GeneralMayhem

I don't think you're disagreeing with me. The comment I responded to says that calling Trump voters ignoramuses was -

> trying to find an easy way to avoid the conclusion that the majority of them are sane and rational people who liked what he was saying.

My point is that to vote Republican in 2024 you must either be insane, irrational, or outright evil. It doesn't make you that way, it reveals that you already were.

> Many people who voted for tribe X voted for tribe Y a few years back. Have these people irredeemably changed in your eyes?

I think that Biden->Trump voters, or Obama->Trump voters, are incredibly stupid or short-sighted. There is no good reason to have done that. If you were a consistent Republican voter you might instead be a selfish racist piece of shit, but if you've switched from the Democrats in recent years the only option I have is to assume you're a gullible idiot.

And to be clear, yes, I think this is specific to the time we're in. I don't think I'd say this in 2000, for instance - it was pretty obvious that W was not going to be a good president, but he was not an incomprehensible choice, and you could imagine people who thought Gore's brand was tainted by association with Clinton's various forms of griminess. But Trump and his merry band of lunatics are not simply "the other tribe". They are an obvious and unprecedented threat no matter what your values are, unless your only value is breaking shit for the lulz.

As found elsewhere on this thread, the rate is based on trade deficit. Trump believes that having a negative trade balance with a country means that they're cheating somehow, as opposed to meaning that you just buy a lot of manufactured or raw goods for them.

And no, that does not make any sense, and you're not missing anything. He believes this because he's a fucking idiot. He's aggressively racist, comically petty and thin-skinned, and overtly authoritarian, and as far as I can tell actively wants to permanently destroy American science and civil society out of spite, but he's also really, really, really dumb. In this case, he's managed to combine his powers to take a goal that's born out of racism and xenophobia and then implement it in the most idiotic way possible, and somehow the result is even worse than the sum of its components.

If you're sane and rational and decided that you liked Trump's promises (with "rational" implying that you were actually listening to what he'd do, and not blindly accepting his nonsense about "I'll make everything perfect immediately!"), that leaves only the possibility that you're evil. Or a Russian operative, I suppose.

His promises on things he can actually do are exclusively for things that are wantonly destructive and incomprehensibly stupid (tariffs, mass layoffs), hateful and incomprehensibly evil (mass deportations without due process), or straight up treason (pardoning J6 insurrectionists, breaking alliances). If you voted for this person, you have to either be so stupid that you believe his obvious lies, or so evil that the things that aren't lies are things you like.

The Central Valley is an incomprehensibly vast area of incredibly fertile soil, due to its history as a seabed and collection basin of all the mineral runoff from the mountains. It also has California weather, which means one of the longest growing seasons on the planet. Crops grown there grow faster and easier than anywhere else to begin with, and then on top of that you get to grow them twice in one year. It's really kind of unfair when you compare to farmers trying to scratch out a crop anywhere else.

That said... it's not like California is the only place it's possible to grow almonds, or even to grow them profitably. It's just the most profitable place, especially if you're exporting to a US- or Western-centric market. And as with everything related to the environment, that's because the profits are centralized while negative externalities are socialized. We all pay the price of the reservoirs depleting and the aquifers running dry - maybe not monetarily, yet, but in the form of LA needing to ration water in homes, and in the form of possibly causing earthquakes [1] - but only a small handful of people collect the benefits. And because water is available in practically uncapped quantities for such an incredibly cheap price, they have no incentive not to do so.

How much should society value a change in the risk of The Big One happening in the next decade by, say, 1%? Or a similar increased risk of thousands dying of thirst in an increasingly hot summer? Or even just a extra few weeks of water rationing being in place every other year? Probably a lot more than what the almond farms are collectively paying for their water.

I do actually believe that markets can solve a lot of problems - but in order to do so, pricing needs to include the entirety of the transaction. Right now, water - especially bulk use of water - appears cheap, because our future selves or children are unknowingly kicking in part of what's being paid. Non-renewable resources like this need to be a lot more expensive in places where they're scarce, or else they're going to become extremely expensive at some point in the future.

[1] - https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/can-climate-af...

Go panic isn't really usable as catch/rethrow because it can only be done at function scope. To make them useful for that pattern, you need a scoped `try { }` block where you can tell what part failed and continue from there. Either that, or you need lots and lots of tiny functions to form scopes around them.

One thing that `if err != nil { return err }` lets you do, which panic/recover doesn't, is annotate errors with context. If you're throwing from 5 layers deep in the call stack, and two of those layers are loops that invoke the lower layers for each element of a list, you probably really want to know which element it was that failed. At that point, you have two options:

1. Pass a context trace into every function, so that it can panic with richer meaning. That's a right pain very quickly.

2. Return errors, propagating them up the stack with more context:

  for i, x := range listOfThings {
    y, err := processThing(x)
    if err != nil {
      return fmt.Errorf("thing %d (%s) failed: %w", i, x, err)
    }
  }

One could start by not violating every labor, environmental, and financial law all at once. Does it make more sense that every business in the US has the constant attention of every federal agency? Or that Elon has done some particular things - for instance, things he's constantly bragging about on his own social media sites - that would tend to arouse suspicion, if not serve as direct evidence, that he's in violation of obvious regulations?

It's going to dramatically depend on department. EPA? Probably a passion, but also not a lot of other places to work for those exact jobs. IRS auditor? Maybe; maybe that's the job they could get, or maybe it's a choice between that and making $$$ at a big-name consultancy. 18F? Almost certainly a choice of patriotic duty, because those people could walk into any big-tech job and make multiple times their salary.

Most of these workers had better-paying jobs in the private sector. 18F existed specifically to hire top tech-industry talent to work on federal-government modernization and efficiency projects. The people there almost certainly took a pay cut because they wanted to do with that was good for their country.

No shit. Vandalizing the government has been the only goal of the Republican party since at least 2016. They're just taking the masks off now.

Yes, you are being too cynical. There is no way that anyone who chose to work at 18F - a place that exists to make government actually more efficient, that has a reputation for quality and execution, and that doesn't pay nearly as well as the private sector - is at all okay with Musk's slash-and-burn version of "efficiency". This kind of message exists to point out the difference: if you actually care about efficiency and good governance, you wouldn't possibly dream of firing these people. Hanlon's razor can't even explain it; even if you're an absolute moron you wouldn't do it. The only possible explanation is actual malice.

Because they were designed and implemented by a team in Zurich. I'm not joking, that's literally the reason.

Yes... that's what I said

Trump is very obviously a far-right president. That's an incontrovertible fact that even he wouldn't disagree with. It is also a blatantly true fact - as evidenced by their words and actions over the last several decades, and especially since 2016 - that the right wing is hostile to competent, professional civil service. Pointing out that such people are going to make it impossible for a place like 18F to do its job isn't partisan. Failing to point it out, or equivocating over "well both sides have their points", is in fact obscenely biased toward the far right. That's what "sane-washing" is: describing the clearly insane in the same legitimizing language you'd use for normal disagreement.

If a neutral observer calls you a fascist, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're biased or compromised. You might just be a fucking fascist.

While I agree with you, the "parasitic" act I was referring to was specifically taking over the USDS. The image I had in mind was the fungus that mind-controls insects.

Trump doesn't have the authority to create new federal agencies, so he claims to have repurposed the authority of an existing one, retaining only the shell for appearances. I don't think that can possibly be constitutional - it entirely defeats the point of Congress having that authority, and is effectively a line-item veto if the law can say "this agency will exist for X purpose" and the president can simply ignore the "for X purpose" - but it doesn't matter if neither Congress nor the courts are willing to do anything about it.

18F - and its sibling the US Digital Service, before it was eviscerated to become the host for the DOGE parasite - is exactly the sort of thing you would create if you want government to run efficiently. Creating room for well-meaning technical experts to offer their expertise across the government, without being locked into a lifelong public-sector career path, is a fantastic idea. Even at its worst, it's taking work that could otherwise go to beltway-bandit contractors, but in-house, with all the cost and friction reduction that that implies. At its best, it's able to spot cross-agency opportunities that no other agency would see on its own.

If you're still on the fence about giving the current administration the benefit of the doubt, dismantling these agencies based on zero analysis is perhaps the clearest possible evidence that "efficiency" is not the primary goal, or in fact a goal at all.

That link doesn't contradict the person you're replying to. Actual orthogonality still has a probability of zero, just as the equator of a sphere has zero surface area, because it's a one-dimensional line (even if it is in some sense "bigger" than the Arctic circle).

If you're picking a random point on the (idealized) Earth, the probability of it being exactly on the equator is zero, unless you're willing to add some tolerance for "close enough" in order to give the line some width. Whether that tolerance is +/- one degree of arc, or one mile, or one inch, or one angstrom, you're technically including vectors that aren't perfectly orthogonal to the pole as "successes". That idea does generalize into higher dimensions; the only part that doesn't is the shape of the rest of the sphere (the spinning-top image is actually quite handy).

But the training data isn't open...

I agree that open source doesn't mean open assets, but neither does open assets mean open source. You could make a linguistic argument that the training data is part of the "source" of the model (as in, from whence it came), but in any case the point is moot because neither the training data nor the code is open.

> If I write a program, then obfuscate it and then release the obfuscated code under an open source license, would you consider it open source(I would)?

I wouldn't. Most definitions of open source say something like "in the form used for editing". You can release a built binary under an unrestrictive license, but that does not mean that you've opened the source. It's literally the plain meaning of the words: the source, as in where the thing comes from, needs to be open for it be meaningful.

It's not a purity contest, it's a clarity contest. If Meta and Deepseek want to operate the way they have been, where they release baked models and whitepapers, that's fine - and you're right, it's certainly more than they're obligated to release. They just shouldn't be calling it "open source" when the source is literally not open.

Games like that, or the open-source clones of commercial games that require original assets to play (e.g. OpenXCOM), actually give a very clear analogy here: open source does not mean open assets. The software code is under a separate license from the data it processes. Emulators like Dolphin are kind of in this situation too - the program is open, the data it processes is not.

And that's fine! It's still valuable to have access to the source code, even if the "batteries" aren't included. Of course, if you really want to call it an open source model you should include the source for the data scraping/cleaning stages too; then the only thing missing would be the compute time and risk of acquiring dubiously-legal inputs.

I personally prefer a taxonomy like:

* Open weights: you can download the artifact and run it locally, not just use it through an application like chatgpt or an API.

* Open source: the code that created the artifact is provided in the same format that the authors used to work on it.

* Open data: the dataset that the source code was used on is available for download.

All three of those could be individually licensed or released, for 8 possible combinations. In the analogy to games, they would correspond to the licenses on the retail binary, the source code of the game, and the original uncompressed art assets or Blender projects, respectively.

We knew this was going to happen. That doesn't make it acceptable. The correct response in this situation is not to say "well, they were mean to him, therefore he gets to hit them back". It's to notice that he committed crimes, too many to count, and came very close to actually facing the bare minimum of consequences for them - and now he's throwing a fit and turning himself into a dictator so that that can never happen again. There is no tit-for-tat, both-sides-do-it in this situation. It's a criminal continuing his criminal enterprise, but now even more blatantly.

> Russia Hoax

There was no Russia "hoax". There are a few basic facts that no serious person disagrees with:

1. Russia very clearly interfered in the 2016 presidential election, in a number of ways, including internet disinformation and an actual hacking campaign to steal and then selectively leak DNC internal documents.

2. Said interference was blatantly in favor of Trump.

3. At least some members of the Trump campaign were aware of and encouraged, if not actively participated in, those attacks. Several high-ranking campaign officials, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and George Papadopoulos either pled guilty or were convicted at trial for related felonies.

4. According to Robert Mueller, a lifetime Republican and respected investigator, as detailed in the entirety of volume II of his report, Donald Trump personally obstructed justice - that is, perpetrated a cover-up - in an attempt to prevent American law enforcement from determining the truth or extent of Russia's involvement in his election victory.

Had Trump not been president, he would have been indicted at the time. Had Republicans in Congress not been either spineless or implicated in the same corruption, he would have been impeached and removed from office. Had he not spent four years stacking the justice system with unqualified political hacks, or had Merrick Garland had a proper grasp on the severity of the situation, he would have been indicted and convicted immediately upon leaving office.

You can find people on the left making statements that are not in evidence, like "Trump and Putin conspired together to..." or "Trump didn't really win in 2016 because Russia hacked the voting machines", etc., etc. Many of those things go too far. But the idea that there was Russian interference in the election, and that the Trump campaigns were not just beneficiaries but willing participants in it, is not in any way a "hoax". It's as close to a proven fact as it is possible to get.

> raided Trump’s properties

With a duly granted warrant, after a lengthy period of requesting that he return stolen national security documents peacefully.

> refused to release any details about his assassination attempts

I don't know what this is possibly referring to. The FBI gave statements when they learned things - see e.g. https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/fbi-pittsburgh-special-age.... There just wasn't that much to know.

> I just think it’s hilarious that no one thought of Trump won that he wouldn’t go after them.

Well yeah, but again, that's not because he's justified, it's because he's both a criminal and a petty, vindictive egomaniac. It's unprecedented for the FBI to spend so much time attacking a president, but that's because it's unprecedented for a president to spend his entire campaign and time in office doing nothing but constantly commit crimes.

If we lived in a society governed by functioning rule of law, there would be no way for Trump to "go after" FBI agents. The mere idea of firing someone for having investigated you fairly in the past should itself be disqualifying from any position of power. Of course, Trump is now going to instruct the FBI and the rest of the DOJ to actually go perform witch hunts, so the next Democratic administration (presuming there is such a thing) will have to fire his appointees and unwind all of those investigations... and the media will dutifully report on it as just a thing that happens now between political parties, and the neutrality of the justice department will be a thing of the past.

Not the person you're replying to, but I often use "fractal complexity" to describe problems with a certain character, and I (and I assume this poster as well) mean it in the more precise sense: as Wikipedia puts it, fractals have "detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales". Fractal problems have complexity at every level of resolution; they're tricky in broad strokes, and if you zoom into one area it's internally complex, and if you zoom into any sub-area it's internally complex, and so on, forever.

Most of computing is this way if we're honest about it; the space of possible sub-disciplines of software engineering is nearly infinite, as is every possible subfield thereof, or sub-sub-field, or...

> what does the left mean by "free speech".

One difference is that the left doesn't generally advocate for absolute free speech, so it isn't hypocritical. I think the left is generally more open about the areas where free speech shouldn't be absolute - namely, where it causes manifest harm, especially to underprivileged groups - whereas the right will use it in a doublespeak way where they claim to be free-speech absolutists while actually favoring only their own ideology.

But also, the main difference is that the left wants to protect speech that is factually true and punish lies, whereas the right wants to protect lies and punish truths. So even if the strategies were very similar, I wouldn't actually care all that much - you can still differentiate and make a value judgment. Scientists should lose federal grants if they publish made-up or obviously biased research; they shouldn't lose federal grants if they publish results that are inconvenient to the current president's fragile masculinity.

> does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology?

No.

I'm guessing you're trying to not-so-subtly talk about gender identity/trans people. If you're trying to say that "there are only two biological sexes" is a true fact that the left suppresses, then (1) it isn't a true fact (according to literally the entire medical community), (2) even if it were, it's not relevant to gender identity (nobody questions that trans women are biologically male, it just isn't relevant), and (3) the left position isn't that you can't say such things, just that saying it makes you an idiot and likely a bigot, and it should be treated like any other hate speech: if it ends up causing harm (e.g., by inciting physical attacks on trans people, or getting them fired from their jobs) then there should be legal consequences (the harmed people should be able to sue you, it should be a violation of equal-employment laws, etc.).

> I'm not aware of any censorship regarding fossil fuels.

Have you looked at any news reporting lately? The Trump administration just spent half of last week stripping every mention of climate change from every government website, and threatening any research organization that takes public money against looking into it.

> the Sierra Club and Thunberg are able to say whatever they want in this country

The Sierra Club is a mess and a neutered shell of what it used to be, so nobody really cares what it says.

Greta Thunberg has been personally mocked and threatened by Donald Trump, so I don't think it's fair to say that she can say whatever she wants - I think she'd be in very real danger if she came here.

When Trump (or Republicans, generally) say "free speech", they patently do not mean what the rest of us mean by free speech. They mean:

1. Everyone should be able to say horrible things about sexual and racial minorities.

2. Everyone should be able to deny scientific facts that are inconvenient to Republican ideology, the fossil fuel industry, or any of their friends.

3. There can be no consequences for (1) or (2), even when it obviously contradicts other laws (libel, incitement of violence, fraud, etc.) or oaths (to truth, to the constitution).

4. Stating a fact or opinion contrary to (1) or (2) is in fact trampling the free-speech rights of right-wingers, and is therefore forbidden.

They don't want free speech. They want free speech for themselves, and enforced consent, if not assent, from everyone else.

Today's Russia is not communist in any way. It's a far-right-wing autocratic kleptocracy, where all power is held by a single individual and those who have personal favor with him, all wealth is managed through a cycle of corrupt state-sponsored ventures, and all cultural identity is wrapped up in tradition and faux-masculinity. There's not even a pretention of left-wing influence; it's a fully fascist state.

The USSR was obviously similar in practice for most of its history, especially under Stalin, but it still pretended to maintain the trappings of a communist structure. And at least the USSR made it clear what the rules were: it was an unabashed command economy, with property owned by the state, and economic decisions flowing through the party leadership. The Putin/Trump version where there's a de jure market economy but de facto control by the ruling party is a different kind of corruption incentive - it's much harder to challenge what theoretically isn't happening.

> It isn't possible to implement incoherent policies

If you assume that the goal is to implement a policy, no, it's not possible. But that's never the goal with such chaos. The goal is to make it unclear what's allowed or not, so that the real answer becomes: whatever the current ruler favors is allowed, and whatever he dislikes is disallowed. "Woke ideology", like "globalism" or "cultural Marxism" before it, means nothing, which means it can mean anything.

Also relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew....

It's incredible, really. I thought the main point of being a billionaire was independence. "Fuck-you money" taken to the extreme. You've "won" society, now do whatever you want. Make things better for humanity by funding novel research. Or sit in a cave and build the best orgasm machine ever. Whatever. I think Larry and Sergey have the right idea, but in very different ways: Larry has completely disappeared to go live on a private island, and Sergey gets to be as weird as he wants and still pops in to work on whatever tech project he finds interesting. I don't think having billionaires who live completely separately is a good thing for society, but those responses at least make sense to me.

Zuckerberg became rich and famous for being a smart guy who didn't do the bullshit that other people wanted him to. Remember "move fast and break things"? And now instead... he (and Musk, but he's probably a true believer; and a number of others, but to lesser extents) want to... kowtow and suck up to a weak, blithering idiot? Profess the value of caveman-tier "masculinity" ideology? Never mind how obviously contradictory it is to believe in both "men should be strong" and "Donald Trump is what we should want in a man" - what is the point? Why is this what he wants to do with his power and wealth?

Yeah... there's no such provision. The only mentions of the president in that bill are:

1. In the definition of a "covered company". The bill itself already saus that TikTok is covered; this is only a provision to add other companies to the list.

2. In determining what qualifies as "divestiture" to have the ban lifted. That's described as happening when -

> the President determines, through an interagency process...

"TikTok wrote me a big check and said nice things about me" isn't an interagency process.

Moreover, just in case we've forgotten, *Donald Trump is not currently the president.* He has literally zero power until tomorrow afternoon. He can't grant pardons, he can't lift law enforcement decisions, and he can't write executive orders. The promise of an executive order, even if such an order would be lawful tomorrow (which I can't understand how it would be), is not a legal document that can make something legal today.

Okay, fine, let's play this game.

What did Trump do to get TikTok back online?