domain:experimental-history.com?q=domain:experimental-history.com
DiscourseMagnus
17m ago
I didn't used to believe in this, and I'm still, say, maybe ambivalent? But I do think there's a real chance that we start seeing some serious shit in this regard in the near future, trends that happen slowly and then all at once.
Imaginary_Knowledge
32m ago
Brilliant people lie by telling truths.
SkoomaDentist
32m ago
Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008
I could swear Search is outright worse than it was in 2008...
Recursive_Enlightenment
34m ago
AI. Can relate to how students should be taught to write given AI, and what work will be available when AI gets even better and we get cheap robots.
DiscourseMagnus
34m ago
No, the public doesn't really care about this and even if they did care about this after they've had a bullhorn directed at them telling them they should care about it,
Bullshit. I wanted a Trump Attorney General who'd round up and publicly execute all of the political insiders (probably hundreds of thousands of them) who participate in the secret organized mass abduction, enslavement, rape, torture, and murder of children and adolescents. (Epstein. Pizzagate. Not QAnon. QAnon was an obvious feint for retard boomers who just want to be told to relax.) It's already been pretty obvious since early in Trump's first term that he was in fact one of those political insiders, but the ridiculously sleazy Gaetz ever getting anywhere near the Attorney General position is one of the most blatant fuck yous to the American public I've ever seen. Rotten, the lot of them.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
37m ago
Was there some kind of cap reason that made it more advantageous for the Giants to bench Jones than release him?
It was to avoid the possibility of his injury guarantees kicking in on his contract. If he got hurt (on the metlife turf for that matter) he'd be owed more money. It'll never happen, but I think the league needs to work out some "for the sake of being classy" CBA rules in the future that will allow teams to get cap relief in spots where the alternative strategies indicated harm the public image of the NFL. Danny Dimes, Russell Wilson, Tua Taigovailoa, Deshaun Watson. We have these conversations where it would all feel so much nicer if the salary cap weren't involved, but the salary cap is such an important part of the team building process that one can't afford to ignore it.
I'm deeply ambivalent on the topic of tanking. On the one hand I prefer cyclical contention to the brutal oligarchy of the European leagues, where it's understood that the only way a team really goes from worst to first is if it gets purchased by some evil billionaire. I love to watch a homegrown team turn it around. On the other, I see so many teams tank and never really get out of it. Even a team like the Process Sixers, that achieved drafting a perennial MVP candidate, ultimately never got over the hump and built a real stable likeable team with a winning culture. Losing for the sake of losing is often a cul-de-sac.
This is why I will never stop stumping for the idea of redistributing draft picks based on bottom 5-10 teams at the trade deadline, which then turns into a new league table where the best team out of that group gets the #1 pick, and so on and so forth. Incentivize winning, even after the a team is out of the playoff race. Today there are only a couple teams outside the bottom ten who aren't looking at any shot at the playoffs, maybe Dallas and Indy and Chicago feel a little left out. Replace #TankForTravis with #WinForTravis. Strictly speaking, it wouldn't be impossible for Jacksonville or the Giants to outplay the Bengals down the stretch, especially if they were incentivized to actually try.
I'm excited for the Eagles-Steelers, they're likely to get stumped by Pittsburgh. But the more important games are against the Ravens, who seem to have a bit of choker to them. Beat the Ravens, and all they have to do the rest of the season is beat the teams they're supposed to beat.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
37m ago
Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
37m ago
Games having increasing delays is a very common feature. I'd argue that MMOs are a good example of this because while you may continually get loot, there's increasing delays in getting useful loot. Basically all video games have very quick rewards at the beginning in the "tutorial" section (which might not be explicitly set out as a tutorial, often just the early game introducing the mechanics via clearly intentionally easy levels) when teaching the mechanics followed by more spread out rewards. Which isn't necessarily exploitative: a more interesting, difficult challenge will of course take longer than the tutorial of "here's what the A button does".
But for a more pure version, you can look at "incremental games" or really any game with a gacha/loot box mechanic, which I understand is standard in generic modern mobile free-to-play games. Basically, there's a whole type of games where increasing the delay is combined with the option to pay real world money to shorten the delay.
Bleep
43m ago
The allegations are at least plausible enough that, in the eyes of the public, it disqualifies him from being the nation's top law enforcement officer.
No, the public doesn't really care about this and even if they did care about this after they've had a bullhorn directed at them telling them they should care about it, it's not the reason why Gaetz stepped down or wasn't able to be confirmed without huge political capital being spent. It was because Washington DC hates him for a few reasons having nothing to do with these alleged "ethics" violations. The main reason was he took out GOP leadership McCarthy when the majority of the conference wanted the McCarthy gravy-train to keep rolling. The reason why they hate him is he doesn't play ball the way the way they all play ball and admits too much about how Washington actually works. He has money and he has grass-roots support so he doesn't need them. Full stop. This isn't about the pearl clutching and jowl-shaking politicians on TV claiming it's because he paid women to have sex with him and it's high time we stop playing along like it is.
Also, with the long list of people who have occupied the position of "the nation's top law enforcement officer," a man whose worst skeleton is he paid women to have sex with him and may have had sex with a 17 year old who had a real Florida ID confirming her age was 19 would be a big improvement over the majority of lawless, vindictive clowns who have occupied it over the last 5 or 6 administrations.
And the sad thing is the allegations about him paying women to have sex are nonsense. The "credibility" issue with witnesses is they were caught lying about details in their allegation and it looks like they were paid for it in the first place and it's also why the complete DOJ and House report won't be released.
07mk
1hr ago
The first and only one that comes to mind is Katawa Shoujo, a hentai visual novel made by a bunch of people from 4chan, based off of a page of sketches of a bunch of disabled girls by a hentai artist named Raita. It's a basic dating sim style visual novel where the protagonist goes to a school for disabled people and can bed girls who are deaf, blind, lacking legs, lacking arms, or just has severe burns over most of her body. It's quite good and was well received and, IIRC, had a Steam release in the last year (all versions of it are completely free, AFAIK).
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
It's not about the individual characters or elements though, it's about the philosophy behind them. The idea of having a character in a wheelchair in your fps about elite spec ops units is bugnuts retarded and can only come from a brain warped by a perverse concept of inclusivity. World war 2 was not won by girlbosses and jamming one in your game immediately demonstrates a fealty to diversity over anything else like pleasing your fans or historical accuracy.
But yes, the justification used to do all that was easy money. It was an overly simplistic perspective that equated to cooking the golden goose to smuggle in the progressive agenda, but that was the justification.
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions.
By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?
I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe
DiscourseMagnus
1hr ago
Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.
Perhaps more important than Russia falling and China rising is Russia and China getting friendlier with one another. The Sino-Soviet split was a major factor in the Soviet loss of the Cold War; now, Russia and China are becoming a single anti-American bloc again.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Political Quick Hits
A few scattered thoughts that don't merit separate posts:
The Nancy Mace Capitol Hill bathroom saga has come to an unceremonious close. Sarah McBride issued a public statement that she came to Washington to legislate, not to wage personal battles, and that she'd abide by whatever the House wanted. Trans activists were predictably disappointed, not only wanting a more forceful response from McBride but a unified response from House Democrats, but they weren't going to get it. The only notable public statement came from AOC, who pointed out that neither Mace nor Mike Johnson could tell you how they planned on enforcing such a rule, unless they planned on posting a guard who would check the genitals of anyone who looked suspicious. She also cynically accused Mace of trying to exploit the issue to get her name in the papers. Mace responded by calling AOC dumb and her suggestion disgusting, but she didn't offer any alternative enforcement mechanism. Johnson himself sided with Mace, but only to the extent that he believed existing rules favored her interpretation, and he never said that he'd be bringing Mace's resolution to a vote.
This whole tack seems like it's part of a new strategy for the Democratic Party. Five years ago an incident like this would have resulted in mass condemnation from the entire party, including those in leadership positions. The sum total of opposition in this case came from three people, and all three seem like they were hand-selected. Two were LGBT themselves, and the only one with any national profile was AOC, easily the most liberal member with any credibility. And even then, the comments were unusually focused. All three reps managed to hit just two themes: That the suggested rules were unenforceable, and that Mace is doing this as a publicity stunt. No long jeremiads about trans rights or anything. It's almost as if they've finally become aware that the issue is a loser, and rather than engage they'd rather let the issue quietly die while letting the least vulnerable members of the party get a few potshots in.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Gaetz withdrawal, the center of attention among Trump's controversial cabinet picks has shifted to Pete Hesgeth. In addition to falling woefully short of the traditional qualifications for Defense Secretary, Hesgeth is taking heat for sexual misconduct allegations in his past and for comments suggesting that women shouldn't serve in combat. Once again, Democrats have been unusually silent, with the exception of Senator Tammy Duckworth, whose legs were blown off in Iraq. I suspect this whole thing is part of an exercise in time biding. There is serious doubt as to whether Hesgeth will survive the confirmation process. But a sex scandal and some controversial comments won't be enough to sink his nomination on their own. The biggest knock against Hesgeth is that he's written books where he essentially says that conservatives should aim for complete victory over liberals, whom he describes as enemies of America, and suggests that it may ultimately be appropriate to use the US military in pursuit of that goal.
If Democrats bring this up now then he gets to respond on his own terms, and by the time confirmation hearings roll around the results become predictable. On the other hand, if they start hammering him about predictably dumb shit now then he spends his energy responding to predictably dumb shit that he gets predictably hammered about during confirmation hearings, only for Democrats to change tack in the middle and start asking him about all the controversial opinions in his book. I wouldn't expect him to be caught totally off guard, but he won't have had weeks to rehearse his responses. How he responds to this kind of grilling could be the difference between whether the requisite number of Republican senators vote against him or not.
One other notable figure Democrats have been eerily silent about is RFK, Jr. I suspect this is because while rank and file Democrats hate him for his dumb woo woo opinions on vaccines and other things, actual politicians realize that he's the most liberal cabinet member they're likely to get. Hell, he's probably more liberal than anyone Kamala Harris would have appointed to the post. So Democrats won't challenge him, just lob softball questions at him asking him to expound on his opinions of abortion, single payer healthcare, dangerous chemicals, and big bad pharmaceutical companies. If the guy is going to be confirmed anyway, and is likely the best you're going to get, then why not throw your support behind him in a way that makes Republican senators squirm? Worst case scenario his nomination fails due solely to opposition from the party that nominated him.
After Hesgeth, Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the nominee that the smart people seem to think has the least likelihood of being confirmed. I don't think it behooves Democrats to back her in the way it behooves them to back RFK, but her nomination presents an interesting conundrum. A large part of Trump voters supported him, at least in part, because he was perceived as an America First isolationist who wouldn't get us into any new wars and try to get us out of existing ones. Yet Tulsi is the only cabinet nominee who seems to embody that vision. Everyone else—Rubio, Walz, Hesgeth, Ratcliffe—are all traditional conservative hawks. Her presence in the cabinet would only serve to foment the same kind of dysfunction that riddled Trump's first cabinet. As a former Democrat and tepid member of the GOP, Republicans might prefer a more united front when it comes to foreign policy and sweep her aside as the Democrats did, and for the same reasons. That being said, I've always been skeptical of Trump's supposed dovishness, as I've never met a Republican who didn't want to bomb Iran at the first opportunity. But I still think it's odd that he hasn't just gone full neocon.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.
From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals.
By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.
I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.
daguerrean
1hr ago
Can anyone think of any notable artworks produced by extremely online and transgressive subcultures like incels (but not limited to them)? Things like Negative XP. Ideally things with some artistic merit and not just meme value (like Elliot Roger's My Twisted World).
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
This seems heavily confounded about the fact that honest people will communicate their brilliance in honest ways and use it towards pro-social ends, ie publishing scientific papers or teaching people, or just explaining their thoughts and intentions openly when queried. Meanwhile, brilliant but dishonest people will hide their brilliance and use it to gain power and wealth in sneaky ways. There are lots of politicians and high-level bureaucrats that are really really good at political manipulations, which requires a certain type of intelligence, even if they appear stupid when talking about object-level policies. Leaders of cults or Backscratcher Clubs are going to be very intelligent and also dishonest. There are brilliant lawyers and CEOs and investment bankers who make tons of money and keep their secrets to themselves because the more people know what they know the less advantage their intelligence gives them. Literally anyone dealing with zero-sum interactions has an incentive to be smarter than the people around them, meaning to not broadcast their intelligence, and to deceive the people around them into doing the wrong thing so they can be exploited.
People at the extremes of rational/scientific/autistic intelligence are honest, because the thing that distinguishes this type of intelligence from the sneaker manipulative type of intelligence is the focus on truth and objectivity. The former is often the stereotype people think of when they think of intelligence, but if you define it this way then the connection between intelligence and honesty becomes tautological. If instead you define intelligence as the ability to perform cognitive labor and/or solve problems required to achieve one's goals then we notice this large class of anti-social and dishonest but very intelligent and successful people doing things that pay more than science does.
recovering_rationaleist
2hr ago
- Current existential threats: AI, pandemics, nuclear proliferation (and Lybia, Ukraine, NK, Iran show the incentives for/against a country pursuing nuclear weapons)
- The rise of global trade: semiconductor markets, shipping lanes (compare to Roman Roads), global financial markets / how and why the USD is the global currency
- Global telecom and instantaneous communication
- Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.
- Chinese demographics (and the big question of economics in a shrinking population), China and Taiwan/Hong Kong (back to its origin in opium wars)
- Chinese dependency on the West: China imports fuel and food, exports manufactured goods.
- US military build-up in the Pacific vs. South China sea as a barrier to US containment
- Hybrid warfare
- Not current issue, but a fun thing for me to think about: "how to raise a country into an economic miracle" (Korea) vs. "how to destroy a country" (Venezuela, Gosplan). The relevant point I would emphasize is that you need some unit of value (money) which signals the amount of resources which go into a product, and which signals how many resources people are willing to give up for that product. This distributed computation cannot be efficiently centralized!
- Within the US, the financialization of corporations and rising power of private equity/monopolies: downfall of Boeing (funneling money into stock buybacks), PE firms buying real estate and setting up local dental monopolies, market power being abused to add junk fees and raise prices (Ticketmaster), etc.
"...resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms..." Which has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing Woke.
"...money invested in ESG-focused funds..." This is just hilariously missing the point. Blackrock doesn't just "invest" - it provides day-to-day funding for businesses. You don't get access to those funds if you don't meet Larry Fink's requirements on diversity, which is why I had to sit through interminable videos of my CEO (and other bigwigs) verbally fellating Fink's (Fink is praised by name) diversity initiatives and how vitally important they are, never mind the obvious negative impacts it has had to our company's performance.
edit: also, what makes you think that only the funds specifically marketed as "ESG-focused" get your money? Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
The energy transition, with a discussion of peak oil. Low TFR and population aging. Mass migration, populism, social media.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2hr ago
Van Creveld's 4th gen Warfare manual is one I'd recommend for this list!
DelendaEst
2hr ago
Yeah, the defenestration of Brendan Eich was one of the first big moves of the Awokening. High level devs just tend to be lefties, it doesn't have to be all of them just enough to make it SEEM like its all of them and keep righties in the closet (and Damore the ones who don't), and the unaligned will mostly go along with whichever group seems to be in the majority.
Whatever the difference is between how Saquon is doing this season and how Swift did last season, and Miles Sanders the year before that. Literally the exact same team on offense, Saquon is the only major change. Jason Kelce was swapped for Mekhi Becton on the O-Line, but the line might actually be better on net than last year, not because Becton is better than Kelce necessarily, but because Jurgens is a better center than he is a guard, and even though Kelce-Jurgens at C is a slight downgrade, Jurgens-Becton at RG is a huge upgrade. Beyond that there's a new WR3 if they're playing 11 and Calcaterra has surpassed Stoll at TE2 if they're playing 12, and every now and then they trot out BVS in 21 which they never did in '23 with Swift, but those are marginal changes.
Saquon is a massive upgrade over Swift or Sanders. Swift had a good season, Saquon is having a transcendant season.
And the argument goes for everyone who is in competition for MVP. It's a team sport. QB's need to throw the ball to someone who catches it, and they need to get protection from an O-Line, and they need a running back to keep the defense on their toes. A good QB with a quick release makes an O-Line look good, an indecisive QB can make a good O-Line give up sacks all the time.
Ultimately by my normal standards if the season ended today, I'd want to see Josh Allen get MVP. But if they don't give it to Allen, I'd say Saquon has as good a claim as any other player when you look at how the team improved from his play. Mahomes isn't actually playing that well, Goff isn't that inspiring, Lamar has thrown up some real skunks in big games and isn't doing enough to get it consecutive years. After that I'm just not seeing it. But that's if the season ended today, there's still time.
There's something to be said for it being easier to get an average RB than an average QB, but it gets a little circular at a certain point.
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