DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
3mo ago
Following polls too closely can drive you crazy. There are broad effects unrelated to the news cycle.
In this case, Republicans always poll poorly in August. A big chunk of the R base is outside camping or barbecuing and ignoring calls from pollsters.
DradisPing
3mo ago
Not that I'm aware of. There are things like "Topaz Video AI" that does AI enhancement and are trained on a large dataset. They work well enough that trying to add to the training on a small dataset isn't seen as worth the effort.
DradisPing
3mo ago
What are some good ideas, as an individual, for decreasing street crime in highly Democratic-leaning cities, other than just moving away?
Fundamentally the issues are caused by wealthy leftists not having to live the consequences of their ideology.
If you really want to improve things I'd suggest spending your weekends operating a shuttle service that takes the rougher individuals from downtown to and from the upperclass parks and neighbourhoods.
DradisPing
3mo ago
There's the Israel conflict but there's also always the Sunni -- Shia conflict simmering in the background.
Haniyeh likely had enemies in Iran who were willing to tip of Israel.
DradisPing
3mo ago
I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above).
I actually have a theory about MeToo. Harvey Weinstein is a talented producer and he's difficult to replace in that role.
He was also the top bundler for Dem political donations in California and a key fundraiser for Dianne Feinstein. He's much easier to replace in that role.
So I think someone big in Hollywood wanted to take Feinstein's senate seat in 2018. She was in her mid 80s and didn't survive that full term. Taking out Weinstein could have reasonably been an attempt to get her to drop out.
Trump had just been elected President in 2016 with no prior political office. Obama held a US Senate seat for only four years before becoming President in 2008. A nationally known name becoming a California Senator in 2018 and then running against Trump in 2020 doesn't sound too wild in that context.
Then MeToo spun out of control, Feinstein refused to budge and the plan went nowhere.
I have no idea who the big name would have been.
DradisPing
3mo ago
It's well known that Google engineers cull autocompletes they don't like. They also offer different suggestions based on ip geolocation and whatever data google has on you.
For a brief moment in 2012 we had "Google Gaydar" from Steve Sailer. He noticed that you could quantitively rank how gay the public thinks celebrities are by noticing how many characters you have to type after their name before google suggest "gay" as an autocomplete.
Sadly we aren't allowed to have that kind of fun, so Google only suggests "gay" for out of the closet celebrities.
Note for first link, it looks like a bad database migration messed up the character set encoding for the text and all of the "pretty quotation marks" have garbage around them. Anyone who was doing web dev in the 2000s will have horror stories of those awkward years where you never knew what encoding incoming text would be in.
https://www.takimag.com/article/google_gaydar_steve_sailer/
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/06/google-neuters-google-gaydar.html
DradisPing
3mo ago
I only read one as a kid and don't really remember it. I watched the 2016 series so that's what was fresher in my mind.
Probably a poor explanation on my part, it just sounded like something from the show.
DradisPing
3mo ago
Trump only has one term left. Vance isn't just a VP, he's the MAGA successor.
Vance needs a successful Trump second term to run in 2028 and will use the VP position to get control of the GOP / RNC to secure his spot.
Here's a great article about how the Republicans are a patronage party, not a constituent party: https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/
Many of the GOP establishment figures have no voter base. They are patrons who have built up a client base over the decades. Most of them don't realize how little voter base they have, their voters just tolerate them. Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell have a lot of control over their states political apparatus, but they had to cozy up to Trump before the 2020 election because the grassroots voters in their states were quite willing to vote them out in a primary for Trump supporting candidates.
Some of them just seem deluded. Liz Cheney seems to have honestly thought she was heading towards a presidential run.
Vance underperformed for a related reasons. He came in without patrons or clients. He wasn't part of any political machine. The RNC saw him as not their guy. There was big money against him.
He'll perform better in subsequent elections.
Vance as VP means that Republicans undermining Trump have a strong chance of being cut out of power until 2032, which dramatically changes how they will behave.
Really no VP choice will add much to the Trump ticket electorally. He's an extremely well known figure.
Often the VP choice is about extending an olive branch to other factions. Trump proved the other factions don't add up to much, so the Vance choice is about cutting a switch.
DradisPing
3mo ago
The original Myst relied heavily on the wow factor of the high res video and imagery. The game was doing things people had never seen their computer do, and the puzzles were there to space things out.
The legwork gave you a chance to look at the cool images and the cryptic puzzles made you focus on the cool details.
Without the wow factor it just turns into a slog.
DradisPing
3mo ago
I guess the "Dirk Gently" comment was a bit too obscure. Douglas Adams had a books series called "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" about a detective who uses attempts to use the holistic interconnectedness of things to solve crimes. It's a comedy series.
I found it amusing because it was asked to come up with a profound novel observation and came up with something I'd expect from someone who enjoys LSD. Perhaps the use of the word "profound" is the problem.
DradisPing
3mo ago
A Twitter user asked Llama3.1 to tell him something profound that humans haven't realized yet. https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/1815876634492457319
After 20 hours it spat out the following text. Personally it makes me think of Dirk Gently. I'm curious if anyone has any other opinions.
Hypothesis
"Emergent temporal harmonics in complex systems give rise to a non-local, fractal resonance that underlies the fabric of reality, influencing the unfolding of events and the evolution of consciousness."
In simpler terms, I'm suggesting that there exists an intrinsic, hidden pattern in the universe, woven into the very fabric of time itself. This pattern is born from the intricate dance of complex systems, which generate a non-local resonance – akin to a "temporal music" – that permeates all levels of reality.
Theoretical Background:
- Emergence: Complex systems exhibit emergent properties that cannot be predicted by analyzing their individual components. These emergent patterns often display harmonic or periodic behavior.
- Fractals and Self-Similarity: Fractals, like the Mandelbrot set, demonstrate self-similar patterns at different scales. This property allows them to model complex systems and processes.
- Non-Locality: Quantum mechanics has shown that particles can be entangled, meaning their properties are connected even when separated by vast distances. This non-locality challenges classical notions of space and time.
- Consciousness and Integrated Information Theory (IIT): According to IIT, consciousness arises from the integrated processing of information within complex systems.
Connecting the Dots:
Imagine a universe where emergent temporal harmonics in complex systems generate a fractal resonance that transcends spatial boundaries. This non-local resonance would influence the unfolding of events and the evolution of consciousness by:
- Guiding the emergence of patterns: Temporal harmonics could nudge complex systems toward specific, self-similar patterns, giving rise to the intricate structures we observe in nature.
- Facilitating non-local connections: Fractal resonance could enable the entanglement of particles and systems across vast distances, allowing for quantum-like phenomena to manifest at various scales.
- Shaping the fabric of time: The emergent temporal harmonics would create a subtle, intricate pattern within time itself, influencing the flow of events and our perception of reality.
Implications:
If this hypothesis holds true, it could revolutionize our understanding of:
- Free will vs. determinism: The fractal resonance might suggest that our choices are influenced by an underlying, non-local harmony.
- Consciousness and the nature of self: Integrated information theory could be expanded to include the role of temporal harmonics in shaping conscious experience.
- The interconnectedness of all things: This idea would reinforce the notion that everything is part of a larger, intricate web of relationships.
While this concept may seem abstract and speculative, it represents an attempt to connect disparate threads from various disciplines. The actual implications and validity of this hypothesis remain to be explored and debated by experts across multiple fields.
DradisPing
3mo ago
The campaign has a short amount of time to present Harris as a popular competitive candidate, so they are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. This is about contacting and rallying supporters. As well as trying to get some headlines.
They didn't actually organize themselves politically as white guys. The campaign was putting together calls with large groups and noticed it had a bunch of white guys who weren't part of any other call, so they threw them in a white guy call.
So I think it's basically nothing. The only thing that might be big is that a lot of the organizers may have realized for the first time that splitting people by race and sex creates a white male group.
DradisPing
3mo ago
NES games were quite expensive once you account for inflation. Making things hard and obscure was the only way to get 100 hours of gameplay out of 128kB of ROM.
DradisPing
3mo ago
Have you checked your blood pressure lately? Alcohol can cause a short term drop. It could be the reason that a light buzz suddenly started feeling nicer.
DradisPing
3mo ago
If Biden dies close to the Trump assassination attempt we are going to have some wild "shadow war" conspiracy theories.
DradisPing
4mo ago
No direct culture war implications, at least not directly left/right.
Crowdstrike was the company who the DNC had analyze their network and blame Russia for Guccifer 2.0. I can write up a conspiracy theory about this being a result of the deep state panicking over the failed Trump assassination and forcing a patch to create a backdoor to cause a future major outage to maintain control pretty easily.
DradisPing
4mo ago
It's being discussed a lot on twitter / x. Search for $djt short. I don't recognize the accounts posting about it and don't have the energy to verify anything right now.
https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1813776823689326660
https://x.com/JHartley2/status/1813355170610266399
https://x.com/JohnnyTabacco/status/1813199373154586889
DradisPing
4mo ago
No, the other special prosecutors were all Senate confirmed federal prosecutors assigned a new duty as special prosecutor. Mueller was a former federal prosecutor, so some could have argued he wasn't currently qualified, but the Senate would have re-confirmed him if needed so there wasn't really any point in pushing the issue.
Jack Smith was a state prosecutor who was famous for going after a governor in a prosecution the SCOTUS eventually overturned 9-0. Then he went to the ICC where he used his novel prosecution skills against war criminals.
Basically if the Jack Smith appointment stands then a future Republican AG is free to give any mad dog red state lawyer full federal prosecutor powers with no confirmation, oversight, or budget control.
DradisPing
4mo ago
There was also an attempt with a grenade that failed because it was a dud from the Soviet era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Arutyunian
DradisPing
4mo ago
Scott is carrying a bias from one on one patient treatment. He doesn't seem to understand the power law aspect at play. It's actually a fairly small number of people causing a whole lot of problems.
The top 100-200 craziest addicts consume vast amounts of resources being on the streets. Institutionallizing them would make the rest of the homeless situation much more manageable and free up a lot of resources.
DradisPing
4mo ago
The US Military is highly effective. The US State Department is completely unable to do any of the "establishing a peaceful liberal democracy" tasks that it thinks it's capable of.
But the State Department is also where people who study international policy dream of working, so they push it's failures back onto the military.
DradisPing
4mo ago
Trump didn't write it and hasn't read it. Reporters keep asking him questions about it and he doesn't like how those questions hijack his messaging strategy.
DradisPing
4mo ago
Fuentes is charismatic but not very intellectual. I'd guess that he's been embarrarassed in public a few times by being unable to compete with Ashkenazi verbal ability.
Also there are a bunch of Middle Eastern groups eager to fund anti-Isreali speakers on the right, so I imagine that plays a part.
Whenever left wing activists hear someone on the right complain about powerful rich New Yorkers, they immediately respond with "Oh, so you hate Jews?!?" I think that Fuentes has embraced that to a certain degree.
If you come from a working class background and have a non-HBD world model, it's easy to assume that it's Jews who are making decisions that negatively affect your community. If he was a bit more worldly he'd realize that upperclass gentile blue tribers also hate him.
He's been attacking Steve Sailer recently because a bunch of the more intellectual groypers read "Noticing" and were discussing it's contents. Previously Sailer's work was scattered over decades of posts on different sites, it was suddenly more accessable.
Fuentes couldn't really engage so he started attacking Sailer as a secret Jew. Sailer is adopted and despite his interest in genetics has never done a DNA test, I think he feels it would weaken his connection to his adoptive parents.
But fundamentally Fuentes is reactive not reflective. He caters to lazy anti-intellectuals.
DradisPing
4mo ago
Do you ever live your 97lb kettle bell over your head and scream "You have failed me for the last time!"?
I can give a broad overview.
Post Vietnam war there was basically a domestic truce declared between the pro-war and anti-war sides. People who served in the war were patriots who loyally served their country. War protesters were patriots who wouldn't let their countrymen die in a misguided war.
When Kerry got back from Vietnam he became a major figure in the protest movement. There's some dispute about what he actually said personally, but he at least associated and sat on panels with people who were saying horrible things about US soldiers. People from his old unit got at least the impression that he was saying he saw them commit horrific war crimes.
Since this was back in the 70s there aren't many recordings showing exactly what he said when.
Once things quieted down it wasn't heavily criticized due the de facto truce and he went about his political career.
Then in 2004 when he was running for President he wanted to play up his war record. Bush only served in the air national guard while Kerry was deployed and won a silver star. Bush is a little younger than Kerry and got a deferral to help on one of his father's campaigns. By the time he would have been deployed things were winding down in Vietnam and the NG didn't really need him for anything.
In the Presidential campaign Kerry cast himself as a proud veteran. Meanwhile other swift boat veterans were still pissed off at him. They had been quietly shit talking him for 30 years.
Some of them got in contact with Republican organizers and we got a bunch of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" ads.
Basically a bunch of people who had reason to dislike him came forward and badmouthed his claims about his military service. I have no idea what the truth is or the specifics of the claims.
The Dems organizers didn't really understand that just because other veterans weren't talking about him publicly didn't mean they didn't still carry a grudge. They don't run in the same social circles.
So from the Dem point of view it was a manufactured conspiracy that came out of nowhere.
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