PokerPirate
1mo ago
I'll add to this that BIOS passwords do not provide much security even in the ordinary context without armed guards. In order to do something with a BIOS password, you need physical access to a machine to type it in. But if you have physical access, you can also easily reset the BIOS password by removing a battery. (This would break a seal on the machine, but those seals can also be replaced.) So I don't think this leak of BIOS passwords meaningfully made the election less secure.
I'm still very much opposed to electronic voting, however, because of all the other ways they make voting insecure.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I did look into this, and they generally require co2 cartridges and regular cleaning which reduces their cost effictiveness. I also have the goal of cutting the fuzzy drink addiction entirely at some point, and the regular bill reminds me I should be making progress towards the goal.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I'm "down" to 3ish cans/day. That's still a $10 pack every other week = $250 / year. That feels like a lot of money to spend on water when the tap spits it out for free.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I "accidentally" started drinking about 4 liters/day Coke0 after my kids were born to stay awake. (It felt safer to have a cold soda around babies rather than hot coffee, plus I like the taste better.)
I weaned myself off by drinking the sparkling water from costco. Still expensive, but no more caffeine dependency.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
For a robbery caught on camera, or a murder where the killer’s fingerprints are on the knife and his DNA is on the scene? What is there to argue about? Why is a defense attorney necessary? What do we gain by pretending that going through the (expensive, time-consuming) motions is valuable?
The purpose of a defense attorney is not to get the accused acquitted at all costs. Their purpose is to help the accused navigate an extremely stressful environment. That can include, for example, encouraging the accused to take a plea deal in the case of overwhelming evidence. There's a reason the vast majority of cases do not end up in trial.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Github repo with course content: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/cmc-csci181-languages
All the lectures recorded and put on youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSNWQVdrBwoa4KNaiKr-ayUdROZdSZ_1E
(unfortunately the audio didn't capture on the first video)
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I'm teaching a class on LLMs right now, and the students are working on a project to use LLMs to answer questions about the current election. (They're using a RAG based system to pull in news articles to answer the questions, and they're next assignment is going to be to get the system to respond in the style of Harris/Trump.)
Anyways, to evaluate the students' work, I needed to create a dataset of US election facts. I call it the Hairy Trumpet dataset (github link), and I'm surprised I haven't heard this pun on the candidates' names anywhere else yet. I especially like the pun because hairy trumpet is also the name of a weird fungus, which seems fitting for a dataset on politics.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.
Two comments:
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The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.
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What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I agree. That's exactly the type of book that JTarrou should write.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
PokerPirate
3mo ago
My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.
Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?
Your previous stories/posts were full of fascinating small details about life as an infantry grunt and made great connections to larger themes in both politics and life. The stories had a blend of humility and grandiosity that was riveting.
This post, in contrast, is super boring. You sound like a Kvothe-wannabe (which I know you're not). I don't care what you write about, just get back to writing actual autobiographical stories, and we will all gladly read them.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
This doesn't make sense to me. Why would "the middle drop out"?
I assume that most people who believe that voting is a waste of time also believe that the major candidates don't reflect their preferred policies. This makes these "drop outs" by definition very far from median.
Dropping out should only matter if the two extremes do them at different rates. If dropouts are uniformly distributed or distributed at the extremes, then there's no change in the stability of the results.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
Trump’s instantly infamous remarks* at the NABJ conference have been universally decried and only sporadically defended.
I just watched that video, and wow! Trump did a fantastic job with the first 5 minutes of that interview. Whatever you think about his candidacy, there's a lot to learn about rhetoric here. He instantly disarms a very hostile question and builds great rapport with the crowd. I wish I had 1% of his skill as a speaker.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
This finally explains to me why Patrick Rothfuss hasn't finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. (The first two books definitely exhibit the "chauvanism" you're describing, but book 2 of the trilogy was published in 2011 and there's no signs of book 3 ever coming.)
PokerPirate
4mo ago
Eh.. sorry it got strange. I definitely don't think the North should have invaded the South. It was a bad decision morally and strategically, and it decimated the Korean people. I just think it's worth understanding our enemies' motivations in order to be able to accurately predict their future behavior, which is necessary to make them less dangerous.
I understand your point about opportunity costs, and think it's quite valid. We just have a different model of how collaboration works. Your model is:
The North has a fixed set of possible projects it can work on. If we help even with "good" projects, then that lets the North divert resources they would have had to spend on those projects to military projects, and so the bad projects are indirectly helped.
My model is:
The North does not have a fixed set of possible projects. If we add more good projects to the set of projects they might want to work on, then that will divert resources that would have otherwise been spent on bad projects to these newly found good projects.
Of course, details matter about which model is true in any situation. I think the specific examples I've shown are solidly in the second category.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
You can find a summary of my career in this college newspaper bio of me: https://tsl.news/professor-mike-izbicki-discusses-path-to-pacifism/. There's more details about me leaving the navy on my blog at https://izbicki.me/blog/my-co-discharge.html.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
It's astonishing to me that people still think giving them "no strings attached aid" ...
Academic exchange is not "no strings attached aid". It is a mutual relationship where both parties benefit from the arrangement.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
even though they have a history of cyberattacks and crypto scams? I don't know why you think there's no risk, or any benefit, in freely helping them increase their IT skills.
Eh... I think the cyberattacks/crypto scams are blown way out of proportion. Literally every country on earth does this. For some reason, however, it's only used as an excuse to block exchanges with North Korea and not with countries like Israel.
Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations. I have a pretty good sense of what types of training contribute to hacking capabilities and can ensure that the academic exchanges stay far away from that material.
it frees up their state resources to work on other, more black-hat stuff
I disagree. For example:
-
Albert Einstein was part of an enemy state in WWI. This led to his theory of relativity being ignored by the outside world because a Good American (TM) wouldn't support German physics. If non-Germans had paid more attention to Einstein, then we would have understood relativity ~10 years earlier, and the whole world would be better off because of it. Ignoring Einstein did not result in increased capabilities of the German war machine, and I think was clearly a mistake in hindsight. Who knows what types of Einsteins are living in North Korea right now that we don't even know about because we don't want to support North Korean science?
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Above I give two examples of the work I did in North Korea that resulted in North Korean programmers being assigned peaceful tasks (contributing to open source software and fixing the KCNA webpage) that they would not have otherwise completed. If these exchanges hadn't been happening, then those programmers would have been assigned other tasks (possibly military related) instead. I personally know several American machine learning researchers who have benefited from the pull requests, and several government analysts who rely on the improved KCNA website to perform their jobs.
There's a lot more examples of why I think this work is a net-benefit in the /r/theschism link above. If you disagree with any of those particulars, I'd love to learn why.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
Tangential, but wtf? I can't believe this has been hidden in theschism for years. Have you written about your experiences in this role beyond your polite request to resume academic exchange? I assume we haven't resumed it.
There's:
- a travelog at mailto:https://guest:trip-to-pust@izbicki.me/pust/
- a description of how I got NK students to contribute to open source software: https://izbicki.me/blog/teaching-open-source-in-north-korea.html
- and how I helped fix the North Korean's official KCNA webpage at: https://izbicki.me/blog/fixing-north-korea-kcna-webpage.html
I have more fun stories I'd like to share but either haven't gotten around to it or have been asked by the "state department" not to.
You lay out some good points with the Soviets in that post, re: collapse and nukes. Academics can provide a basis for further collaboration. Do you think there are any risks associated with academic exchange with geopolitical rivals and adversaries?
With major powers like China/Russia, I think there's some risk (but the way the FBI/military talk about the risk is way overblown). With a much smaller country like North Korea that is super isolated, I think there's basically no risk.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
On May 1st, 1946, a South Korean guerilla tried to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Kim was speaking at a political rally in Pyongyang when the White Shirt guerilla threw a grenade on stage. Kim's bodyguard---the young soviet officer Yakov Novichenko---caught the grenade and threw it away. Novichenko was seriously mutilated by the grenade blast, but Kim survived the incident without injury.
The recent assassination attempt against Trump reminded me of this story, and I wanted to share it with themotte for two reasons:
-
It's just a great story, and one that I wish were more widely known. For me, it helps shed light on why the North Koreans felt like they "needed" to start the Korean War and invade the South in 1950. (I only know about Novichenko because of my time living in North Korea, where a North Korean army officer told me to look him up.)
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I feel like there should somehow be a meme connecting these two assassination attempts and the Trump/Kim summit, but I'm not enough of a meme-warrior to figure out how to do it. Maybe one of you all can pull it off?
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Seriously. Who wouldn't expect the owner of tons of super fancy golf courses to actually be good at golf? TDS indeed.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Which is why authoritarian movements tend to use female-coded language- "equity" and "safety" are the two popular ones-
It's hard for me to see why these words are "female-coded". For example, they were explicitly two of the main reasons for the founding fathers of the US to launch their revolution, and I don't know anyone who sees the founding fathers as female-coded figures.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Hmm... this doesn't quite line up with my understanding of history.
My impression was that all of Latin American military coups of the 1900s had quite widespread support from the rank and file military. The purpose of taking over the radio station and local telephone exchange was not to prevent the average private from realizing what's going on, but rather to prevent the people outside the military from coordinating (both armed resistance and escape plans). Going back even further, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, all the soldiers certainly knew they were doing something "illegal". They just didn't care because they were loyal to Caesar and not the existing state.
I'd sincerely appreciate reading a more detailed analysis if you think I'm wrong.
Is there really a norm against killing foreign heads of state in war? It seems to me like this happens all the time.
When the US invades a country like Iraq and declines to kill their leader, one of the main strategic reasons for this decision is so that there exists a clear person with authority to surrender. Often, when a leader is killed without surrendering, the armed forces splinter into a variety of insurgent groups and there is no way to achieve a diplomatic resolution to the conlfict anymore.
This argument suggests that Putin would have a strategic reason to not kill Zelensky, but Zelensky has no corresponding interest in not killing Putin. My guess is that if Zelensky had the chance, he would definitely choose to kill Putin whether or not the US supported the decision.
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