roystgnr
3mo ago
Oh, the machines won't stop at just your code.
https://github-roast.pages.dev/
roystgnr
3mo ago
In this campaign, you don't need "public support", you just need "less public disapproval". Trump is at +8.3% disapproval right now; Harris has plummeted from a recent +17.4% disapproval down to a mere +5.5%. RFK is at +7.8% and Chase Oliver is at "Who?", so she's currently the most popular candidate not by virtue of being popular but by being less relatively unpopular.
If someone wanted to nominate a good candidate then their opponents might have to worry about having enough time to convince the public that their candidate is also good, but for some reason there just hasn't been much threat of that happening for the last decade.
roystgnr
3mo ago
"to every commenter addressing him", maybe? Not being able to out-type the sum of 10 people trying to rebut you shouldn't be banworthy. But one reply to each of those 10 people is probably a fair requirement, and as a bonus it would create an incentive for the 10 to initially only post one comment with their best arguments, which would slightly reduce motte-and-baileying, troll feeding, and dogpiling.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I don't think any of these exactly apply here, but there's
Celebration parallax: "A fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it" or on what normative inferences are drawn from it.
Law of Merited Impossibility: roughly, "That won't happen, and boy are you going to deserve it when it does", which leads to the
Law of Salutary Contradiction: "That's not happening and it's good that it is."
roystgnr
3mo ago
Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?
"I shouldn't assist in the defense of those people who aren't 100% on my team" has been a popular philosophy throughout history. Usually briefly.
We call the tactic that exploits that philosophy "Divide and Conquer", but if you drill down into the details it's amazing how many instances could have been better described as "Watch Them Divide Themselves, and Conquer".
The trouble is identifying when a group is N% on your team and choosing a reasonable threshold of N, of course. There are groups of Christians who would shun you socially and economically for your differences if they had enough power (at which point their most zealous kids would start pushing the Overton Window back into "arrest the blasphemer" territory), and there are diametrically opposed groups of Christians who would literally turn the other cheek if you hit them (which sounds like a friendly group of neighbors to have, until you realize they won't assist in your forceful defense when a threat starts hitting you), but there are still other groups of Christians who can actually play Tit For Tat correctly when it's called for. At one point the third group was so numerous as to be able to build modern civilization; it might be reasonable to decry the mockery of any who remain, for old times' sake, even if you can't find reason to decry it on general principles.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I couldn't call myself a traditionalist, but isn't the general line that "playing the field is good and virginity is good"? Then the reasons for the former and their implications toward the latter practically name themselves. Date a lot of people before "going steady", and with a little luck you'll probably learn a lot you didn't know about relationships and about your preferences and about how your available choices mesh or don't mesh with you, and hopefully you'll then find a good match to investigate further. Date-and-have-sex-with a lot of people in a world which predates good contraception and antibiotics, and you're basically inviting a plague upon your people, whether because God or just because harsh-economics and STD epidemiology. The reliance upon God for traditionalism today is just because that's the strongest argument left, in a time when "harsh economics" just means that DoorDash is expensive and when even the uncurable STDs are very treatable.
roystgnr
3mo ago
9/11 was a stated reason for invading Iraq, but only in an indirect way. 9/11 was treated as evidence that being reactive rather than proactive about terrorism risk was unacceptable, and from that premise even a small probability of Iraq developing serious functional WMDs was deemed to be unacceptable, because we couldn't afford to wait until "the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud", to quote the most memorable phrase.
But that's the stated reasons, and a vengeful public was not really listening closely.
"Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.
The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11."
Plurality failing the Independence of clones criterion so badly might suggest the easiest step forward. Switch to approval voting, where sparking a competition between "President Mediocre" vs "President AlsoMediocreButWillFireTheIdiots" no longer risks splitting the vote and getting "President Bad" elected instead (all candidate evaluations in the mind of a partisan voter, not necessarily objective), and we might then see a lot more voter control over the worst bureaucrats.
Though ... I can't actually say that that's not "coup-complete" still. It's hard for me to picture the existing parties agreeing to a voting system that will take away their insiders' power, and it's easy for me to picture a world where voters have been granted a way to remove idiot bureaucrats but never exercise that control because the marginal voters are also idiots.
roystgnr
3mo ago
automatic gunfire their way
I was expecting this to be a typical "people call a semi-auto weapon 'automatic' to sound scarier" situation, but I was at least responsible enough to click on the video before jumping in with "ACKSHUALLY," and wow.
This was less than a month ago? How frequent are machine gun attacks in LA?
roystgnr
3mo ago
Of course it's not just an "online" problem.
Traditional newsrooms lost 40,000 jobs in 12 years, the majority of their employees, mitigated slightly by 11,000 new online news jobs over the same period. The problem has not abated yet; we are now at around two straight decades of decline.
Online there's a "1% rule" to worry about? Ha! Offline we should be lucky to get such a huge, broad cross-section. 50K newsroom employees is 0.03% of the US workforce.
What kind of person, while watching even the first half of this collapse, was coming to the conclusion that "wow, there's the career for me!" Is this type of person someone to whom you want to outsource your epistemic hygiene? In theory we might find a few genius altruists with multi-million-dollar trust funds who decided to give up on any other financial stability for the cause of restoring honor to the Fourth Estate (but can anybody name one?); in practice we're starting with a crop of people who make bad life choices and then we're winnowing that crop down further based on whether they were pragmatic enough to rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "honor". The only redeeming feature of this mess is that the economics also want to winnow away anyone who doesn't rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "crazy political zealotry", but human psychology is such that zealotry is attention-grabbing so I'm not sure this second form of winnowing is quite as effective.
roystgnr
3mo ago
There should be a lot of distance between "this is a bad shoot, the cop should be prosecuted" (maybe? but a pot of boiling water definitely counts as a threat of "great bodily harm"...) versus the hopefully less controversial "this is a bad shoot, the cop should never hold a gun again after being fired and his replacement should be trained much better". Screaming that you'll "shoot you right in your fucking face" is not how you deescalate the muttering person, screaming "drop the fucking pot" is not the order you give when you think that flying boiling water is a danger, and walking closer to the threat is not the way you keep everybody safe when you have a long range weapon and the threat is a heavy object held in the hands of a non-professional-shotputter.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Yeah, baring evidence not presented yet, Cheatle just seems at worst incompetent and at best woefully hands-off, rather than malicious.
Did the congressional hearings ever explain the "sloped roof" thing? I can think of hypotheses under which she's not malicious there (it was never really a thing, some underling told her 2+2=5 and she didn't see an issue with repeating that), but the null hypothesis here still seems to be "she just made something up in the middle of an investigation", which would mean it's at least some evidence of malice. We don't get pissed at Nixon because we think he broke into the Watergate; just helping with the coverup was bad enough.
roystgnr
3mo ago
They have like a 7% chance of dying within a year.
This is so accurate I feel like you must have checked the same actuarial table I pulled up; next time add the hyperlink too so your statistics aren't mistaken for hyperbole!
roystgnr
4mo ago
Oh, it seems entirely reasonable to me, just a very specifically weird way to be reasonable, out of a lot of alternatives. As a choice pushed by narcissists it would make sense to me. But as a request specifically made by a blind person it's an interesting mystery.
roystgnr
4mo ago
... why a color specifically? You'd think that type of clothing, hair style, distinguishing feature, or a half-dozen other things would be more relatable than color.
Was he one of the many (most?) legally blind people who still have some (ultra-blurry) color vision?
Or is it a sense of humor thing? "Hey, you know how there's this major qualia that I'll never get to experience? Could you bring it up in a way that will sound natural at first but will make you feel a little more confused and uncomfortable the longer you think about it?" That would actually be awesome.
roystgnr
4mo ago
"Conflict of interest"?
She should have said something, but she may be at the bottom of the list of people who should have. It would have seemed creepy if the only person sounding the alarm about Biden was the one person with the most to potentially gain personally from that.
roystgnr
4mo ago
And if you can't accept that, fuck you.
The demand to be able to curse anyone who disagrees with you with nothing to throttle you isn't really supporting the pro- "classic 'law-and-order' conservative" and anti- "demonize rather than argue" stance you're claiming here. The moderation here is correctly identifying some of your posts as bad, even when agreeing with your conclusions, because it actually is pro-order and pro-argument and anti-demonization.
roystgnr
4mo ago
That's enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be arrested; not enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be fired. If Billy Bob is among your customer base and there's now only one way to make him feel safe walking down your rope aisle then maybe you do what you need to for him to feel safe.
IIRC the (ex-)Home-Depot lady didn't even go that far, it was more like "Billy Bob's favorite candidate deserves to be hanged", with Billy (and his compatriots) in no danger, but it's still defensible for a judgement call to land somewhere in between "we should just ignore this" and "we need to call the cops right now".
roystgnr
4mo ago
And Buffy, though that was more of a remake than a spinoff.
Andor was arguably better than Rogue One; both were uneven with mixed beginnings saved by their endings, but Andor had better development in the middle.
roystgnr
4mo ago
That would be a very dishonorable way to go out
Surely just the opposite? Being self-aware of one's own limitations, especially in a context where they sneak up on you like aging does or where they make it harder to be self-aware like cognitive problems can, is much more honorable than letting those limitations hit reality unchecked.
roystgnr
4mo ago
I could easily imagine a strategist thinking "we don't need someone on that roof, we've already got snipers on two other roofs covering it", without thinking ahead to the snipers' dilemma of "there's someone on that roof now - is it one of the local cops from the building below? did our own plans change? just how suspicious does that guy have to look before I kill him?"
But the trouble is, that's not what the "strategist" reported thinking; her official thoughts were "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," and the trouble with those thoughts are that they are the most obviously false excuses that I've ever heard, and yes I am including all the "gosh he just fell out of that window" stories about Russian politicians. Sometimes people really do fall out of windows; at this point the odds are a quadrillion-to-one but who knows? But if you say you're keeping your teams off of roofs where the slope is too high, after there have already been many photos published of your teams at the same event on roofs with higher slopes, then that is an outright lie.
I still suspect that this lie was an attempt to cover up incompetence, not an attempt to cover up conspiracy - conspiracies being pre-planned, you'd expect one to come up with a less ridiculous cover story! - but lying in the middle of the investigation is still the point at which the failure here crosses the line from dereliction of duty to betrayal of it.
I continue to think that, once someone cracks keeping "chain of thought" out of the loss function, via something as simple as begin/end tokens, we'll see an improvement in performance that's the equivalent of the difference between an answer a human can give while blathering off the top of their head vs an answer a human can give by quietly thinking about it first and then thinking about how they're thinking about it and then assembling the best of those thoughts into a final verbal answer. I do not add 1234+8766 by going left-to-right, but certainly addition is also not the only place where I think about the later parts of a problem before coming to a conclusion about the earlier parts, so any kind of reversal that only applies to numbers is just a hack.
On the other hand, the longer I continue to think this, the less likely it is that someone hasn't tried to do it in enough ways to conclude that it's a failure for some subtle reason I don't understand.
roystgnr
4mo ago
I loved School of Rock more than any animated movie he's ever done, so I want to agree, I just don't see how to justify that with data.
roystgnr
4mo ago
I don't think he was ever A lister.
Jack Black is the 37th highest-grossing leading actor of all time. He's top 100 by just about any objective metric. His biggest stuff is voice acting in kids' movies (lead villain in a $1B+ movie last year) so he doesn't have as much face recognition as most of his peers, though.
Your alternative theory is that Walz is praising what a maverick and iconoclast Trump is?
"Weird" used to be something we could rely on the (American, at least) left defending, sure. All hail the outlaws, Spielbergs and Kubricks! Keep Austin Weird! We just commemorated the 25th anniversary of "The Weird Al Show" with the release of "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"! "Queer" has been reclaimed as a term of pride!
Seeing how many people are eager to throw that attitude away now that the left is on top is a gross, Orwellian, "Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others" betrayal. It's throwing every actually-weird kid out there under the bus just to score a few political points. I used to think that seeing Animal Farm as a universal story made me a big cynical skeptic, unsurprised at how movements will throw away their support for the little people after they get solidly entrenched in power, but I'm still dumbfounded at watching people throw away principles as a way to push their polling lead above 2%.
I hope it's a flash-in-the-pan meme, not true newly-bipartisan support for anti-weirdness. Imagine how much harder it's going to be to dissuade bullying in the future if it becomes clear that so many victims weren't upset because they were righteous, they were just upset because they were envious.
I haven't been this disappointed since I discovered how many fellows on the anti-censoring-Communists left weren't strongly anti-censorship but rather just pro-censorship and pro-Communism.
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