PokerPirate
4mo ago
I'm a well-above-average-informed protestant, but whenever I hear all you "serious" Catholics talking about your beliefs/church politics, I have no idea what you all are talking about. Is there a good "Catholicism for protestants" book that I should read?
(I'd prefer something beyond a Catholicism-for-dummies level treatment. I've read the bible multiple times and many non-canonical early writings in their original languages. I can read Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. I'm familiar with the broad outlines of church history, but definitely weakest in the post-Constantine pre-reformation era. My goal would be to really understand the way a typical priest/bishop/etc views their work and how that's different than protestant leaders. I don't want to just learn a set of facts that I could get from reading wikipedia articles. Maybe a good biography of a recent Catholic "politician" might fit the bill, I'm not sure.)
PokerPirate
4mo ago
the progressive faction ... weighed down by outsized responsibility for the sex abuse scandal(s)
Could you enlighten the heathen among us why the progressive faction has outsized responsibility for priests molesting children?
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'm a US citizen and I have no idea what you're talking about. I'd love it if someone would give a writeup.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I used to work at a 3 letter agency hiding my identity on the internet. Two points jump out to me from your post:
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I don't think your change of MAC address caused you this hastle. The MAC address is a physical layer id and won't get transferred beyond your router in the TCP/IP packets. Something you install (like a game) could use the MAC address to uniquely identify you, but I don't see how something like gmail could do that. Is there some sort of new javascript black magic that lets gmail access the MAC address? It seems much more likely to me that you triggered additional "security" measures via some other path.
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Your burner phones also uniquely identify you. If two phones are in the same location (or connected to the same wifi networks) for extended periods of time, the borg can link them together as belonging to the same person pretty easily. These burners are probably a waste of money unless you are literally throwing them on a train after buying them and using them once.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Most of the issues raised by your hypothetical can be resolved by the content of the contract signed by the parties.
I do not want to live in a word where people buying a $10 device from walmart have to sign a contract.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Just make IoT doodad manufacturers liable for bad things that happen with them and the problem will sort itself out, no state intervention with the potential for universal surveillance and totalitarian control needed.
This is a very common opinion, but if you delegate the assignment of liability to the court, then you will get even more problems about state overreach.
Consider the following scenario: A consumer buys some smart lights for their house. The smart lights are hacked, and hacker uses these smart lights as a proxy to launch ransom-ware attacks against hospitals. The hospitals are collectively "forced" to pay $100 million in ransom to continue their operations. Who is liable in this case? The consumer who didn't put the smart lights behind a firewall? The hospitals who had employees fall for phishing emails? Or the IOT company for not updating the security of their devices? If you don't have legislation defining what makes someone liable, then unaccountable judges will be forced to legislate from the bench about who is liable and who is not. If you don't like the decision, then you can't just vote them out of office the same way you can with legislators.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Lurk https://old.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/ and try to understand all the jokes.
That was my main strategy for shifting gears from being a professional machine learning theory researcher to doing computational linguistics work.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
How does one actually sign up for these types of trials? I've long admired the conscientious objectors who got injected with infectious disease to help medical research instead of fighting in the army, but I have no idea what I should do to do something similar. Something like donating a kidney is more obvious how to do, but also seems like there's a lot more hurdles since it seems to happen so much less.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
But the next time some genuinely asks me "I don't get it. why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?" I wish I could use an argument from authority using quotes from Clausewitz.
Now that I think about it, this was probably the real reason for including Clausewitz in the Naval Academy curriculum. I definitely saw random O6+s namedropping Clausewitz to get us junior officers on board with their harebrained schemes.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
Those are extremely important lessons, but I'm skeptical that Art of War and On War can actually deliver them. I went to the Naval Academy. Everyone was "required" to read these books. We also had various practical exercises related to how to achieve military objectives. I saw no correlation between the people who actually read those books and did well academically and people who understood how/why to achieve military objectives.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
Thanks for posting this. I've often had difficulties articulating why my understanding of "faith" is different than "not needing proof to ascent intellectually to something". But the synonym of allegiance is excellent.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I had no idea about that fine! I usually tell this story in my CS classes when we talk about networking, and now I have a new morbidly hilarious tidbit to add.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I remember watching the Harry Potter movies before reading the books, and was totally confused by parts of movies 3, 4, and 5. (These are some of the longest books, but don't have correspondingly larger movies than the first two.) Lots of other people I know IRL feel similarly.
GOT is different because they got a whole season to explain a book instead of just a movie.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
Operation Ivy Bells is the go-to example of the astounding success American spies have in the technical arena. Basically we tapped an undersea cable the Russians used for top-secret military communication from 1971-1983ish, and we knew EVERYTHING that the Russian navy was doing because of this wiretap.
It's also the go-to example of how easily Americans sell out their own country. An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
PokerPirate
8mo ago
I hate the dentist.
I'm not scared of the dentist, I just hate everything about the office visit. I hate having to schedule appointments months in advance. I hate having to arrive 15 minutes before the appointment only to wait for 30 minutes before I'm escorted to a chair and another 10 minutes before the dentist sees me. I hate that the dentist is always trying to upsell me on tooth whitening products, and their business model is full of moral hazards. I hate that the dentist only provides "dumbed down" explanations of everything and can't answer my questions in any detail.
Nevertheless, I feel a need to go every few years in order to remove tartar from my teeth and verify there's no cavities. (I'm still not really sure why I should remove tartar from my teeth, though, as no dentist has been able to explain this to me other than it's "just what you should do because bacteria".)
/rant
PokerPirate
8mo ago
The legalese consent forms doctors go over with patients are a joke.
My wife also recently had laser eye surgery, and had to go through signing dozens of pages that describe the complications. Of course the doctor went over with her at a high level what the forms meant, and she didn't read them, and just signed anyways.
I really wish that we could just sane 1 paragraph (or even better bullet point) list consent forms for everything, not just medicine.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
Many philosophers/theologians already self describe as Christian atheists, and they usually have much more complicated theologies than you're suggesting. They're complicated enough that I've spend the last 30 minutes trying to think of a decent summary that responds to your post, and I can't do it. So instead I'll just link to the wikipedia page and let you learn more if you'd like.
Personally, I struggled for a long time with the "humiliation of professing that thunder comes first" part of Christianity. I find the Christian atheist solution to this problem to this problem quite satisfying, and probably closer to what the "original" Christianity of Jesus looked like than what most modern American Christians believe.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
This survey caught my eye. It’s probably not perfect but it showed 20% of mail-in-voters admitted to some kind of voting fraud.
This writeup doesn't inspire much confidence in me. The only details they have on their methodology are the following sentence:
The poll of 1,085 likely voters was conducted from November 30 to December 6, 2023. Among those surveyed in the poll, 33% were Republicans, 36% were Democrats, and 31% were “other”; 32% were 18-39 years old, 46% were 40-64 years old, and 22% were 65 or older.
But how were these "likely voters" determined? Random phone calls? Knocking on doors? Are they all from Portland or spread out over the US? Are they rich or poor? Were they paid for the survey?
They don't even answer how many of these "likely voters" they survey actually voted or voted by mail!
Based on this incredible lack of detail, it's hard for me to take these results seriously. If there's a more detailed writeup somewhere that I missed, I'd love to see it. I didn't see any link to one though.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
The market already has solutions to this problem, they're just normally used for highly skilled staff like programmers. One very common structure is to issue stock options that only vesting after a certain period (like 4 years), which strongly incentives workers to stay with the current firm until vesting. Another common structure in the academic market is that university's will purchase a house for a professor with a 0 interest rate loan that gets forgiven over the period of 10-20 years. But if the employee leaves early, then the loan reverts to a standard (or even much higher than standard) interest rate.
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American. American's do this so much that there are thousands of memes making fun of us for it. So I see getting bent that a Somali-American calls herself Somali as just a thinly veiled boo outgroup.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
You might enjoy reading about the Shackleton Expedition to the South Pole. The ship wrecked, and Shackleton managed to somehow bring everyone home by clever use of life boats and navigating. The story is much less grim than other shipwrecks (no drawing straws about who will get shot and eaten), but has lots of endurance-style adversary to overcome.
There's lots of good books to choose from, and I don't have a particular recommendation.
PokerPirate
9mo ago
My audience at the time (maybe a 200 or so friends/family) consisted of plenty of skeptical people, and so the small nods were directed towards them. This is a pretty common format for people doing overseas NGO work in non-US friendly countries.
PokerPirate
10mo ago
I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.
Unfortunately, Trump instituted a travel ban to North Korea in 2017 (and Biden has kept the ban in place), so I haven't been back. I still have regular zoom calls with the faculty/students there. Some examples of successes that have come from this work are facilitating only open source contributions from North Koreans and helping North Koreans fix their internet infrastructure. But this sort of work is obviously much harder without being able to go in person, and these days I have much less insight to what the average North Korean thinks.
In my opinion, "no longer pursuing reconciliation with the south" is a huge deal. This pursuit of reconciliation was one of the main pillars of legitimacy for the Kim regime. Whenever I talked to a North Korean about their country, they always brought up that they want reunification. Literally on every street corner in Pyongyang were maps of a unified Korea and propaganda posters saying things like "We want to hug our brothers in the South". So I am very curious how this will be spun for the domestic audience.
PokerPirate
10mo ago
As we get closer to the point where LLMs can spontaneously generate 5000-10000 word pieces that make plodding but cogent arguments and engage meticulously with the existing literature, huge swathes of the academic journal industry will simply be unable to survive
I think you're wrong about this being a good thing. Currently, all the best journals in most allow anyone to submit. Sometimes you get people outside "the cathedral" getting really novel ideas published and changing fields. Once it becomes too easy for hoi palloi to submit, journal editors will start relying more and more on the author's credentials. Not from Harvard/Yale/Oxbridge? Then you're totally out of luck.
Thank you very much for the detailed suggestions! These definitely look like they're on the right track for me.
(Sorry I don't have much else to add now. I feel like a comment like yours that required some real effort deserves a longer reply, but I don't have anything to reply yet without having had a chance to read your recommendations.)
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