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blooblyblobl

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blooblyblobl


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, obviously don't just take my word for it, but:


Photolithography is the use of high-power light, extremely detailed optical masks and precise lenses, and photoresistive chemicals that solidify and become more or less soluble in certain solvents upon exposure to light, to create detailed patterns on top of a substrate material that can block or expose certain portions of the substrate for the chemical modification required to form transistors and other structures necessary to create advanced semiconductors. It's among the most challenging feats of interdisciplinary engineering ever attempted by mankind, requiring continuous novel advances in computational optics, plasma physics, material science, chemistry, precision mechanical fabrication, and more. Without these continuous advances, modern semiconductors devices would struggle to improve without forcing significant complications on their users (much higher power dissipation, lower lifetimes, less reliability, significant cost increases).


The roadmap for photolithographic advances extends for at least 15 years, beyond which there are a LOT of open questions. But depending on the pace of progress, it's possible that 15 years of roadmap will actually last closer to 30; the last major milestone technological advance in photolithography, extreme-ultraviolet light sources, went from "impossible" to "merely unbelievably difficult" around '91, formed a joint research effort between big semiconductor vendors and lithography vendors in '96, collapsed to a single lithography vendors in '01, showed off a prototype that was around 4500x slower than modern machines in '04, and delivered an actual, usable product in '18. No one else has achieved any success with the technology in the ~33 years it's been considered feasible. There's efforts in China to generate the technology within the Chinese supply chain (they are currently sanctioned and cannot access ASML tech); this is a sophisticated guess on my part, but I'm not seeing anything that suggests anyone in China will have a usable EUV machine for at least a decade, because they currently have nothing comparable to even the '04 prototype, and they are still struggling to develop more than single-digit numbers of domestic machines comparable to the last generational milestone.


There are a handful of other lab techniques that have been suggested over the years, like electron beam lithography (etch patterns using highly precise electron beams - accurate, but too slow for realistic use) or nanoimprint lithography (stamp thermoplastic photoresist polymer and bake to harden - fast, cheap, but the stamp can wear and it takes a ludicrously long time to build a new one, and there's very little industry know-how with this tech). They are cool technology, but are unlikely to replace photolithography any time soon, because all major manufacturers have spent decades learning lessons about how to implement photolithography at scale, and no comparable effort has been applied to alternatives.


There's two key photolithographic milestone technologies in the last several decades: deep ultraviolet (DUV) and extreme ultraviolet (EUV), referring to the light source used for the lithography process. DUV machines largely use ArF 193nm ultraviolet excimer lasers, which are a fairly well-understood technology that have now been around for >40 years. The mirrors and optics used with EUV are relatively robust, requiring replacement only occasionally, and usually not due to the light source used. The power efficiency is not amazing (40kW in for maybe 150W out), but there's very little optical loss. The angle of incidence is pretty much dead-on to the wafer. The optical masks are somewhat tricky to produce at smaller feature sizes, since 193nm light is large compared to the desired feature sizes on the wafer; however, you can do some neat math (inverse Fourier transform or something similar, it's been a while) and create some kinda demented shapes that diffract to a much narrower and highly linear geometry. You can also immerse the optics in transparent fluid to further increase the numerical aperture, and this turns out to be somehow less complex than it sounds. Finally, it is possible to realign the wafer precisely with a different mask set for double-patterning, when a single optical mask would be insufficient for the required feature density; this has some negative effect on overall yields, since misalignments can happen, and extra steps are involved which creates opportunities for nanometer-scale dust particles to accumulate on and ruin certain devices. But it's doable, and it's not so insanely complex. SMIC (Chinese semiconductor vendor) in fact has managed quad-patterning to reach comparable feature sizes to 2021 state-of-the-art, though the yields are low and the costs are high (i.e. the technique does not have a competitive long-term outlook).


EUV machines, by contrast, are basically fucking magic: a droplet of molten tin is excited into an ionized plasma by a laser, and some small fraction of the ionization energy is released as 13.5nm photons that must be collected, aligned, and redirected toward the mirrors and optics. The ionization chamber and the collector are regularly replaced to retain some semblance of efficiency, on account of residual ionized tin degrading the surfaces within. The mirrors and optics are to some extent not entirely reflective or transparent as needed, and some of the photons emitted by the process are absorbed, once again reducing the overall efficiency. By the time light arrives at the wafer, only about 2% of the original light remains, and the overall energy efficiency of this process is abysmal. The wafer itself is actually the final mirror in the process, requiring the angle of incidence to be about 6°, which makes it impossible to keep the entire wafer in focus simultaneously, polarizes the light unevenly, and creates shadows in certain directions that distort features. If you were to make horizontal and vertical lines of the same size on the mask, they would produce different size lines on the wafer. Parallel lines on the mask end up asymmetric. I'd be here all day discussing how many more headaches are created by the use of EUV; suffice it to say, we go from maybe hundreds of things going mostly right in DUV to thousands of things going exactly right in EUV; and unlike DUV, the energies involved in EUV tend to be high enough that things can fail catastrophically. A few years back, a friend of mine at Intel described the apparently-regular cases of pellicles (basically transparent organic membranes for lenses to keep them clean) spontaneously combusting under prolonged EUV exposure for (at the time) unknown reasons, which would obviously cause massive production stops; I'm told this has since been resolved, but it's a representative example of the hundreds of different things going wrong several years after the technology has been rolled out. Several individual system elements of an EUV machine are the equivalent of nation-state scientific undertakings, each. TSMC, Intel, Samsung need dozens of these machines, each. They cost about $200M apiece, sticker price, with many millions more per month in operating costs, replacement components, and mostly-unscheduled maintenance. The next generation is set to cost about double that, on the assumption that it will reduce the overall process complexity by at least an equivalent amount (I have my doubts). It is miraculous that these systems work at all, and they're not getting cheaper.


If you're interested in learning more, there's a few high-quality resources out there for non-fab nerds, particularly the Asianometry YouTube channel, but also much of the free half of semianalysis.


From an investment standpoint... Honestly, I dunno. I think you might have the right idea. There's so much to know about in this field (it's the pinnacle of human engineering, after all), and with the geopolitical wedge being driven between China and the rest of the world, a host of heretofore unseen competitor technologies getting increasing focus against a backdrop of increasing costs, and the supposedly looming AI revolution just around the corner, it's tough to say where the tech will be in ten years. My instinct is that, when a gold rush is happening, it's good to sell shovels; AI spending across hyperscalars has already eclipsed inflation-adjusted Manhattan Project spend, and if it's actually going where everyone says it's going, gold rush will be a quaint descriptor for the effect of exponentially increasing artificial labor. So I'm personally invested. But I could imagine a stealthy Chinese competitor carving a path to success for themselves within a few years, using a very different approach to the light source, that undercuts and outperforms ASML...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


a putative scifi shotgun turret against low-flying drones in such an environment could perhaps cover a 0.01km² area.




Your estimate of engagement area is off by three orders of magnitude. Existing systems are designed to bring down drones from several kilometers away. This is actually really easy to do, and gets easier the closer you get.


Collateral damage is a problem, so we usually deploy these kind of systems in remote military installations with established secure perimeters. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where drones could be deployed close enough to these installations that they couldn't be intercepted in time. But again, it's not really feasible to place a secure perimeter around every substation, dock, or bridge in the country, and there are actual collateral damage risks for doing so even in limited capacity. Hence the fun EW toys.




Russia has widely been considered superior to the US in EW




Then they got into a war where EW matters, and the truth became more complex. There are effective EW systems on both sides of the conflict, which can and do suppress drone activity, this is not some hypothetical annoyance when effectively deployed. The challenges are not the capabilities of the technology, but the logistics of supplying advanced technologies to the combatants, particularly across several hundred km of active conflict zone. Ukraine has effectively no domestic EW manufacturing capability, and its benefactors provide extremely limited quantities of systems, in many cases for prototyping assessments before high-volume manufacturing can take place. Russia is so systemically corrupt that they can assemble heaps of money for EW manufacturing, pocket 90% of it, and distribute chinesium equivalents that basically don't work instead.


Compare with growing domestic stockpiles of anti-drone EW equipment near military bases, and active deployments around high-value political targets. These have a different logistics problem - how to deploy them effectively and immediately against a threat - but if it ever came down to street-level warfare with a threat of prolonged drone attacks, a response does exist.




China could easily afford paralyzing a city




I suspect they could not afford the war it would start... Even if they could, they nevertheless choose not to.




reported to come in from the sea, too




Ukraine's drone boat campaign took Russia quite by surprise, and the cost-to-hazard ratios has been quite impressive. But there's a lot more going on here:


    

  • Ukrainian benefactors are providing satellite capabilities to track Russian ships and communicate with drone boats
    • 

  • Prototypes enjoyed significant software assistance from western companies
    • 

  • Russian navy vessels make the state of US navy vessels seem palatable by comparison - maintenance and armaments are very likely heavily degraded across the entire fleet to begin with
    • 

  • Drone boats are only one part of a multi-prong effort against the Black Sea fleet, which also includes missile strikes, much larger aerial drones, and sabotage
    • 



In principle, an autonomous submarine drone carrier unloading a swarm on Manhattan sounds like it could work, evading existing oceanic tracking systems and putting a swarm near critical infrastructure with minimal risk of interception. I don't think "autonomous stealth submarine drone carrier" is something straightforward to develop and deploy - this takes a lot of research and resources to get right. Some smaller-scale swarms using very small surface vessels also seem possible, but low-yield.




this is a glaring limitation to its ability to project power




The reality is: if any significant number of drones are in the air and angling to explode on your infrastructure, and your country is not a postage stamp investing heavily in modern missile defense systems to repel an endless stream of homemade rockets from the doghouse next door, you and whoever is attacking you are already in deep shit. The time to prevent drone attacks is before the first drone ever takes flight. If your argument is that preemptive deterrence doesn't sell expensive drone defense systems, I agree.


But on account of all the collateral damage concerns outlined above, deploying sockpuppet drone warfare against your own civilian population is a terrible idea that invites chaos. It's not impossible that encouraging spending on expensive drone defense systems could invite such reckless behavior, so I'm not going to dismiss the possibility outright... But it's not in my top three explanations, which currently look like:


    

  1. It's actually just planes or stars or satellites or... Etc
    2. 

  2. It's actually civilian drones, and someone did something they shouldn't have for boring reasons
    3. 

  3. 1 or 2 but at least one was some kind of surveillance op on behalf of a foreign military/intelligence apparatus
    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Rheinmettal, Thales, BAE all have such systems in production today; other players are in development. Ukraine doesn't have them because they're not 50 years old and rotting in a warehouse; Russia doesn't have them because they went all in on EW and, in typical Russian fashion, produced something claimed to be effective and dangerous on paper, maybe even showed off some fancy prototypes, but then collapsed into graft and half-measures under actual wartime pressures.


As noted, any real first world country can solve this problem today.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's an absolutely absurd amount of money being thrown at drone warfare in general in the US - eleven figures and growing by my estimate. But the thing is, that's almost entirely about building up attack capabilities - because drone warfare is the culmination of like five different disciplines worth of buzzword bingo! AI, machine learning, machine vision, autonomous weapons, 3d-printing, batteries, advanced semiconductors, supply chain challenges, mesh networks, swarms and coordinated behaviors, cost-to-hazard ratios...


Drone defense is surprisingly straightforward, provided you're a real first world country. There's a lot of fancy electronic warfare toys that can trivially defeat anything off-the-shelf, and anything more robust to EW (whether a cheap firmware reflash or a custom high-autonomy platform) is still vulnerable to a half-decent shotgun. In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards. Protecting high-value locations is basically a solved problem - I'm sure there's still some ongoing grifts to solve it even more expensively better, but for any location worth protecting, the means exist today.


Of course, cheap by military standards is still ludicrously expensive by infrastructure standards, and there's a few orders of magnitude more critical infrastructure targets than military targets, so there's not really a scalable solution to this problem that involves grounding or destroying drones just before they strike infrastructure targets. The actual scalable solution is to license and regulate drone ownership, and use early warning systems built on top of existing surveillance capitalism to track and crack down on anyone whose purchasing habits start to look like the incredibly obvious signs of building a drone fleet, not to mention the equally obvious signs of building a ton of explosives to attach to those drones. Anyone with the capability to overcome regulation and surveillance and still pose a credible threat (cartels, China, Russia, maybe Iran) faces the risk of starting a war with their actions - and if this risk isn't enough deterrence, we've got bigger problems.


It is in principle possible for some jihadi group to smuggle enough drones, explosives, and operators into the US to do 9/11 Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, but it would take an uncharacteristically spectacular degree of coordination, training, and resources. I don't think anyone is sockpuppeting drone terror in response to a perceived threat of jihadi drone terror.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a fertility crisis, not a parenting crisis. Can it really be called selling out your children if you never have any?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I generally agree. Reform is a far better option than repeal. But the Jones Act is a meme and virtually all discussion of it is unproductive signaling. There's about a hundred other things that are equally or even more important for renewed US maritime self-sufficiency, but which are one or more of the following:


    

  • Massively capital-intensive and a gigantic gamble on a long-term investment that very likely will never pay off (mega scale dredging projects along natural US waterways; construction, maintenance, and repair facilities for expanded fleets)
    • 

  • Contingent on the existence of domestic industries that have been hollowed out and off-shored (what use is dredging waterways if no one uses them; are there enough US steel producers, assembly firms servicing shipbuilding needs, and domestic manufacturing volumes to make large-scale interior shipping profitable)
    • 

  • Third-rail line items for the affected constituents, against which running a political platform is electoral suicide (port automation in particular is DOA; see also the Dockworkers Union mafia boss video)
    • 



There's also a few extremely critical differences in the manufacturing sectors you highlighted where the US is competitive:


Rockets: There was a massive, underserved market that wanted to put payloads in space, but which could only do so at incredible expense, with extremely limited launch frequency. SpaceX commoditized and accelerated payload delivery, granting them near-total monopoly on world demand for space launches, before the competition even got out prototypes. They give high-status nerd jobs to an extremely overproduced market of estranged aerospace engineers, and use their status to pick top talent away from low-pay positions in government that are regularly threatened by cyclical party politics. Most of their flights are uncrewed, and the crewed flights carry literal astronauts - that talent pipeline isn't running dry any time soon, particularly when global demand for astronauts is countable on one hand (provided you count in binary on your hands... which is a normal thing that other people definitely do). The military isn't making demands that SpaceX build their rocket entirely out of US unobtanium, because they tried that with NASA and it went well enough to result in SpaceX existing.


Contrast with shipbuilding: the market has many competitors with decades of experience, most of the market has no comparable binding restrictions on material or labor sourcing, and no one enters the industry for nerd street cred. It's now a massive uphill battle just to gain a foothold in the market, and anyone trying has to face pressures that just don't exist for SpaceX.


Fighter Jets: The US spent decades pouring money and talent into the production of fighter jets and selling them to allied nations, justifying the expense by pointing at the hostile foreign superpower doing the same; then the hostile foreign superpower collapsed. It has taken decades for any credible competition to re-emerge in the market, and arguably we're still not there. Notably, fighter jets are also unambiguously weapons, in fact high-tech weapons, with all purchasers being militaries trying to gain substantial competitive advantages over adversaries - it's not a race to the bottom on cost. Even if the materials and technologies are highly exotic, the cost is currently bearable, the volumes of exotic materials required are relatively small, and the procurement process is at least partly designed around this requirement.


Contrast with shipbuilding: we don't sell aircraft carriers, we might sell a handful of submarines for the first time ever to Australia in a decade as an explicit attempt to block Chinese naval dominance in the Pacific, and we don't even have enough capacity to build or maintain our existing fleet well. Recent military shipbuilding efforts have been somewhere between a total mess and an absolute disaster, with projects running over-budget, over-schedule, and suffering from early cancelation or non-functional key armaments. We just flat out aren't competitive on non-military vessels.


Cars: This one's easy - a big chunk of the manufacturing is done outside of the US. When competitors got better at cars, we forced them to manufacture those cars in the US or face steep import tariffs. Cars are multiple orders of magnitude less expensive than ships, creating economies of scale. They are commodities for domestic transport, and are indispensable for a substantial fraction of the country.


Contrast with shipbuilding: if the US demanded that all ships docking in a US port had to be made in the US or face steep tariffs, I predict exactly zero foreign shipbuilders would set up shop in the US. There's no economy of scale without volume, and there's just not enough US ship volume to justify that expense compared to the global volume of shipping. The tariffs would just be passed on to consumers, either directly at ports or indirectly overland through Canada and Mexico.


A closer analogy might be nuclear power plants. We used to build lots of those, but the one-way ratchet on the regulatory framework imposed some frankly ludicrous requirements on new and existing projects, making it almost entirely unprofitable to bother in the present time (even after a majority of the national security concerns have evaporated). We subsequently lost all industry knowledge and experience, except for a tiny military niche. A handful of startups have concluded that the only way forward for the technology is to deliberately eschew the major advantage of nuclear power - scale - because it is no longer economically possible to scale. And now a competitor superpower is credibly focusing national effort on generating their own nuclear power industry.


I'm reasonably confident that the legislative gridlock and ephemeral executive alignment of the US has rendered us structurally incapable of ever solving this problem again - by the time we figure out how to set a national agenda that is durable to half-decade pendular political cheap shots, we will have been thoroughly eclipsed by China, and on the way to our own steady decline and stagnation much like most of Europe. My best-case reform package for the Jones Act is too heavily dependent on so many other reforms and re-industrialization efforts that will simply never be.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Bob McGee was the liaison




I assume this was supposed to be David McGee.


I'm missing a connection here. How are McGee or Kent connected to Greenberg? How did they become aware of a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz that they could use as leverage? Is the implication that Greenberg was running a honeypot on behalf of the DoJ, and McGee was aware of it from his previous job? Did McGee even work in a position where he would be aware of a secret investigation?


How would the FBI leak an investigation being conducted by the DoJ? Isn't it more likely that someone in the DoJ found out about what the FBI was about to do with Don Gaetz (whether through official or back channels), and the DoJ leaked it instead to prevent the FBI and Gaetz from getting a wire recording of their attempted blackmail?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can get behind some wall spaghetti testing


Double tilde: 30% vs. 90%


Triple tilde:30% vs. 90%


High-spatial efficiency double tilde: ≈30% vs. ≈90%


EDIT: this is a known issue, see https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/736


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Any minute now, the Democrats will bend the knee to Donald Trump, their sworn enemy, tripping over themselves to recant each of their decade-long records of anti-Trump rhetoric, so they can tell him he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The likes of Oprah and George Clooney and Obama can surely overcome these unfavorable initial conditions to convince The Rockstar Formerly Known As Orange Bad Man that the people definitely don't care about that whole tidal wave of illegal immigrants thing that happened for the last few years. Taylor Swift will dramatically un-endorse Kamala Harris, acknowledge that he kinda had a fair point with the childless cat lady thing, and lay the groundwork for some progressive Supreme Court justice appointments. I bet Kathy Griffin will convince him that proudly holding his severed head on a magazine cover was actually a sign of respect.


Fortunately, JD Vance appears to have first dibs on this strategy, and seems more than willing to swallow his pride.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The swing state polls seem accurate to within the claimed 2-3 percent. From an electoral college perspective, the accuracy of FL or NJ is less crucial when they're assumed to be a solid lock for one party. It does make for surprising upsets in some places occasionally.


I'm significantly more concerned about the monodirectional bias of the error.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm looking through the second link... The 1500 number isn't mentioned anywhere (they say "thousands") and there's nothing in the article that suggests registrations or requests for mail-in ballots are in any way fraudulent (besides the high volume from a single delivery).


Am I missing something? Did the article change to omit or modify this information between when you posted and when I read it? Are you thinking of some other story?


Also, MSN is cancerous, here's a slightly less gnarly link with the same article from fox43 (your first article source).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Note to future confused readers - this reply appears to be an estranged response to this post.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The point of the argument in the footnote is to show that, once the "genetic engineering" boo lights are removed, everyone's revealed preferences favor the same outcome as the world in which we select embryos for higher intelligence, harmful comorbidities included (real or imagined). If people somehow think that rolling the dice with nature is less likely than embryo selection to unintentionally couple higher intelligence with undesirable traits, to the extent that it's preferable to accept "natural" outcomes orders of magnitude worse than their preferred outcome to mitigate the risks unique to embryo selection, they either have a dismally wrong understanding of embryo selection (which, reminder, is just rolling the dice a bunch and picking the best-looking result) or they're not reasoning consistently.


At its core, objecting to the reasoning of the geneticist with a shrug and an "I dunno man, sounds risky" isn't actually an argument about the risks (surely the geneticist has deeply considered them, and our objector is already on-record as lacking the qualifications to do so!) - it's an expression of distrust.


I suspect people's primary objection, regardless of whether they clearly understand and express it as such, has nothing to do with the long-term risk of embryo selection at a genetic level, and is instead based on the same obvious ethical and political concern for any eugenics proposal - that it will be applied unfairly by some groups to gain power over others. This includes geneticists and their employers miscalculating, misrepresenting, or lying about risks, evading liability for accidental harms or unsatisfactory outcomes, and charging enormous sums of money for extremely modest benefits; and rich parents granting their children an effortless comparative advantage over the majority of children whose parents don't (or can't) pony up to rig the game for themselves.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a speculative Twitter thread suggesting Polymarket is being distorted by a single huge better: https://x.com/Domahhhh/status/1846597997507092901


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for October 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you're just deploying to Windows machines, it's genuinely not hard to use newer .NET versions to produce that <10MB GUI binaries most of the time:


    

  • If you know your deployment runtime (for .NET Desktop, win-x86, win-x64, or win-arm64), in modern versions of .NET you can just dotnet publish -r <runtime> and it skips the default runtime bloat. Of course, you now have to deploy the right binary to your user, but this isn't hard in 2024 - Windows on ARM is basically a fantasy, W11 doesn't even have an x86 version any more, and W10 is going out of support next year (whether you like it or not - RIP).
    • 

  • You don't have to bundle the runtime with your application. For the minor annoyance of adding some extra code to your installer bundle to download and execute the runtime installer when the runtime is absent, you can convincingly gaslight your users into thinking your application is just the tiny binary, and the runtime library is just some weird Windows thing that came along for the ride. And this is basically what you had to do with Visual C++ Runtimes, so it's not like the users haven't been doing this for years...
    • 



I guess if you're optimizing for binary size, you're never gonna beat Microsoft bundling the .NET Framework binaries directly into every Windows distribution for you. But if you can, come join us in the future! I uplifted a .NET Framework 4.5 application to .NET 8.0 Desktop with about 10 lines of inconsequential code changes and some project file hackery, then attached new pieces to the project using abstract static interfaces and generic math only available in .NET 7 or greater, and added a few lines of code to a bundled installer to download the runtime from Microsoft. It all just works, it's about 20% faster on the critical path, my binary size went from 1MB to about 1.5MB, and it took me a day instead of a month to add the new feature I needed. It's great.


I won't claim there's no reason to use .NET Framework any more (particularly if you committed crimes against humanity with AppDomains), but the happy path for most new GUI development in C# targeting Windows should point you squarely at .NET Desktop on the most modern version of .NET LTS (the even-numbered ones). It's infinitely more tolerable than the other garbage desktop front-end frameworks excreted and subsequently rug-pulled a year or two later by Microsoft in the last few years (UWP, MAUI, WinUI x where {x ∈ N, x < ∞}), it's not a website and some WASM in a trenchcoat (Blazor, ElectronNET), and you still get all the WPF goodness (and WinForms, if you really want it).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for October 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Incidentally, you can use Electron.NET with .NET Core and get the "best" of both worlds. The .NET portion is tiny, but the electron portion is basically guaranteed to be over 100MB, full of front-end razor template/css hell, oodles of extra javascript to do all the things that aren't natively supported correctly, squeeze your entire UI update logic through a SignalR straw, and an infinite menagerie of implementation bugs and issues. But it'll run on just about anything, including a browser. And the ASP.NET side is pleasant to work with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For now...


CWD cases have rapidly expanded from a handful of states a few years ago to more than half of the US and most of Canada. Overpopulation, indirect contact transmission in deer, and durable environmental contamination are going to mix in a nasty way for the next few decades. Several states already have incidence rates in double digit percentages of the statewide deer populations.


And there's moderately compelling evidence of venison-to-human transmission.


Whether or not the venison-eating population is fine today, I personally don't like the odds, and it doesn't look better in 10 or 20 years. Even if transmissibility between deer and humans is poor, nobody knows for sure. I don't want to take the risk with a guaranteed-fatal deadly disease affecting single- or double-digit percentages of the North American deer population, that can't be reliably detected without a lab examination, for which the trigger is a protein that is stable below 1000°F and is unaffected by stomach acid.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Tangential rebuttal to the idea that we should be eating the local wildlife: I'd like to not get prion diseases. This is admittedly more specific to deer, and I can get behind an "eat more rabbits from your backyard" proposal. But the prevalence of CWD, the difficulty of killing and butchering a deer without damaging and blood-mixing any part of the nervous system, and the fact that the harmful protein remains a stable environmental contaminant in the soil for years, compels me toward lower-risk culling of deer.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The UAW is still going strong... Clearly someone has a use for low-skill, high priced, lazy, dishonest labor. Just maybe not the people required to hire them.


In any case, I think "lack of English language comprehension" is the real nail in the coffin. We can get away with Spanish since it's basically the unofficial second language of the USA, but I don't see too many government forms translated into Creole.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The fiber I mentioned has been replaced with newer, higher-bandwidth stuff a couple times in the last 40 years. The key value proposition wasn't the fiber itself - it was laying a channel with enough access ports that anyone could run whatever they want through the run for the next hundred years. In this case, the power company paid for the fiber itself, then businesses paid for updates and replacements decades later, and it cost a fraction of what it would have to tear up all the streets and put in new channels everywhere. Like @FiveHourMarathon mentioned in the sibling post, leaving room for expansion and future updates is smart.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Greenfielding new commercial construction? Absolutely, put it in now. Back in the 80s, a family member's residential construction business put in a fiber network for the power company in a front range city, and the one-time installation cost has paid for itself about a thousand times over, even allowing for updated runs and municipal gigabit fiber to the home in that neighborhood. Smart infrastructure investment is usually a good deal, even if it's pricey up front.


Just don't make me re-wire my entire panel box for solar/battery/EV deployment, when I have none of those things, just to finish my damn basement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At a county level, non-mandatory code compliance can once again become mandatory. My father runs (well, ran) a business remodeling homes in and around a city where such adjacency to reality is the default disposition, and the cost and time difference between projects in this county and projects in the neighboring farmland county would make your head spin. Pulling permits for just about anything is a nightmare, since the city takes this as an opportunity to force homeowners to update their properties for modern code compliance. We've had deck jobs where the city-mandated updates to insulation, electrical, etc ended up costing more than the damn deck.


The city council loves bragging about how they have some of the strictest and most complex building codes in the nation, because in their minds, it means they're doing the most in the fight against climate dragons. It somehow goes unmentioned that a lot of these initiatives are counterproductive or dangerous (mandated over-building electrical infrastructure for any job that touches an electrical installation encourages people to get creative with their own wiring jobs). A lot of the other mandates are clearly back-scratching graft for a captured industry - the insulation requirements are so ridiculously overprovisioned that in many cases the only way to meet the county requirements is with special sealant foam along every wall joist, which costs like $3/ft and is sold by one company in the state. Note that this can also be an add-on requirement by the county for anything that opens an exterior wall for any reason (including maintenance and repair). This all has exactly the expected effect on willingness to perform maintenance by local landlords, and large swaths of the city have properties full of dozens of trivial issues that get swept under the rug to avoid incurring massive update costs unrelated to basic maintenance. And of course, the dilapidated ghetto-houses in this city are worth double or triple the value of the neighboring county's much-nicer modern homes, contributing another unironic brag by the city council.


During the pandemic, out of an "abundance of caution" the city council decided to shut down the building and planning department - offices closed, phones off, no one responded to emails - and moved all the permitting forms online. The online form was totally broken, of course, and auto-rejected all applications. For 18 months, you simply could not pull a permit in the county. Homeowners were understandably upset with this state of affairs, and eventually ignored the permits and moved ahead with their projects. As long as we follow code, and get engineering approval for anything that needs it, the only thing missing is the formality of a city stamp on your piece of paper, and they're not supposed to arbitrarily reject you if you're doing everything right, so... Of course, the instant the city comes back from their 18-month paid sabbatical, they immediately start suing every homeowner who did unpermitted work, starting, of course, with the people who live in viewing distance of the city council members! The city council got a reality check at the state court level, but not before wasting millions of dollars attempting to punish their own citizens for a problem they created.


Most of the city council secured re-election.


My dad has since left the state.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I knew before I previewed the link that this would be the ciechanowski animation, and I'm here to express my extreme delight with everything on that site. The GPS animations are also stand-out spectacular. One of the few people on the internet doing interesting things with the new WASM toys.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe! I like to forget which is which. It makes for some funny threads.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I met a call for indiscriminate mass murder with a self-regulating incentive system that simultaneously brings out the best in people, offers a second chance to those truly down on their luck, and condones the death of the undeserving - I'd hardly call that "unbounded sympathy".


On a serious note, I totally agree that there has to be a limit to society's generosity for recalcitrant insanity and unrepentant antisocial behaviors. I also think that, as far as solutions, "kill them and everyone that roughly matches that description" is a lazy edgelord hot take; the ridiculous cost of food and shelter lately is probably responsible for a considerable fraction of the "roughly matches that description" class; and there's an important distinction between criminal and personal nuisances.