quiet_NaN
1d ago
Which gets us back to the existential angst about mass shootings, and my claim these are one-man civil wars. So, we could rule in such a way that people don't want to do that- which is what we want- or we could just ban the guns because we're too lazy and selfish to do that (and in so doing discard our ability to be that kind of political actor- naturally, those who believe in mob rule/Democracy and fancy themselves in charge of that mob are most in favor).
The problem with that is that this means the influence of any particular group is proportional to both how many there are of them (good) and how omnicidal they are. Basically, ten jihadists will have more influence on what rules are enforced by society than a thousand quakers.
This will advantage memes which are ready to defect against society at the slightest provocation over memes which are more pro-social. It seems really hard to make a society out of people each itching to prove that they are a crazier motherfucker than all the others around them.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
My chemistry teacher begged to help any of us who might actually try an Anarchist Cookbook explosives recipe, also based on the proposition that too many of its recipes were suicidal if followed as-written. I don't think anyone took her up on it, though; the wildest homebrew reaction I ever ended up seeing was a friend's thermite in college.
This makes me slightly envious, I would have certainly taken him or her up on it. The fanciest thing I ever got do synthesize in school was nitrocellulose. I can still feel the disappointment like it was yesterday when a teacher who had promised to synthesize any ether compound we wanted reneged on that when I picked an ester of nitric acid and glycerin.
Nor did I ever try that on my own, my balls to brains ratio is apparently low enough that I still have all my fingers. I did thermite on my own though, it is reasonably safe when done outside with some eye protection and plenty of sand so you don't start a big fire.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The problem with guerrilla warfare in urban settings is that it generally involves war crimes, e.g. fighting out of uniform, relying on your opponent to have qualms about killing civilians by accident. Or getting your opponent to kill a lot of civilians in the process of fighting you, thereby earning a propaganda victory (like Hamas did).
From Mao's protracted war to Vietnam and GWB's adventures, the general rule seems to be that the winning strategy is to give less of a fuck about the civilian population than your opponent. This leads obviously to a race to the bottom.
Besides, the means to fight a modern insurgency against the US are IEDs, not guns. If the NRA were serious about killing the enforcers of a tyrannic US in the future, they would forgo small arms and focus on legalizing the ownership of C4.
Obviously blowing up US troops with your mobile along with civilians while you hide among the civilians is not exactly as glamorous as the Rambo fantasies some 2A proponents might have.
So when I say that almost all Americans do not have the stomach to effectively resist the US government, I mean that as a compliment. I know that I would not have the stomach for that either, and I am thankful for that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
2A states "you have the right to retain the means to wage a civil war"
Even under the current SCOTUS, this seems plainly false. You do not even have the right to keep the means to fight the ACW. And warfare changed a lot in the past 150 years. Automatic weapons are not the biggest deal. But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.
Realistically, any Americans having a beef with the US military would resort to tactics of insurgency: hiding among the civilian population, striking from hiding and hoping that the feds will value the lives of civilians enough that they do not simply flatten your city block. In other words, war crimes.
The days of Washington when an armed, motivated local population could defeat a great power (though not on their home continent) in open battle are long over. If you want to update 2A for the last century, you would have to allow private citizens to engage in mutually assured destruction against the US, like the USSR did. I have heard few people argue that this would be a good idea.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Even though the US has the questionable distinction of being a country where gun deaths are the top cause of death for some minor age groups, I do not think that school shootings, although commonplace enough, are responsible for much of that death toll. Under utilitarian considerations, I think that having a few ex-marines with AR-15s on any school grounds is probably not very effective in the cost per QALY saved.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
It was a pump shotgun, meaning this shooting could have happened even in the majority of Europe.
I have never seen a pump action shotgun in Europe. AI has the following to say:
What countries actually do. France is a good example of going stricter than the baseline. It puts smooth-bore pump-action shotguns into Category B2, which requires authorisation, while a narrow subset of pumps (fixed stock, 4+1 capacity or less, barrel at least 60 cm, overall length over 80 cm) stays in Category C. Even Category C requires the owner to be over 18 with a valid hunting, sport shooting or clay pigeon licence. Germany requires a permit (WBK) for essentially all firearms, though licensed hunters get some simplifications for long guns. Germany also specifically bans pump guns that have a pistol grip in place of a stock. The UK, outside the EU, treats any shotgun holding more than 2+1 shells as a Section 1 firearm, the same tier as rifles.
The majority of EU citizens are not going to legally own something like the 88, ever. Nor even a single barrel break-action shotgun, for that matter.
If that kid had started a shooting spree with a crossbow, then your argument would hold -- crossbows are freely sold Germany (if you are 18). Though I suspect that we would take a dim view on a parent gifting their special needs child a deadly weapon.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
In general one-off claims of sexual abuse from a young child against a stepfather or family member tend to be far more believable than a MeToo or a Cornell 7.
This is probably the one category of claims where we should default to believing the child unless the child is clearly mentally unstable or prone to lying and exaggeration.
I think it would be reasonable to have different systems with different thresholds of evidence.
To send the accused to prison, we need "beyond reasonable doubt".
However, child protection services do not operate on that threshold, nor should they. If they believe that parents are net negative for their kids given their probability estimate of facts, they can generally take them away. This is subject to judicial oversight, but "well, you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt that I raped my kid, so I get to keep and continue to rape them" will very much not fly.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would argue that Google docs is simply another niche. It lives on the web, while MS Office (back in the day) lived on windows computers.
This opens other options for collaboration which simply did not exist in traditional office software. For example, for a beam time, we had to make a shift plan to coordinate between two dozens people employed by various organizations who were on a random assortment of operating systems. Someone wiser and more pragmatic than me had the idea to just make a Google spreadsheet. It worked great, they just mailed the editable link around and everyone entered their availability. Nobody had to install anything, connect to any VPN, create accounts (except for the original spreadsheet creator, who needed a Google account), authenticate etc.
So Google docs carved out their niche because they offered something which Microsoft simply did not offer.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Orwellianly calling it
Sorry, native German speaker. The word "Justiz" in German means the legal system, with no particular claims that it is just ("gerecht").
It's already a low confidence signal that mere words could be enough to bring charges.
I am unclear if he was indicted by a grand jury, and if they had any evidence besides her testimony.
My understanding is that generally, prosecutors do not want to lose court cases, so I suppose that the median tale of "my step-dad totally raped me" would not go to trial.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
A smart 12 year old could plausibly manufacture physical « evidence » on her own body, as well as perhaps other types of « evidence », just thinking through it, if she were very devilish and devoted to lying.
Sure. However, there are base rates to consider.
Probably one in a hundred men would risk everything to fuck a cute 12yo, with perhaps four more being successfully deterred by the penalties.
I admit that I am vaguer on the rate of 12yo who would fish their stepdad's condom out of the trash, penetrate themselves with a penis-sized object and distribute the contents of the condom within their vagina, then go to the police to claim either statutory or violent rape, fooling the police into collecting the evidence in an embarrassing medical procedure, while also lying successfully (and avoiding evidential pitfalls). It might plausibly have happened in human history, but I think it is very rare for sixth-grader girls to engage in such behaviors. Saying that one in 10k girls will do something so crass within her 13th life year is almost certainly an overestimate.
So on priors, we might believe that 99% of the men who are accused of raping a 12yo with rape kit DNA evidence are guilty.
Of course, I do not know what the evidence against that guy in particular was. Perhaps it was weaker than DNA, and thus easier to fake. But if it was merely "he said/she said", few people would flee a jurisdiction rather than trusting the court process, which is very much designed to err on the side of "not guilty".
quiet_NaN
6d ago
If the mother was a remotely neutral party, e.g. the daughter had accused her football coach, then I would sure trust her a lot if she said "ok, my daughter claims he raped her, but four weeks ago she was claiming that her English teacher was a cannibal and three months ago that her schoolmate had gunned down a stranger in the woods."
But I expect that about half of the women who are confronted with evidence that their daughters were raped by their romantic partners will react with denial.
The alternative is simply to horrible to contemplate. "My taste in men (or my lack of ability to judge character) resulted in my daughter having her life ruined in my care" is simply not a reality most people could bear facing. If accepting a reality meant one would kill oneself, humans are pretty great at not accepting that reality.
Life with a vindictive lying teenage daughter is not easy, but it beats having a partner who is raping his stepchildren by a country mile. Sure, your neighbors will be wondering how you raised your daughter so wrong, but that is much less of a social death sentence than having them wonder if you were watching while your partner was fucking your daughter.
So her mother claiming her daughter is lying is worth very little, here.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I highly doubt that the 10k$ borrowed were all spent on legal advice. Very likely it paid for bail. I imagine that bail restrictions which prevent you from skipping bail are common?
I also feel it unlikely that an innocent man would trust the judicial process so little that he decided to become a fugitive from justice instead. I mean, obviously the hero waking up in a hotel room next to a suffocated prostitute because he was framed by some sinister, highly competent entity is a common movie trope. And indeed in that situation it might be entirely rational to become a fugitive rather than entering an Alford plea.
But a 12-yo is not exactly equal to some Illuminati conspiracy as far as her ability to frame innocents is concerned. I find it unlikely that the prospects of facing baseless accusations in court would drive an innocent into hiding.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think character matters in politics. So do the people of Ohio -- if nobody cared about the candidates beyond their policies nobody would have produced an ad with the words 'pathological liar' in them.
If your politicians do whatever will benefit them personally, then you can not depend on them being honest about their preferred policy either. The way I see it, character is a prerequisite. Policy differences would have to be very large to overcome this. I would probably vote for Trump over Stalin reborn running on a credible campaign of turning the US into the USSR.
The other thing is civility. While it might seem that we have rock bottom on civil behavior in the culture war, I can assure you we are still a long way off. "Yes, my candidate obviously hired hitmen to kill his opponents, but his tax policy is much more sound than theirs" is not a thing you will hear me utter.
The third thing is that even if you only care about getting results no matter the cost and the commons burned, he seems not to be very good at getting the results, because his campaign ad backfired spectacularly. There is no place in politics for Stupid Evil.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I mean, purely on priors, claiming to be a sexual abuse victim is statistically correlated with being a pathological liar. Though I suppose that most liars who wrongly claim to be sexual abuse victims will not be able to point to the person they accused fleeing the country. If she was claiming to have been raped by three unrelated men during her childhood and five more in college, and none of the investigations had ever gotten anywhere, that would be very different.
A mother who worked with sexual abuse victims calling her daughter accusing her husband a liar pushes the probability of her daughter being a liar up, but only marginally. Humans are very much willing to believe whatever is the most convenient thing for them to believe, and for plenty "my daughter is a liar" is much easier than "the person I fell in love with is a terrible human being".
For political office, I would prefer someone on whom the priors of being a pathological liar are low, same as I would prefer someone for whom the probability of being a rapist is low. So the ad harms Acton's qualification very marginally.
On the other hand, the decision by his campaign to publish this ad harms Ramaswamy massively. He most certainly did not have more insight into the truth of the claims than the grand jury decades ago.
Even if I could tolerate playing dirty, he played dirty incompetently, getting caught in the crossfire. A savvier candidate would at least have made sure that the ad did not have his fingerprints on it, then released a statement on how horrified his campaign was about the ad, and pledged to investigate who had paid for it.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Donna borrowed $10,000 from her father and hired an attorney who recommended that she and Bud move away for awhile until things could calm down and charges could be dropped.
Is this ethical behavior for a lawyer? It seems a small step from advising your client what chemicals to use to dissolve the victims body in so the cops would not find anything. If I were a lawyer I would be careful not to mention anything which obviously prevents justice from being done outright. "Based on a preliminary analysis of the evidence, it seems very likely that you will go to prison for multiple years after the trial." If the client picks up on it being not in their best interests to be present for the trial, that is not my fault.
Also, especially as someone "building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America" (presumably a program to help SA victims, not a program to facilitate SA), skipping town makes you look guilty as fuck. Absent physical evidence, sexual abuse is notoriously difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt. And this was likely a few decades ago, so the chances that you get a jury who decides to just take every claim by a woman as gospel seems small.
At best, it is a vote of no confidence in the justice system. "Any guy can go to prison if his stepdaughter accuses him of sexual abuse because he did not buy her an iPod" seems a bit outlandish from where I stand, and if you believe it, that raises the question if this is not a worthier cause area to dedicate your life to than helping the supposed victims of sexual abuse.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
My guess is, the rise of coding agents in early to mid 2025 saw sudden demand for memory, because this requires having to store large projects.
I was under the impression that the median memory chip is probably sitting on a fancy GPU in an AI data center. I do not think that people running vibecoded corporate-sized java codebases is enough to explain the shortage.
There are also higher order effects, though -- some FPGAs face a shortage not because AIs use them, but simply because producing AI chips is so massively profitable that it is very tempting for fabs to upgrade to the latest process generation instead of making peanuts by continuing to build boring 28nm chips.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
But if you solve 100 physics problems, you may wind up with some commercially valuable or dangerous tech.
Depends very much on the kind of physics. Suppose LLMs find a consistent theory of the four fundamental interactions which agrees with observations. While important in some ways, this will not lead to a superstring bomb in all likelihood, at least not within a decade (at non-singularity speeds).
By contrast, I would claim that most experimental physics problems are at their heart engineering problems. Going from Hahn's discovery of fission to reactors and nukes was mainly an engineering problem (though it did require inventing some new physics along the way). Controlling fusion power is mainly an engineering problem. So is building LHC or LIGO. My experience is that the new physics being investigated (e.g. the Higgs) is the tip of the iceberg, with most of the work being in the underwater part -- detector physics, vacuum and cryo tech, magnets, control systems, calibration procedures and so on.
Rule of thumb for fundamental physics: if your experiment can easily be built using off-the-self components, then someone would already have done it. With all of the instrumental physics/engineering required to get to your physics of interest, LLMs can help but will not accelerate the process by 10X, I feel. Take the Helium leak detector, for example. A good AI might come up with the idea of using noble gas mass spectroscopy for leak detection on its own, and it can help you design the MS, but likely most of the challenges are practical ones where you simply need to build a prototype and test if it works.
People seem to have made this assumptions that we’ve hit the limits of new physics. Anyone claiming interesting effects or results is a crank and it’s all fantasy.
I think that we have definitely picked the low-hanging fruits of our current paradigms. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1903 (using COTS components no less -- photography was already mature by then). This kicked off a series of discoveries which lead to the standard model, nuclear power, etc. The last piece of the puzzle so far was discovered in 2012 at LHC, at costs absolutely astronomical compared to what earned Becquerel his Nobel.
I think the physics community has roughly the right priors on someone making a revolutionary experiment in their garage. And even if individual members are not always amendable to evidence, eventually the physicists would come around. If your cold fusion is providing energy to cheap to meter, if your conservation-of-momentum-violating space drive is getting you to Mars, the physicists will be very interested in figuring these out. The problem is that so far, it seems like the alternative proposals are exclusively by cranks and snakeoil salesmen.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
They will coexist, rather than the later being obsolete. Overall, mathematicians don't have to fear losing their jobs anytime soon (unless of course you happen to have the precise problem you are working on scooped by AI, and even then, your skills would presumably transfer to new problems.
The right question to ask instead is what moat mathematicians have, what skills they have which are immune to being encroached upon by AI. Three years ago this was easily answerable: LLMs sucked at basic math.
Today, it is a lot less obvious to me. Sure, at the moment the models might mostly come for proofs which rely on heavy numerical computation efforts, because software development is a capability in which they were trained quite a lot for unrelated reasons, but in the end the domain of mathematics seems quite susceptible to RLVR.
Human mathematicians might be better at identifying interesting areas of mathematics, but even that is not given. A model might need orders of magnitude more training data to get which math is interesting than a human would, just like a model requires orders of magnitude more training data to learn English than a human, but this does not matter if the training data is available. A model can trivially be trained on every math publication published in the last hundred years, while a human can see only the tiniest fraction of them.
I am sure that once upon a time the best way to solve chess problems was to have an expert human player working with a computer, but today the human simply has nothing to offer which would improve upon the machine. This does not mean that it will be similar in every domain, but at least that this outcome is possible.
I am in experimental physics, and I feel that for the moment, we have still a bit of a moat in that unlike the models, we have hands. Even if you give the models biodrones (i.e. minimum wage labor wearing AR goggles), I think the sensory feedback quality would be worse than what a skilled human can get.
Still, I liked my situation a lot better when our moat was our ability to think rather than to use our hands.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Joffrey sat on the thrown but the true power was Tywin.
Not really. The decision to
Sure, all the GOP positions are selected for loyalty to Trump personally, but there is no Blood Bond binding Senators to Trump, nor do House candidates have a tadpole inserted into their brain upon winning the primary (to my knowledge).
Unlike an absolutist kingdom, the US has a constitution and it gives the president a lot of formal powers. The default assumption is that the president is the most important politician in the US. At the end of the day, he or she decides who gets investigated by the DoJ, which bills get vetoed, what the policies of federal agencies are.
Trump's cronies might be Trump's, but they are also cronies. Some might be willing to lay down their live for him until the moment he dies, but most are probably loyal to him because at present, it pays to be loyal to him. When Trump leaves office, it will be common knowledge that he will never again hold public office, nor be in the position to repay favors much longer. That is not a great position to be in if you want to be the power behind the throne.
Basically, my assumption will be that he will go back to just being some guy with a twitter account full of bullshit.
Though a bit also depends on how he leaves office. If in two years he gets Vance or Rubio elected by a landslide, that will net him some informal influence -- a lot of congress candidates will owe him for endorsing them. On the other hand, if he manages to lose (as I imagine he will), future generations of Republicans are unlikely to cling to the MAGA platform.
The fact that he was elected twice is already weird enough. But a huge part of him winning a second term was due to unforced errors of his opponents. In six years, even the Democrats will be hard-pressed to find someone more senile than Trump to run against him
quiet_NaN
13d ago
An indictment on the system
Hard disagree. Obama or GWB or Clinton could have all gotten honest capability assessments from the military/intelligence community. So could Trump, if he wanted. I am not a fan of the CIA, but I do not think they would push a president they dislike into a bad war just to harm him domestically. I also do not think their median employee is a pink-haired lesbian with a gender studies degree.
While Obama and GWB have fired some high-ranking generals, under Trump 10% of the top brass was fired or sidelined. I surmise this is not conductive to an atmosphere of honest feedback. "Mr Hegseth, I think engaging Iran on this scale will not result in regime change, but drag the US into a long-winding and unpopular war" is unlikely to be received very well -- probably he would tell you to get your testosterone levels checked because you are lacking the Spartan warrior spirit or something.
Trump got the presidency twice because he is good at influencing public perception -- who cares if his claims are bullshit as long as the people believe them. Unfortunately for the US, neither the economy nor the military run entirely on vibes.
The system which really failed is not the US intelligence apparatus, but the electorate which decided to elect an egomaniac who believes he is better at everything than the long-serving domain experts.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
If both the wokes and MAGA converged on using minors as suicide bombers to attack the other side, that would not make it okay to do so simply because the other side does it.
Someone who would willfully lie to the public merely to prevent a Romney presidency is clearly a piece of shit. That does not mean that Trump is not also a piece of shit for lying about Obama's place of birth.
Despite what the culture war feels like, we are not actually in the middle of a civil war where the left wants to string up all the SUV drivers and the right wants to string up all the LGBT* folks. Even if Trump had a plan to seize power on Jan 6, trying to prevent his election through lies would backfire and further erode civil norms.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Nuremberg (which was, basically, to legitimize killing off a bunch of German elites)
This seems an odd point of view. If the purpose was to legitimize killing German elites, then at 55% success rate they did not do a very good job of it.
The subsequent trials were even less effective at eliminating Germans:
489 cases went to trial, involving 1,672 defendants. A total of 1,416 of them were found guilty; fewer than 200 were executed, and another 279 defendants were sentenced to life in prison. By the 1950s almost all of them had been released
About 212 people executed (in the West) is a tiny number compared to the number of people murdered by the Nazis. Even when just considering the Shoah, we get around one death sentence per 25k victims. The real number of people who were guilty of the crime of genocide (and thus should be punished like a common murderer) was obviously orders of magnitude higher. I maintain that hanging all the about 22k members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (unless they could prove how they had been working against the regime, like Gerstein) for starters would have resulted in a much better approximation of justice.
Edit: fixed formatting bug.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
The US and Israel both have bona fide systems in place to prosecute war criminals. Therefore, even though we don't necessarily agree with all of the decisions of these countries, under our charter we lack jurisdiction over them
This is not how it works. I am sure that Milosevic had a military court system which was also responsible for dealing with war crimes.
Instead, the relevant test is in Article 17 of the Rome statute.
The conduct in Gaza which the ICC found objectionable was for the most part official state policy of Israel. Likewise Hegseth's decision to sink suspected smuggling boats and then kill any shipwrecked survivors. A government which orders conduct generally does not criminally investigate fulfilling these orders.
The real restriction on the ICC is territorial jurisdiction. Fortunately, Palestine was admitted to the Rome statute as a state party, thus the ICC has (arguably) jurisdiction in Gaza.
By contrast, the ICC would not have any authority to try the Pretti shooting: it happened on US soil by an US perp, and the US has withdrawn from the Rome statute, thus they would need voluntary cooperation of the US.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
I recall exactly one case in which a US citizen was arrested by the US government and sent to be imprisoned by an unrelated third party country without due process. That was under Trump II.
The ICCs mandate is rather narrow, mostly involving war crimes and crimes against humanity. While I am sure that there are some wokes who would dream of sending every Republican to the Hague, the SCOTUS will very much not let them, nor would the ICC convict them of anything.
The steelman version is that at the end of his administration, Trump (or Vance) give Hegseth a full pardon for any conduct he did while in office, thereby making it impossible to try him for the conduct he had ordered during subsequent administrations. Sending him to the Hague would bypass that pardon. (Of course, arresting him while bypassing the US court system would be tricky. I mean, the SCOTUS has already established that the next Democratic president will not have to answer criminal charges for any official conduct, but if a president orders a US citizen kidnapped and sent to the Netherlands he might as well order him kidnapped and dropped out of a helicopter.)
However, I do not believe that this is likely to happen. No resident of the White House wants to normalize criminal investigations into official conduct of administrations, for reasons which are plenty apparent. Nor were the Democrats historically very much against what might be considered war crimes, so far.
"It does not matter that the military outguns the civilian population by 1:50 (on money spent per year, order of magnitude), because they will fracture in a civil war." -- Yes, but then the civil war will be decided by US military fighting US military, with private gun owners watching from the sidelines.
The only way private gun ownership would dominate is if the US military (including national guards etc) made a decision to sit the war out. This is almost certainly not going to happen. If armed insurgents are fighting police for control of a city, everyone on any side will expect the US military to get involved.
I disagree. War is about achieving strategic objectives through military means. Attacking the will of the other side can be an instrumental goal, but it is not the only or even dominant strategy. Inflicting misery can sometimes be effective at eroding the will, but other times it can be counterproductive.
Populations do not simply have a morale bar and once you have killed enough kids it drops to zero and they surrender. World war one lasted for years for years despite tremendous costs in human misery. Germany only surrendered when the Hindenburg line was breached and the occupation of Germany would have been inevitable. The IDF leveled Gaza, and still Hamas is a dominant political force there. There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
In our enlightened times, we also do not generally consider inflicting misery on the civilian population supporting your opponent to be legitimate tactic of waging war. Typically, states ban tactics which are cruel but not very effective for them. This is why small arms are legal for warfare and chemical weapons are widely banned, for example.
Take the anti-ICE protests. To the degree that they are successful, they follow the playbook of non-violent resistance.
If instead they were aiming at maximizing the misery on their opponents, for example by bombing the families of ICE agents, they would be an utter failure. A vast majority of the US population is against bombing American kids, and they would quickly find themselves slightly more less popular than Al Qaida.
The winning strategy is not excessive violence, but baiting your opponent into using excessive violence. You do not need 2A for that. The only anti-ICE victory related to 2A rights is the Pretti shooting, which is very much not how 2A proponents would have imagined to influence policy.
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