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Commander, USN (ret). Former Googler. Computer programmer.
User ID: 2527
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3mo ago
I'm not as convinced as you about Trump's chances, but I needed to read something positive today and your post definitely hits the spot. Thanks!
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3mo ago
My opinion as well. With apologies to the mods, who no doubt have more work because of him. But it makes the site better to have the variety.
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3mo ago
Semi-related: gas station chain Kum & Go is finally rebranding.
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3mo ago
My conspiracy theory story, told quickly because I really should be working right now: I was assigned to Carrier Air Wing Five. While we were deployed, our CAG (HMFIC) was quickly and quietly relieved due to "loss of confidence". All the officers were pulled into a conference room and we held a quick ceremony where DCAG (number 2 in command) assumed responsibilities for the Wing. Never saw CAG again.
It turns out that he was sleeping with the base XO's wife. They were both married with kids. Infidelity is a common reason for getting fired in the military (perhaps the last place in America where that's true). But immediately after the change of command, the rumor mill was still a little unsure about the specifics and I wanted to know more, because when you're stuck in cramped quarters with the same people for long periods of time, gossip is high entertainment. So I googled. And whoa boy did I find some conspiracy theories. My favorite was that he was relieved because the US was going to attack North Korea in a week, and the CAG wouldn't do it, so they replaced him with someone who would.
As you may recall, the US has not launched an unprovoked air strike on North Korea. The conspiracy theorists were just throwing shit to the wall and hoping some stuck.
I like this post, and I think it's important to understand what has happened and what is possible for a US conspiracy. But it's also important to keep a very strong bayesian prior that each particular conspiracy theory is incorrect.
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3mo ago
Guess I don't really know the guy but didn't think I've ever see Madoka Magica in the same sentence with Yudkowsky and drone warfare.
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1808229407020273899
Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series
Curious to hear if you like it. I've been trying to get a better understanding of history but have been struggling to get through most of the books I've tried.
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3mo ago
I have yet to tire of Paperback Paradise. Pee Wee Herman Melville makes some brilliant, hilarious tweets (posts? X's?) and isn't followed as broadly as he deserves.
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3mo ago
Yudkowsky mentioned Madoka Magica fanfiction To The Stars as being the best science fiction to predict the future of drone warfare. I liked Madoka Magica, so figured I'd give it a try. As you may see from the fanfiction.net link, it's 910,487 words, which is roughly 10 novels worth of prose. I use Calibre to manage my ebook library, and it has a plugin to download from fanfiction.net, so I downloaded the whole thing and sent it to my Kindle. I then spent about 3 weeks feverishly devouring the whole thing, only to get to the end and discover that it's not finished, and the author writes at a snail's pace. It wasn't until chapter 65/70 when I even considered he might not wrap up all the loose ends. The lesson for me is to use AO3, where it's much clearer that the work is unfinished. I've been moping around and having trouble starting another nonfiction book after that letdown. I really, really, enjoyed the work, but hate the idea of having to come back to it every few years to find out how the story is progressing.
I'm nearing the end of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. I can't recall a book that better captures the mentality of fighter pilots, the politics of the military, and the experience of wearing the uniform. The author isn't afraid to make bold claims, like "A performance report like this would normally kill your career" or "Nobody would dare talk to a General like that" (not actual quotes, but it was an audiobook and I don't want to scroll around to find specific examples). The only thing I disagree with in the entire book is the claim that promotion to Colonel, Boyd's final rank, is more difficult than the promotion to flag officer. Otherwise it's my top recommendation for fiction writers (or anyone) who want to understand the experience of being in the US military. I also recommend it to anyone who enjoyed The Pentagon Wars, since the dysfunction of the Air Force picking aircraft and Boyd's fight to get the right plane built is quite similar.
What are you reading?
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3mo ago
Oh, no, I enjoyed your colorfulness. I'm still hung up on this comment because I think focusing on the molten iron slag metaphor pedantic. Colorful writing can get in the way of productive conversation, sure, but I feel like we here can handle it better than in many other forums because of the userbase and the rules. I learned something today, and that's awesome, because I had believed that McDonald's coffee was abnormally hot when it actually wasn't. I came into the thread with that old understanding, and I enjoyed ABigGuy4U's response because it colorfully confirmed my priors. If the counter to that post stopped at the differences between iron and coffee, I would have learned that comparing coffee to iron is wrong in some contexts, the end.
Instead, there was a discussion, and I took the time to ask an LLM, and it turns out that was wrong. Rereading, I also notice that this may have been implied earlier in the thread but without enough details for me to learn from it: I didn't know what side the fact sheet from the American Trial Lawyers Association took. I don't think the criticism should be on the colorful writing, because even if ABigGuy4U's point was made without metaphor it still would have been the same root error of believing McDonald's coffee was dangerously hot compared to other coffees.
Huh, alright, Claude agrees with you about the home brewing:
Q. What is the temperature range for coffee in a carafe of a home drip coffee brewer? In *Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, *Stella Liebeck's attorneys argued that, at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C), McDonald's coffee was abnormally hot, but I have trouble assessing that claim without knowing how hot other coffee is.
A. To assess the claim made in the Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants case, it's helpful to compare the temperature of McDonald's coffee to typical home-brewed coffee. Let's look at the temperature range for coffee in a carafe of a home drip coffee brewer:
- Brewing temperature: Most home drip coffee makers brew coffee at temperatures between 195°F to 205°F (90.5°C to 96°C). This is the ideal range for extracting the best flavors from coffee grounds.
- Initial serving temperature: Immediately after brewing, the coffee in the carafe is typically around 180°F to 185°F (82°C to 85°C).
- Holding temperature: Many home coffee makers with warming plates maintain coffee at temperatures between 150°F to 170°F (65.5°C to 76.7°C) after brewing.
Comparing these temperatures to the 180–190°F (82–88°C) range cited in the Liebeck case:
The McDonald's coffee temperature falls within the range of freshly brewed coffee from a home machine. However, it's higher than the typical holding temperature of home-brewed coffee after it has been sitting on a warming plate.
I wish you The_Nybbler had focused on that instead of the slag part. Because, and I am wondering if you're not people aren't hearing me here because you haven't nobody has replied to this point, I liked the metaphor and hope we continue to have colorful writing here.
Edit: I just realized you're not The_Nybbler. Correcting last paragraph in italics, original text crossed out.
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3mo ago
Here's a NSFW reddit thread with a picture of her burns, which is way worse than the experience most people get when they spill coffee on themselves. I daresay something that would cause those injuries could be reasonably described as "ultra-dangerous".
One of the answers to this Quora question has a picture of someone's arm after they touched molten metal, and to non-medical me it seems similar enough to the lady's injuries. Yes, less time in contact with skin between her coffee and his slag, but I just don't think the distinction is enough to be worth arguing over.
And, again, I like a good metaphor.
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3mo ago
I think that's an unnecessary nitpick, and we should encourage colorful metaphors because they're fun to read.
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3mo ago
Two mods have left the site
I saw TracingWoodgrains posts about leaving here. Who was the other one?
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3mo ago
One of my favorite culture war book reviews is of Days of Rage, covering how left wing terrorists in the US were supported by groups like the National Lawyers’ Guild.
Having not lived through the Weather Underground and McCarthyism, I'm hesitant to say which side the shoe was on or how much it should inform our strategy for the current state of the culture war. I do remember 9/11 (I was standing deck watch at the Naval Academy) and the culture for the decade after that. Criticism of the war effort was treated pretty harshly, and that was a time and topic of right wing (RW) dominance. But I also recall gay marriage ballot initiatives failing across the country (an example of RW dominance) until the 14th amendment got stretched around it (LW victory). And we still had Superman embarrassed to be an American enough to change his "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" into "Truth, Justice, and all that stuff" in the 2006 movie Superman Returns (LW dominance). Christianity was never protected or sacred (LW dominance). I recall more collaboration and respect between Republicans and Democrats in Congress (less hostility in the culture war). I'm surely biased, but it seems to me that "elections have consequences" defectbot has been exceptionally effective over the past decade or two at pushing the pendulum to a far left position with much higher amplitude/height than the right swing it was returning from. All of which adds up to limited utility in looking to history while swapping "right" for "left".
Is there anyone here with book recommendations about the culture swings of history, in ways that would inform right wing decisions today?
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3mo ago
No, I do not think Japan was "appealing to the better nature of the US" when they surrendered. They lost the war, and had to agree to everything the US demanded of them. I do not think anyone on the right should view the surrender of Japan as aspirational, nor do I think the right is doomed to lose the culture war today in the same way Japan was doomed to lose the war in the Pacific after Midway (arguably Pearl Harbor, but that's a completely different discussion).
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3mo ago
You would describe the end of WWII hostilities between the US and Japan as "no, I'm not going to hit them back, instead I'm going to try to appeal to their better nature and end this"? I was hoping for an example with more parallels between the current left/right power dynamic, showing that the underdog could expect a fair resolution by taking the high road.
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3mo ago
Would you show me some historical examples of when your choice 1 was successful? Mitt Romney is the favorite counterexample of how that strategy doesn't work here in practice. I don't think Gandhi is a good analogy, since the modern American right lacks many of the factors favorable to him (Britain's economic and military weakness after WWII, a shared Indian cultural identity, international pressure against colonialism, Britain's willingness to negotiate).
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3mo ago
That's a very good question. I think, for now, America is rich enough and people are comfortable enough where a Balkans-esque civil war is impossible. There may be targeted terrorism similar in scale to what we had in the 70s, but that would still leave the ability of new or existing institutions to broker a peace because Americans won't have to actually murder their neighbors for food. I think the disaffected male youth will have enough video games, porn, and chicken nuggets to mostly skip out on joining their local warlord.
But even so, if my options to 1) take the high ground and lose my culture, heritage, future employment for my children, firearms, and everything else right-coded; or to 2) fight back and risk a hot civil war, then I'll choose to fight and encourage others to do the same. Read Solzhenitsyn about how a victory by the left can go; it's not as if a choice of the right to "take the high ground" aka "surrender" would be safe from the horrors of war.
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3mo ago
"Pick sides" in this context is "we should get our enemies fired from their jobs" vs "we should abstain from doing that". Apologies if that wasn't clear.
Regardless, that does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. From the standpoint of the right, the choices are:
- Your proposal, where the right takes the high road and keeps losing the culture war until they cease to exist, or
- Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop
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3mo ago
That does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. People do not pick sides based on which they view is more of a hypocrite; they pick sides mostly based on what's socially acceptable. The Peace of Westphalia was not negotiated because the Catholics "turned the other cheek" so much that the Protestants felt guilty. It was because everyone got tired of the killing.
The responses to StickerMule's milquetoast post-assassination-attempt call for unity tell me that the left is not close to being tired of the metaphorical killing.
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3mo ago
I don't think it will lead to introspection by most people on the left; most people in general are incapable of "are we the baddies"-type introspection. An escalatory course of action is likely to lead to a change in behavior by the left because when it's widely known that (doing whatever left-coded thing the right is able to push outside the overton window) will cost you your job, friends, social status, etc. then most people will stop doing that thing. The masses will make posthoc rationalizations for why they were justified in their prior behavior but now they know better.
If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs. The right would have to wait until the majority of the left decides to perform that "are we the baddies"-type introspection, and that will never happen.
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3mo ago
This is happening and CrowdStrike already has multiple page warning about various efforts.
Falcon Sensor Content Issue from July 19, 2024, Likely Used to Target CrowdStrike Customers
From the second link:
CrowdStrike Intelligence has monitored for malicious activity leveraging the event as a lure theme and received reports that threat actors are conducting the following activity:
- Sending phishing emails posing as CrowdStrike support to customers
- Impersonating CrowdStrike staff in phone calls
- Posing as independent researchers, claiming to have evidence the technical issue is linked to a cyberattack and offering remediation insights
- Selling scripts purporting to automate recovery from the content update issue
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4mo ago
That's actually a really helpful perspective for me. Funny enough, I had the following conversation with my 6 year old this morning:
Son: I like your new tattoo. Kids like tattoos.
Me: Well this is a permanent tattoo. You can only get temporary tattoos until you're 18.
Son: I'll do that! Will you drive me?
Me: When you're 18, you can drive yourself.
Son: I could drive?
Me: Yes, but you'll need your own car, and they're expensive.
Son: How much does a car cost?
Me: $10,000. You'll have to save up!
Son: I'm going to count my money now. gets his cash box where he keeps his allowance, and spends the next 5 minutes counting out the $45 he has in there
He has no concept of the difference in scale between the $10,000 and the $45 he has. He was counting it, and if he got to $10,000 then he would get a car. He didn't this time, so he needs to keep saving. I find his focus, sincerity, and innocence sweet for a 6 year old. I'd find that level of numeracy terrifying in a 16 year old, but apparently that's where half of all Americans are. "My 6 year old's understanding of numbers" is a theory of mind I can grasp.
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4mo ago
At some point I hope to make an effortpost about innumeracy, and how people who work with numbers are grossly overestimating the ability of the average person. This old Unz post really stuck with me. The example Level 3 question is literally read a table and pick the smallest number in the appropriate row. Back in 2012 less than half of 15-16 year olds in the USA were able to answer a Level 3 question correctly. I'm a numbers guy, and I really struggle to imagine the perspective of someone unable to do that. And that's half the American population (perhaps a little less, as some people could learn with age)!
wanyeburkett's thread you linked makes a similar/related point. patio11 has some good insights. There's also a good discussion to be had about whether giving these innumerate people an LLM that can understand numbers and complex processes for them is good solution or if that would just encourage more complexity.
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4mo ago
Hard agree. I was a Windows fan since 3.1 and switched to Ubuntu a few months ago. The transition was not smooth. I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting, which I accepted as necessary since the alternatives are either ads in my Windows 11 or getting locked into the overpriced Apple ecosystem. But I would not recommend it for someone who is not technical, especially not for someone who "would very much prefer not to have to learn more command line registry nonsense".
Probably because it's a lot more fun to say.
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