PokerPirate
1d ago
FWIW your point seems obvious to me about the US. There have been 14 US presidents since WWII, and 8 of them have military experience.
PokerPirate
3d ago
For the parents: How do you introduce/talk about yourself and your spouse to your kids friends? Are you on first name basis? Do you go by Mr/Mrs so-and-so?
My sense is that Mr/Mrs so-and-so makes it easier for young kids to understand their relationship to you and that they need to respect your decisions. Some of my peer group, however, goes by a first name basis. Most parents never even broach the subject with their kids' friends, and so the friends are in an awkward limbo where they don't know how to address parents.
PokerPirate
7d ago
The song came first, but I doubt Stallman or any of the fellow GNU folk had that song as an explicit motivation.
PokerPirate
9d ago
Whoa... you're blowing my mind...
But do you really pronounce something like ISO/IEC 27000:2018 as "ey-so slash eye ee cee ..."? I guess I never refer to the name of the org without a bunch of other numbers after it.
I maintain a git repo about the "programmer dialect of English" that I use to teach my computer science/data science students how to not sound like a n00b/PHB. It's niche, but many people here are likely to fit into the niche.
The document goes over phonology / lexicon / grammar / discourse differences in programmer English vs American standard English, but to give you all a taste, here's the top of the phonology section:
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RAG (as in retrieval augmented generation with LLMs) is pronounced "rag" not "R-A-G".
NOTE: The word "rag" has only one sylable and is faster/easier to pronounce than the 3-sylable "R-A-G". The practice of pronouncing abbreviations as acronyms stems from the programmer's desire for efficiency in all things.
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ICLR (a famous machine learning conference) is pronounced "I clear".
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PNG is pronounced "ping" and not "pee-en-gee". This pronunciation is specified in the standard.
The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.
PokerPirate
10d ago
I've enjoyed reading everyone else's advice here, so I'll add in my own: It's your responsibility to manage your own parents (and protect your spouse from their inlaws).
In the extreme case: my parents traumatized my wife ~1 year into our marriage by getting into a yelling match over politics/religion. I had to tell them that they were out of line, and that I'd be cutting contact with them if they continued to behave that way.
Less extreme: my wife's relatives regularly give too much sugar/presents to our kids, and it's my wife's job to let them know when to stop.
PokerPirate
20d ago
This is my exact relationship with my kids/wife. I suspect it's overall healthy for the kids to have one "strict" parent and one "soft" parent, but I agree that modern mothers have gone off the deep end. I often find myself having to be harder on the kids than I'd like to be in order to strike a better balance.
PokerPirate
20d ago
I've got a 1, 2, 3, and 6yo. All were sleeping through the night by 6 months. I (father) was responsible for the night shifts, and did basically the Ferber method.
PokerPirate
20d ago
We've got an all-in-one Narnia that I got used for $2. It's fantastic for an adult, but for kids I'd go with the smaller size. The font on our all-in-one is a bit too small to be comfortable for a kid to read (or to point with you're finger at what you're reading to show a kid), and the weight is too heavy for them to comfortably carry it around. Mine is ~400 pages but they are very large (bigger than US letter paper size).
PokerPirate
20d ago
That's a great idea, I'm going to try it :)
I started my kids off with Harry Potter. After watching the movies, it's much easier for them to visualize what's going on when I read. I read books 1 and 2 to my 6 year old that way.
I thought about doing the same with the Hobbit or Narnia, but the movies aren't quite as friendly to young kids. (I've also got a 1, 2, and 3 yo right now that even Narnia would be too much for. Harry Potter is full of funny scenes in between the scary ones that these other "kids" movies don't have.)
PokerPirate
29d ago
I like your shared thoughts.
But I also really want the AI to go away and would be supportive of more extreme moderation in the future. I haven't seen a single thread with AI content that I thought was productive.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
in the United States it is illegal to use surveillance aircraft and NSA SIGINT assets to hoover up reams of data and then act without warrants in response.
This isn't really true in the sense that you're implying. Ordinary police regularly use surveillance aircraft to establish probable cause for an arrest. Ordinary police don't quite have NSA SIGINT assets, but they do still have quite a bit of SIGINT assets they use regularly. If there was political will to arrest/imprison drugees, it would certainly be possible for the police to do so legally.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
When Bush walks over, Obama stands up to shake his hands like an old friend. Trump stays seated and neither he nor bush acknowledge each other. Then Obama and Trump are back to cracking jokes with each other.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
LLPSI is pretty intense for an elementary schooler. There's much better material for young learners. Minecraftium is a youtube playlist of a Latin teacher playing minecraft while talking latin, and is a good example of something in the same "natural" style but geared for the younger audience. It's not a complete course by itself, but there's lots of other similar material out there.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I think the phrase "quantum woo" vastly understates the potential impact of quantum computing on machine learning. The quantum algorithm zoo, for example, lists a number of quantum machine learning algorithms. Several of these get exponential speed up from classical algorithms, but even a quadratic speedup of grover's algorithm would be game changing at the scale frontier models operate on.
I agree that most normie use of quantum in the brain is "woo". And I also agree that it's not been established that the brain relies on any quantum effects. But there is actual legitimate research in these directions and it seems wrong to offhandedly dismiss it.
For those (like me) wondering why "female" should be related to "sucking", it's because the babies suck on their mothers breast. (See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/female and follow the etymology links.)
Another fun note is that the old-english for male was "weaponed" because their was a weapon between their legs: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/w%C3%A6pned#Old_English
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I'd forgotten about this film. This is a really good suggestion... there's lots of fantastic themes in that movie. Thanks!
PokerPirate
2mo ago
My kids are also into Harry Potter. They've started calling Neverending Story "white harry potter" just because the dvd case is white. It's a great story!
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Oooh.. Ben Hur. I hadn't heard of that before, but it sounds fantastic. I'll have to watch it with my wife, and maybe with my kids when they're a bit older. Thanks!
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Aaahh... I remember these from when I was a kid... my 2yo is super into dinosaurs right now, so that's likely to be a winner... thanks!
PokerPirate
2mo ago
What are the all-time best movies / shows for kids to watch?
This Christmas, I watched the Home Alone series with my kids (6yo, 3yo, 2yo, 1yo). The movies are fantastic. They keep the kids engaged with humor, and they provide valuable lessons on family (you might think they're a pain, but they're still wonderful), independence (kids can accomplish a lot of things that adults can't and they should be encouraged to try), some seemingly bad people are good (the shovel guy/pigeon lady are scary at first but turn out to be great people in the end), and some seemingly good people are bad (the thieves dress up as cops and trick a lot of adults).
I want to find other similar movies to watch with my kids that are fun and full of great lessons. Does themotte have any recommendations?
PokerPirate
3mo ago
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.
PokerPirate
4mo 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
5mo 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.
It's certainly not a golden ticket. @cjet79's original claim is that veterans from a hypothetical European-Russian conflict will have outsized political influence in their respective governments. I'm just saying I think we've seen that trend in the US where the political class has a much larger fraction of veterans than ordinary citizens.
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