PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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I used to be a big fan of RCV (and pretty much anything is better than FPTP), but I’ve become convinced that STAR voting is better than RCV.

There’s no “algorithm,” it’s not confusing, it’s mathematically better, it doesn’t suffer from any of the traps that ranking-candidates systems suffer from. Basically you just give a star rating 1-5 to each candidate and whoever gets the most stars wins. Easy peasy.

Supreme Court, later: No one ever told us we would be in the crosshairs

How could this have happened, we were the good ones

Yeah, almost to an excessive degree. To me it's fine, it just means the designer has room to grow in terms of their skill at getting the right balance, but also it's going to be a little bit of personal taste. This video includes some pretty interesting discussion of the balance between spelling things out, making sure that everyone can notice and enjoy them, versus making things opaque knowing that you'll leave some people behind but making it that much more special for the people who found them "all by themselves" without any kind of prompting.

I think a lot of it is just that it is one manifestation of the collapse of every type of interpersonal obligation and performance responsibility in the modern American world.

Bear with me for a second here: There is this story about a guy who cut holes in the ceiling to spy on people's private moments in rooms in his hotel. It was incredibly wrong, and eventually he was caught, but one of the things that makes the entire story fascinating was his disgusted observation of just how careless, ugly, and apathetic people are to each other in private moments. Not just in sexual context, they're just not that aware or caring across the board, to this shocking degree, when you think about how short life is and how much the people around you and your impact on them matter.

I won't try to summarize the whole thing. It is fascinating. I don't think every culture is like this. But I definitely think American culture is like this.

Almost as if it is only mildly interesting

TIL.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unique definition 3 includes examples like "very unique" and "fairly unique." So it's incorrect only if you assume that American usage is wrong and British usage is right, I guess. According to the Cambridge Dictionary I think you are right about how it's used in British English.

The picture of their special donation toilet with its dramatic lighting is one of the best things I've seen all day.

Yeah. It's not a perfect game, it has many issues, but it is fun and exciting and it does something very very different, very successfully. I'm reminded of the Zero Punctuation review of Psychonauts basically saying that its number one good point was that it was something genuinely mad and original, in contrast to the sea of imitation that is modern gaming, and for that alone hooray.

Yeah. That one was on my list to play but I haven't checked it out yet, I have heard similar things about it.

All I can say is you're missing out... I can see that it's a type of game that may not be for everybody, but it is honestly probably the most unusual game I have ever played in my life and I'm enjoying it a lot. I almost did the same as you did, I beat Leshy one time and then continued messing around with it sort of out of curiosity... and then the whole actual fuckin' game started.

It just made me pick a file from my hard drive, made me a card based on it, and then told me if I let that card die, it's going to delete that file. This game is nuts man.

Yeah. Probably my least favorite brand of it is when someone wanders into the comments to say, "I heard Kamala Harris wandered over to Gaza personally and shot some Palestinians just for fun, and then stopped by Tel Aviv to engage in some light foreplay with Netanyahu before getting back on a plane home stopping only to personally cause capitalism and so that's why I don't think I'm going to vote for her, I just don't feel comfortable personally" and then reacts with "Whoa whoa whoa that's only what I heard, I don't really know, I don't know why you are getting upset with me, I'm not even sure it's true to be honest, I don't really pay close attention to politics" when I get irritated at them about their type of engagement.

Yeah. There are genuine types of sophisticated trolling which involve pretending to be overtly polite while refusing to engage in any respect with the substance of what the other person's saying, using politeness as a shield to sneak bullshit and bad-faith engagement into the discourse while making the other person look unreasonable if they start getting irritated about it.

In about 100% of cases where I've seen someone accused of "sealioning," though, it is just that they are trying to engage with the conversation and ask for sources, if you have a certain way of approaching disagreement, that's kryptonite to your argument and so the only response is to start whining about sealioning.

Yeah. I strongly dislike this whole classification that politely asking someone to back up what they said, or asking basic questions about it, is proof that you’re a terrible person and grounds for immediately quitting the conversation.

It also strikes me as relevant that the same people who say it is a sin, also tend to have no problem with overtly toxic behavior like slinging extreme abuse at anyone who disagrees with them or otherwise being an asshole.

Gee, I wonder why it might be important to have working OPSEC in the highest levels of your strategic decision making. Well, that ship has sailed, and probably cannot come back.

(Not that I'm in favor of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, I'm just saying shit happens when you are incompetent. There is a deliberate confusion between saying "nuclear program" to mean nuclear activities like medicine which are perfectly normal and which lots of countries do, which is all Iran was doing with their uranium throughout all the middle of the 2010s, and nuclear activities trying to build a bomb. I don't know how much of what they're doing is the second thing, although it seems likely that it's nonzero, but I know that some is the first thing and Obama was able to talk them out of all of the second thing, and they agreed.)

I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish.

Yeah, you're right, I wrote my language backwards. I just fixed it. "You could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish" is what I meant.

1. Yeah, this is interesting. I'm a little skeptical of any analysis that proceeds immediately to statistical analysis of one particular assignment of "letters" with the implied boundaries to the letterforms, without apparently dealing with the nontrivial problem of figuring out how likely it is that any particular shape is a particular "letter" or where the boundaries are. But you could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that's of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).
2. You need the http:// in front of your link, it's being processed as a relative link compared with this document
3. Why is Leisure Suit Larry at the top of this paper

Edit: I backwards

The most compelling hypothesis I saw for the language explanation was that it was Manchu with an unusual romanization. It's such a rare language (basically dead language at this point) that it would make sense why the statistics line up for a real language, but people haven't managed to decode it. Then add to that the fact that it's not super clear what glyphs are stylistic differences and which ones are alternate glyphs, and it's not even clear where to split the forms into different glyphs because they're all connected, and it kind of makes sense.

This video is the most compelling case I've seen for it not being a real language. Like I say, it's kind of sad to think it might not have a real decoding.

Earlier statistical analysis had shown it had some definite similarities to a real human language, it's not just gibberish or an amateur hoax. I have to say I'm a little bit sad that it seems like it's turning out it was just sophisticated gibberish.

It was always thus. Wars are incredibly profitable, the sides don't really matter if your goal is to get rich off them.

And storing the source and such for every dependency would be bigger than, and result in the same thing as an image.

Let's flip that around.

The insanity that would be downloading and storing everything you need, wrapping it all up into a massive tarball and then shipping it to anyone who wants to use the end product, and also by the way assuming that everything you need in order to rebuild it will always be available from every upstream source if you want to make any changes, is precisely what Docker does. And yes, it's silly to trust that everything it's referencing will always be available from whoever's providing it.

(Also, security)

Docker is like installing onto an empty computer then shipping the entire machine to the end user.

Correct. Because it's not capable enough to make actually-reproducible builds.

My point is, you can do that imaging (in a couple of different ways) with Nix, if you really wanted to. No one does, because it would be insane when you have other more effective tools that can accomplish the exact same goal without needing to ship the entire machine to the end user. There are good use cases for Docker, making it easy to scale services up as was the original intent is a really good one. The way people commonly use it today, as a way to make reproducible environments for ease of one-off deployment, is not one. In my opinion.

I've been tempted into a "my favorite technology is better" pissing match, I guess. Anyway, Nix is better.