PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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606

Joined

2 yr. ago

Absolutely. I think the entire community benefits when we have 60 year old ladies with gardening tips, foodies discussing fine dining and recipes, pet owners with advice driven by twenty years of owning chihuahuas, and sports people talking about sports (okay, that one’s not so much in my ballpark, as it were, but it’s all part of having communities).

If it’s a community for Linux users, or ML folks (machine learning, not politics), or the otherwise terminally online and tech obsessed, I’m fine with the bar for participation being high. At that point we have a filter rather than a net. But if we want to displace (or at least be a serious alternative) to services like Reddit, we need to make the on-ramp and UX easy for people whose interests are interesting but don’t necessarily include technology beyond knowing how to click on the blue words. If someone can tell me that putting an aspirin in my rhododendron will make it spring forth like Athena from the head of Zeus, I don’t care if they know the fediverse from a hole in the ground.

Also, I made that tip up. Don’t do it, or if you do let me know if it actually works.

I think if we could get something like this and build an Apollo type UI around it, we’d accelerate adoption and some app builder would make a fair chunk of money. I’m not allowed to build apps, but I do hope someone takes this up.

This really has nothing to do with religion or politics - that’s just the trigger.

This person needs to be put into psychiatric care immediately and given the appropriate treatment as they are a danger to themselves and others. They should not be allowed to post a bond and leave custody. A medical evaluation should be performed, obviously, but this is clearly a psychiatric case.

I believe the Trump administration made the legal argument that anything the president does cannot be challenged if he did it in the belief it was necessary for national security, because that is the first and foremost responsibility of the president and the office itself is the ultimate source of that authority. I think it might have been when they cleared out the protestors in DC, but it was that kind of context.

What I’m wondering is whether that would give Biden the authority to order the arrest of the Supreme Court and members of Congress on the grounds that he believes they’re conducting a conspiracy against the United States and present a threat to the nation and the constitutional order.

Obviously, I’m just kidding.

Unless…

Thank you for this. I know these kinds of resources exist, and I even occasionally remember to make use of them :)

What I’m suggesting is that lemmy (and the community as a whole) would benefit from baking this functionality into the clients (including the web front ends if that’s a big chunk of the user base).

Discoverability is always a problem. Even centralized services such as Reddit have issues - I was still discovering new communities pretty much until the day I left after being on there since Alien Blue came out. It’s worse in decentralized communities because of the nature of the beast. Back in the Usenet days, it was considered a point of pride to know enough to find niche newsgroups, and even ones like alt.hack felt exclusive. Most of it passed around by word of mouth.

Even though the Usenet-like aspects of lemmy give it advantages over centralized sites like Reddit, I think we’ve learned enough over the last 30 years or so that we know user experience is absolutely critical if you want a popular service. I’m going to hazard a guess that when the big, well funded apps start to federate, they’re going to have those kinds of features built in. I’d rather see some of the smaller developers roll out features like that first, so that they can continue to be competitive (as AB and later on Apollo were for Reddit).

This is not going anyplace good.

Also, the hand movements look completely unnatural. It’s like that scene from 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy is shooting that spot and winds up holding two coffee cups.

Also, the woman suppressing a grin while talking about the war in Gaza was beyond disturbing.

And this is their most curated footage. This is their best stuff used to show off their work.

They haven’t climbed out of the uncanny valley yet.

I agree. I don’t know that I’d rank it quite as high as some other factors if we’re trying to find some function for “causal elements for human ecological success” or something like that, but there’s no doubt it was selected for and the degree to which we are good at it is a good indicator of its importance. Good call.

I think there’s a problem it introduces for users, particularly casual users (which I think we could use a lot more of).

The first problem is discovery. Discovery isn’t something that can be solved server side afaik without adding a unifying layer to act as an indexer, which is kind of feasible but not really in the federated spirit and would need client integration in any case. Discovery could be made better on the client side, but every client I’ve tried so far has no idea how to do results ranking. I’ll search for “politics” and the top result will be from a topic on an instance with zero posts and two subscribers. Some allow users to specify a sort order but miss results present on other clients, and the sort orders are pretty primitive and only allow you to choose one. I’m also honestly unsure how mainstream search engine indexing is supposed to work (eg “Toyota repair reddit”).

The second is content repetition. People (and bots) will frequently post the exact same content to multiple communities and multiple instances. This problem is exacerbated by the lower content rate, which leaves people browsing /all in case someone posted something interesting somewhere. Again, maybe this is something you could do client side with some off the shelf recommendation engine, and I think a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed, and even posts (on identical articles, for example) into a single displayed post, such that the conversation could cross multiple instances transparently.

Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.

For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.

Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.

You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).

Sources and methods are never compromised in these releases.

Second, one of the things they teach you in intelligence analysis is to not only read the facts that are being reported (and try to measure their accuracy), but to ask why they’re being reported. Not as in “Why is the NYT making this a headline” - that’s not what matters unless you’re doing media studies or sociology. I mean “Why is the government/organization putting this out there?”

In this case, it’s obvious. There’s a current narrative around the Russian war on Ukraine, and it’s being pushed by some American politicians and news agencies as well as foreign actors, and it’s being used for political effect. There’s perfectly justified reasons for skepticism from numbers published by both Ukraine and Russia for both fog of war and propaganda reasons.

The Biden administration has an active interest in maintaining US and international support for the war, and that’s in danger because of a perception of a lack of success. They need to counter that narrative.

I don’t have any reason to believe that these numbers are wrong - I very much suspect they’re largely right - but the political angle is why they’re being reported, while US intelligence estimates of other conflicts currently going on around the world are not.

I have a tendency to wait for seasons to be completed before marathoning them, with a few exceptions. The problem with that approach is that I can fall away from shows as new ones come out, and forget to circle back. Despite being a huge Trek fan (I can’t estimate the number of times I’ve rewatched TNG, DS9, and VOY), I’m behind on all of the new Treks.

I am a fan of Michelle Yeoh. She’s one of my favorite actors, and I’ll go out of my way to watch whatever she’s in. Stamets was a favorite character, and more often than not it was his plot lines that pulled me along into the next episode. I mean, I’m a biologist with mycophobia, and I still obsessed with his personal, romantic, and scientific journeys.

I just could not get into Burnham, though. One of the reasons I loved DS9 so much was that Sisko was about as close to a realistic military officer as Trek has come. I love Picard and Janeway, but Sisko was the only one who I felt could have been someone I knew during that stage of my life. There was still plenty of Trek going on, but when he got military, you could tell.

Burnham was the exact opposite. It was like every single decision point was where she’d do the least military and even the least Starfleet thing. I could throw around words like selfish or immature, but it wasn’t even restricted to that. And they were entirely broadcasted and predictable - I’d be watching and say “Oh, please don’t let her do X,” and sure enough she’d do X. This wasn’t a plot point or a flawed hero motif, it was built into the character.

I loved Milly. I loved Saru (love anything Doug Jones does). But Burnham was terrible, and the show revolved more and more around her. She wasn’t a femme Kirk or a woke Janeway. She was like a privileged 15 year old given command in a galaxy-spanning military/scientific/governmental organization.

I will make it back to the new Treks. I’ve finished all of my Taika Waititi shows, I just did my Nth rewatch of Schitt’s Creek and The Good Place, and I’m still a couple months away from redoing The Other Two. I need to scratch my sci fi itch. I just don’t know if I’m going to make it back to Disco before doing something else like SNW or Picard, or yet another pass through the old Treks.

For this, not really. This story just sounds more like a poor man’s Frank Abagnale than a super spy.

The absolute last thing most people involved in intelligence work want to be is “interesting.”

That’s a fascinating question. I am not sure about animal research on dreaming, but Thomas Metzinger is an experimental philosopher (for want of a better term) who studies the basis of the concept of the self as a coherent entity, and his work includes extensive research on phenomena like lucid dreaming, phantom limbs, and out of body experiences. I’m not talking about anything paranormal - there’s conditions under which people’s experience of perception and self become separated from our ordinary experience of “my self is sitting behind my eyeballs.” He collaborates closely with experimental psychologists and neuroscientists, so between his work and references you might be able to see if there’s a correlation.

Evolutionary biologist here.

I know this is a recurring meme, and it does have a basis in truth. However, in my opinion, it vastly overemphasizes a single aspect of early humans at the expense of other and more important distinct human qualities (and I’m using this term to also refer to our closely related species and ancestors).

First, the real distinction is sociality. Humans are the most cooperative species of hominid. As someone once said, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. This translates into being able to coordinate efficient hunting practices in a variety of ecosystems.

Second, and very related, is social learning. Other species can also exhibit social learning, but never to the degree humans do. Most species figure out things in evolutionary time - what counts as food, what counts as danger, the best way to do X, etc. Humans do it daily and pass it on to each other. We learn to kill prey by setting fires in grasslands. We develop tools and teach each other how to make and use them. These are all interlocking effects. The bigger our brains get, the more helpless our babies are, so the more we need societies, which creates increasingly complex social dynamics, which rewards more complex brains, and so on.

In short, it’s intelligence and social learning replacing learning in evolutionary time that made humans successful, possibly to the point of self destruction.

It really depends on what you mean by both terms. Was Tesla a scientist? Was he an entrepreneur? Neil deGrasse Tyson? 23 and Me co-founder Linda Avey and others had a background (BS) in biology and worked as a research assistant before going into business, and I’m sure some of their early hires were biologists with PhDs.

In any case, you have two related points of tension. First, most people we think of as scientists (that is, people who conduct scientific research in academia) have a different personality type than most entrepreneurs. They’re often less money-oriented and less people oriented. People who go down a career path that leads them to studying the Hox genes for forty years are not the kinds of people who go to business school.

The second part is that not a lot of what’s considered pure science is particularly marketable. Again, it depends on your definitions. Is materials science “science?” Does a materials scientist working at 3M count as a scientist? Does such a person working at a startup count as an entrepreneur if they aren’t part of the c-suite and don’t get involved in the business side of the business?

There’s obvious exceptions that work mainly around disciplines. Is a computer scientist a scientist? A lot of them are entrepreneurs. Biotech is a second example. Note that we generally don’t mean “biologist” here - these aren’t evolutionary biologists or ecologists. You’re not going to get funding for a startup that studies the family dynamics of the naked mole rat.

In short, it’s rare because there’s little overlap in personalities or fields of research. There’s certain applied sciences where it’s more common, as long as you’re willing to stretch some definitions a bit.

So, typically an employee of an intelligence agency has a diplomatic passport and is attached to an embassy or some such. It is considered generally unacceptable (at least in some countries) to have a cover as a journalist, but other private employment is allowed. Being an intelligence officer with a cover as part of an aid agency is generally not allowed, although that does happen, and results in things like vaccine refusals and the execution of medical personnel who are trying to eliminate diseases. I’m not going into specifics, but one of the places where that happened rhymes with “Wackystan.”

Anyway, the job of the intelligence officer is to recruit spies, like an admin assistant in some government agency. They generally don’t do the physical spying themselves, but they’ll use various approaches to get foreign nationals to send them files and such.

In any case, this person just seems like a cool con man. The absolute last thing someone involved in intelligence wants to do is attract attention (most of the time - some recent Russian operations in the US have been quite blatant), and this person was just having a great time.

Thank you, that was exactly the answer I was looking for.

I already donate to PP and the ACLU, but is there some kind of legal defense fund for women in this kind of position? Do those organizations have everything covered so it’s better to just increase donations to them?

I know there were a number of charities launching as well as independent activities helping women travel out of state for safe abortions, and I am just trying to get a sense of the best way we can put our money to use while we’re still working on reversing the political side of this.

Question for the legally aware:

I’ve seen many cases where the court will adjust jury-awarded penalties downward. A jury might find a chemical company liable in polluting a river and award the claimants $100M, and the court will adjust it to $5M.

The justice and potential for corruption etc aside, could the judge in a case like this and given an event like this increase the amount Rudy must pay over and above the $43M or whatever it is that’s being asked? Could the court say that the impenitent and repeatedly offending nature of Rudy merits additional penalties above and beyond what was asked for in the context of this case, or like with the Trump defamation case would it need a separate trial?

And that’s where the whole tri-omni approach starts to eat its own tail.

I have a whole shtick about free will not being compatible with either a materialistic nor a tri-omni worldview. I simply do not believe it exists, nor is it possible.