wlxd
17hr ago
I actually looked into this the other day. As it happens, Tubman was posthumously promoted to one star general last month, and her participation in that raid is given as part of the justification. Wikipedia says she lead it, linking to the website of the National Mall eyesore as a source. It says:
On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman, under the command of Union Colonel James Montgomery, became the first woman to lead a major military operation in the United States when she and 150 African American Union soldiers rescued more than 700 slaves in the Combahee Ferry Raid during the Civil War.
As its source, it links to History channel website:
Working in a series of camps in Union-held portions of South Carolina, Tubman quickly learned the lay of the land and offered her services to the army as a spy, leading a group of scouts who mapped out much of the region. Tubman’s reconnaissance work laid the foundation for one of the more daring raids of the Civil War, when she personally accompanied Union soldiers in their nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June 1863
So her leadership in that raid has already turned into just accompanying soldiers.
I looked at other sources talking about her promotion, like NPR and Smithsonian, both obviously very sympathetic to Tubman. They are much more careful about describing her role. NPR says she “helped guide” soldiers, which makes sense if you understand her role as a spy and a scout. Smithsonian says she “oversaw military operation”, which is close to claiming her to be leading it, but then it clarifies that she “worked with” Colonel Montgomery on it, and anyone with experience in corporate performance reviews knows that “worked with” means “been there but hasn’t actually contributed much”.
So, it seems like the Wikipedia and NMAAHC are basically full of shit when they say she led the raid, but somehow the belief that she did is widespread, apparently thanks to Wikipedia. Additionally, promoting her to Brigadier General for her military role is extremely jarring. While I think it would definitely be reasonable to posthumously grant her a military rank for her spying and scouting role, a 1 star general rank is much too high, and frankly insulting to other Civil War participants, like eg Colonel James Montgomery, who actually led the raid.
Either way, in my mind, Tubman joins the long list of diversity heroes whose actual achievements have been wildly overstated, like Ada Lovelace, or Margaret Hamilton.
wlxd
19hr ago
How does this have any bearing on the question of human consciousness? As far as I can tell, the consciousness qualia are still outside our epistemic reach. We can make models that will talk to us about its qualia more convincingly than any human could, but it won’t get me any closer to believing that the model is as conscious as I am.
wlxd
4d ago
You’re right that grid scale storage is not very economical, but I was thinking a bit about this: doesn’t Norway have good geography for large scale hydro storage? Basically, dam up the fjords, and pump them high with water.
wlxd
5d ago
It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.
wlxd
6d ago
Two years in, she’s still unmarried, childless, and does not even have a partner. (I checked out of curiosity after browsing my old comments and finding this one with explicit prediction).
wlxd
14d ago
Romania, like most of of the world, does voting by paper ballots only. I don’t see how hacking any “election systems” would be material for the election results that would warrant wholesale cancellation.
wlxd
15d ago
Private tier 1s and state schools is enough to provide education. Rest is mostly credential signaling.
wlxd
16d ago
no matter how poorly they do, the college gets paid
Yes, and that’s why making them dischargeable doesn’t make sense. The schools are paid up front. The loan payments are made to Federal Government. If you allow the loans to be discharged, the schools don’t lose a penny, and it’s the taxpayer who bears the cost.
wlxd
16d ago
Collapse the entire education Ponzi by making student loans forgivable in bankruptcy.
That’s an extremely counterproductive idea as stated if the goal is to attack schooling industry. It would be a huge boon to schooling industry if these were dischargeable. Instead, what you need to do is to stop the federal government providing the loans.
wlxd
17d ago
For small ones, easiest way is to walk to their back, then quickly place a 7x7 patch of gun turrets with construction drones, and then manually loading them up with red ammo by quickly ctrl-dragging around (you need to have lots of ammo in your inventory). They die before they have a chance to drop one lava bomb.
wlxd
7mo ago
I can second that, and I've heard exactly the same sentiment from my wife (who is very successful in her well-paid career). This was instilled in her by her mother, who worked a fake government job helping applicants fill paperwork for farm subsidies. She was paid peanuts compared to her husband, but she prided herself at being independent (even though everything was actually paid for by her husband).
Women just don't want to be dependent on their husbands, because they heard a lot of horror stories of abusive husbands, and so they want to maintain a put option ready to exercise. Usually, however, they suck at pricing this option, especially the theta.
wlxd
8mo ago
My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance.
This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.
On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.
There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.
wlxd
8mo ago
The point is to make the childless bear the burden. Basically, tax childlessness heavily. It can be structured as heavy child tax credits to make it more politically palatable. It would immediately give childless incentive to join the other group: unaffordability makes for a weak argument when it is childlessness that makes you poor.
wlxd
9mo ago
EVs share a lot of the parts with ICE cars. Structure, doors, windows, seats, trim, suspension, wheels. If you consider hybrid ICEs, which most car manufactures already have a lot of experience with, this grows even more: batteries, electric engines, regen breaking. Moving to EV only does not require starting anew: you just ditch the drivetrain, and replace it with beefed up version of what you already do for hybrids. None of this is easy, but it’s not $51B of assets going down the drain.
wlxd
11mo ago
The AI companies are working very hard on robotics as well. It's not just LLMs.
wlxd
11mo ago
It’s not “what if”, as this is clearly true. The question is, rather, so what?
you want me to not acknowledge at all the hypothesis that their opinion might have something to do with the fact that it disgusts them.
No, feel free to acknowledge it, but so what? People are free to form their opinions based on disgust, and this is not considered to be any sort of demerit to their position, except in a couple of progressive hobby horses. For example, most gun control advocates are disgusted by guns. Should we discount their opinions based on that?
but do you really think that pointing out this pattern of behaviour over time is not acceptable?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make in this paragraph.
wlxd
11mo ago
What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
wlxd
11mo ago
most are targeting DeSantis rather than Trump, which seems like they aren't actually serious about winning.
The only way either of them has a chance is if Trump actually gets removed from the ballot. No amount of attack ads on Trump are going to convince enough voters against him. Thus, attacking Trump is a waste of money, and it makes more sense to preemptively attack DeSantis.
wlxd
1yr ago
What kind of negative effects does the excess of women produce? Excess of men is thought to cause violence and unrest, but this mechanism doesn’t work with women, because they are not nearly as aggressive as men are.
wlxd
1yr ago
Think back to the microcomputer revolution of the 80s, with IBM PCs, Commodores, Amigas, and Apples coming into mass market. These devices were very extremely basic toys by today’s standards, barely useful for any practical purpose at all. And yet, people who embraced and played with them first, and then remained in the field, have later been part of making an enormous change and creation of value, and have been handsomely compensated in the process.
wlxd
1yr ago
Indeed, STDs are mostly transmitted by drug users and MSM, not the average encounter for the types of people most likely to conform to what the teachers say.
This is true about GRID (also known as AIDS), but not true about other STDs. Syphilis and herpes spread quite quickly among users of heterosexual casual sex. This is because HIV has relatively low likelihood of transmission in penile-vaginal intercourse, in contrast to e.g. syphilis, which spread like wildfire around the world in 16th century in a matter of a couple of decades after the initial contact was made, despite much lower population mixing coefficient at the time.
I was at a demo at work two days ago where a mid level engineer was showing some (very useful to the organization) results on data collection and analysis. At the end, he shows us how to extend it and add our own graphs etc, and he’s like “this python data analysis tooling might look messy and intimidating, but I had zero idea how to use it two days ago myself, and it’s all basically just a result of a long ChatGPT session, just look at this (he shows the transcript here)”.
This effectively means that if ChatGPT saved him half a day of work, then this generates hundreds of dollars for the company in extra productivity.
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