roystgnr
18hr ago
Bear in mind that Polymarket is pricing Loss-of-Vehicle for the SLS rocket, and hopefully the Orion's Launch Abort System means that the odds for Loss-of-Crew during launch are significantly lower.
On the other hand, it looks like 12% is just for the question "Artemis II explodes?", specifically referring to "the booster", and if the crew dies due to just the capsule failing reentry then that would count as a "no" on the Polymarket bet despite it counting as a "hell no" for the future of Orion and SLS.
roystgnr
18hr ago
I like Eric Berger's thoughts: "its extremely low flight rate ... makes every fueling and launch an experimental rather than operational procedure."
But I have to wonder how much of the liquid hydrogen leak is just attributable to, well, liquid hydrogen. Less than a quarter the temperature of LOX (a bigger difference geometrically than LOX temperature vs air temperature!), for a fluid which engineers usually first learn about in the context of embrittlement. They had some LH2 leaks to sort out back during Artemis I preparation too.
the question what exactly is lurking under the surface ready to bite the crew in the ass is relevant.
Historically, new rockets tended to have something like a 50/50 chance of failure on their first launch, and that Artemis 1 went as well as it did is a good sign for the future. I would be even less worried for the future if we could afford to launch these things regularly, though, so we could wait to put humans on the fourth launch or the fortieth rather than the second.
roystgnr
19hr ago
Who here makes extra payments on his mortgage?
I do, or at least I add an extra $1k of principle reduction on top of every standard monthly payment.
It's mostly a bad decision. I've got an extremely low mortgage rate, locked in when rates were briefly next to nothing, and I can now get a higher return even in an FDIC insured money market account.
My rationalizations, in increasing order of importance:
It may be preventing me from making dumber investment decisions. I've also got a lot in a money market account, and index funds, and tech-centric index funds, and Nvidia in particular, and I fear if I had more money sloshing around free then I'd be tempted to get even more risk-tolerant, possibly at just the wrong time, begging to get hit by a market "correction".
I've got a swath of college tuitions to pay, starting in the near future, and a lot of financial aid applications consider home equity to be inviolate in a way no other investment I could make would be.
It's probably preventing me from making dumber spending decisions - keeping my checking account balance low enough that I have to double-check it before paying the credit card bill seems to have a strong psychological effect on me when I'm tempted to spend frivolously.
It was my wife's idea, and she leaves literally every other investment decision to me. I'd feel like a jerk telling her "we shouldn't pay off our house faster with a fraction of our savings" when she lets me get away with ideas like "we should gamble a bigger fraction of our savings on these guys trying to make god out of silicon".
roystgnr
22hr ago
The model weights are deterministic parameters that literally decide how the system behaves.
This is false for most modern implementations. The same model weights, even at 0 temperature, give different outputs for runs in different environments (where "different" can be as subtle as putting the same hardware and software under more or less load), because anything that changes the ordering of reduction operations over non-associative (e.g. floating-point) arithmetic can change the result.
you can describe behavior directly in terms of the underlying code
Well, you can imagine you can, anyway. LLM execution has that in common with Molecular Dynamics simulations: you can write down the equations on paper, but you're never going to evaluate them that way.
roystgnr
2d ago
It's almost a meme how many times I've been told "I'm boring, sorry," by women whose hobbies included watching YouTube videos and eating dinner, alone, at home.
Wait - are they calling you boring, or themselves? I've heard of a stereotype of some single women who badly want to be entertained despite being utterly unengaged themselves, but in the stereotype they're not self-aware about it.
I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy
When credentials weren't so important, efficiency made it seem sensible for teaching and student evaluation to be done by the same institution. Once credentials' importance skyrocketed, game theory concerns became paramount, but the mistake is now too ubiquitous to change.
I'm a Linux user (btw), but I do have to admit I'm fringe.
I use Windows and OSX too, but I do everything I can on Linux because I prefer the user interface.
roystgnr
3d ago
Formatting fix:
Q: Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents?
A: They'd hand over emails given a warrant.
roystgnr
5d ago
I suppose? It's more like the optics of a street gang fight to me, honestly. A bunch of people on both sides who like to talk shit and throw hands, ready to smash things or deliver a beat-down to someone who they think earned it, none of them with any kind of faith that a judge might be able to deliver justice instead, going armed but still swinging and shoving and stepping up like they can't risk their pride or can't imagine the guns might add any weight to those choices, and then some point a gun flashes and someone's panicked and suddenly there's screaming and flying bullets.
roystgnr
5d ago
I don't think it was bias; the clip I ran across was focused on him smashing the tail light, and actually committing a crime is more damning than just running his mouth off.
But there is something to be said for dramatic irony, too. Thank you very much for the source!
(The clip I ran across wasn't from that APNews page - does that page actually publish any of the Pretti videos? You'd think a story headlined "New videos show..." would show new videos, but the only video player I can find on that page just gives me a mix of ads and unrelated headlines.)
roystgnr
5d ago
"assault me motherfucker!"
Are the words in quotation marks here a quote? Could you link the source? The only copy I've found of the earlier video didn't have anything like that, but possibly because the clip was too truncated.
roystgnr
5d ago
Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution
Of course it does. "Execution" isn't a word that includes legitimate or illegitimate attempts at self-defense, involuntary manslaughter, or even anything covered by the felony murder rule. The etymology is a contraction from "execution of death" (i.e. a death sentence) which uses the general/original meaning of execution, "the carrying out (of a plan, etc.)".
If a killing was pre-planned, it might be described as an execution. If a killing happened unplanned because the killer was on a hair-trigger and "Someone said gun!" then, even if it was criminal, it wasn't an execution.
roystgnr
5d ago
You're definitely not paranoid here. Anything done against federal officers would be a federal offense, so finding a prosecutor shouldn't be hard, but getting a fair jury might be trickier.
Even ending with jury nullification would probably be better than what actually happened, though. At least the arrests would get threats (whether to the officers' vehicles or to themselves, in hindsight) off the streets temporarily, and the optics of "Minnesotans think criminals should run free" would be much better for them than the optics of "DHS thinks due process is no substitute for violence". Plus, arrests come with arrest reports, which aren't nearly as good as bodycams but which are still less patchy than "we found some guy with a cell phone video a couple weeks later". Did DHS tackle this guy because they were pissed that he vandalized their car? Did he vandalize their car because he was pissed that he broke their rib, but there was some prior reason for the tackle?
roystgnr
5d ago
We now know ICE knew he was dangerous and crazy.
Did they? The DHS statement was that "DHS law enforcement has no record of this incident." A smashed-up DHS tail light, and a protestor with a broken rib, but apparently that's just another day ending in 'y' to everyone involved? Unless the first shooter happened to be one of the same officers from a week and a half before, by the time Pretti was killed he'd be just some guy to them again.
How did nobody involved in that first incident decide to make an arrest or file a report? Apparently that rib was broken while Pretti was tackled and pinned by five agents, but the agents afterward "quickly released him at the scene". I get that arresting people involves paperwork and isn't nearly as fun as breaking bones, but it is the standard approved method for getting criminals off the streets! To touch back on the topic of the original post: if our officers are going to act like Freikorps, then to reflect that status their uniforms don't need to be better, they ought to be worse!
roystgnr
6d ago
I'll counter with "(heat-safe) silicone cooking utensils", the ideal material for a house full of semi-competent cooks. All my stuff is 15 or 20 years old, and over that length of time everything eventually gets accidentally left on a hot pan, where wood surfaces turn to char, nylon and other plastics turn to goo and poison-smoke, and good silicone just shrugs it off and stays good-as-new.
Plus I'm too lazy to hand-wash (much less oil) wooden spoons like I do with my wooden cutting board, and I've noticed that wood tends to get gradually ruined by automatic dishwashing.
roystgnr
6d ago
I have a carbon steel wok, and it seems like the ideal material for that (light enough for wok tossing, quick temperature changes when I need them), but I can't see why I'd want it for a skillet. My wok doesn't season as nicely as my cast iron skillet, I don't move my skillet around while cooking so I don't care about light weight, and I do care about heavy weight - retaining as much heat as possible when we (sometimes over-...) load it with steaks is like 90% of the point of that skillet! For anything that doesn't need a long sear, what's the advantage of a carbon steel skillet over (thick, quality) stainless?
roystgnr
8d ago
FRED actually already has at least one discontinued M1 series, which was weekly data.
That's really interesting!
From a discoverability standpoint I'd think that the solution would be a simple hyperlink - the discontinued M1 page has a link to the new M1SL; just add a link in the other direction too and we're good.
But from a epistemological standpoint? The mathematician in me wants to say that it's silly to call the new data a new series, so long as it's the same thing being measured, even if it's evaluated with a different frequency. But the engineer in me is bowing in awe to whomever decided something like "we're using a different evaluation process at the lower frequency, therefore it's a different measurement even if it's the same measurand, therefore we're putting it in a different series".
roystgnr
8d ago
Yeah, that makes sense, but defining a new measure that we can calculate and giving it the same name isn't actually a solution to our inability to keep calculating the old measure, it's just a very interesting case of the streetlight effect error. We should end our M1 graphs at the date where we can no longer calculate the original M1 definition, start our "M1b" graphs at the date where we have enough data to calculate the new M1b definition, and never plot them as the same line on the same graph. OP here isn't the first or even the tenth person I've seen who didn't realize that that graph discontinuity was an artifact of a definition change, despite (or, really, because of) the paragraphs underneath that are needed to explain that.
roystgnr
8d ago
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Seriously, whose idea was this? We should have just kept calling the old definition M1, and created the new definition as M1.5 or M1b or something. Instead we've got a definition of M1 that's so screwed up, explaining precisely how screwed up it is is a famous problem in philosophy.
roystgnr
8d ago
I was debating whether I should move this to the new thread for visibility, but I just saw your "More as a way that I can refer to my own thought sin the future." edit and I'll respect that.
I think of violence being a knob for the left and a switch for the right.
I tend to sympathize with the position the right takes here, though it does get tricky: the physics of violent threats are a continuum, yet we have to break that continuity somewhere because the game theory of responses to violence demands discrete Schelling points.
I'll double down on your 2010s sci-fi-writer citation with a 1980s sci-fi-writer citation:
- Never throw shit at an armed man. Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.
Niven uses as an example the events that Wikipedia call the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, though Google wants to autocomplete "1968 dnc" with "riots" ... and yet that's a surprisingly tame example, in hindsight? Hundreds of injuries, on both sides, but only one death, of someone who shot at the cops first? Impressive trigger discipline, despite widespread reports and video of the Chicago cops showing ... less discipline ... with clubs and gas and mace. If they were operating on a "switch" mentality, it seems it was a ternary rather than a binary switch, and they managed to hold it to that middle position.
And I don't see that the knob-vs-binary-switch distinction accurately describes the left-vs-right side of the conflict this time. Calling the officers in Minnesota "the right": are they really Switch people?
One of my most-upvoted comments on TheMotte (+34,-2) discusses the problems you get into when knob mentality meets switch mentality: when someone suddenly knocks you to the ground, thinking that they've just turned up that knob a bit, a Switch might reasonably decide that such a sudden and improbably-but-possibly-lethal attack means a switch has been flipped from "non-lethal" to "lethal".
In the latest videos of Pretti I've seen, his last intelligible words before the incident seem to be "do not push them into traffic!", and the officers only oblige in the sense that shortly afterward we see the officers suddenly shoving a woman into the curb instead of the street. Even if we presume that she's done something criminal, is this proper arrest procedure? It seems to be literally accelerating motion rather than arresting it. Pretti should have just filmed a sloppy arrest (or even an illegal assault under the color of law, if that's what it was), not gotten literally into the middle of it while armed, but in the end he was more-than-amply punished for not thinking like a Switch while trying to defend the woman knocked to the ground. Will there also be any punishment for the offense? None of the DHS officers drew a gun until after one took (and too-ambiguously announced) Pretti's un-drawn gun, so they likewise didn't seem to believe that the violence thus far had flipped a binary switch.
Perhaps they're a bunch of Knobs too.
roystgnr
10d ago
Or am I wrong, and Antifa did actually kill right-wingers, and I just never heard about it?
Right-winger, singular, at least. I don't actually remember a second off the top of my head, but I wouldn't be surprised if I forgot 1 or 2 more. I would be surprised if I missed 10 or 20 more.
roystgnr
10d ago
Lots of suggestions already for Manhattans. Good show, everyone! I'll just add that, if you're making them yourself, you can get a lot of variety out of the same basic recipe by just trying different bitters or by adding dashes of different liqueurs like Maraschino or Cherry Heering.
If you're making your own cocktails, though, the must-have is the weeski, both because it's a great cocktail (though my personal recipe uses only 1.5oz whiskey, and usually .75oz Cointreau) and because its name is too stupid to repeat in public.
roystgnr
10d ago
I've only ever seen a 1:1 Godfather recipe, and only tried that once or twice. I didn't think it was even good enough to try tweaking. But 1:4 and 1:8 aren't small tweaks; they sound like they might be worth another look. Thanks!
roystgnr
10d ago
25% of all women's dating profiles have ACAB in them to this day.
Citation needed? Sorry to be annoying; usually when I see an unsupported claim that looks like hyperbole I'll try to be the change I want to see in the world and find references myself rather than just asking for them, or even do the sample counting myself if I have to ... but I'm happily married and "I swear I only downloaded that dating app to tally statistics! Statistics!!" is the sort of idiot plot that I wouldn't even want to watch in a sitcom.
roystgnr
12d ago
This seemed so implausible to me that I went and hunted for accurate sources ... and found references for both claims. So... wow.
I'm also not usually a fan of the "child with a gun", but even stopped clocks get to be right twice a day. "I just really do question whether or not they'll come to [our rescue]" seems to be a reasonable concern, if not about intentions (Germany did stick it out in Afghanistan for decades), then at least about recent capabilities vs peer adversaries. They're in an at least an order of magnitude better shape now, and still improving, but is that because they've fixed the root problems or just because they got tired of being repeatedly embarrassed by leaks to the press?
roystgnr
12d ago
followed the correct procedures
But is that what happened in Uvalde?
Two months before Tuesday's mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead, the Uvalde school district hosted an all-day training session for local police and other school-based law enforcement officers focused on "active shooter response."
"First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm's way," according to a lengthy course description posted online by the Texas agency that developed the training. "Time is the number-one enemy during active shooter response. ... The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone."
The excuse for ignoring all that was that the cops supposedly thought the shooter was barricaded in there alone, not with children, hence they were in no rush to assault the shooter and were free to assault the kids' parents instead.
With so little data it's hard to be sure.
If the odds of failure had actually been 1/200 per flight, then you'd expect to see a ~50% chance of no failures, 34% of 1, 11.6% of 2, 2.5% of 3, etc. Seeing 2/135 failures is good evidence that 1/200 was overly optimistic, but not proof.
That said, Feynman found engineers willing to give risk estimates as high as 1/100, which was still probably too optimistic (the last post-Columbia post-mortem analysis apparently said 1/90?) but not by much.
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