domain:themotte.org
NunoSempere
5m ago
My impression is that the numbers you are mention... aren't that high; Israel is probably willing to spend many more of its own lives in this conflict.
For reference, if we adjust the 150K to 500K deaths[^1] from Russia's war in Ukraine from Russia's population of 143M to Israel's population of 9.757M, we get 10K to 34K, and remember that we are talking about deaths here. So there is room for a 10x here easily.
This doesn't really speak to your point of whether Hamas' fighting capabilities have been degraded. But Israel has been fighting a war with many fronts, in which Iran has been taken out of the picture, Hezbollah has been disabled in Lebanon. Recently the Israeli army claimed that they had operational control of 65% of Gaza, which is congruent with your perspective.
[^1]: Recent reports say 1M dead or injured, but use the confusing term "casualties" for this, to make it look bigger.
birb_cromble
6m ago
5.56 out of a 20" barrel can defeat level IV plates at 100 yards, and possibly up to 200, depending on the bullet construction. Velocity is a hell of a thing.
What I am struggling with, however, is understanding the game plan of the aliens - specifically why on Earth the alien Theseus went up against would intentionally seed the Icarus Array with a lifeform capable of turning the entirety of humanity into a super-intelligent hive-mind. That is an utterly suicidal move.
My takeaway from the two books was this:
Beginning of Blindsight
Theseus arrives at Big Ben.
The Captain/Jukka Sarasti realizes almost immediately upon encountering Big Ben that all current life in the Solar System is fucked.
Big Ben is the alien. The Scramblers are just antibodies or pieces of the larger hivemind that is Big Ben/Rorschach.
The rest of the plot of Blindsight plays out, with The Captain knowing in advance that Theseus and its crew will be inevitably reprogrammed and consumed by the Scramblers.
The Captain executes a dead man’s hand strategy where whatever information Big Ben inevitably sends back down the telematter stream to Icarus is going to be edited/hacked.
End of Blindsight/Beginning of Echopraxia
Big Ben sends information back down the telematter stream to Icarus. Under normal circumstances, this would start the process of creating Big Ben 2, except now with access to all the matter and energy of the Sun, rather than the brown dwarf Big Ben 1 was found orbiting.
The Captain’s dead man’s hand strategy results in this information not beginning the process of making Big Ben 2, but rather Portia, which has similar capabilities to Big Ben 1 but is a competing organism. This hack was what the Captain was working on the whole time Theseus was engaging with Big Ben.
The Captain expects Portia to consume all life in the Solar System, but in a hivemind kind of way similar to the Bicams, thus allowing humanity and vampires to continue existing, sort of, while also being able to compete against entities like Big Ben.
End of Echopraxia
Portia is humanity. The human shaped bodies are just antibodies or pieces of the larger hivemind that is Portia.
Book 3 would be a war of super-intelligences between the alien Big Ben and the nearly as alien Portia, with all remaining human-esque entities caught in the middle.
NunoSempere
13m ago
Some items I'm looking at this week:
OpenAI to release web browser
Nearly 700 civilians killed in Israeli attacks on Iran
The new Bangladeshi government has an audio recording of the previous leader, Sheikh Hasina, ordering her forces to use lethal force. They will use this in her trial.
Hamas gives 'positive' response to 60-day ceasefire proposal but says talks needed on implementation
Russia allegedly field-testing deadly AI drone powered by Nvidia Jetson Orin
Israel launches new ground incursion in Lebanon, raising fears for truce
Trump Ups Criticism Of Putin As He Releases Weapons, Considers Sanctions
No fewer than 500 Israelis killed in conflict with Iran — Iranian parliament speaker
Church leaders: It's time for Nigeria's Christians to defend themselves – Catholic World Report
Supreme court clears way for Trump to mass fire federal workers
Former Bangladesh police chief admits to crimes against humanity amid crackdown trial
Yemeni armed forces hit Ben Gurion airport, other Israeli targets with drones, missiles
Yemen's Ansarullah pledges sleepless nights for zionists after terrorist 'israeli' incursion
Gaza ceasefire talks begin in Qatar amid ongoing tensions
Iran president Masoud Pezeshkian says Israel attempted to assassinate him
Trump claimed victory against the Houthis in fight over Red Sea shipping. Now they are sinking tankers again
What to know as Yemen's Houthi rebels launch new attacks on ships in the Red Sea
Climate change made Europe's heatwave up to 4C hotter
Climate change tripled recent heat deaths in Europe, scientists say
North Korea quietly building chemical weapons for combat
China provided real-time intelligence to Pakistan during a recent conflict with India, according to India's Deputy Army Chief.
As bird flu evolves, keeping it out of farm flocks is getting harder
First round of indirect Israel-Hamas talks ends inconclusively, 'situation in Gaza likely remains grim for foreseeable future'
South Sudan's worst and longest cholera outbreak enters critical stage
India admits heavy losses in 'operation sindoor', to posthumously honour 100 soldiers
Iran Fatwa Fundraiser to Kill Donald Trump Raises Over $40 Million
[Iran International] |reported| that Mansour Emami, another cleric in Iran's West Azerbaijan Province, announced a reward of 100 billion tomans ($1.14 million) for anyone who killed Trump.
Israel defence minister plans to move Gaza's population to camp
Israel's Defence Minister has directed the military to devise a plan for relocating all Palestinians in Gaza to the southern territory, with plans for a 'humanitarian city' to accommodate around 600,000 initially, potentially growing to house the entire population. The relocation aims to secure the area against potential Hamas operatives, operating under a proposed ceasefire for construction. This proposal has been met with strong condemnation from human rights advocates and warnings from the UN regarding the legal implications of forcibly transferring civilians, which is classified as ethnic cleansing.
Iran's government says at least 1,060 people were killed in the war with Israel – The Frontier Post
Tribunal indicts Sheikh Hasina (in absentia)
Death Toll in Kenya's Anti-Government Protests Rises to 31
Haiti death toll hits nearly 5,000 in nine months as gang violence spreads
"Hong Kong citizens felt immensely proud visiting the Shandong aircraft carrier group."
The US military will test a "Joint War Zone Distribution Center" in Australia.
General Ronald Clark, Commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, announced during the 'Protector's Blade' exercise that the Army is testing a new logistics capability in Australia aimed at efficiently prepositioning equipment and supplies in the Pacific theater. This initiative supports the military's strategic readiness for potential long-term operations, focusing on establishing 'Joint Theater Distribution Centers' that can be crucial during military conflicts, humanitarian missions, or natural disasters.
These distribution centers are set to be established across the Pacific region, with the Army currently managing centers in the Philippines and Australia. The exercise, which involves around 35,000 troops from 19 countries, serves as a platform for developing logistics capabilities and testing the Army's new 'Mid-Range Capability' missile system, the 'Typhoon.' Clark highlighted the necessity of these centers to mitigate logistical challenges and emphasized their essential attributes, which include operational port capabilities and storage for various supplies.
Unusual USAF and Space Force Drills Near Taiwan
UN reports 798 deaths near Gaza aid hubs amid ongoing conflict
Hamas agrees to release 10 hostages during Gaza peace talks
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported that it currently exercises operational control over 65 percent of the Gaza Strip.
European heatwave caused 2,300 deaths, scientists estimate
Europe's freak back-to-back heat-domes killed 2,300 in eight days with temperatures 'reaching 48C', study finds
MathWizard
Good things are good
17m ago
If each and every one of the twelve "normal" dudes is actually normal, middle of the bell curve in terms of criminality, then yeah it's going to be much safer, although it's still a non-negligible risk factor. Ordinary people can get violent if they're acting to protect their children from what they perceive as a threat (and rightly so in many cases). If instead they're chosen randomly from the distribution, then out of a dozen men you're going to get several on the low end of the bell curve. Given that 9% of men end up going to prison, you're likely to get one being an actual criminal who just hasn't been caught yet. Who might then act violent towards the others and get them pulled into trying to fight back in an attempt to protect themselves, the woman, and/or the child. Modify this again by noting that the subset of men who are likely to fall for a stunt like this are going to be below average in intelligence and general quality, so you're very likely to be pulling from the lower end of the bell curve repeatedly, even if not quite at the depths that prison would be.
It's still qualitatively the same risk scenario, the prison part does make it worse but it's merely an amplifier to the pre-existing risk.
Totalitarianit
19m ago
This post's conversation also reminds me of first amendment auditors who go to public places and record everything and everyone around them because they're not legally in the wrong. They operate under the guise of protecting the first amendment, but this (as Primaprimaprima put it when describing Karens) is of secondary importance. Their real motivation is to create a reaction that they can capture and record, then post on their YouTube page.
The extent to which these people who aren't "technically" wrong corrode the cohesiveness of our society can't really be quantified in real time. I think a lot of us just understand that it is bad and that it will have future implications. Normal people recognize the problem as well, but there is no way to say "no" with any real force unless a law is broken. An atomized society has nothing but the law to truly dictate behavior, but more laws ultimately lead to less freedom. Informal resolutions while they can be deeply satisfying also carry the potential for overreaction or being too heavy-handed.
When it comes to feminists bitching about family structure, they're just trying to ensure they maintain as much social power and freedom as possible, and, since the receipts of "family structure" abuses are readily available, they constantly point to them to beat back the opposition. What makes them even more powerful is the online presence of women, especially neurotic ones, who will collectively treat any issue they're arguing for as if it's the most morally important problem of our time. These women are numerous, and passionate, and hysterical. The only real recourse seems to be one where society collects the receipts of unchecked feminism and pluralism. Unfortunately, it will have to run its course and we will have to continue to watch people be as annoying and as immoral and as disgusting as possible while still not being "technically" wrong.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
25m ago
but if the tariffs are painless and everyone is still buying cheap shit from China, aren't we losing???
It does count as tax revenue, so to the extent you care at all about deficits and debt, that's at least helpful.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
36m ago
but if the tariffs are painless and everyone is still buying cheap shit from China, aren't we losing???
Pretty much, yeah.
Of course it was never reasonable to think that "tariffs" meant "stop all trade with China". It couldn't have meant that, because that's just not how things get done in the neoliberal world order. I'm not an economist and I haven't followed the technical details of this story closely, but I do know that there's no big red switch labeled "TARIFFS" that they just flip on and off. You look at the actual details of the agreements and it's always something like, "an O(n*log(n)) prorated surcharge will be applied to soybeans from these three farms just outside of Shenzhen every fifth Tuesday when Venus is in retrograde", rather than "fuck China we got our own soybeans now". The devil's in the details.
So either Trump's powerless to implement his vision of reshaping global trade, or he doesn't actually want to, or this IS the agenda as he envisioned it and this is the extent of the impact. But either way it doesn't look like much of anything is going to change.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
Echopraxia was quite the mess. There were things I enjoyed about it, but it lacked a lot of narrative direction and also contained a lot of plot points that didn't make any sense at all just because the story had to happen.
I think in general Watts' short stories work better than his novels, since short stories lend themselves to the exploration of a single conceptual thread which is his clear strong point. With the exception of Blindsight I think things tend to fall apart when Watts is left to craft an extended narrative - there are often a whole lot of unrelated ideas not relevant to the story and there's a general lack of narrative cohesion. The lack of character depth also tends to become far more clear when he has more words to waste on them. Though, you don't really read Watts for his spellbinding characters.
No_one
38m ago
I don't know, I only ever played Ark on the official servers. The game .. may feel fun for ~800 hours if you play by yourself in the PvE mode but it's about 1/20th of the entire game experience. PvE itself can be challenging and fun, especially on Aberration, but the real experience is infinitely more fun. The issues is, permanently running servers reward no-lifers, so even those who could dedicate 4 hrs of it each night, as much as people used to watch TV, would be unable to compete with students, unemployed, part-time employed people who love the game..
The only problem with Ark is, that devs can't program and can't create good rules.
I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her
That's because they wanted to reward players and the level scaling is absurd. A tame direwolf with a few lvls into HP is going to have about the same HP as an alpha carno. If in the game high level tamed animals weren't absurdly stronger than wild ones, navigating the map could be an actual challenge. People wouldn't like that at all!
Ironically, you picked a pretty bad example because direwolves are notoriously 'squishy' due to having no saddle damage reduction. They're a niche animal with limited uses, mostly bred as pets. You want a high level direbear with a decent saddle, but ideally a high level t-rex. That's going to eat everything except a giga or titanosaur. (as to fighting those, the only safe way is trapping them and using weapons or dinos that do % damage, like another giga or allosaurus)
Anyway the meta to understand is relatively easy and in any case, there's always the wiki.
WhiningCoil
38m ago
If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.
IMHO, this is a perfect is the enemy of good situation. Is someone managing your decisions better than you, such that you are having even marginally better life outcomes than you were before them telling you what to do? Well, then how much of that added value they skim off the top comes down to competition between overseers.
Shit, I think we just reinvented the labor market.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
43m ago
Peter Watts is, in my opinion, a very original writer, but not a very good one. He introduces interesting concepts or combines concepts in interesting ways, but his misanthropy is downright monotonous, his characters are pretty much just "what if someone were extremely fucked up in this particular way", and the plots are always "everything's fucked and then it gets worse". Garnish with more or less novel scientific ideas, interesting to read, but not really good books as such.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
I'll probably read anything he writes, if only to hear about his latest inventions.
faceh
44m ago
On the flip side there's the principal-agent problem.
If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.
Maybe there needs to be an overseer-advocate role whose sole job is to audit the other overseers and ensure they're at least complying with best practices.
But this adds extra complexity and expense to this system.
So one really hopes that in the aggregate the added costs of supervising the supervisors and auditing the expenses and otherwise ensuring that the wards are being treated adequately well are actually producing more value than just leaving those folks to their own devices to be exploited.
I can see why institutionalization was a popular solution for this in decades past. If you can put the wards all in one place and lock them in, it takes relatively few supervisors to manage them all, and in theory if you can check in on the conditions regularly and make sure there's no wanton abuses.
In practice, the people most drawn to these jobs would, in many cases, be the most likely to want to commit some kind of abuse.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
44m ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold?
Er, well, no
Surrogacy businesses everywhere in sudden disarray.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
45m ago
My fancy ramen from the Asian grocery does indeed seem to have gone up significantly in price. That's the only "pain" I've been personally felt from the tariffs and I'm pretty sure the response from pro-tariff policy people would be that I should stop buying Chinese noodles and get aboard the Korean noodle train. Because I am a very stable genius, I predicted this months ago:
None. I think the impact of tariffs will turn out to be wildly overrated. I have no actual empirical basis for that belief or an articulable mechanism, I just kind of don't believe that Nike is actually going to have more than a marginal price change. Maybe I'll be wrong, but my current stance is that "tariffs don't work" will be even more true than many people believe.
In all seriousness, I will continue to be actually pretty agnostic about the whole enterprise and think that we won't really know what the actual outcomes are for quite some time yet.
Goodguy
48m ago
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Especially when the soldiers are untrained and inexperienced and likely to panic when gunfire starts coming back from the other side.
The idea of luring ICE agents out using fireworks and then shooting them once they are out in the open seems like good tactics to me. But it seems that the attackers would have probably done better had they delayed the plan and spent some more time on the target range first.
gattsuru
55m ago
Supposedly at least some of the attackers were John Brown Gun Club nuts. Which isn't evidence against the feds being involved, but JBGCs are also pretty famously prone to collecting mall ninjas with expensive or goofy gear.
ControlsFreak
57m ago
Compare what I wrote:
There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay.
I don't know to what extent a clustering can be identified that can be simply labeled "not wanting to put in the effort".
I enjoyed the book so much I read it four times. Not that there aren't quibbles to be had with some of its storytelling, but the concepts and overall narrative are strong enough to overcome its deficits.
something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste
Vehemently disagree with this in particular. In theory Lovecraft would be something I'd enjoy, but I get pretty tired of his penchant for showing the reader incomprehensible unexplained creatures, then stressing endlessly about how easily our world could be ended by them - IMO, that is trivially easy to achieve if no burden whatsoever is made on the writer to explain anything or make it make sense. The challenge with this kind of fiction in my opinion is to introduce a concept inherently clever or terrifying enough to maintain that sense of starkness, alienness and cosmic horror even when the mystery box is opened fully. I get so tired of aliens where the entire point of their existence is to be alien for the sake of being alien - it's easy to write godmade horrors if you're just optimising for weirdness and incomprehensibility, it's not easy to write them if you're simultaneously trying to make them comprehensible and plausible while retaining the dread. The horror in cosmic horror comes from it feeling real enough such that the audience would actually entertain it as a possibility.
Blindsight's cosmic horrors are maybe the only ones in fiction that feel truly alien and scary to me. Most of the others I've encountered are basically souped-up elves with even less plausibility.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
Yeah, no. How do you think the situation would play out if a dozen dudes straight out of prison ran into each as they were serenading her in front of her house, vs. a dozen normal dudes? I'll go out on a limb and say the latter have a significantly higher chance of figuring out what happened, calling her a bitch, and laughing it off at the bar, and the former have a significantly higher chance of turning the neighborhood into a minor war zone.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1hr ago
I have picked up Quasimorph the turn-based extraction shooter and have been enjoying it so far (still mostly at the stage where I stay at Mars and Mercury). The recent announcement that promises the player being able to set up his own trade outpost is, let me be excused for being repetitive, promising.
I have also looked into The Rose of the World, the schizo-cosmological tract the game pulled the parallel reality stuff from, and it is a fascinating read as well. It can be freely found here for inquiring minds.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
There's one false flag that I think you haven't ruled out, though, and that's the possibility that this was yet another FBI sting gone wrong. The FBI would have recruited Song under false pretenses, provided him with the guns and some plans, and planned to arrest the bunch at some point, but the group jumped the gun and actually did it. That's probably not what happened here, but it does fit their M.O.
I do always enjoy being reminded of the FBI's involvement in the shooting at the "draw muhammad" contest in Texas.
gattsuru
1hr ago
[Previous discussion here and here]
Mackey's a putz, but the trial and government arguments here were an absolute mess, and the court punting on both the constitutional and statutory construction issues is going to allow those messes to turn into a massive 'process is the punishment'-style problem at length. It's kinda funny that I called the appeals court doing so, but to be fair the long delay (15 months from oral args to decision!) makes me think that the court neutered a broader decision to keep out a dissent.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
Who's narrative?
The observation that BLM protests are often whiter than the police departments they're protesting is a running joke in southern states.
I'm (still) playing Anno 1800, in between finishing FFVII rebirth, my NG+ of Metaphor: ReFantazio, and returning to low-level LotRO. My biggest takeaway is that the newer LoTRO writers are far, far worse than the original dev team.
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