant weeds, their fruits tend to vanish on me almost immediately after ripening, before I can pick them myself.
roystgnr
12d ago
Into/Across Spiderverse. I reserve the right to throw this out if the third movie is atrocious, but unfortunately there's a real risk of that happening.
"Into the Spiderverse" would stand up okay on it's own, I think, even if the trilogy doesn't stick the landing, but I agree that it's only going to belong in a "favorites" list if all the checks they wrote in the first half of the sequel (I can't even call it the first sequel; not enough closure) don't bounce.
X-Men First Class => X2 => Days of Future Past. The payoff for this one is immense
That's an interesting watch order. Why leave out the first X-Men movie? I understand deciding that the benefit of "Days of Future Past is a little better if you watch X-Men 3 first" isn't worth the cost of "but you have to watch X-Men 3 first", but watching X-Men before X2 is win-win.
roystgnr
12d ago
Are you using "thinking mode" or "research mode" with your LLM(s)? With advanced math even the latest models will still hallucinate on me when they're just asked to immediately spew output tokens, but at least ChatGPT 5 has gotten good enough with "reasoning" that I haven't caught it in an error in output from that. (Some of this might be selection bias, though: waiting 5 minutes for a response is enough hassle that I'll still ask for immediate-output-spew for anything that's easy enough to double-check myself or non-critical enough that I can live with a few mistakes)
I still wouldn't rely on any claim for which it can't give me either a step-by-step proof or a linked citation, and with history you're stuck with citations as your only option, so ask for (and follow up on, and worry about the quality of the sources of) those.
The only problem is that they give you completely different answers! Of course, I could just rely on how plausible their answers sound (if they can fool me, they can fool the players), but I am too neurotic for that.
You want to keep your narrated facts straight, and you want your worldbuilding to be consistent with the facts, but don't be afraid to add a few sets of conflicting lies and half-truths to your dialogue. There's only one past, but there are sometimes multiple conflicting histories of it and there are often multiple conflicting perspectives on it. Consider the Brazilian vs the American attitudes toward Santos-Dumont vs the Wright brothers.
roystgnr
12d ago
This was my point, maybe I should have put it at the end and not the beginning.
Your main point could have been that "this is an amazing pasta maker!", and could be entirely correct, but no choice of sentence placement is going to get people to ignore any other inflammatory points you happen to make along the way. If you hate inaccuracy, callousness, and polarization, you have to be very careful not to drop a blood libel in the middle of your post; otherwise it doesn't come off as hate, just jealousy.
Instead their conclusion is, to tweak your phrase, "it should have been immediately clear to the ICE officer and to viewers that that suddenly-accelerating SUV did pose a threat of death or grievous injury"
No, it wasn't. So many failures of theory-of-mind going on right now.
For me, too, to be fair. It now seems that my theory (that you think it should have been clear to the officer that the car hitting him posed no serious threat) was wrong, and instead your mistaken belief is that it's a requirement for self-defense that the threat be immediately clear? That would just get us back to my first SNL gag reference, days ago,
"I think a good gift for the president would be a chocolate revolver. And since he's so busy, you'd probably have to run up to him and hand it to him."
Obviously suddenly brandishing a chocolate revolver will never be an clear threat, because it's not actually a threat, but a reasonable officer would construe it as a threat and would be justified in using deadly force to defend against it. Likewise, even if the driver of a vehicle wasn't gunning it hard enough to spin out her tires on ice, an arresting officer in the path of the vehicle is allowed to interpret the criminal's car suddenly accelerating into them as a grievous threat, and is not required to think "but what if I double check the tire angle" before it may become too late.
Do you think the administration's reaction to the shooting is a "reasonable path for America"?
Nope. Goods crimes were obstructing justice, harassment, and vehicular assault, not terrorism. But I can't really directly respond to the administration, not with anything more serious than upvoting someone else's twitter response to a higher-but-still-rounds-to-the-same-number total. Trump never became a Motte poster. (Even if he did, I couldn't imagine him obeying the rules here well enough not to eat a permaban within a year.) If an administration called Good's actions "terrorism" here, I'd give them the same pushback and chance to correct that that you got for "murder", and the same downvotes to posts where they either failed to correct or repeated the libel.
I get that it feels unfair that you're being held to higher standards than the White House just because you're here and they aren't, but what's the alternative? If I said you couldn't meet standards higher than theirs I'd deserve a mod warning for such an egregious insult.
Right-winger, singular, at least. I don't actually remember a second off the top of my head, but I wouldn't be surprised if I forgot 1 or 2 more. I would be surprised if I missed 10 or 20 more.
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