ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
As someone who lives in a city that's really gone to shit because of feral homeless, this kind of strawmanning is a pet peeve of mine. All that it would take to clean up the problems with the homeless is enforcing laws currently on the books. They harass somebody? Prosecute them. They jerk off in a library? Prosecute them. They dump out a garbage can on the sidewalk to look for reimbursable cans? Prosecute them. The problematic homeless are constantly committing crimes, JUST PROSECUTE THOSE CRIMES. That's all it would take!
I can't say that I would object too hard if my city adopted Judge Dredd rules and started executing vagrants, but there's no need for any tyranny at all besides the tyranny of basic law enforcement.
ArmedTooHeavily
28d ago
Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.
As someone who lives in a weed-legal state (Oregon), I disagree with this. A couple reasons:
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The weed market is currently crashing hard. The gold rush is over, dispensaries are failing left and right, and weed farms are hugely overproducing leading to incredibly low prices. In 5 years there will be a LOT less dispensaries, billboards, etc.
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A significant cause of violence at dispensaries is that the bank/credit card companies will not service dispensaries because of federal laws. This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this; even consuming the product makes you less violent. If the federal legal complications get cleaned up (aka we get federal legalization) most of the issues with crime and violence will dissolve. And it has, in fact, reduced violent crime by eliminating the black market trade.
That being said, I agree with Lomez about this more generally and am firmly against legalization of all other drugs (holy shit legalizing meth and opiates has been a disaster).
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
I would love to see a top-level comment laying out the arguments for all of these.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Well, at least he is definitely making it to Valhalla.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Very much agree. What, I wonder, have the two examples of the X-37 done in their cumulative decade in space?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Distillation/mimicry is a lot cheaper than training from scratch, especially with access to logprobs (even only top-k logprobs), though the success metric for the student model is "how well it predicts the teacher model" not "how well it predicts the ground truth distribution".
If this were true (I certainly don't know enough to know if it is), it seems like it would open up massive opportunities for implanting hidden tells and and probably exploits in the models of anyone who aped your model.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Effectively nothing happened on Jan 6th, though. There was a riot and it accomplished nothing.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
So do you agree or disagree with the base level argument "nothing happened"? Note that "They tried to make things happen, but they weren't successful" is not in disagreement with "nothing happened."
"It turns out cheap cotton was the most expensive product in the history of the earth" to quote Nick Land.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I think it was significantly the latter. I've watched more than one writer get swallowed by the Twitter algo and more or less lose it. Martyrmade (Darryl Cooper) is a good example, and I'm glad he's focusing on making his next podcast and not tweeting much.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
This is worth remembering. National security concerns or whatever are important, but perhaps the horrors of war and the suffering of those forced to endure it is at least as important.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
very interesting, thanks.
Knowing nothing about this but your comment, it occurs to me that a combination of compartmentalization and Shulgen just being a kooky general could be sufficient. But also, you are right, there is a lot of unexplained weirdness that is insufficiently captured by "it's just disinfo."
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Your first (threat of non-gov entities getting the tech) is a good one, though imo not conclusive. Perhaps they made the bet that no one would shoot one down? Perhaps something about the tech makes them particularly hard to shoot down (this would align with the email's bit about "fly one over the white house").
Re your second: No, China could simply send a private communication to the US saying "FYI the thing that's about to happen over NJ is us", do something with the drones that would require the spooky tech (e.g. depending on what the tech actually is it could be to fly one into controlled airspace without being detected, to do otherwise impossible maneuvers, etc) and voila, effective show of force. You have to remember that we are not the intended audience, the US government is. This played out over and over during the cold war, there is lots of precedent for it.
While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities.
You emphatically do not know this. We know there were classified congressional briefings about the drones, so there is clearly information about these drones that is not public. It seems pretty obvious that if there were evidence of a classified technology being used, the government would prefer to keep that from the public.
You are right that the only evidence that we have that the drones were chinese is this one potentially mentally unwell guy. My point is simply that that theory does seem to fit all of the available facts and is possible.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
The B-21 almost certainly employs classified "novel propulsion systems", just like the B-2 did.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
If the US has unmanned fighter technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
"UFO" in the traditional sense (ostensibly alien spacecraft) has been used as a disinformation tactic since the late 40s. It worked at Roswell (which was, in fact, a crashed secret American balloon) so it got rolled into the strategies used to cover up secret military projects. I'm making up these percentages, but I'd say 75% of UFO sightings are totally banal misidentifications, 10% of them are outright fakes, 9% of them are unknown-to-the-public aircraft or other tech, and 1% are legitimately weird shit that nobody understands.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Two things:
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The email clearly says that the US already has the technology, and that China only recently attained it. So no risk of the US knocking down a drone and stealing the tech.
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The entire point of the "show of force" in this case would be a demonstration that China has this novel propulsion system and can successfully deploy it over the US. "Why drop nukes on Japan, it would so much cheaper to just drop conventional bombs?"
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
My wife, upon telling her very excitedly about all of this: "antigravity is just flying, we already have that."
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.
As polite feedback, I think your post would be better without this sentence and that this is almost universally true about this sentence.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Forgot mod hat?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
It remained secret until it was unavoidably revealed because its result needed to be used and was impossible to hide.
We know that other secret military planes have remained secret for decades before being revealed.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
PTSD doesn't make you believe in aliens.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Atomic weapons and radar stealth are the two biggest examples.
I think laser-projected plasma generation is another that hasn't been declassified yet.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!
It was definitely doing something up there for 900+ days, but the antimatter mining thing is probably not it. There are only ten kilowatt hours worth of antimatter in the entire van allen belts.
Nope. Absolutely fucking not. Not only will further subsidization just incentivize more homelessness, we have massively increased our homelessness spending concurrent with the homeless problem getting worse. We've run this experiment and it didn't work.
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