mozz

mozz , 4 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

They took the guy who led the legendary team that made the search not only work instantly at a previously unimaginable scale, but also freakishly well as far as "finding exactly what you want based on almost any query," back in the late 2000s, if you remember... that guy, when he started pushing back against the people who wanted to fuck up search results to boost imaginary metrics that were theoretically (and, probably, not really) going to make more money from ads, they pushed him out.

This absolutely excellent article goes into detail about the exact moment, if you had to pick one, when Google stopped being a legendary tech company and simply became yet another behemoth coasting on its past successes until the market changes under it and it can't adapt, fades, and takes its place with all the others, all the way back to IBM and DEC. Nothing's changed in a big enough way for it to get knocked back into that obscurity yet, but it clearly will at some point.

mozz , 1 day ago

How did the police go insane?

They shut down traffic to work a fatal accident, he ignored a detective who told him to stop, something happened that led to the guy getting dragged for 30 feet and sent to the hospital with minor injuries, so they arrested him and from the only video I was able to see they were walking pretty calmly with him during the arrest. Once they realized who he was, they let him out of jail in time to play golf, but he's still facing some charges.

Am I missing context where something crazy happened? That all sounds pretty straightforward.

(Aside from the conservative person being shocked and appalled that a wealthy golf player with a little white-person smirk on his face is being subjected to the rule of law as if he was one of the poors, that part I can agree is pretty funny.)

mozz , 1 day ago

IDK man. I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario where the police just decided out of nowhere "Fuck this PGA vehicle, I hate it now! And will arrest the driver for no reason" when the driver was just following all their instructions exactly and all of a sudden the cops all got angry and it was all very confusing (which was more or less Scheffler's version.)

I also note that Scheffler and his attorney didn't say anything that sounded like "nobody got dragged by his vehicle, that part didn't happen" or anything that directly contradicted what the cops said. He just said that when it happened it was confusing and scary.

I'm happy to wait for the bodycam footage too, though. Presumably we'll be able to see exactly what happened during the critical events.

mozz , 1 day ago

See this is why I don't like ACAB. Once you start taking this cartoonish version of any given type of people, you start looking at things in this really skewed perspective. People could be good or bad or a mix of both or whatever, sure, but once they're "the enemy" and everything they do is stupid and evil and wrong, the kinds of things you start thinking are plausible start to become off kilter.

I think there is about a 0% chance that the cop just didn't say a word and ran up to the car with his gun out and started trying to break in like a crazy person, and that was the first thing that happened. Maybe it's 100% true that the cops miscommunicated and one guy had told Scheffler to go, and another then told him to stop, or something like that, but I'm still real curious about this blank space between "He was proceeding as directed by another traffic officer" and then there being a cop attached to the outside of the car and Scheffler still moving the car forward and it being a "chaotic scene."

I mean, he stopped after 30 feet, instead of continuing on his merry way through their accident scene or whatever. Sounds like if what happened was the cop grabbing the car and not letting go, then his strategy worked. My bet would be that the bodycam video will show some other less chaotic things they tried to do to get him to stop, as a first step, and the majority of the chaos stemming directly from Scheffler's actions. IDK, maybe not and maybe it's silly to talk about what the video will show before seeing it, but that is my feeling.

mozz , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Part of the point is that they were working a fatal accident. There could have been medical people walking around in unexpected places, or still a body in the road he could run over, or who knows what. If he was driving towards the road that was closed for that reason, then absolutely yes; physically stopping the car if the guy isn't responding to verbally stopping the car is part of the cop's job, not just letting him go and good luck to anyone walking around in the accident scene. (I don't really know, so maybe it wasn't that, but also as far as I know maybe it was.)

It's actually really common that cops have trouble getting people to understand that there's some urgent physical reality that overrides their "but my house is right there" or "but I have to get to work" or "I'm too important to have to stop" argument that in their mind is way more important, and so they need to be able to drive right through the place with the gun battle or the dead body or the downed electrical wires, or whatever.

mozz , 1 day ago

So, I saw this story and I typed a comment about how it was pretty much guaranteed (given Musk's cutting of the engineering department and the scale of Twitter's operation) that this would cause some slight amount of breakage for the forseeable future, and the unfixable and unflattering nature of the ensuing jank would be the nail in the coffin for Twitter (which for some reason still is home to a lot of journalists and primary sources and etc even to this day in its wrecked-up form).

Then I thought, you know what, I don't actually know that that's how it'll happen, and deleted the comment and moved on with my day.

And then just now I just tried to click on a Twitter link, and saw a black page with this:

Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

(Button: "Try Again")

⚠️ Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com

Oh shit, it must be Firefox's fault! Yeah, must be causing issues. My bad man, you're right; I guess I will need to switch browsers now so I can have the privilege of using Twitter.

mozz , 1 day ago

I mean

Remembering old friendships and times we were suffering and struggling together, even if the present day is death and mistrust and we’re enemies, doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world

To a lot of people the US and the EU have often been the devil man that Russia is today. We can let it go for short periods of time, I think, sometimes.

Just my opinion

mozz , 1 day ago

Yeah, maybe so. I'm sorta just playing devil's advocate. My point wasn't that Russia isn't a terrorist state which is visiting pointless destruction on the world at large in a stupid and dangerous way, more that the US has also roamed around the world killing innocent people for a variety of reasons, and we still get to go the Olympics and everything.

(I mean I'm not saying they're the same, and I kind of like that Russia got excluded from some of the friendly people's clubs when they started behaving like a rabid dog. Just, I'm saying maybe extending an olive branch every now and then is okay.)

mozz , 1 day ago

Yeah.

Russia invades Ukraine and bombs apartment buildings, it's like hey WTF those are perfectly innocent people

Israel turns the whole of Gaza into a wasteland of corpses and famine and it's like well of course, they're seeing to their security situation, as any country would, here's some bombs my loving brother

I don't think Israel should be allowed at the Olympics either, FWIW

mozz , 1 day ago

Working in tech support be like

mozz , 1 day ago

Yeah. You would have had to triangulate your way around to getting the information that is exactly the information that you knew already that it was.

---

"Sir, I need you to go to the oil that you used and check if it is non-hydrogenated or hydrogenated. It should be printed on the back of the label."

"What do you mean, I never had this problem before"

"Yes, I'm aware, they have changed the oil constitution recently. I'll be able to resolve this problem for you, I just need to know if the oil is hydrogenated or not."

"I don't see what that has to do with anything"

"Can you just check the back of the bottle, please? Then I'm sure we'll be able to get your recipe working again"

"Okay, well I didn't actually use oil, I used toothpaste because it was expired and I wanted to get rid of it"

"Aha! Okay, I understand sir. I'm glad we were able to get to the bottom of the issue you're having. So, if you make the recipe with toothpaste, it definitely won't taste the same or have a good consistency. I think if you switch back to using oil you'll find that the pancakes still taste the same as they used to"

"But I think I should be able to use toothpaste."

"Absolutely. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

mozz , 2 days ago

It's not just Rust users

mozz , 2 days ago

Pretty sure once you're killing hundreds per day it's reached stage 9. Stage 8, they've been at for decades now (occasional massacres for some, systematic semi-deadly oppression and isolation and exclusion for all with the threat of more at any time).

All of Palestine has been a ghetto since the wall went up in the 1990s.

mozz , 2 days ago

I came here to say this.

Modern physics already gives special status to observer objects and properties that “non-observer” objects don’t have, and every universe needs to be defined from some particular point of view instead of “objectively” from outside. There are a couple other weird things but those are two big ones to me.

And so a physicist from the 2100s where physics is defined in relation to consciousness asks a modern physicist, so why did you think it was all just atoms and numbers in an “objective” universe?

And the modern physicist says what the fuck are you talking about don’t get all weird and religious on me

And the future physicist says okay dude good luck then

mozz , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Why does the detector in the double slit experiment cause an interference pattern if its state depends on which slit the particle went through, but then it resets its internal state after, without transmitting the result?

mozz , 2 days ago

Absolutely false. You have apparently never heard of the exact aspects of quantum mechanics which so surprised physicists when they were first discovered? (which are pretty much its defining feature) IDK, it kind of sounds that way.

I’m honestly not saying it’s as simple as the pop science oversimplification of QM, even though my comment was kind of invoking exactly that oversimplification. But yes, things like having the detector erase its measurements without recording them were exactly the types of experiments which started to point to something much stranger going on than just one object’s state depending on another.

Citation

Wheeler's delayed-choice experiments demonstrate that extracting "which path" information after a particle passes through the slits can seem to retroactively alter its previous behavior at the slits.

Quantum eraser experiments demonstrate that wave behavior can be restored by erasing or otherwise making permanently unavailable the "which path" information.

Emphasis is mine. If I’ve misunderstood something then fill me in, sure.

mozz OP , 3 days ago

I sorta had that same reaction, yeah. His Super Mario video was endlessly fascinating and then from time to time I would go to watch one of the others and they didn't seem all that different or exciting. Then yesterday I happened on this one, and for whatever reason, it absolutely hooked me.

mozz OP , 3 days ago

I feel like it's like sports; if you do the game then it's interesting, but if you're just observing it as an observer, then it's sort of pointless.

I have observed live speedruns which are absolutely compelling though, too.

mozz , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.

The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).

mozz , 5 days ago

Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.

My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.

But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.

mozz OP , 6 days ago

Yeah. I've been out of the loop apparently, because today was the first that I heard of it.

mozz OP , 6 days ago

Yeah. Gaben has a strong track record of bringing technology to the market that works, from a company that wasn't already around and doing things better overall before he got involved with it.

mozz OP , 6 days ago

I hadn't heard of most of this, and it's sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.

The controller was stolen IP

Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.

I'm not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on it, but I'm skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of "SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion."

But at the very least, saying that it's demonstrated that it was "stolen" is, to me, not accurate.

and is still currently fighting the lawsuit

This part is objectively not true, unless there's some glacially slow appeals process I'm not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I wrong?

mozz OP , 6 days ago

Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve's games. I was sort of wondering if this is a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren't warranted anymore in the present day.

But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person's assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don't think it's based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.

mozz , 6 days ago

I think a large part of this is that X is the only major social media which has no dedicated team for detecting and banning the propaganda bots / troll farms.

I have no idea how much of the Q / antivax / conspiracy material on social media is deliberate campaigns to destabilize American politics in general (as opposed to perfectly organic homegrown nuttiness which the US has always had plenty of anyway), but I know it's not 0.

mozz , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

Musk is a useful idiot. He ruined Twitter and the US government quietly thanks him for it because it no longer serves as a tool to see unfiltered events happening on the ground (like Israel murdering Palestinians). So mission accomplished there

Yeah. Twitter back in the day actually used to be a usable substitute for print journalism, without the editorial bias and selective coverage. If you paid attention to who to follow, you could actually get a lot better picture of the world from Twitter than from almost anywhere else.

I don't think the US government is alone in wanting that gone so they can control the narrative instead, but they're definitely one party that was happy about it.

and now the new target is TikTok

And this is where you went straight off the fuckin deep end.

I do not know a single person who gets their picture of the world from Tiktok whose viewpoint isn't reliably dogshit takes on literally every single issue. (Specific e.g. antivax, "BLM protestors are just running around beating people up, they have to be stopped," "everyone's moving out of California to Texas and Florida because Republican politics are better") Maybe there's an accidental alignment of pro-Palestine-protestors news from Tiktok right now, but it's not like that narrative is un-heard-of in any MSM news or other social media. The whole landscape at this point is Palestine flags as far as I see, and the other platforms are usually a lot more nuanced and informative.

I don't know why you'd object to an algorithm controlled by Elon Musk or the US government or just a lawful-evil alignment to sell advertising and hook people to dopamine loops and nothing else (all very good things to be suspicious of, yes), but all of a sudden when the Chinese government's involved, you're like "finally someone trustworthy to put in charge of public opinion, no way this can go wrong."

mozz , 6 days ago

The person I was responding to, if I've read them right, was trying to argue that Tiktok was the next target because people could get unfiltered information about the world through it. My point was that Tiktok is about the worst possible tool for getting useful unfiltered information about the world that one could possibly imagine, and then adding some context and detail to that.

mozz , 6 days ago

I have this surreal experience sometimes where I'll say something like "I don't think the US government is alone in wanting that gone so they can control the narrative instead" and then find someone lecturing me about how exactly what I just got done saying might be true.

That said, the person I was talking to was clearly implying that banning Tiktok would be a bad thing because people can get unfiltered information through it. You can try to say they were saying something else that's more sensible, if you want. I won't stop you. They don't seem to want to clarify it themselves, so it's hard to say.

mozz , 6 days ago

But at the same time, it has helped radicalize and inform so many in the ranks of Gen Z, amongst other generations.

I know when I think of people I know who get most of their news from TikTok, I'm like "damn that person is super well informed and I'm always happy when I talk to them about politics and world events"

Out of all the platforms, every single other one of which including the one you're on right now and the elephant one and Usenet and ZMag and Hackernews and all the rest

I do not know which reality you inhabit where TikTok invented people knowing about Gaza, but I promise you that there are better platforms, where you're allowed to talk about drugs or alcohol or use the word "blood", or "Uyghur"

mozz , 6 days ago

Random question, what's your opinion on the Uyghur re-education camps? Or the treatment of the Hong Kong protestors and how it compares with the treatment of US protestors of aid to Israel?

mozz , 5 days ago

I didn't ask about how you felt about Israel's genocide. I'm assuming, based on what you already said, that you're against it. So am I.

If you had to narrow down your feelings on the Uyghur internment camps to one of three responses, would it be:

• I'm against them
• I'm for them
• It's more complicated than that

And, the same question for the police response in Hong Kong.

mozz , 5 days ago

Okay, just curious.

I mean, yes, it should be a shockingly easy question to answer and I'm happy that you're against them. I've just gotten in the habit of asking people who display one view that's surprising to me if they hold other surprising views which might not appear initially to be correlated. Most of the time, they do, which is a very interesting result to me.

mozz , 5 days ago

Every government in the world has good and bad in it, because every government is made of people. Different ones have different amounts; it's not like every country's government is the same or has equal good/evil levels. But sometimes people take it to the point of classifying "good ones" and "bad ones" and handwaving away the bad things that the "good ones" are doing. To me, that's not really a safe or sensible way to look at things. It's just not how things work. In my opinion.

mozz , 7 days ago

He committed the idealist's perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it's okay not to play ball with it.

"Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn't do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they're gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life."

"Preach."

"I'm gonna plead not guilty because I didn't do anything wrong."

"No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake"

Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.

mozz OP , 8 days ago

I looped in Tucker because it kinda looked like you asked a question implying a certain answer, and then tried to make fun of me when I provided the answer (which was different than the one you implied).

No?

mozz OP , 8 days ago

You said "imprison" in your first message. I didn't misstate shit.

mozz OP , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Your joke was a hyperbolic exaggeration of an imaginary situation where Biden is the primary authority suppressing criticism of Israel. He isn't. Roughly in order, it's local police, then congress (not really), then Biden (not at all). That's why I reacted negatively to the joke, and to your clarification of "actual facts."

I left some room for reasonable interpretation of what you said, since "accuse" can mean either formal or informal and they're very different here. But "imprison" and "federal and state" kind of biases the interpretation towards something formal. But in any case, when I clarified exactly what I think about it, you sent me a clown emoji and got hostile about it and claimed I was changing my position. And you're confused that I'm not being super friendly? There's a big difference between someone not being polite to you and them speaking in bad faith.

I sort of have a hair trigger for this stuff because I'm accustomed at this point to all the propaganda-bots coming out of the woodwork saying "Biden Biden Biden" any time they get a chance to draw some weird tortured-logic connection between him and some unrelated story about something bad. So if it sounded like I jumped down your throat I apologize. But Biden doesn't really have much to do with Israel rejecting the cease fire, or with suppression of the protests, so it's gonna irritate me whenever someone pops into a story to bring his name into the picture out of nowhere.

mozz OP , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Me: Posts a story angry about Israel's crimes

You: Biden Biden Biden

Me: WTF where did that come from, also what you said is wrong

You: Ahh I see... This is about biden? did your politics get hurt? What about Israel and their crimes?

I think we're done here

mozz OP , 8 days ago

Hamas must be deposed for meaningful safety

Likud materially supports Hamas, in my opinion specifically because of their propensity for violence that was useful to Likud's goals of sabotaging the peace process.

1. Increasing the violence and repression as a solution to terrorism hasn't been working for decades in Israel; it's unlikely that doing more of it would suddenly start working now
2. Your whole premise that Netanyahu is aiming to increase the safety of the Israelis is totally at odds with his actual behavior

mozz OP , 8 days ago

Is Israel government and military deranged enough to think they can go forward on their own?

Seems that way

I suspect that in usual fashion, when that approach blows up and they get shit all over them, it'll be everyone else's fault that it happened that way

mozz OP , 8 days ago

Would Israel get their hostages back in this cease-fire agreement?

Yes. Hamas wouldn't get all of theirs back.

No.

Wait, which agreement were you looking at? The Qatari proposal releases all the Israeli hostages during the second of three phases.

mozz OP , 8 days ago

Yeah. It doesn't take this army of super sophisticated technology to overcome Hamas's souped-up mortars and the occasional rock. Diplomatic support and UN vetoes is where the US really can make a difference, and does.

mozz OP , 7 days ago

I phrased my point a little poorly maybe -- I meant that from Israel's POV, I think US weapons aren't critical (and definitely not to fight against Hamas, although that's not their only regional enemy), but US diplomatic aid is absolutely crucial.

The issue that Israel's POV is working on a project to wipe out a civilian population so they can take all their land and pretend they never existed, and so US aid shouldn't be looked at purely through the lens of what's needed by Israel at any given time, is a pretty relevant addition to that, yes. 100%.

mozz OP , 6 days ago

How in the WORLD had I not heard of this