roystgnr
15hr ago
If the murder rate stays constant, but “rate per potential exposure” gets worse, someone is getting exposed at a higher rate.
Just the opposite. murders / population = murders / exposures * exposures / population. If murder / population is constant while murder / exposures increases then exposures / population, the exposure rate, must be decreasing inversely.
Shouldn’t it be strictly easier to tell which neighborhoods have turned into death traps?
Is it? I know there are sites that give neighborhoods "walkability" scores, but at least the first one I pulled up is only giving a theoretical number based on the mass transit availability, distances to the nearest grocer/cafe/school, etc; I'd have no idea how to find an actual number of people who walk down a particular street (or who drive in a particular area - the only armed robberies I found out about first hand were at a stoplight and in a parking lot) on an average day.
roystgnr
19hr ago
nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word
Even before 9/11, "nation building" was enough of a dirty word that popular opposition to that exact phrase helped give the Presidency to ... checks notes ... George W. Bush.
I think Bush did realize that 9/11 gave him ... not a blank check, but a ton of latitude ... but he also realized that he was cashing in that latitude just by reversing his campaign's attitude and launching major foreign wars, and so he was naturally (if mistakenly) reluctant to go all the way and admit that any such war wouldn't actually be worthwhile unless and until we built a non-hostile nation in place of the one the war knocked over. We instead just prayed that the Northern Alliance would step right into the power vacuum and develop such a nation for us, and so instead of sending in your 500,000 troops to rebuild we just sent in ... 5,500? Roughly one person for every 3,500 Afghan people? That sounds like such a tiny force that I'm tempted to look through the wiki history for vandalism, but in any case it was enough to handle the "knocked over" phase of the war admirably; it was only afterward that we should have either left entirely or gone in on rebuilding en masse rather than hoping to get away with the "advisory" gambit alone this time.
roystgnr
19hr ago
Source: you made it up and it sounded too good to check.
A couple months ago Elon Musk reposted this tweet including: "Be very, very strict with SNAP, Section 8, and EBT. Force these do-nothings to get up and go to work." This might say questionable things about his thoughtspace or his priorities, but not his money. The net worth of the world's richest man increased by $200 billion last year.
roystgnr
1d ago
I think there's room to ask about whether, even as the crime rate-per-population has gone down dramatically, the rate-per-potential-exposure has been less changed or has gone up. As Scott says, "We’re a safetyist culture"; we avoid risks more than we used to. We also have more attractive alternatives to risks - where I would play sports in the street or at worst play video games in person with the neighborhood kids, my children go to the rock-climbing gym or play networked video games with their friends farther away. I grew up in a residential area where once I got old enough I could walk to a convenience store, perhaps past some sketchy houses; my kids are growing up in a giant suburb where it wouldn't matter if the houses were sketchy because there's nothing they could get to on foot regardless.
On the other hand, the answer might just be "no, the rate-per-potential-exposure has gone down too". Or it might be that this isn't a sufficiently well-defined metric, because in a big country there's always someplace where it's just too dangerous for an innocent person to go and someplace else where it's perfectly safe and there's no obvious way to decide how to weight those places when averaging.
roystgnr
1d ago
Eventually good times are replaced by hard times, and hegemons cease to be hegemons. Thus any prediction of the form "good times make X, X makes hard times" is likely to come true eventually - including the instant case where X is "weak men".
This isn't valid logic. We can infer (after adding an unstated but natural assumption or two) that at least one prediction of that form is (at least sometimes) true, but not that any prediction of that form is sometimes true.
Consider the counterexample: "good times make carnivorous bunny rabbits, carnivorous bunny rabbits make hard times". Not obviously forever false, but not likely (I think - what's Colossal Biosciences working on these days?) to become true, and definitely not entailed by the premises.
roystgnr
1d ago
Meeting new people from all around the world? Being surrounded with proof that you've achieved a goal towards which you've been working your whole life?
I was also going to guess something about beautiful architecture, under the presumption that cities would go all out to show off their artistic skills for these things... but, is it just me, or are most Olympic villages kind of ugly? De gustibus non est disputandum, I know, but the only thumbnail that really caught my eye turned out to be a building from 1881. Hosting the Olympics is famous for entailing economically crushing expenses, so maybe custom-built Olympic villages simply cut every corner they can to try to mitigate that ... but if you're going to take on decades of debt rather than just decline to host, would it be crazy to spring for some bricks and carved stone before the creditors cut you off? I guess constructions like the luge track spend more time on camera than the residences do, but at least nice residences can recoup extra expense as resale value; the luge track, not so much.
roystgnr
7d ago
What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
That might be about right. My oldest started around then, and is still the biggest Star Trek fan among my kids. I thought TNG would be the smoothest introduction (and I may have been right - we've watched a bit of TOS and my daughters find Kirk annoying), but especially when he was around 10, my son thought that TNG was often too boring and sometimes (well, just the Borg episodes, as of Locutus) too scary to be enjoyable. But even my youngest daughter was picking Star Trek episodes for her turn at "movie night" back when she was only 8.
what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch?
We started with but skipped the vast majority of season 1 TNG (just skipping ahead to the best episodes), and honestly the exact watch list wasn't a big deal. Trek of that generation was mostly written to be episodic, with background knowledge helpful for adding nuance but with the most important exposition slipped (or sometimes crammed...) into each individual script. Occasionally an episode will be a 2-parter and you can't possibly skip the first part, occasionally an episode will be a "sequel" to a story like Moriarty or Picard's Flute (but of course in those cases you wouldn't want to skip the first part), but in general each episode stands alone well.
If you want to challenge yourself with some tricky choices, then you move on to Babylon 5. Also kind of a slow start in season 1, but in its case even the slower episodes more often than not packed in some characterization or backstory or foreshadowing or outright arcplot development that makes the later episodes much more enjoyable. We skipped the pilot and maybe half of the first season there, because I didn't want to waste too much of my kids' time if they decided they still didn't like the good parts of the show, and in hindsight (they all liked it) we skipped too much.
To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with.
Could I talk you into the 1950s and late 1940s? That was mostly a previous generation of scientists, but 8 is a great age for most of the Heinlein juveniles.
roystgnr
8d ago
It might be worth looking for exams your kids can sit, if they're learning more regardless, to get some recognition for it. My son studied a bunch of math on his own during Covid, but then was bored silly when all his school would offer him was at his grade level. Fortunately the local University has a Credit-By-Exam process for high school subjects, and a decent Algebra I score was enough to get him jumped to Geometry the next year.
roystgnr
13d ago
Gaines county, Texas
A short while ago, someone made a comment which mentioned that technology and wealth seem to be utterly failing at making us happier, and (IIRC rhetorically) asked who could have foreseen that. I was starting to write up my non-rhetorical response, about how the Mennonite wariness of technology is in part specifically due to their having foreseen the risks of being trapped into dependence on some technologies (and the wealth they bring) which end up decreasing our interdependence on our fellow human beings, which weakens the bonds of community we form, which are far more important to human happiness than material wealth.
And then while doing a few searches to get quotes, I ran across the deaths of Kayley Fehr (a 6 year old Mennonite girl) and Daisy Hildebrand (an 8 year old Mennonite girl).
There's still a lot to be said about the distinction between religious laws (Mennonite communities do not prohibit vaccine use!) and religious culture (Mennonites in West Texas only have something like an 80% measles vaccination rate, well under what's believed to be needed for "herd immunity"), or about the pain of balancing Type I vs Type II errors, but I can't bring myself to write it.
roystgnr
14d ago
Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
It was a decade and a half before Nazi Germany, but the Ruhr Uprising set up a left-wing paramilitary that drove the right-wing paramilitaries of 1920 Germany out of town.
Would Hitler have tolerated this?
The fact that the answer was "no", whereas the Weimar Republic's answer was "well, maybe for a few weeks, tops", was part of the background that let Hitler seize power. Psychologically, fascism is basically what you get when the human sense of disgust goes out of control, and if you want people's disgust reactions to go overboard then the most powerful scenario is a combination of enemies that disgust them and "friends" who normalize going overboard in reaction.
Minnesota is no Ruhr Uprising - the death count is still around "two", not "a thousand" - but it's also not a situation that would have seemed incongruous in Wiemar Germany. It's vastly less significant in scope, but it's not in a different category.
Perhaps what is most different is the bulk of public reaction? The Ruhr Uprising spooked the median German more than its suppression did, and opposition vs support for that suppression was divisive even among leftist factions there. Opposition to current ICE practices, on the other hand, has expanded well past the median American and is still climbing. Some opposition to ICE is still an expression of unthinking disgust, and in particular the sort of anti-border-control protestors who are "reinventing borders from first principles" with Minnesota checkpoints are about as anti-fascist as the "Anti-fascist Protection Rampart" was, but groups becoming fascist while decrying fascism may come out ... weirder ... than historical groups who went fascist deliberately.
roystgnr
15d ago
Can said dinergoths deflect flying furniture one-handed? (famous chair deflection about 1:30 in)
But I actually have no idea whether this 2022 event remains unbeaten because Waffle House violence is actually rare, or just because getting such awesome chair-fu caught on video is rare. Back in my "go to the diner at 1am" days the diner was either a Denny's or a local chain with only a couple franchisees.
roystgnr
15d ago
As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit.
As someone from the US I've got to second this request. I've got 6 24-hour diners from 3 different franchises within a 15 minute drive of my house! Maybe @MollieTheMare is right that it's just a Southern thing now? 3 of those diners are Waffle House.
Maybe the "relatively expensive" qualifier is what's important here? Or maybe not. A quick check says that a big (eggs, bacon, toast, waffle, hashbrowns, but water to drink) breakfast at the closest spot to me would top $15 after tax and tip, and a full but cheap lunch or dinner (I'm assuming you don't get a T-Bone or something) is in the same range. That makes me wince as an old person whose mind recoils at accumulated inflation, but it's still only an hour's wage as a new fast food hire here. It looks like the situation is about the same for the "working poor" as it was a generation ago. This Denny's menu from 2003 shows comparable meals that would be around $7.50 with tax and tip, at a time when fast-food cooks were earning $7.27 per hour.
Or maybe the change was much earlier? My "young person in debt (not poor, just not working during college semesters) going to 24 hour diners" days were a few years before and after 2000, and I didn't notice any skyrocketing prices during that period, but maybe things were much cheaper in the 80s or 50s or something.
roystgnr
16d ago
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.
roystgnr
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
18d 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
19d ago
Formatting fix:
Q: Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents?
A: They'd hand over emails given a warrant.
roystgnr
21d 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
21d 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.)
I think the key words here are "aimed" and "government agency". Amazon famously didn't make its first annual profit for nearly a decade, but investors were still expecting profit eventually, estimating the likelihood of net profit in the long run, and wouldn't have funded it indefinitely if that expectation ended. A government agency has no such aims and no such limitations, whether or not it does its own production, but at least if it has to procure from among competing third parties there's someone who has an incentive to keep costs down.
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