VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.
Snarkly, I think it makes sense for humanities students to take some math and physics classes for gen-ed reasons. I see lots of pontificating from the self-declared "educated" classes that clearly lack an understanding of calculus and other entry-level numeracy concepts.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I would believe its purveyors may claim that, but I've never seen "critical theory" come to a positive conclusion about any real pretty much anything. There is a lot of pontificating about how pretty much everyone suffers from pervasive, say, racism, but I don't think I've ever come across "actually, X is good enough" except about some perfect hypothetical. I don't really see much depth to the field (happy to consider otherwise) beyond tearing imperfect things down and wanting to replace them with nothing.
As someone raised Christian it pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" (true), but lacks the radical forgiveness that is supposed to accompany that phrase.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place.
"Critical" in English has a few surprisingly different meanings. After all this time, I've realized that "critical theory" is "critical" in the sense of "inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably", while I might have naively assumed it meant "of, relating to, or being a turning point or specifically important juncture" (both quotes from Merriam-Webster).
IMO we should find a new name for "critical thinking" that less strongly suggests it should be about tearing things down.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.
Sea level has been rising (possibly slower than that) for several thousand years. We know this because there are underwater archaeology sites like Doggerland and Heracleion (that one may be more a matter of localized geology) where people at one time lived on dry land.
Admittedly the rates of rise may be changing, but assuming a null hypothesis of completely static sea levels seems wrong too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.
From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals.
By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.
I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Is that a function of education time/costs? Employers are willing to take on apprentice welders and electricians, but the educational hurdle for an NP is several years of training before someone becomes employable. Pilots need (preferably paid) hours to hit minimums for airline work. Nobody seems to be willing to hire to train engineers or lawyers either because those are harder to learn (earn licenses) while working at more entry levels.
It seems to me as someone who only uses the healthcare system but has friends who went into medicine that there is a huge fraction of medicine, mostly in general practice where we already have a shortage of doctors, that consist of handling the same dozen ailments over and over again. How much time do pediatricians spend diagnosing ear infections in kids and writing notes to send them back to school and prescriptions for amoxicillin? Or GPs asking the same lifestyle questions and giving the same advice ("quit smoking, lose weight, get more exercise"). The AMA cartel would have you believe that it takes years and years of specialization to handle this, but it seems that most of the front end stuff really can be handled by someone like an NP who knows those dozen ailments well, and most importantly when to ask for a more expert opinion.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d 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
13d 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
13d 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
14d 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
14d 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
18d 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
18d 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
18d 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
18d 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
18d 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
19d 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
19d 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
19d 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.
The other obvious lawfare strategies would be to find a red state prosecutor with whatever nebulous nexus to bring state charges not subject to the pardon according to lots of blue media ink ("lied to a patrol officer about the nature of his travel"). Or to use the pardon to compel unfavorable testimony (voids the fifth amendment right to avoid self-incrimination) or face even further charges.
Not that I'd endorse these, they just seem the logical escalating responses.
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