VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Do you have any recommendations for finding good hobby discords for, I dunno, underwater basket weaving? I see a decent number of active Facebook groups for such things, but Discord seems to have poor discoverability.
Is there a way to do C++ without header files?
I wouldn't recommend it as a permanent process, but when I'm sketching things out I often define functions within class definitions in headers. You can almost get to a point where you only have header files, but there are a few caveats (circular dependencies, static member initialization, inlined code size) that prevent me from liking it for bigger projects. But it can be helpful if you haven't finalized interfaces since there is only one place they are defined.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
If option A means potential prosecution and option B means a possible hike in malpractice insurance premiums, option B wins every time.
Definitely most of the time. But abortion seems a topic of generally much stronger opinions than euthanasia, and at least one doctor there (Kevorkian) was willing to go to jail for what he believed in. As far as I know, nobody is actually in jail for violating post-Dobbs abortion rules in the US, which I find surprising.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I think the implication is that left-leaning doctors are, either deliberately or quite possibly inadvertently, engaging in something like Washington Monument Syndrome with abortion cases: in the same way that the first cuts to the NPS prominently close the Washington Mall, marginal non-emergency abortion restrictions are read to apply to even life-or-death cases that should be pretty clear.
I wouldn't put huge weight in it, but there are plenty of examples of partisans reading opponent's rules maximally uncharitably. The fight over school library books comes to mind: this is probably choosing a side, but every rule that is charitably "stop putting the works of Chuck Tingle in the kindergarten section" is read uncharitably to ban (unabridged) copies of The Diary of a Young Girl.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans?
Are you familiar with the story of Mexican separatist Pancho Villa and the Battle of Columbus, NM (1916)? That led to an uninvited US expeditionary force wandering around in Mexico looking for Villa, but only finding his subordinates.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
If, as the right (persuasively) argues, it is racist towards Anglos / French / Germans to flood these countries with migrants, ending their former status as (de facto) ethnostates, then opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is likewise antisemitic.
This is funny to me because I usually approach the thought experiment here from the other side: If, as the left (IMO not completely persuasively) argues, that it is The Right Thing (tm) for the residents of Springfield, Ohio to accept a bunch of Haitian refugees seeking asylum granted by a far-off government and to think otherwise is obvious bigotry, then why can't we tar Palestinians who reject living next to Jewish refugees (who were in 1948 fleeing far greater persecution than Haitians in 2024) granted part of the land by a far-off government (the UN in New York) similarly? Surely only an antisemite doesn't appreciate whatever the Israeli equivalent of a taco truck is!
Of course, in the real world these things are more nuanced, and I don't really find either case completely compelling: there are legitimate arguments against poorly-controlled immigration, but IMO far fewer in favor of violent ethnic cleansing campaigns against immigrants. Although the parallel between Hamas and the Klan as anti-immigrant militias seems at least interesting to consider.
I don't know that I want to stan RFK here, but the status quo isn't inherently better: public health generally has a lot of egg on its face, not just from the pandemic. Attempts at COVID vaccine mandates seem pretty ham-handed in hindsight given their lack of long-term immunity. The FDA approved, over the advice of its own scientists, a very expensive drug for Alzheimer's that wasn't even found to be effective. Literally the current assistant secretary of HHS was found to have put political pressure on WPATH to remove age limits from gender medicine in its guidelines at a time when many Western countries have reviewed the literature and are questioning the practice for youth.
I get where you're coming from, but I find myself questioning whether putting RFK in charge will actually make things worse. At least he'll get push-back against crazy policies.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Definitely some of that. More than a few have been second (or more) generation, and a couple of those have talked about working for their parent's classic immigrant businesses (gas stations, laundromats, that sort of thing), so I don't think their ancestors all arrived with high-tier degrees.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
When you say she was key, do you mean she was significantly involved in the leadership or funding of Amazon, or do you mean in terms of general love and support?
From what I've read, she was effectively working for the company from its founding until it was self-sustaining in the late 90s, doing everything from negotiating logistics deals to even shipping packages when it was still operating out of a garage.
If your comparison is the first dozen employees at Apple or Microsoft, she probably deserved pretty hefty compensation just for that effort alone. But there are probably other reasonable perspectives.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
There are too many possibilities to reasonably jump from a report of a burst pipe to fraud.
I was talking with a local friend who works elections in [red state] and apparently at the end of the night they loaded the local machine-counted sums for the precinct into the back of a personal vehicle (in tamper-sealed boxes) and drove them to the county central counting facility to hand them off. Apparently last time it was just the driver, and this year they were instructed to at least drive together in pairs, potentially followed by the poll watchers.
My thoughts were roughly (1) I think I mostly trust these folks to do the right thing, but (2) it'd be really easy for anything dramatic here to make national headlines, and I'm kind of surprised it hasn't. I guess you have burst pipes as an example, but "DC ballots stolen when election worker gets carjacked on the way to deliver results" seems quite plausible as a random happenstance but also looks a lot like deliberate election fraud. We're IMO lucky that doesn't seem to have happened.
Also that securing a distributed secret ballot is a fundamentally harder problem than most would give credit for.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Do you think Jones would have escaped the huge damages if he claimed that, I suppose, his bipolar disorder made him do it? I don't know if he's ever been diagnosed with anything like that, but there also seems to be to be at least a vibe that those sorts of protections don't apply to red tribers like Jones, but do to the in-group sometimes.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
I guess I'm not a political consultant, so I might be very wrong (then again, so are the consultants sometimes), but my visceral feeling here is that politicians that have previously staked out now-seen-as-extreme positions won't be able to just sweep history under the rug. Harris tried, and while it wasn't the only argument against, plenty of Trump campaign hay was reaped from her stated 2020 policy positions and Senate votes. I can't see AOC winning without a huge vibe shift back to 2016-2020 Democrats' values (not impossible if the next term goes very poorly, I suppose) or explicitly talking about why crying in front of border fences was good then but doesn't conflict with an immigration stance that isn't "open borders" now.
But of her generation of left-leaning politicians, I don't find her the worst.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
In at least a few non-Ivy schools I keep tabs on, student-led BDS efforts last year got forcibly pushed aside by non-student university leadership, presumably concerned more about federal law regarding national origin discrimination (and maybe also in response to major benefactors grumbling). Generally this took the form of "student elected leadership may not even debate this motion" and while there was (and probably remains) some grumbling from some students, it seemed that the university won.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Probably because they need to actually pass a technical interviews to get in rather than just being able to con their way through informal interviews.
This has been my experience in (non-FAANG) engineering, although most of the South Asian ancestry engineers I've worked with have been citizens or at least permanent residents that studied at good schools in the US, so it's probably not a representative sample of the space. I've had no real complaints about working with them, and many have been quite talented and motivated.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be.
I've come to the conclusion that local political censorship ("evaporative cooling") within a community is something that probably has pretty strongly nonlinear behavior. Badgering, for small values of badgering, works in terms of swaying consensus -- it probably shows up great in academic studies or commercial A/B ad testing. But it reaches a point of diminishing, or even negative returns: at some point, maybe even between your 95 and 99 percent numbers, where the evaporated community starts condensing and forming its own alternative structures, eventually re-establishing a more representative balance.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.
While there are certainly plenty of examples of this, I don't think it's as universal as is often claimed. I've known government technical folks that are incredibly competent and focused, especially in leadership roles. Sometimes you get folks in over their heads, but I don't know that the general low-level public-facing employees (social security office staff?) should be taken as typical examples. And honestly I've had pretty good experiences even with my local mail carriers and park service rangers. I've seen general-level officers speak a few times and always been impressed -- memorably, one gave an hour long technical keynote with slides without ever glancing at anything but the audience.
There is a lot of pride and patriotism, and to be honest not even that bad of pay, in the federal service in at least some areas. On the other hand, they are hamstrung by a very risk-averse culture -- nobody ever got fired for adding an extra protracted approval process or required training -- and by complicated rulebooks cooked up in response to the last few thousand times someone defrauded the government. There is certainly room for substantial improvement.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Was that a deliberate attempt to kill pedestrians (terrorism) or just complete reckless disregard in the heat of the moment? The degree of premeditation wasn't clear to me from what I read of the press coverage at the time.
There was also the 2014 incident at SXSW that killed 2 and injured 23, although that seemed to be reckless disregard while fleeing police, rather than ideologically motivated.
Not sure if it makes a difference to me in terms of the relevant criminal punishments, but it seems like it would be relevant for trying to categorize similar events.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
As a ramming weapon, yes. But there was a spate of using them in bombings in the '90s. The 1993 WTC bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing both used Ryder rental trucks. But I suppose that just proves your point that people crazy enough to commit mass homicide are rather derivative in terms of their methods.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
'Luxury' housing is just the word we use to describe the most expensive houses, it's not a characteristic of the houses that makes them qualitatively different.
It's even worse than that: it's a pretty meaningless marketing adjective that makes you feel better about paying a lot for something. Everyone slaps on the label except those at the cheapest, er "Value!" end of the market looking for price-conscious customers, and the polar opposite of brands that are well-known to the point where using the label is déclassé. And this doesn't just apply to housing.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
As much as I hate remakes in most cases, I keep imagining a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck and an oblique reference like this to the "Who is the president in 1985?" "Ronald Reagan." "Ronald Reagan? The actor?" gag.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
I believe the official position of both Taipei and Beijing is that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of it. They disagree on which government is legitimate for it, though.
As such, I'm not surprised the US endorses this stance (although it does have some relations with Taiwan). I do hear that the vibe in Taiwan is shifting toward more acceptance of standalone independence, too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13d ago
Color me also skeptical, because otherwise one might expect to see noticeable IQ differences between the towns that don't add fluoride (famously, Portland) and the rest of the country.
Now, I have heard people suggest that "there must be something [not] in the water in Portland", but that is never followed by "and it's making them smarter than the rest of us."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14d ago
Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.
although it's hard to measure by design
I've been wondering recently if there is a term for the science/art/engineering of organizational structures for a specific goal. I know it very peripherally in how IT security engineering starts overlapping with physical security (two factor, physical access control, social engineering attacks), but I haven't seen a collected book or corpus of "how to design your organization to align incentives and ensure people can be kept honest". Does such a thing exist? Or is it too broad and disorganized of a topic? On the gripping hand, would I even trust something based on psychology and human factors research given the replication crisis?
Unsure, but interested in reading more.
I think you're right that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with it. I remember at the nadir of my dating life (before Obergefell) looking in the mirror and asking why I couldn't find an awesome woman. And at least very briefly thinking that I'd be a good one myself (fit, tall, all those cool male-coded interests: what's not to like?). But it wasn't a popular idea to consider at the time, so it got shoved aside never to return and things got better for me within a few weeks. I'm occasionally thankful it didn't get further consideration at the time.
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