JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
14d ago
You know what, I for one am missing the Democrats that just want to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes. I mean, no open borders and putting thousands of migrants into hotels on taxpayer cost, no ban on combustion cars, no government censorship of speech, no taking kids from parents to change their gender, no males in woman sports, no pro-Hamas riots, no banning Jews from campuses, no camps for people who don't vaccinate, no DEI commissariat at every major institution, no calling me Nazi every time I disagree with them? I don't say I would agree with them, but that's certainly something I'd rather have in the opposing party. We could actually have an argument and see whether voters like more taxes in exchange for more services or not, and whatever would be the result, we could keep some respect for each other once we're done. Right now, it's like "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills".
JarJarJedi
16d ago
I don't think with Obama ("I have my pen and my phone") or Trump (who was supposed to overthrow democracy in 2016 but got too distracted by tweeting and forgot) there was a question about at least intent for the President to rule. Of course, no ruler is absolute - even kings and pharaohs learned that their power is not infinite if they pushed the limits - but at least they were trying to rule. With Biden, there's no plausible way he could.
JarJarJedi
17d ago
I was genuinely curious, not because I'm interested in going full vegetarian, but because I thought it's an interesting thing to try. But I didn't like the taste at all, so I gave up on the thing.
JarJarJedi
17d ago
But how do they decide who's on top? What if CIA wants one thing and State Dep another and chief of staff another?
JarJarJedi
17d ago
Kinda big-scale question, but it's not exactly culture war and the other threads fit it even less I think so I'll ask here. Something that has been bothering me for a while is this question: who is managing the federal government right now? I mean, US is the presidential republic. So, theoretically, the President is the person who is supposed to define policy and manage affairs, at least as far as executive branch of government - which is by now enormous - is concerned. The proverbial buck, as they say, starts and stops with him, at least that's the theory.
However, I think it is completely laughable to consider the idea that the person who is nominally the President now is capable of anything like that. Moreover, I can't really know but I have a strong suspicion this is the state of affairs for at least a couple of years by now. In that timeframe, certain decisions have been made and certain policies are being followed, etc. etc. - so some kind of governing is happening. Who is doing it? Is it Jill Biden? Is it some kind of collective like the Politburo in the USSR? Is it just each department of the government doing its own thing and minding its own as it sees fit? Who is the real President or Presidents?
JarJarJedi
17d ago
Where I live, I have no idea what ideologically most of people are, though since it is quite red area, I have my suspicions, but I don't know about each person specifically.
Ideally, I do not mind living around people who disagree with me on ideology, provided the disagreement is not too far. If somebody thinks we need to raise taxes and spend the money on public works projects like building a park, maybe I disagree but I'm fine living with them around me. If somebody thinks enforcing laws is racist and we should cut the police budget and use the money to distribute free drugs to drug addicts and perform gender transitions to kindergarten children - I'd rather live in a place far, far away from that person. It probably will be hard for me to draw the line per policy, but usually such things come in a package, and having lived with the results of applying that package to day-to-day life, I'd rather not go through that again.
JarJarJedi
17d ago
I almost never hit a problem that I can't diagnose fairly quickly
There can be only two reasons for that, based on my experience: either you are an extreme, generational quality genius, proper Einstein of bug triage, or you've just got lucky so far. In the former case, good for you, but again, that works only as long as the number of problems to diagnose is substantially less than one person can handle. Even if you take 1 minute to diagnose any problem, no matter how hard it is, there's still only 1440 minutes in a day, and I presume you have to also eat, sleep and go to the can. Consequently, this means a bigger system will have to fall into hands of persons who, unlike you, aren't Einsteins. And if the system is built in a way that it requires Einstein to handle it, the system is now under catastrophic risk. It could be that the system you're dealing right now is not the kind of system where you ever foresee any problem that you couldn't handle in a minute. That's fine - in that case, keep doing what you're doing, it works for you, no reason to change. I am just reminding that not all systems are like that, and I have worked many times with system that would be completely impossible to handle with the "lone genius" mode. They are, in fact, quite common.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
The first one has no text and is an assembly of half-second clips with rapid cuts, can you make any sense out of it? Like, figure out what is the bank's name and what happened to it?
The second one at least gives the name of the company Automated Bank Services, and the source of their reporting: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/credit-card-transaction-company-says-mornings-payment-problems-caused-by-attack/
So yes, it looks like they could indeed mess up with Israel's credit card processing provider (not a bank), blocking it for about 3 hours. Looks like a banal DOS, for which they had no protection for some reason.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
They are easier to reason about up to a point. Which a typical HFT trading setup will probably never cross, but a lot of other companies frequently do.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
recently republished by those antisemites over at Haaretz
You are saying it as if it were preposterous, but yes, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken has a long history of hating IDF, wide sectors of Israel society (basically anybody outside far left), supporting BDS and Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. He personally called Israel an "apartheid regime" and Hamas "freedom fighters" as recently as this year, so he may not be the most objective party here and certainly not one that being mentioned in the context of criticizing Israel reinforces the critique. I'm not sure if he qualifies as an "antisemite" - maybe yes, maybe not - but he would certainly support and endorse any libel and any fabrication that makes Israel look bad. It's basically not just "dog bites man", but "dog that is known for bitting men and having bitten men today, bites man again".
JarJarJedi
18d ago
OK maybe never is going too far. I'm not saying one-man band can't compete necessarily. In some cases, with the man being particularly awesome, it can happen in a particular place at a particular time. But scaling this to a company of hundreds of people would be absolutely impossible, because one person can not communicate effectively with hundreds, it's just physically not possible. One person or small number of persons can not be the bottleneck. And super-clever solutions would necessarily make them the bottleneck. It's either one-man band (maybe with a limited cast of janitorial staff) or a scalable corporation, but not both. And for some niches, being small is fine, but most businesses want to grow. And, very frequently, those who do grow eat up those who don't.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
Yeah that's another aspect. When you graduate from "one man band" to development team, and from development team to 20 teams each of them doing their own thing and needing to coordinate and figure out how not to step on each other toes, turns out hyper-smart CPU-optimal solutions are very rarely the best ones. You need common languages and solutions that can be made reusable and portable. Otherwise the undomitable volition solution needs to be thrown out and redone, because however good is whoever wrote it, he is not very scalable. There were times where lone heroes could single-handedly win battles, by their sheer will and awesomeness, and it's very romantic. But modern battles are never won that way.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
They don't actually, they pretend he is to make the attacks on him justifiable. They know perfectly well he's not a threat to them, I haven't heard a single case where a leftist would hate Trump but has been afraid to reveal it out of fear of violence from his side. I have multiple cases known where people displayed absolutely grotesque examples of hate towards Trump, without any fear of retaliation. Which is completely justified, because no retaliation by Trump ever happened. Worst he did is to call people insulting names and rant about them on Twitter or Truth Social.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
If you operate under the principle "If Democrats publicly accuse Republicans of something nefarious, they have already done the same thing, but bigger and worse" - you'd be correct in no less than about 80% of cases.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him,
I can't remember much careers being blown up by #resistance against Trump though. Even with Trump being nominally president, the best careerist move has been to join the #resistance, not to oppose it.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
I don't see how you can restore the norms until both sides want to restore the norms. If the left doesn't want to restore any norms acceptable to the right - and they clearly do not appear to - then "restoring the norms" for the right means capitulating to whatever new norms the left is going to want. And doing it again and again, repeatedly, with the "norms" shifting arbitrarily far left, and taking flak as "norm-breakers" at each squeak of disagreement. I think it can only be "norms" if they are acceptable and agreed on if not by all than by the majority of the society, and I don't think there's anything the current left could offer that would fit the mold. If they want to go back from "western culture is racist" and "everybody who says is a woman is a woman" and "the left should control and police every public discussion" and "any speech not approved by the left is violence" and "violence against people lower in oppression hierarchy is not real violence" and so on - then there will be some norms. Until then, I see the talk of the "norms" as psychological warfare aimed at convincing the right they have already lost, they just don't realize it yet, but it's time to accept it.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
Trump will move the needle towards right wing strong man authoritarianism.
It is just sad to read this after 4 years of Trump presidency in which he was unable not only to come even in the same neighborhood as any "authoritarianism", winged or wingless, but to be able to govern properly as the stature of the President in the presidential republic implied. He was one of the weakest presidents in terms of how much he had things under his personal control, and his plans have been routinely derailed both by deep swamp resistance and by his own party. And yet, we get the same scary story about how he's literally hitler we got in 2016. Makes one think, however "rational" we try to be, our prejudices will come through at the end and that will be it.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
What seems to be missing here is common household. That's what most married couples do, and most friendships and other arrangements don't. Me and my wife have common bank account, which each of us can use independently, common property that we both use, etc. Treating it on the individual basis, ignoring that fact, would both clearly unjust (a family with one income would pay radically different taxes than a family with the same income but earned by two people, for example, even though they essentially are in the same financial situation) and would create a huge mess in practice. That aspect makes the marriage unique, as there aren't many other arrangements in the society where people essentially form a single economic unit long-term. Theoretically you could do it with your good friend, in practice pretty much nobody does. This is much more important, IMO, than "love".
JarJarJedi
18d ago
Maybe because when I seen it, it was in "Russia has nukes, we must satisfy all their demands" form
If you believe the recent Woodward's book, that has been the essence of the US policy towards Russia for the current administration. They were all overcome by mortal fear of Russia using the nuke, likely due to bad intel (probably injected by Russia). And since Woodward is pretty much a sock puppet for the people who define that policy, I think it is believable.
JarJarJedi
19d ago
Israel is using AI tools with little oversight to determine whether an individual is a Hamas operative.
I'm not sure what is actually being reported here. So far I see two facts being alleged - that Israel is using AI system to figure out who could be Hamas operative, which is 90% accurate (spectacular number if true, to the point I even suspect they are being over-optimistic), and that Israel is using phone tracking to locate specific suspects. The latter has nothing to do with AI, as for the former - I am not sure what is supposed to happen after a certain person has been identified as "90% likely to be Hamas operative". The article uses phrases like "automated kill chain", but there's no evidence or even allegation such thing actually exists in any meaning of the word "automated" - do they mean if the system identifies a person, he would be automatically targeted by some killing machine without human supervision? If so, why don't they say it explicitly and describe what this system is and how they know about it? If no, then what "automated" means?
And on the other hand, I am not sure what kind of oversight you would put on such a system. Let's assume you indeed had a system which with probability of 90% can tell you whether or not certain guy in Gaza is in Hamas. Now, how would you verify it? Obviously, if you had some better system, you'd use that one from the start. You could review the data yourself - but do you have better than 90% accuracy? I mean, if you spot some hilarious bug in the system - on the level of "black vikings" and other hilarious bugs in public LLMs, sure. You can block that. Like if the system marked every guy with name "Muhamad" as Hamas member, than you can notice it and overrule the system. But let's say you didn't notice that. Moreover, you tried it 100 times and went out and captured those guys and 90 of them admitted that yes they are in Hamas, or you found Hamas membership card on them and so on. E.g. let's assume 90% is true. How do you oversight that system then? Verifying each person manually is impossible - there are like 50 thousands of them, and most of them are hiding and it's impossible to verify anything about them until they are either captured or dead. So what do you base your supervision on?
JarJarJedi
19d ago
A cyberattack from Iran hit an Israeli bank, and maybe credit card users generally, blocking users off.
I couldn't get from that - which bank was that and what actually happened?
JarJarJedi
19d ago
A simple solution is to set up the app on one box and a standby on the next box. If it goes down, you simply respond and assess and confirm yes, the primary is down. Lets start the standby.
Then the standby goes down, or doesn't start. Your next move? You start debugging shit when people around you run with their hair on fire and scream bloody murder at you, the system is down over 2 kiloseconds and you still didn't fix it yet, are you actually sent from the future to ruin as all?
And note that this will definitely happen at 3am, when you are down with the flu, your internet provider is hit by a freak storm and your dog ate something and vomited over every carpet in your house. That's always how it happens. It never goes the optimistic way. And then you realize it'd be cool if you had some tools that can help you in these situations - even it it means paying a little extra.
JarJarJedi
19d ago
While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.
But are you? My experience has been k8s makes shipping - and by that I don't mean compiling the code (or whatever people do to package python apps in your country) and throwing it over the fence for some other people to figure out how to run it, but actually creating a viable product consumable over the long periods of time by the end user - way smoother than any solution before it. Sure, I can build a 50-component system from the base OS up and manage all the configs and dependencies manually. Once. When I need to do it many times over and maintain it - in parallel to debugging bugs and developing new code - I say fuck it, I need something that automates it. It's not even the fun part. Yes, it means I'll pay the price in pure speed. If I were in a hedge fund doing HFT, I wouldn't pay it. 99% of places I've seen it's prudent to pay it. My time and my mental health is more valuable than CPU time. Not always, but often.
JarJarJedi
19d ago
And you have a perfect memory.
Sanders is wrong about a lot of things, but he's not wrong about this: the Left used to be the movement of the working class, or at least aligned with the working class and paying attention to it. Now it mostly moved on to luxury beliefs. I can't believe for a steel mill worker or a tradesman the priority issues would be transgender rights, getting more migrants in and ensuring everybody drives an electric car.
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