ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
3mo ago
Some things in it are dumb, but I'm a bit sympathetic: you literally can't test everything; organizational mandates to test everything ("we're TDD!") just slow down development without adding much if any value; and if your organization relies on not having any shitty programmers on the team, your organization is doomed to fail, because at scale you will get shitty programmers.
The thing that's absolutely unconscionable is the lack of staged rollouts. That limits the blast radius of bad releases no matter how stupid the person was who made the bad release. That's like SRE 101.
I would say I'm appalled and surprised at how bad that is, but I'm not. It's just the state of software engineering as a field. We're all idiots and should die in a fire. (I'm a bit grumpy because I spent the day integrating with an LLM-based auto code eval system that represents scores with emojis.)
ThenElection
3mo ago
Would you recommend going with the Norteños or the Sureños? I like that the Norteños are a local business, but the Sureños have a great introductory deal going on right now ($5 monthly DoorDash credit!) and are offering lower interest rates for their BNPL program. Or maybe both, to hedge my bets?
ThenElection
3mo ago
No. I'm saying that it's perfectly fine for the government to ban abortion or not and to require financial support from parents or not, and it should do whatever it can in that space of policies to limit the consequences of unintended pregnancy from affecting me.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Start making evaluation of students at school track objective measures of learning instead of whether the teacher vibes with the kid, and maybe you'd have a point. As it stands, boys significantly outperform girls on standardized tests, particularly at the top end. It's likely the abandonment of objective standards that students can fairly compete over is a major part of why boys are disengaging (and also explains the collapse of the college wage premium). It's not surprising that when you turn school into a question of who can flatter a teacher and her their biases more that you end up favoring girls.
ThenElection
3mo ago
there is no principled reason to finance her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support.
If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.
Legal paternity surrender would increase the number of abortions (great!), but also increase the cost to the taxpayer (bad!) There's no principled reason either that someone should be able to get an abortion or that someone should be free from financial obligations: the government should just do whatever makes for a better society.
ThenElection
3mo ago
I'm excited for a thirty second long campaign ad about Moldbug.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Anyone who thinks of Googlers as superhuman geniuses capable of plotting world domination has no idea how Google works and how bureaucratic and lifeless it is.
It's definitely something very dumb and crude, and almost certainly driven by some incredibly but dumbly risk averse mid-level exec who wants to make sure they don't get into trouble with their manager for bad press about bias during election season.
ThenElection
3mo ago
That's a bit harsh; although I can see the argument that being a sole financial provider for 18 years is a worse deal for the father, the asymmetry isn't so great that you can entirely discount women's contribution.
ThenElection
3mo ago
In the medium term, how likely are young men to take to the streets, instead of wasting their lives watching porn and playing whatever the modern equivalent of WoW is?
We are a long way from the point where there's a domestic civil war. I think the left should pay a lot more attention to the needs of men, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that it loses anything if it doesn't. Men are just withdrawing from society and stagnating, not rioting. Even vote wise, each male vote lost is more than compensated by an additional female vote won.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Even when abortion restrictions weren't in play, you'd often hear people defending abortion as something needed because having a child substantially impacts the mother and she's often not ready for it. The same argument applies to men, but then to make that analogy becomes something... deeply stigmatized. It is a clear double standard. I say this as someone who broadly supports maternal abortion rights and opposes financial abortion.
I don't think young men are en masse forming a political identity out of financial abortion, but I do suspect they're becoming bitter and listless because of the dominant oppression lens that obscures their actual lived experiences.
As conjugations have been lost, there's been a trade-off to add more redundancy via other linguistic structures. For instance, modern English uses articles, prepositions, and modal verbs much more extensively than Old English. Forcibly dropping more declension and conjugations would just drive us to other forms of redundancy.
If there were a free lunch to be had by dropping redundancy, some individual would have taken it and used it to process information more efficiently.
I think written English could use some significant reform (making spelling more consistent), but the language itself is on the Pareto frontier of information efficiency.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Yes, many way have redundancy. Analytic languages trade off less morphological redundancy for more contextual and syntactic redundancy. The overall information bandwidth of different languages is pretty similar, with noise (the average not differing much between different societies) and neural computational power being the limiting factors.
There is correct English just as there is correct Python or correct French.
The comparison to Python is useful. One big project in NLP back in the day was defining a formal grammar for English, analogous to one for a programming language. Countless careers were spent on this paradigm.
That project failed, spectacularly. Human language empirically doesn't follow a formal grammar. All it is is a dense, giant mass of statistical correlations that agents pick up through positive reenforcement through interactions with other agents. Try writing a grammar of English in a couple of megabytes of ANTLR files, and you are doomed to fail.
Of course, you can train some classification model on some subset of English data labeled as proper and the rest improper. But you'll find that the stricter you make it, the more you'll find good and even great English rejected.
ThenElection
3mo ago
The issue is that when there is a correct language, it creates a target for any group to seize for its own ends. And if you trust the people best positioned to seize correct language--university academics, media personalities, and government bureaucrats--to be careful stewards of useful, pleasant English, I don't know what to tell you.
ThenElection
3mo ago
That wouldn't make English more effective, it'd just make it easier to learn.
It would actually make it less effective. Condensing inflections seems to be discarding redundant information, but the redundant information makes verbal communication more robust to noise. And verbal communication in real environments has to happen over very noisy channels.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Languages naturally diverge over time. To counteract this, you need some kind of central coordination to act as a centripetal force. I don't trust any group to police language in a way that doesn't betray their own parochial biases. And, in particular, I don't trust the people who today have the power to police Proper English not to mangle it even more than they already have as a display of raw power.
It's better to let individuals use language in whatever way that's most useful to them. Those who want to participate in the broader consolidated market can naturally learn to code switch to the dialect they need to.
To be clear, I don't think you have any obligation to try to communicate with people using dialects that are grating.
In 10 years, suppose proper SAE (which descriptively is the prestige dialect used by the American college educated class) has managed to extirpate archaic forms like "mom" and "mother" in favor of the correct "birthing person." They remain in use among some holdouts insisting on speaking CAVE (conservative American vernacular English), but state, society, and institutions all vigorously police its use and shut out CAVE people from positions of power. What's a prescriptivist to do, once that has become the prestige dialect? Shrug their shoulders and get on with the times?
ThenElection
3mo ago
They aren't ignorant: they know that SAE has you say ask instead of axe. Otherwise, they wouldn't axe someone who used ask: "why you speaking white?" And people can and do regularly code switch depending on their audience.
Vernaculars are used as a way to indicate tribal membership. Going out of your way to use a vernacular mismatched with your audience is always going to raise eyebrows.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood. If everyone around you says aks, shouldn't you then also say aks?
With most language, historically it's been characterized by something closer to genetic drift than driven by anything like a fitness function (there are some universal trends: language traits that compress too much information or too little are both disfavored). Homogeneity has real benefits, but it also takes energy to create and maintain. Control isn't free.
A lot of the more obnoxious prescriptivism came from elites who wanted to impose (imagined) Latin grammatical structures on English. Entirely status and in-group signaling, and totally contrary to English as spoken by anyone at the time.
Recognizing that AAVE has its own consistent structures doesn't mean you can't teach SAE. But it's kind of important to recognize that it's a shibboleth to indicate education level and class membership. That way you know that someone who says nucular is an outsider and therefore an enemy (if only by virtue of the fact that they're choosing to use the vernacular of the enemy).
ThenElection
3mo ago
Aks predates ask; it's the form preferred by Chaucer and the author of Beowulf. Ask is a modern degeneration enforced by London statists in their government building exercise. An unsavory task (or, more appropriately, tax).
ThenElection
4mo ago
The ad is decent, but the issue is message discipline. If Republicans can stick to the ads' line, they're in a much better spot.
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Reduce opportunities for Biden's state to be revealed to the public. If you truly believe that Biden is entirely senile and demented only getting by on copious doses of Adderall, then wait until the Democrats are more entrenched on supporting him. They may still have had the ability to do a swap even post-nomination, but it makes that even more damaging and chaotic.
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Have a playbook on Kamala. Messaging and messaging discipline. The RNC was effective at making Trump cute and cuddly; don't throw that away with off-key messaging.
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Lay the groundwork well in advance for whatever attacks you are going to push. There's a balancing act here: too much attention on Kamala means less on Biden. But Biden's negatives at the end were much higher than Kamala's: the goal should have been getting them around equal negatives, so a swap doesn't help too much. Or, if you're absolutely certain Biden will drop out or die, then focus all fire on Kamala.
Do we want every controversial decision by local governments reviewed by state governments?
As someone who follows true crime more than is average for a guy, Zahau's case was absolutely sketchy. But if everytime a controversial decision is rendered, it needs to be reviewed by a Higher Power, there's basically no point in having a local justice system. You can say a review is necessary only under very clear criteria, but that's what happened here: it didn't fall under any clear criteria (the local system being idiotic is not one of them).
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