roystgnr
2mo ago
I take it you missed the dialogue about that solution? If you're wise you'll remain ignorant and stop reading this comment now.
Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you.
Wired tried to explain that although "some white users worry that calling attention to their race by texting a pale high five (or worse, a raised fist) might be construed as celebrating or flaunting it", "The yellow emoji feels almost like claiming, “I don't see race,” that dubious shibboleth of post-racial politics, in which the ostensible desire to transcend racism often conceals a more insidious desire to avoid having to contend with its burdens."
And NPR let you know that, although "some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don't want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text", "there was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit", so even if you're "just exhausted [from] having to do that. Many people of color have to do that every day and are confronted with race every day" - so is it really fair for you to get to ignore it?
Indeed, "the default yellow is indelibly linked to The Simpsons, which used that tone solely for Caucasian characters (those of other races, like Apu and Dr. Hibbert, were shades of brown)."
(No mention of the other characters who were non-Caucasian and yellow or lighter, for some reason.)
roystgnr
2mo ago
At least with most 90's hearsay there wasn't any obvious reason beyond shock value for someone to make it up to spread, yet it got made up and spread anyway. With the Springfield, OH hearsay it's quite likely that people like "Nate Higgers" (videoed at an earlier town meeting) are inventing more than just awful aliases, in which case we need higher epistemic standards than a game of telephone.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I haven't seen any citizen accounts of a Haitian having killed a person's cat, though, just an account of an account of an account. A screenshot of a private Facebook post about a report from a neighbor about what a daughter's friend saw ... is technically evidence, but it's approximately the same quality of evidence as a typical urban legend, the sort of "Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Watch Out!" material that used to spread virally back when the only way we had to spread things virally was email. Today you can read a hundred of them en masse if you prefer.
I wouldn't consider this debunked, but we're going to need to trace the gossip chain back a few more links before I'd consider it confirmed either.
Recorded evidence would be nice, too, now that we live in a country where 90+% of the population habitually carry video cameras in our pockets. How does someone see something shocking, something ongoing (like a hanging cat corpse) rather than instant, and not be on the ball enough to get photo and video evidence? Even if you're just going to call the police, and you don't anticipate the need to get independent evidence in case the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, wouldn't it be a good idea to get evidence to give to the police in case the criminals mess with the crime scene while you're waiting for a cop to arrive?
roystgnr
2mo ago
It would be nice if we could legalize things without normalizing them. The attitude that "Everything not compulsory is forbidden" used to be known as the Totalitarian Principle, a dystopian hypothetical we need to avoid, not an unavoidable tendency we need to live with. I'd hope we could find a lot of cultural space around "if I do this my friends will intervene and my acquaintances will shy away" before we get to "if I do this my acquaintances will have me jailed".
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, though. "It would be nice if" and "I'd hope" are load-bearing clauses here.
Wikipedia agrees with you
Wikipedia's "Holocaust" article first specifies that it limits the term only to European Jews, then mentions "non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these", linking to their "Holocaust victims" article that includes a dozen categories. I don't think all the wiki editors are 100% on the same page here...
The shocking things about the Holocaust vs the mass civilian death tolls common in war were the deliberateness of it (dead prisoners were the goal, not just negligence) and the industrialization of it (literally "holokaustos"=="whole burnt offering", referring to the crematoria). Neither characteristic was restricted to just the Jewish victims, even if the proportionate effect on Jewish victims was an order of magnitude or more greater. The genocide of other "untermenschen" was also intentional, and though it was much less industrialized, there were still over 100,000 non-Jews murdered at Auschwitz, not just a handful of exceptions. Seems to me like they should count too.
I suppose it was also astonishing that the Holocaust included a country trying to kill its own citizens, rather than just being uncaring about others', and that characteristic wouldn't apply to any Polish or Soviet victims of the Nazis, but that includes the majority of the (predominantly Polish) Jewish people murdered too; the self-destructiveness of the Holocaust was important but not central.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Thanks to LEDs, police couldn’t even detect an increase in energy usage if they tried.
And thanks to LEDs, even if they could it's not even close to probable cause. CNet, a few days ago, reviewed "The 8 Best Indoor Smart Gardens for 2024". My wife got one for us last year. They're never going to be remotely price-competitive with farmland, but they're now cheap enough to be a fun yuppie hobby, and that means that even if the cops get subpoenas for hydroponics supply sales they're likely to find far more literal herbs than metaphorical herb.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I'm basically a meatsack wrapped around opinions
I think we've got a new TheMotte motto!
The worst period of parenting is when they are no longer content just sleeping/laying around and want to move, but cannot walk.
I thought it was the first few months, before they stopped waking up needing feedings in the middle of the night, myself. My kids were never unhappy while being carried when they were pre-walking, and the "I'm getting a ton of exercise" stage was a welcome change from the previous "I hope I don't fall asleep while driving to work" stage.
(things then get awesome, with the "oh my God the little alien is trying to communicate, this is like First Contact" stage)
roystgnr
2mo ago
I think we might need to distinguish between positive capacity and negative capacity here. Consider the contrast in an example just written up this afternoon. The ability for an arm of the (US) state to quickly get people to the moon may not be as high as it was 60 years ago; the ability for other arms of the state to ensure that leisurely reexaminations of their own concerns take precedence may have never been higher.
Link summary: either Musk has started writing the SpaceX blog himself, or even the grunts have moved from diplomatic to pissed about licensing timelines "derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd". I'm surprised the "it uses literal drinking water" quote (bold in original) doesn't link to a hot take on Twitter X.
On the other hand ... do you have any quantitative analysis of the munitions problem? I think issues with artillery production are somewhat more alarming than issues with Starship development, because the latter is designed for long-term economics rather than to give a middle finger to Russia (like the Apollo program or current munitions production) or to secure weapons capabilities (like 1960s expendable rockets in general or current munitions production). DoD isn't yet interested enough in Starship to butt in the way I'd expect them to do for an ammo factory, so any issues with that must be more fundamental than just bureaucratic infighting.
roystgnr
2mo ago
It's clearly not close to the norm in the sense of "normal distribution", but it's closer than it should be in the sense of "normative". Back when the pregnant woman got run over you could find de jure support for the victim in pre-existing Arkansas state publications, and the state police settled out of court later, but if the cop who ran her down wasn't fired then in some de facto sense wasn't any norm against that superseded by a "let the vehicular assailant get away with it if they're a cop" norm they consider more important?
roystgnr
2mo ago
I finally finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, starting it (and its previous prequel to Deus Ex, Human Revolution) from scratch after putting them down many years ago.
Gameplay-wise, they try to stay faithful to the original Deus Ex, except for the common modern concessions (a distinct cover system, which I liked, lack of body-part-specific health, which I disliked, and health regeneration, which I despise). Playing at "Give Me Deus Ex" difficulty was too easy, apparently because the difference in damage taken vs "Give Me a Story" difficulty is only 21%, not a full 300%. One of my fondest memories of the original Deus Ex showing its colors was 10 minutes into the game, getting killed for the first time, thinking "What is wrong with this game, that I can die from a single pistol shot to the head?", then thinking "What is wrong with every game I've played before, that I don't expect to die from a pistol shot to the head?" The level of nonlinearity (lots at the tactical level, a little at the strategic level) was on-par with the original, in both good ways (many different combat/stealth/hacking alternatives, a few major story beats that can be changed, hub levels with a lot of non-combat interactions, side quests that are intriguing but not overbearing, revisiting of old locations under new conditions and with new goals) and bad (the stereotypical Die Hard Ventilation Shafts are as common in little apartment complexes as they are in big office buildings, and their routing is obviously extradiagetic everywhere). Mankind Divided also completely backed away from the biggest complaint about Human Revolution (dumb boss fights pawned off on a subcontractor or something for development); there's now only one "boss" in the entire game, the cutscene before that fight doesn't hand you an idiot ball, and the fight itself leaves you a great number of tactical alternatives (including simply finding a way out and fleeing, I'm reading).
Story-wise ... it doesn't fit as well as it should, I think because they painted themselves into a corner with the first prequel. In Deus Ex you met maybe a half dozen mechanically-augmented characters. They're in a strained position in between "superhuman abilities" and "becoming obsolete due to nano-augmentation", which is interesting, but they're mostly economic elites or their elite enforcers, and it's clear that they should have been superhuman and rare back in their day. Human Revolution did "superhuman", but to do a "baseline-vs-augs" story they gave up on "rare"; they're now common and you meet dozens of them. Mankind Divided uses the ending of Human Revolution to flip the script the rest of the way, with mechanically-augmented people still common and treated as subhuman due to the prior conflict. Even tonally in its own context this doesn't always work; the dialogue and situations mostly pattern-match the kind of bigotry you see against underperforming subpopulations, not against overperforming-but-hated ones. The ending gives some closure, albeit not as much as it should. This is clearly part of a trilogy that was never finished, but it does stand well enough on its own that I don't feel cheated.
Graphics-wise ... did we just hit "good enough" a decade ago? I'm reminded of a comparison I saw of the 2013 vs 2018 Tomb Raider video games, where the main character's hair was more flowing and realistic in the latter, and that was about it. I'm sure kids these days could find a lot to complain about before I chase them off my lawn, but after living through an era where every year felt like a completely new paradigm, it's nice to be able to just treat even decade-old AAA graphics as a solved problem, and focus on gameplay and story.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Or by voting at all am I giving legitimacy to a system I detest anyway?
By "a system" do you mean "the eventual winner(s)" or "democracy"? Voting against the eventual winner(s) gives them less legitimacy, while giving democracy more legitimacy.
Even if it's democracy you detest, though, it's got a commanding lead in public legitimacy, and it's hard to see how withholding your contribution will help change that. Half the point of a democratic state is that it naturally co-opts its own most effective enemies. If you want a revolution but not enough to drag yourself out the door to participate in the Regularly Scheduled Peaceful Revolution, you're probably not going to be participating in the violent revolutionary meetings or the guerrilla terrorist attacks either.
At least go to the polls to vote in local elections, and pick a third party (it'll be Libertarian as usual for me) to vote for for President while you're there. US voter turnout is commonly below 66%, and it's not because principled people who want to signal our protest would actually win elections if only we could coordinate, so without actually casting a vote for someone there's no way to send a signal other than "the couch is comfy".
I don't envy the swing state voters, though. The game theory says to suck it up, figure out which of the two front-runners is less horrible, and vote accordingly, but how do you do that this year and not just feel soiled afterwards?
Edit: actually, I guess you want to figure out which of the two front-runners would be less horrible in context. You might think that Harris is less horrible but also more likely to have her horrible decisions supported rather than stymied by the rest of the government, for example, or you might think that Trump's positions are less horrible but that he's such a bad representative of them that 4 years of whatever he could enact won't be worth decades of increased backlash.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I'll admit my argument is more shaky here, as it is quite likely that once the US got into bombing range of Japan, and certainly once the atom bomb arrived, there was no likelihood of Japanese victory.
Does this not apply to both theatres of the war? The "if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit" hypothetical doesn't bring Einstein and his "Jewish physics" back to Germany.
I wonder what the modern left attitude would have been about the atomic bombing of Bremerhaven or whereever. On the one hand, if you see everything on an oppressor-oppressed axis then it's hard to get more oppressed than "lethally irradiated". On the other hand, literal non-metaphorical Nazis.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.
On the one hand, that's why normies ended up getting their fancy electric cars from Tesla. As the old economics joke goes, there can't be a hundred dollar bill plainly lying on the ground, because someone would have picked it up already. Musk had to search through muck like "electric motors are for golf carts" and "it's literally rocket science, you're not going to beat Boeing or Lockheed!" to find his hundred billion dollar bills, because if you pursue ideas that any normie can see aren't stupid, then the normies probably already did, and some of them are way ahead of you to monetizing them.
On the other hand, most apparently-stupid ideas are apparently stupid because in fact they are actually stupid. In PvE fields like engineering that's still fine, because the math or the testing will winnow out the bad ideas anyway. If you try out 199 failed filament materials and one good one then you don't become famous as a 99.5% failure, you become famous as the guy who invented the light bulb. But in PvP fields like social media / business / politics, taking stupid ideas seriously in public burns credibility, wasting social capital you could have put to better use elsewhere. Musk does have enough actual capital to not care so much about that, and I can't help but be amused by someone using "fuck-you money" to literally tell people "fuck you", but he's investing in so many good causes that I wish he wouldn't waste so much opportunity cost on bad ones.
By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women.
6 kids (5 surviving, one died of SIDS) with his first wife, one of whom publicly hates him. 3 kids (X, Exa, and Tau) with a later girlfriend (after his second divorce to his second wife, his third divorce total) who he's currently fighting for custody. 3 biological kids via IVF with one of his employees at Neuralink. This sounds like a bad model for Musk, not just a bad model for normies.
roystgnr
2mo ago
It's not chemicals impacting the odds of pregnancy, but it's also not people trying and failing at any age. It's young people trying to not have kids and succeeding that's driving the decline. The birth control pill is released, and within a little over a decade the fertility rate (births-per-1000-women) falls roughly in half, a greater drop than the previous WWI-Great-Depression-WWII plunge. Total Fertility Rate is what we usually care about in the end, but it's an integral of that instantaneous births-per-woman rate over a lifetime, so somewhat obfuscates how rapid the effect was.
In the decades since then, it seems that older people trying to have kids are succeeding more, not failing! The birth rate among mothers 40-44 has more than doubled from 1980-2015 (from very very little up to very little...), the birth rate among 35-39yo mothers is up 150% (which in that case is a significant increase in absolute terms too), and the birth rate among ages 30-34 nearly doubled since 1975.
But at ages 25-29 the rate shows no clear trend downward until a 2006 peak, at 20-24 it's down 25% from the 90s, and at 15-19 it's down nearly 2/3rds.
Looking at provisional 2023 numbers ... the older age groups' birth rate rises have stopped and held mostly flat over the last decade (except that 30-34 might be on its way down now?), 25-29 is more clearly starting its fall, 20-24 is now down 50% from the 90s, and 15-19 is now down by more than 75%.
I suppose there could be chemicals impacting the human drive toward life-long pair mating? In the US marriage has been plummeting for all age brackets for generations. But I think we've got so many cultural factors contributing to that, Occam says don't even bother checking for chemicals right now.
roystgnr
2mo ago
And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens.
I shout "it's the demons!" all the time because that's the traditional example of how it happens.
A coworker writes code with Undefined Behavior. I point out that the C or C++ standard says the compiler is now allowed to let their executable do anything, including make demons fly out their nose. They point out that their code passed a couple tests. I point out that the nasal demons are actually still a best case scenario, because "anything" also includes "passing tests selectively or temporarily".
The worst case scenario is also a typical scenario: the UB works at first, but then in a couple months or years someone uses a different CPU type, or a linker goes to a different object file first, or a compiler gets a more aggressive optimizer, or an updated library leaves the heap in a different state, or a different thread starts winning races, etc. and then the code starts obviously breaking, out in the wild, where if we're lucky it is now crashing and making users scream at us or if we're unlucky it is just producing silently corrupted results, and where in either case the original concern has long been forgotten and the debugging will have to rediscover it from scratch.
And one might read that and smugly think "so don't use C/C++", but they're actually much better about UB than most dependencies. UB in C++ is "you wrote code clearly described as UB in a 300 page standards doc", but in most libraries it's "the API and the scraps of documentation said you needed to do 'X' but the developer really meant you needed 'W,X,Z' and if you did 'W,X,Y' instead you'll start breaking after the update next July, which you can't avoid because it's the only bugfix for a corner case your users started hitting in May"!
(I try to explain this without getting a crazed look in my eyes; success rates vary.)
roystgnr
2mo ago
I don't do as much stargazing as I'd like to, but even before Starlink I caught satellite streaks on long-duration telescope photos, and saw dots that looked too fast+smooth to be planes only to discover they were satellites, both fairly frequently.
Starlink is what gets all the attention for two reasons:
-
They're very close to us, and brightness decreases with distance squared. They start out really bright (peak apparent magnitude 2.6 - the planets and the brightest hundredish stars are brighter but that's about it) and bunched up in "trains" of a couple dozen at a time, and they don't get separated or get dimmer (mag 5 for the first batch, dimmed to 6.3 for the first "visorsat" designs, brightened to 5.6 for the "v2 mini" design) until they've all spread out (under slow ion drives) and raised their orbits to their final altitude. (larger magnitude numbers are dimmer, and mag 6 is about the limit of what can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky)
-
They're very numerous. About a hundred countries have put satellites in orbit, two of them have put at least a thousand in orbit ... and yet if you add up all the non-SpaceX satellites put together, SpaceX has more now. Like 50% more if you only count active satellites. It's something like 6000 right now. They literally launched 42 more with two rockets this morning. They're a bit preoccupied with a manned mission at the moment, so they probably won't be launching a couple dozen more until (checks calendar) Wednesday.
roystgnr
2mo ago
It's worse than oligarchy, isn't it? "You're not smart enough to vote" is both more honest and less insulting than "your vote is super important, let me just make sure you don't do it wrong..."
roystgnr
2mo ago
its just an impression I got people just seem to hate drunk drivers universally regardless of politics.
~75M people are planning to vote for one for Vice President.
(To be fair, that doesn't prove they don't hate him; not a lot of great options these days.)
roystgnr
2mo ago
Even if speech is not a crime it can be compelling evidence of another crime. If I confess to the cops that I committed a murder, that can put me away for murder ... unless I was actually on video with a dozen witnesses at the time of the murder, in which case my exact same speech would not get me convicted, because the speech itself isn't the murder.
(Though I'd say it should get me convicted of making a false police report, but I assume this is where @reconnaissent and I differ)
roystgnr
2mo ago
it seems like you would if you could.
Forgive me for only skimming this discussion, but is there some other comment that gave you this impression? I don't get it from what you quoted.
It's hard to talk about threat in the capabilities sense without any subtext of threat in the intentions sense, but I don't perceive any deliberate subtext.
roystgnr
2mo ago
You're entirely correct but ... aren't large expenditures of your personal physical energy half the point of biking? If you're on a bike because you can't afford a car, I'm totally sympathetic to you wanting to add as few calories you can to your grocery bill in the process, but at least for myself the biggest advantage of biking to work (because "work" meant "typing stuff", not ∫F·ds) was to build up some of the muscle and burn off some of the fat that would during the rest of the day be wasting away and accumulating respectively. I suspect I was more the rule than the exception for cyclists in the USA.
I'd love to hear your opinions of Hydrogen Sonata when you're done. I didn't like Matter as much as Surface Detail, but I thought both of them were a noticeable step down from The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, or Inversions, and I never got around to reading Hydrogen Sonata at all. Of course, I might have stopped from the get-go after Consider Phlebas if I hadn't previously been assured by a friend that better sequels were to follow.
Do author's works have the same "bathtub curve" for failure probability that engineered products do? Not quite for the same reasons, but for similar ones? Their first book(s) are done without enough practice, so have issues due to lack of experience. Then they hit a personal Golden Age. Then when their stock of good original ideas starts to wear out they either dig into the mediocre original ideas or they get repetitive.
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