VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18hr ago
My reaction has me wondering if my (heterosexual male) sexual desires are unusual in their, uh, vanilla-ness. I remember briefly stumbling into the fanfic community long ago and realizing that the tags were helpful because anything beyond "MF" was probably not for me. Which isn't even a comment on volume, just that the entire "kink" scene is a pretty instant turn-off for me, and honestly fulfilling monogamy sounds great to me.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.
IMO there is some reasonable ground for considering "systems of oppression" that I would be willing to not consider "woke". Claiming that slavery or segregation happened, or that women (often) weren't allowed to have certain roles isn't so by itself. I think it also requires a component of looking at those axes in exclusion of others.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I've had great luck with the Discworld books. Although that stretches "chapter book" a bit because Pratchett wasn't a fan of chapter breaks. If you like classic science fiction, the Heinlein juvenile series have been pretty well-received.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
No blog is comparable to a Great Book, etc.
I'm pretty sure I remember it from this article, but the joke at the beginning stuck with me and seems relevant:
There is an old joke. A student at Oxford attends a cocktail party with members of the faculty. Hoping to impress these august dons, the student casually mentions, “I was reading Gibbon the other night …” Later, the student’s faculty mentor pulls him aside to chide him for the comment. “One must never say one is reading Gibbon,” he says. “One must always say one is re-reading Gibbon.”
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I think that's a valid concern in the short term, but I wouldn't expect access control features like permissive action links to prevent a nuclear-capable nation (Ukraine has nuclear plants and engineers) from repurposing weapons it its possession for an extended duration. I assume it's more like a password on a locked computer, but maybe it's more intrinsic than that (I doubt the details are public enough to know).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I think this makes some questionable assumptions about the "rightful" structure of the Soviet empire. As far as I know, those were Soviet weapons, paid for and made by Soviet citizens, some of whom were Ukrainian, and the other SSRs. That permanent control would belong to the (former!) capital unreasonably privileges it over the other fragmenting client states.
I don't think it would be reasonable, for example, for the British to have demanded back all their military assets from newly-independent nations as their empire fragmented. "But those ships and guns belong to London!" seems an odd rallying cry for things in many cases the colonies themselves funded.
But in realpolitik terms, I suppose it did make sense at the time to limit the number of resulting nuclear states for proliferation reasons.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment
I think also because Western leaders have (potentially-legitimate) concerns about the chain of custody of their high-tech weapons, and their massed dumb munitions production has largely wilted to the point where it's taken time to be able to manufacture large numbers of dumb artillery shells in numbers not needed in probably two generations. We spent something like a trillion dollars getting the F-35 to active service, and remember what happened when a few B-29s landed in (Allied!) Soviet airfields: the Soviets quickly fielded the Tu-4 that looked just like it.
The last few decades haven't seen a need for Lend-Lease sorts of military support rather than direct conflict with supporting allies. Maybe giving Stingers to Afghan resistance? And as far as I can tell, some of the Western concern is also as you said (or early on, the reverse: arms to Ukraine are just going to end in Russian hands when they surrender). And also financial costs.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I can't speak for your family, but a few generations back large parts of the state were speaking German. Which went away between 1917 and 1945 for reasons, but I'm sure there were some complaining about three languages back then.
Conversely, if in some counterfactual world I had learned Spanish and I read this comment, I'd likely roll my eyes and think, "Skill issue."
It does seem like bilingualism, at least moderately ability, seems to be becoming more common, especially with intermarriage. It seems to (mostly) work for Canada, but I also expect ubiquitous machine translation to make things hopefully smoother.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune
I just happened to have these next to each other on my reading list a few years back, and I think you've right that the two feel very related, and I approve of your comparison.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Thanks. I suppose publishing a white paper at least opens them up to more serious scrutiny (which I've seen in serious-ish forums like HN). But my initial response is rather skeptical still, though. The encryption methods seem like they should be far more expensive than Apple is letting on [1], and they say they're using this for querying remote databases with encrypted queries. They're less clear on how these databases (for photographic landmarks, URLs, and such) are encrypted in a manner that actually hides the query from Apple. Are the encryption keys different per-device? If so, how do they avoid needing a separate database per device? And if not, it seems there's a lot of trust that they would be unable to figure out which rows matched.
I know Google's approach to similar issues has been focused more on device side ML models. Pixel phones support offline song recognition (I've noticed it's fairly limited to popular songs), and Google Translate can work (in a limited fashion) offline. Why does Apple need to do cloud-based POI recognition in photos? The whitepaper only shows 6 very well known landmarks, but it seems like it'd be easy enough (and secure!) to do this on-device. Given the known computational costs of FHE, it might even be better for battery life.
- Quoting the linked FV paper: "As to whether any of these [previous] proposals is really practical, the answer is simply “no”.... The most recent paper manages to execute one AES encryption homomorphically in eight days using a massive amount (tens of GBs) of RAM memory." That's before their proposed algorithm, but they don't directly seem to claim many-orders-of-magnitude improved tractability.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
There was a fairly infamous case in Cleveland, TX in 2010. Some might debate "Western men" here, but those charged were American citizens as far as I know, not MENA immigrants. Maybe some of them were Muslim, but probably not all.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
pathological need to double down at every opportunity.
Isn't there a classic stock trading scam where you send 2^N Boolean tips ("will go up or down today") for N days, then focus on the small-but-nonempty group that got N correct tips in a row to try to convince them to trust your judgement? It seems like given enough VCs (monkeys) and opportunities (typewriters), even random chance will give you a few coherent words of Shakespeare and a fawning audience expecting great wisdom.
Of course, I do think your average VC billionaire is much brighter than random chance, but there is a huge selection bias when you find the one (of an unknown size set) that has consistently doubled down and won and assume this to be representative generally.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
homomorphic encryption
Are they currently claiming they do this today? My understanding of homomorphic encryption (admittedly a bit outside my wheelhouse) is that it's nowhere near as well-trod a space as, say, RSA. When I last looked, it was possible -- with a bunch of caveats -- to do simple things with a whole bunch of overhead, and certainly no equivalent of a NIST standard (if you trust those: say "Dual EC" with me) for it.
I didn't think the technology to do this well was ready for prime time today, but maybe I'm just a bit out of date. Do they have a white paper, or, better, a bunch of academic papers?
Viable quantum computing dropping today (or even in the next decade or two) would also break almost all extant (asymmetric) cryptography. Yeah, NIST just recently published specs for post-quantum crypto, but I expect it'll be a decade before those are universally supported. Maybe less if it happens: SSL everywhere happened fairly fast, but became a real priority almost overnight. But if quantum were something any well-founded startup could do, nation-state actors could throw some impressive wrenches into any secure networks for a while.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
As others have mentioned, good contractors have enough customers lined up that they don't care.
I wonder if the right disruptive model here almost goes the other direction: not a clearinghouse for finding tradespeople, but a trusted service you can have "on retainer" effectively to subcontract the work. Ideally, you call 'em up, ask for [task], and they shop various provider options (some perhaps that they use often) with a reasonable expectation of the marketplace, and maybe even for an extra fee can manage the "will arrive sometime between 9:00 and 3:00" part where it's pretty disruptive for folks with full-time not-from-home jobs to let them in and get things done without the usual concerns. Bonus points for being able to make sure the job is done correctly the first time.
Although what I've described sounds a bit like a combination of the network of a general contractor (for larger tasks) and a rental property management company. But I've never heard a sufficiently-glowing review of the latter from a renter to want to consider asking "Hey, I own this house and live here: would you be willing to handle when something breaks?" Does anyone actually do that?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
In my experience, hospitals are more than happy to screw over patients in billing as long as they don't complain too much after the fact. Surprise out-of-network anaesthesiologists used to be common (now prohibited), and I've seen hospitals try to tack on not-covered-by-insurance fees that show up much later and weren't disclosed in advance (not that they ever give straightforward billing answers in advance). Yeah, they'll "kindly" remove or waive those if you call and complain a bunch (probably marking it down as "charity"), but it's really annoying and not always worth my billing rate.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
What I find interesting about this is that it wasn't exactly quiet at the time: The Kite Runner was a pretty popular book at the time and featured the practice pretty prominently, albeit set at a time other than the US occupation.
Arguably, there have been several instances where acts that were themselves considered terrorism have at least swayed the public consciousness about other events. I find the Oklahoma City bombing pretty abhorrent, but it demonstrably caused reconsideration of the narrative behind the Waco siege. Or the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation kicked off the entire Arab Spring. Or why we're all talking so much about health insurance denials suddenly.
Of course, plenty of actions meant this way are not successful, but IMO something dramatic and well-documented in this instance might have caused public outcry.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
Earnestly, it'd be nice to see the US improve vehicle-pedestrian safety standards more like those of Europe.
More tongue-in-cheek: we need to ban assault cars! Anything with a higher top speed than 85mph (fastest posted speed limit in the US), better zero-to-60 speed than a Honda Civic (7.5 seconds), or dangerous cosmetic features (spoilers, racing stripes, red paint). Or anything over 3000 pounds. Whoops, most vehicles fit at least one of those.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14d ago
The last few times I've gotten a new Android phone (Pixel), it's come with a USB-C to USB-C cable (with a C-to-A adapter for chargers) and simple instructions to connect 'em directly, unlock the old one, and agree to transfer everything. Admittedly it missed quite a few apps the first time, but the most recent time things almost entirely Just Worked. I think they may have wireless or cloud options there too, but the cable was simple.
Although the security-minded have complained about some of the changes in, specifically, Google Authenticator over the last few years to support this.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16d ago
Defending hadn't worked for anyone yet
Thailand was never colonized. It was also, weakly, a member of the Axis during WWII.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19d ago
Are you limiting "tech" to software companies? Otherwise I'd point to a few European examples like Nokia (pre-acquisition) or Ericsson or AMSL. Acquisitions are also probably skewing your count.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
Are similar warping effects (e.g., make-work projects or services that are created to compensate for a societal failure) a major contributor to variations in GDP values?
As a thought experiment, if nobody got sick, we could eliminate healthcare from GDP, which would be a huge paper loss (and lots of jobs) but doesn't seem to be a loss for what I'd consider "forward progress". I'm not really an RFK-stan or anything, but we presumably have a net GDP gain from incentivising unhealthy lifestyles and then paying for expensive mitigation treatments.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26d ago
If, despite her skinniness and near-veganism, she's strong as an ox and endures like a camel, then there is no problem with her diet.
I think this is probably a good starting point, but I will observe that there are plenty of professional athletes, even successful ones, who have eating disorders. The term of art there seems to be RED-S these days. For those, the concerns are more "are they getting injured more often than they should" (energy deficiency can cause bone density issues), and, for women, if they are menstruating regularly (hormonal birth control can mask this issue).
Fair, I suppose. But the same comment could easily be applied to the vast majority of the content on your average porn site too: most of the content is IMO off-putting, although I won't deny some degree of prurient interest in the most vanilla parts.
More options
Context Copy link