roystgnr
3hr ago
I have a carbon steel wok, and it seems like the ideal material for that (light enough for wok tossing, quick temperature changes when I need them), but I can't see why I'd want it for a skillet. My wok doesn't season as nicely as my cast iron skillet, I don't move my skillet around while cooking so I don't care about light weight, and I do care about heavy weight - retaining as much heat as possible when we (sometimes over-...) load it with steaks is like 90% of the point of that skillet! For anything that doesn't need a long sear, what's the advantage of a carbon steel skillet over (thick, quality) stainless?
roystgnr
1d ago
FRED actually already has at least one discontinued M1 series, which was weekly data.
That's really interesting!
From a discoverability standpoint I'd think that the solution would be a simple hyperlink - the discontinued M1 page has a link to the new M1SL; just add a link in the other direction too and we're good.
But from a epistemological standpoint? The mathematician in me wants to say that it's silly to call the new data a new series, so long as it's the same thing being measured, even if it's evaluated with a different frequency. But the engineer in me is bowing in awe to whomever decided something like "we're using a different evaluation process at the lower frequency, therefore it's a different measurement even if it's the same measurand, therefore we're putting it in a different series".
roystgnr
1d ago
Yeah, that makes sense, but defining a new measure that we can calculate and giving it the same name isn't actually a solution to our inability to keep calculating the old measure, it's just a very interesting case of the streetlight effect error. We should end our M1 graphs at the date where we can no longer calculate the original M1 definition, start our "M1b" graphs at the date where we have enough data to calculate the new M1b definition, and never plot them as the same line on the same graph. OP here isn't the first or even the tenth person I've seen who didn't realize that that graph discontinuity was an artifact of a definition change, despite (or, really, because of) the paragraphs underneath that are needed to explain that.
roystgnr
1d ago
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Seriously, whose idea was this? We should have just kept calling the old definition M1, and created the new definition as M1.5 or M1b or something. Instead we've got a definition of M1 that's so screwed up, explaining precisely how screwed up it is is a famous problem in philosophy.
roystgnr
2d ago
I was debating whether I should move this to the new thread for visibility, but I just saw your "More as a way that I can refer to my own thought sin the future." edit and I'll respect that.
I think of violence being a knob for the left and a switch for the right.
I tend to sympathize with the position the right takes here, though it does get tricky: the physics of violent threats are a continuum, yet we have to break that continuity somewhere because the game theory of responses to violence demands discrete Schelling points.
I'll double down on your 2010s sci-fi-writer citation with a 1980s sci-fi-writer citation:
- Never throw shit at an armed man. Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.
Niven uses as an example the events that Wikipedia call the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, though Google wants to autocomplete "1968 dnc" with "riots" ... and yet that's a surprisingly tame example, in hindsight? Hundreds of injuries, on both sides, but only one death, of someone who shot at the cops first? Impressive trigger discipline, despite widespread reports and video of the Chicago cops showing ... less discipline ... with clubs and gas and mace. If they were operating on a "switch" mentality, it seems it was a ternary rather than a binary switch, and they managed to hold it to that middle position.
And I don't see that the knob-vs-binary-switch distinction accurately describes the left-vs-right side of the conflict this time. Calling the officers in Minnesota "the right": are they really Switch people?
One of my most-upvoted comments on TheMotte (+34,-2) discusses the problems you get into when knob mentality meets switch mentality: when someone suddenly knocks you to the ground, thinking that they've just turned up that knob a bit, a Switch might reasonably decide that such a sudden and improbably-but-possibly-lethal attack means a switch has been flipped from "non-lethal" to "lethal".
In the latest videos of Pretti I've seen, his last intelligible words before the incident seem to be "do not push them into traffic!", and the officers only oblige in the sense that shortly afterward we see the officers suddenly shoving a woman into the curb instead of the street. Even if we presume that she's done something criminal, is this proper arrest procedure? It seems to be literally accelerating motion rather than arresting it. Pretti should have just filmed a sloppy arrest (or even an illegal assault under the color of law, if that's what it was), not gotten literally into the middle of it while armed, but in the end he was more-than-amply punished for not thinking like a Switch while trying to defend the woman knocked to the ground. Will there also be any punishment for the offense? None of the DHS officers drew a gun until after one took (and too-ambiguously announced) Pretti's un-drawn gun, so they likewise didn't seem to believe that the violence thus far had flipped a binary switch.
Perhaps they're a bunch of Knobs too.
roystgnr
3d ago
Or am I wrong, and Antifa did actually kill right-wingers, and I just never heard about it?
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.
roystgnr
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
7d 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
8d 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
10d ago
AMD64 (as if that tells you anything about the instruction set)
Was there a second 64-bit instruction set invented by AMD?
roystgnr
10d 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
10d 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
11d 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
12d 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
12d 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.
I'll counter with "(heat-safe) silicone cooking utensils", the ideal material for a house full of semi-competent cooks. All my stuff is 15 or 20 years old, and over that length of time everything eventually gets accidentally left on a hot pan, where wood surfaces turn to char, nylon and other plastics turn to goo and poison-smoke, and good silicone just shrugs it off and stays good-as-new.
Plus I'm too lazy to hand-wash (much less oil) wooden spoons like I do with my wooden cutting board, and I've noticed that wood tends to get gradually ruined by automatic dishwashing.
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