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nednobbins

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nednobbins ,

“Worse than expected,” depends largely on the individual and what they were expecting. It comes down to expecting one thing and being disappointed in the outcome.

People who expected him to be an ally of immigrants are disappointed in his border policies.
People who expected him to fix Trumps “easy” trade wars are disappointed in his trade policies.
People who expected him to support labor are disappointed in his ban of the railroad workers strike.
People who expected him to champion human rights are disappointed in his support of the IDF.

He may have met your expectations and the expectations of the majority of Democrats. Biden’s 2020 victory depended on several groups who only showed up because they hoped that he would address their specific concerns.

TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up.

The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!

nednobbins ,

It would depend on how well we can control it.

Ideally the material would be completely nonreactive for as long as you’re using it and then instantly degrade into component elements.

The faster things degrade, the higher the chance that they’ll degrade when you don’t want it to.

nednobbins ,

Why is that better? It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.

nednobbins ,

What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.

nednobbins ,

It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.

nednobbins ,

FOIA requests generally don’t involve hackers or leaks. The act exists because citizens insisted that government provides visibility into its inner workings.

What is the equivalent for Google, or any other private company?

nednobbins ,

They could have left out, “for LGBTQ+ people” and it would have been just as accurate.

nednobbins ,

It’s true. Hamas is posting rookie numbers. They’ve got to up their death count by around 10x before they can be in Israel’s league.

nednobbins ,

Lindt is pretty good as packaged chocolate goes. You can always find some fancy artisanal chocolatier if you can afford to spend a few bucks per chocolate but for a HS student Lindt is pretty high tier.

nednobbins ,

That’s the sister. Anon sounds like he has limited means. No need to make fun of them for being poor.

nednobbins ,

The girls themselves are mostly “all for it” when it’s people roughly their age. There are exceptions but most girls that age see 30+ year olds as lame old dudes. Most 30+ year olds aren’t going after high school girls either. That’s why we all cringed at David Woodson’s line in “Dazed and Confused”.

The people who don’t want them to “exert this right” are the responsible parents, friends and community who know that a 30+ year old dating a teenager is creepy AF.

The few people who actually support this are mostly rationalizing.

nednobbins ,

There’s not much to discuss. The vast majority of the time it’s creepy grooming and we all know it. It’s technically legal and there may be cases when it’s genuinely a case of consent and mutual attraction but those are the exceptions.

Attempts to find the exact line are futile. “Half your age plus seven” is a rule of thumb, not a clear border.

nednobbins ,

There is no single reason. It’s the sum of many reasons. They’re too many to list exhaustively but when we see a concrete example the vast majority of people come to the same conclusion on creepy vs appropriate.

When there isn’t a clear line, trying to define one is misleading. You can always find some couple somewhere on earth with an arbitrarily large age gap where people will agree that it’s the result of informed consent. People then try to make the argument that this justifies all relationships with that age gap even though most relationships don’t have whatever extenuating circumstances made the one example palatable.

Large age gaps are creepy. Whenever someone has to ask if a particular age gap is also creepy the answer is almost always, “Yes.”

nednobbins ,

I honestly never understood the attraction to Seinfeld.

There were a few good jokes in there but the whole show was about them being assholes and proud of it.

They’re selfish, judgemental and entitled. They’re constantly mocking and bullying other people and each other. The final episode even lays it out explicitly.

Shows like “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, “Married… With Children” or “Breaking Bad” have various unsavory characters but we’re invited to reject these flaws or at least identify with them as flaws.

Seinfeld is shameless about being an asshole and pretends the rest of us are just too dumb to understand his genius.

nednobbins ,

That’s exactly my point. None of the characters in these shows are role models. We can sympathize with the Bundy’s or their neighbors but the show makes it obvious that nobody wants to emulate them. We can understand why Walther White did the things he does even if it’s clear that he shouldn’t have. The gang in Philly is all about showing us the worst possible decision in any given situation.

Seinfeld, on the other hand, celebrates their behavior. It canonizes our intrusive thoughts as though they were a more authentic form of expression.

nednobbins ,

I think you have a fundamentally different view than I do on the characters. That’s clearly true :)

Even when the characters behave reasonably I always felt that they were motivated more by the potential for public embarrassment than by moral concern.

It’s hard for me to think of George as a fundamentally nice. This is the guy who shoved children and elderly out of the way when he saw smoke, goaded an alcoholic into relapsing because he felt left out, constantly lied to get advantage in situations and even tried to kill a guy out of jealousy.

nednobbins ,

TIL about John Wolf.

At the time, it never would have occurred to me that each one was different or that there was beatboxing involved.

nednobbins ,

You pick your OS based on vibes?

nednobbins ,

Thank you! I can finally fill the void that vibeless OSes have left in my soul.

All joking aside, it does raise a good point.

There are many things that can be objectively analyzed and it might not be a good idea to choose them based off of vibes. When you’re designing those things it’s still a good idea to take vibes into account because people will ignore all that and put googly eyes on their 3-D printer.

nednobbins ,

I may just be to cynical at this point but I don’t trust that at all. It’s just a pause.

Biden has structured that block as a “Type 2” decision. It creates the illusion of standing up to Israel but it allows him to instantly and unilaterally completely reverse it as soon as public attention has shifted.

Given history, I expect that’s exactly what will happen. Once the IDF murders enough people in Rafah, they’ll be “done”. Then they can pretend that they’ve turned over a new leaf and definitely won’t do any more genocide. Biden will congratulate them and resume all the weapons shipments, including sending the stuff that’s currently being held back.

Short of restructuring this as a “Type 1” decision, there’s little reason to think this is anything beyond theatrics.

nednobbins ,

What support did he provide to the protests?

nednobbins ,

They’ve already started shooting into Rafah. That was the safe zone they told everyone to go to.

What push or shove are we waiting for? The start of the full scale invasion? The conclusion of a full scale invasion? Is there some number of civilians deaths that would be too much?

nednobbins ,

Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to the timestamps.

nednobbins ,

General Ripper has entered the chat.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J67wKhddWu4

nednobbins ,

The obvious solution is to attach the flamethrower to the drone.

nednobbins ,

Only a little.

Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.

The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.

This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.

Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.

Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.

nednobbins ,

Time for some wild conjecture!

Bytedance and the CPC both know how unlikely it is that TikTok will be allowed to continue operating in the US. Despite what they’re saying, I don’t think they actually believe they have any chance at winning that lawsuit.

They tried to stop the law from passing but now that it’s been signed they’re shifting strategies. They’re going to go all in on using TikTok to paint the US as authoritarian and hypocritical. Their primary targets will be young people outside the US.

Looking around the world I expect this will have a lot of traction in developing countries. If you look at wonky foreign policy publication you’ll see that the diplomacy nerds have spent the last decade or so worrying about developing nations realigning with China. That will probably accelerate.

They’ll probably also have some success with younger Americans. Older American’s will probably be unconvinced.

It obviously won’t have any affect on China’s ability to buy data on US citizens from any number of data brokers. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if China has at least some access to data from Five Eyes.

Chinas ability to influence opinion probably won’t change much either. We used to call that sort of tactic “information warfare” or “psychological warfare”. Sending messages to an opponent, adversary or rival in order to confuse or demoralize them has been going on for millennia. Nations constantly work to develop new methods to do so. Tiktok isn’t the first or last of such tools and any large nation has a host of other such options at their disposal.

nednobbins ,

I’d go even further than that. There’s a whole network of tools and organizations that many countries around the world use to influence and spy on each other.

China has a whole portfolio of tools they can use for that stuff.
The US has a whole portfolio of tools they can use for that stuff.
Many of those companies are very comfortable working with both countries, or anyone else who’s willing to sign a big enough check.

nednobbins ,

Maybe. China probably has more official channels to interact with Bytedance but we have hard evidence that the US does the same thing.

FOIA provided a lot of insight into various clandestine interactions between US government agencies and private companies. There are a bunch of NGOs that get almost all of their funding from the US.

We also just reauthorized warrantless wiretapping.

The bigger issue is that Meta doesn’t really care. Nobody needs to force them to conform when they can just pay them. As far as Zuckerberg is concerned USD spends just as well as RMB.

nednobbins , (edited )

Absolutely!

The CPC has board seats on many Chinese companies, including Bytedance. You can’t get more official than that.

The CIA engages in information operations both domestically and abroad. Those activities are often in violation of official US law. So they have to be done covertly and we only find out about it decades later after someone manages to push through a FOIA request.

The fact is that US, Chinese, Soviet (back when that was a thing), British, German, etc are all spying on each other. There’s a big spy vs spy thing going on in Africa. The Germans got really grumpy when the US wiretapped their phones a few years ago.

On the surface it may seem like “the authoritarian CCP” is engaging in an extraordinary amount of skullduggery, subterfuge and other clandestine activities but it’s just standard operating procedure for any country. Don’t take my word for it. There are a bunch of retired US intelligence officers saying exactly the same thing on the record.

nednobbins ,

It’s a general problem in real estate now; commercial and residential.

Everyone who was able to refinance to low mortgage rates locked them in. That means that just about anyone who wants to roll over a real estate investment has to take a huge hit in the process. Those rollovers are normally a big part of liquidity and they’ve all dried up.

nednobbins ,

I’d love to see some data on the people who believe that AI fundamentally can’t do art and the people who believe that AI is an existential threat to artists.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a large overlap between the adherents of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions and I wish I understood that better.

nednobbins ,

I’m going to try to paraphrase that position to make sure I understand it. Please correct me if I got it wrong.

AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually need but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?

Is that correct or did I miss or mangle something?

nednobbins ,

I get that and there are a lot of jobs that people used to pay for and no longer do.

The entire horse industry has mostly collapsed. I couldn’t get a job as scribe. With any luck, all the industries around fossil fuel will go away. We’re going to pay less to most people in those industries too.

nednobbins ,

It’s an awkward phrase but I was trying to stay as close to the original vocabulary as possible. I think the point still stands if you replace “not-actual-art” with illustration. People couldn’t get what they were looking for so they paid more for the next best thing. Now they can get something closer to what they’re looking for at a lower price.

nednobbins ,

That wasn’t intentional.

Would it be more accurate for me to change “want” to “need” or the other way around?

nednobbins ,

I can live with that.

I’d support a UBI so that anyone who wants to can just make art for their own fulfillment. If someone wants AI art though they should be allowed to use that.

nednobbins ,

OK. With that change we get:

AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually want but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?

Is that accurate?

The rest of your comment seems to be an other thread so I’ll respond separately.

nednobbins ,

Covering the second half:

I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.

I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.

What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.

There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.

The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.

nednobbins ,

Focusing on those 57 companies doesn’t really address that issue though.

These companies sell fossil fuels. If they actually reduce those sales in any significant way we’d still have to figure out how to get all their customers switched to other fuel sources.

There’s a huge demand for their product so when we go after one of them the others take their place and they’re collectively too big to take on all at once.

The most successful strategy seems to be to make them obsolete. We’ve finally been getting to the point where many renewable energy sources are cheaper than fossil fuels. The other big motivator is fear of the control that oil producing nations might have. There’s some element of individual action but it’s more about government policies and market pressure. Take China or the EU, for example. They’ve been shifting heavily away from fossil fuels. Some of that is likely due to the increasing domestic and international concerns about pollution. They’re also both net oil importers.

That may be boring stuff to most people but it really gets the attention of governments that don’t want to be at the mercy of oil exporters. The kind of attention that gets meaningful laws passed.

nednobbins ,

It’s one thing to refrain from commenting but supporting Israel makes it clear that Germany learned nothing.

nednobbins ,

OK It sounds like there’s only one metric we can use to evaluate how much China pollutes.

The metric is widely used by various academics, government agencies and independent organizations. We have no better metric and that metric says that China doesn’t pollute that much.

That leaves 2 possibilities; the metric actually provides no information at all or it still provides some information.

If it provides no information AND we don’t have anything that does (ie a better metric) that means we literally have absolutely no information at all about how much China pollutes at all. That means we can’t make any intelligent claims about how much China pollutes or how much they’re fudging the number because there’s no comparison to make.

If it does provide some information we’re left with a situation where all of the imperfect information supports the claim that China doesn’t pollute much.

Either way, the evidence as you’ve classified it, doesn’t support the claim that China is, “one of the planet’s most polluting countries,” which was the original claim of this thread. It is, by definition, a baseless conjecture.

nednobbins ,

I agree that CO2 is an imperfect measure and you don’t seem to be making the claim that CO2 has an SNR of 0 (ie it carries no information at all). We seem to agree on the core of your central three paragraphs so I won’t comment on them.

You’ve stated multiple times now that you don’t know any better measures than CO2. So even if there are other measures they’re just as bad or worse. Given this lack of any better metric, on what verifiable evidence are you basing any of your conclusions?

I’m assuming based on the time you responded to me that you are in China so maybe you can elucidate me on how I get this wrong.

The same way you got your conclusions about China’s pollution wrong, by misapplying evidence and jumping to conclusions.

It’s interesting that you should phrase your question that way. The cheap answer would be to point out that you’re not using “elucidate” correctly. You’re missing a preposition. It’s also odd to use “get” instead of “got” here. A corrected version of your sentence might be, “…maybe you can elucidate to me how I got this wrong.” It’s cheap in the sense that personal attacks are easy and do little to advance a conversation. It would be just as silly of me to use your grammar error as evidence that you’re a foreign national as it is for you to use the timing of my posts as evidence of my location.

You might then suspect that I might still be a foreigner who’s studied too much English grammar. That would be correct. It turns out that when I speak my native language, other native speakers can sometimes pinpoint the exact district in Vienna where I was born. These days, none of my neighbors speak German. They love the Sox and rock their “Dunkies”.

Just as in the case of estimating China’s pollution levels, cavalier use of evidence leads to erroneous conclusions.

nednobbins ,

I can certainly agree that there is no evidence to suggest that China is “one of the most polluting countries in the world”. I haven’t seen a shred of evidence to support that claim. It is entirely baseless.

On the other hand, the claim that China’s per capita pollution is lower than that of most industrialized nations is supported by evidence. It is the best evidence we have too, unless you’ve discovered a better metric in the last few days.

A claim that imperfect evidence is equivalent to no evidence is baseless and will lead to erroneous conclusions.

nednobbins ,

You’re saying this as if the pilot was just hotdogging and was totally ignorant of the risks. That’s pretty unlikely.

The Chinese government has been pretty clear about what they think of “freedom of navigation exercises”. If Chinese bombers were flying around the coast of the US you can be damn sure we’d be scrambling fighters to crawl up their butts too.

Those pilots got orders and carried them out successfully. You may disagree with the orders but it’s silly to accuse the pilot of lack of professionalism.

nednobbins ,

As I understand it, a “weapons lock” is mostly about deliberately pointing your detectors at a target. The target may notice a spike in radar sweeps but they don’t actually know what the other vessel is doing with that radar information.

It’s kind of like when someone starts staring at you really hard. You get a feeling that they’re probably up to something but you don’t actually know if they’re coming to take a swing at you or if it’s just RBF.

From what I’ve read it’s something that happens fairly regularly. If you want to warn an other military vehicle without escalating to warning shots you flash some targeting sensors at them.

My guess is that the fighter and bomber were targeting each other and that a bunch of land based radars on the Chinese coast joined the party too.

edit: looks like I was wrong en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_lock-onIt seems that “lock on” as we know it from movies and video games isn’t a thing with modern military equipment. I suspect the signal intelligence folks still have some thing that tells a pilot, “data suggests that someone may be planning to shoot you”.

nednobbins ,

I think the US government considers active radar jamming to be an act of war but I’m not aware of any statements or treaties that would make targeting itself an act of war. As I understand it the US and China do it to each other fairly regularly.

nednobbins ,

They explain why in the article.

From China’s point of view, the US regularly sends planes thousands of miles from its coast to go to harass China. They view it as the equivalent of when an other kid starts waving their hands in your face and saying, “I’m not touching you. I’m not touching you.” They feinting back.

Both the freedom of navigation exercise and the response are messages. The US is saying, “We can project force all the way to your front door. If push comes to shove, we can start blowing up your shit.” China is essentially responding with, “You got yours and I got mine. You wanna fuck around and find out?”

That’s what it boils down to. It’s an extremely angry conversation between superpowers.

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