VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
In theory, can't the cardinals elect "any baptized male[1] Catholic"? Seems unlikely, but we have a number of (supposed) candidates here. Somehow "J.D. Vance" seems like a particularly memeable option, but I'm not sure offhand how to align that as a punchline to a joke.
[1]: It's distinctly apocryphal, but it feels necessary to mention "Pope Joan" and the infamous chair.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Remember, we're all being DEEPLY CONCERNED about slippery slope precedents - can you show us exactly where the judges have explicitly claimed that they CANNOT order the executive...
I think there's a decent argument to claim that Marbury v. Madison has been a slippery slope to such judicial overreach. As evidence, I'd actually point to Roberts' preference for judicial restraint: he seems aware that there isn't an inherent limit on what powers the judicial branch would claim (who would overrule them?) as long as the other branches are keen to follow along. The corollary there is that if the Court were ever to truly "reveal its power level," it might well find out it's not as high as it thinks it is. I was listening to the Louisiana v. Callais oral arguments yesterday, and it seemed like there was an implicit awareness that redistricting precedent at least in theory allows the judiciary to destroy the districts of arbitrary members of Congress, and that it needs to balance its rulings WRT the Voting Rights Act (which are IMHO not sustainable as defined mathematically) and the states' inherent political powers.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Presumably whatever incentives the mediators have available to them and care to use: adding or removing sanctions and further military aid to their counterparty. "Come to the table, or we will make this more painful than your regime can bear" is a threat that I had assumed was implicitly levelled. Whether it is or not seems less clear at the moment, but Ukraine-flagged warships (torpedo boats, as is tradition) harassing Russian shipping or naval assets outside the Black Sea with some degree of plausibly-deniable allied assistance. Or actually biting sanctions on Russian energy exports.
These haven't happened yet, and may not be on the table, but it at least strikes me that they could be.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Maybe I've just worked in small-medium, high-trust (engineering, office) workplaces, but most of the signs I've seen in bathrooms are about upcoming blood drives and security policies (beware phishing). If I have seen such signs, they were at least not terribly memorable.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Your average fighter pilot has probably flown maybe a half dozen other aircraft types too: you don't go straight from a simulator into a jet.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
it's taken a firm stance that the court has no authority to compel the executive to return someone held by a foreign government.
This wouldn't be a sustainable precedent generally, though: if the judiciary can compel specific actions in international relations, even returning American citizens generally, how do you bound that power? Should we have invaded Venezuela to free the Citgo Six? Or Italy to free Amanda Knox? Congress explicitly allowed the executive to invade The Netherlands in 2002 in such a hypothetical situation, so I don't think you can just wave off "by any means necessary, but not those means."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I feel like everyone arguing this is just treating "due process" as an incantation.
I'm fairly certain that this point "due process" has become "enough layers of review until my desired outcome is reached, and no more." Which isn't to say that due process isn't a good idea generally, but maybe we need pre-commitment to what the process should be, like we've started registering scientific studies to prevent cherry-picking results.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Sometimes you just want to identify as the Kool-Aid Man.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Broadly I'd agree with you, as a man who's never gotten used to nude communal spaces. I can change quickly at the gym if I have to, but I generally avoid communal showers anyway. But I know some cultures embrace it more generally (saunas and such).
Individual stalls are nice, but it's hard not to see that it's a more expensive option (more stalls, more fixtures, more maintenance). The West is probably rich enough to afford it many places, but it is using resources that could conceivably be used elsewhere, and I understand if some communities decide to do so.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
"Half our software development team are (trans)women" isn't, IMHO, the gender equality in the workforce that feminists wanted. I don't even really consider myself one, or endorse quotas, but it doesn't scream to me proof that true parity has been reached for little girls' career prospects.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
they do not really get off on the idea of showering with a bunch of random women who can see their dick
While I accept that there exist people for whom this is true (possibly even the majority), there have been enough high-profile cases the other direction (many such cases) that I don't think this statement is a good one around which to design policy.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
You can destroy as much material as you like and as long as the body count is low it will be shrugged.
Admittedly, times have changed a lot, but this was the same calculation Japan made in 1941, which didn't quite work out for them as they had planned.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
This only works as long as everyone who currently demands accreditation decides to edit it to be "accredited or Harvard", which might work for some duration (and also scales in difficulty as the list of exceptions lengthens), but probably still drops their prestige as red state post-graduate schools (law, medical) no longer accept their degrees and red administrations have a seemingly viewpoint-neutral ("non-accredited degree!") way to scour the civil service of their graduates: suddenly a degree from Yale is "just as good as Harvard, with a few more doors open" and its actual outcomes suffer.
Not saying all those outcomes are likely, but none of them strikes me as unforseeable. The alternatives would be the wholesale devaluation of accreditation, but I think that's spread widely enough (how many state laws would have to change?) that it'd be more painful than Harvard-aligned organizations tracking exceptions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
China is a party to the Berne Convention and WIPO treaty and at least in theory has corresponding treaty obligations. I'm not aware of treaty-defined sanctions for violations, but they probably exist. Although "the West considers Chinese copyrights and trademarks void" probably isn't as large a punishment as the reverse today.
spits to remove foul taste of voicing support for current copyright system
They are hoping to finance their retirement from the US federal government’s willingness to tax its citizens in excess of spending, some day in the far future, in order to reverse the whole process
Isn't a fair amount of US debt held domestically? It seems like the same arguments would apply there to American retirees holding US treasury bonds with the expectation that the treasury can make good by taxing (presumed: future citizens, not the retired bondholders), and unlike China those US retirees have at least some power over their government, and may not be mollified by simply inflating the interest away: "Grandma's on a fixed income and we can't just inflate prices until she can't afford anything!"
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
The bailey of BLM is "black lives should matter, but in fact they do not matter to the police who gets away with killing black men at random".
I haven't run the numbers myself, but I would be thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the large spike in murders starting mid 2020, which is IMO at least partially attributable to "BLM," actually caused an increase in the total number of murdered black lives. Uncharitably, "The purpose of BLM is to secure sinecures for friendly academics" seems a POSIWID-framing of the situation, which I'm partially inclined to believe as someone who actually wants to care about (all) lives.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
I'd personally endorse (B), although I could see an argument for (C) in some cases. I think the novel claim of "POSIWID" is that under the analysis of (B), some systems are revealed to have a "purpose" that contraindicates it's mission statement under (A). The idea that systems are complex and efforts to push a given indicator in direction Y might actually move the needle the other direction should be taken seriously: eliminating phonics instruction "to improve literacy" has quite possibly worsened outcomes. Just because a system exists "to fix Z" doesn't mean it's actually helping.
The steelman for (C) is that looking at anything other than outcomes risks endorsing systems that are actively counterproductive but happen to "sound nice" and have "good vibes" on paper: "The purpose of NEPA is to heavily curtail new construction," or "The purpose of the NRC is to prevent new nuclear reactors from being built" (literally the NRC had never approved the construction of a new nuclear plant from its 1975 inception until Vogtle Unit 3 began construction in 2009).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.
I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
It feels very germane to this issue that "immigration judge" is not a judicial-branch role here: it's someone the AG has delegated their Congress-given power to decide the merits of these immigration cases. Honestly, it's IMO a terrible name for the role because it's so misleading. It seems like the relevant questions in this case are less "the administration (and perhaps the AG specifically) disobeyed a judicial order" and more "the administration (and perhaps the AG specifically) didn't follow its own documented procedures": the former is a very legitimate separation of powers concern, while the latter is, still legitimately, more a question of proper procedures -- capriciousness, notice-and-comment requirements, and documentation.
Naively, "if the Attorney General decides that the alien’s life or freedom would be threatened" in (b)(3)(A) seems completely satisfied by the AG testifying "I have decided" regardless of what her delegates have documented in the past. That said, I am absolutely willing to accept procedural questions about what "decided" needs to mean for good governance, weighted against the idea that past executive branches shouldn't be able to forever bind future executive actions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Is that process defined by Congress, or by executive policymaking? Admittedly it could be some combination of both (policy specifically to implement details called out in law).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
IIRC the US opened a completely new shell production line about a year ago that didn't exist at all before 2022. I think the EU has also ramped up production.
how many contact methods does DHS use?
I suspect DHS could have decided not to grant parole without three valid, tested methods of contact, but that was either deemed too much effort or not in line with the previous administration's political objectives.
IMO we should design these systems to avoid even accidental incentives for misuse: establishing "if you provide incorrect information, we can't reach you and therefore you can't be expected to comply with otherwise lawful orders to your perceived detriment" is not a sustainable precedent. There is a reason you can't just send your W-2s to the address of the municipal landfill and tell the IRS you didn't know you owed income taxes.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Does a pretrained, static LLM really measure up to your "actually von Neumann" model? Real humans are capable of on-line learning, and I haven't seen that done practically for LLM-type systems. Without that, you're stuck with whatever novel information you keep in your context window, which is finite. It seems like something a real human could take advantage of against today's models.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Kolmogorov complexity is, IMO, a "cute" definition, but it's not constructive like the Shannon limit, and is a bit fuzzy on the subject of existing domain knowledge. For lossy compression, there is a function of how much loss is reasonable, and it's possible to expect numerically great performance compressing, say, a Hallmark movie because all Hallmark movies are pretty similar, and with enough domain knowledge you can cobble together a "passable" reconstruction with a two sentence plot summary. You can highly compress a given Shakespeare play if your decompression algorithm has the entire text of the Bard to pull from: "Hamlet," is enough!
At the very basic end of things, it seems the easiest way to get started would be Docker or VMs. It's maybe a bit dated at this point, but when I took a CS course on security quite a while back, Google's Gruyere ("Swiss cheese, get it?") was a good toy target application, and there are a number of easily-searchable links for getting that running locally.
I don't directly work in pentesting, so I can't really point you at specific resources, but I think like most folks in tech I've at least had to see the other side of things ("security policy requires these changes"). The concern I'd have for you is that cybersecurity is a rabbit hole both wide and deep: I doubt there are many folks that truly understand all the details of cryptography and implementations (Debian SSH key generation, Heartbleed, Shellshock) and hardware implementation details (Spectre, Meltdown, Rowhammer), or any of a number of other relevant details (rubber hoses). If you just want to try out some fun SQL/JS injection attacks and browser development tools, Gruyere is probably a good starting point, but not being directly in the pentest side of the industry I can't speak to how useful those skills are these days given automated scanning tools for code. I can tell you that I'm pretty careful to sanitize my inputs.
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