jordanb

> I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!

There were all these theories like Comparative Advantage that people would trot out to point out that, if you don't like outsourcing, not only are you ignorant and backwards you're also probably racist.

This is exactly right. The gift economy that Open Source is part of is incompatible with the extraction economy AI represents.

Guess this is the logic for SPCX bond trading at junk valuations?

> they brought in management that was more interested in 'doing management. than making money.

Boy it'd be tragic if these guys felt like they were over their heads, decided to "hire some experts" and ended up with MBAs.

Real bummer I have their manual lathe and mill and have made a lot of things it would have been impossible to make without the ability to machine (even at small scale their machines could do).

One reason why I bought sherline is the company was still in business and creating so many accessories.

I guess I'll be trying to buy stuff off of eBay or something like I would have been doing had I bought Chinese stuff.

Speaking of which does anyone know the details of their small 60 degree carbide inserts? I assume that don't make those themselves.

Not miniskirts but:

https://myairmanmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Nellis...

Anyway in the 1960s the navy was making movies like this:

https://youtu.be/rUKcHe0-m_I?t=234

> so sexist and misogynistic

It doesn't really seem that sexist for a 60s show. There's definitely a ton of male gaze, much like the miniskirts in TOS. OTOH the men are also in tight fitting clothing as well, and just like TOS it has the women in positions of power and authority which was progressive for the 60s.

While the show is campy as hell (in a fun way) many of the plotlines are extremely heavy and dark, like the episode where Striker has to choose between his duty and saving his son's life. Or the episode where his marriage falls apart because he's working too much.

From the perspective of Striker the show honestly shows the destruction of a man. He's left with nothing in life but his job, which also tortures him.

> And I find it cool there was never an in-universe explanation for the purple wigs.

I saw an interview with the costume designer (a woman FWIW) and she liked the idea of the purple wigs both as both a sign that fashion is more flexible in the 1980s and also that the wigs maybe play some practical purpose on the moon. The moon women are in some scenes on earth and they're not wearing wigs.

The silver miniskirt/leotard moon suits the women wear with removable leggings were supposed to be incredibly sexy of course, but also the designer was playing around with the idea of "modular" clothing that could be "reconfigured" for different contexts.

The fishnet shirts the submariners wear is likewise supposed to imply something both practical and highly modern. Of course, talking about male gaze the women in the submarine wear an undershirt under the fishnets whereas the men don't!

This caused me to go on a bit of a deep dive.

99LB (the German version) has the baloons getting released and the generals deciding to treat it as an opportunity for a show of force blowing them up intentionally.

99RB, on the other hand, has the EWS confusing them with a threat causing the system itself being the source of the attack.

The message between songs is different, the German version is a warning about the wrong people being in charge of the doomsday machine whereas the English version is a condemnation of the doomsday machine itself.

Interestingly the band was not satisfied with the English version, mainly because they wanted to be a pop band and not a protest band and they thought the English version was too "on the nose" in its condemnation of MAD.

Personally I grew up hearing 99LB on the radio but thinking about the lyrics of 99RB since I don't speak German. 99LB was more popular even in the english speaking world because it's better performed but we all saw it as an anti-MAD protest song which 99RB definitely is, but 99LB is not quite.

99RB has some really great lines missing from 99LB:

   The war machine springs to life
   Opens up one eager eye 

and

   Call the troops out in a hurry
   This is what we've waited for
   This is it boys, this is war

Understanding the lesson of the Guns of August was a big part of the anti-MAD/nuclear disarmament movement during the cold war: if you build a doomsday weapon eventually you will use it. A country does not spend as much effort and money as the European powers spent preparing for war without eventually going to war.

Using the same logic (important diplomats dead or retired or disgraced) you could say that firing Bismark caused the war.

If the top diplomats had managed to avert the Serbia crisis then the war would have been delayed until the next crisis.

The fundamental problem is Europe had built itself a civilization-strattling war machine with no "abort" button and put the start button on a hair trigger (the interlocking treaty system).

The basic problem is that they had built a domesday machine in Europe, which was the mobilization schedule.

After the Franco Prussian war people realized that the next war would involve massive armies full of mobilized (conscripted) men and the country that could mobilize first would win. Countries spend decades planning for this by manufacturing enormous stockpiles of uniforms, giving their entire male population military training, etc.

But the mobilization schedule for even the fastest country was still measured in weeks, but this was a process where days count. Basically once the decision was made to mobilize millions of people across an entire modern society would leap into action transforming itself into a marshal society. Millions of people getting called up, trains full of equipment going everywhere.

Turning off a mobilization that was in progress was fairly difficult to conceive of, so once the decision was made the flywheel would take over, but decision to mobilize had to be made in a pressure cooker environment where hours mattered.

The death of the duke wasn't the "cause" of WWI it was the starting gun for a race where the horses were all waiting impatiently at the starting line.

Also 99 luftbaloons which was about a kid releasing some party balloons in Germany which confuses the EWS and causes WWIII.

Or the War Games movie and the Norad training mistake that inspired it.

"It's still there" only in a technical sense because it's being buried by the automatic slop machines.

It used to be that, no matter what you want to do, there's a video on youtube of some guy who knows what he's doing showing you exactly how to do it. It could be, like, compressing a rear disc brake cylinder on a car or matching fiberglass gel coat colors, or carving a statue out of marble.

Theoretically those videos are still in there somewhere, all 15 years old at this point, but you'll not find them with youtube search instead you'll find a million AI slop videos no matter what you query.

I think there's a statuary limit at 150 million because there must be an "emergency military reserve" but the caverns start collapsing at 70 million.

Are the round things brine ponds? They look like floating roof tanks

"Axon is Flock but worse" will be the next big fight as police departments are pulling a fast one and saying "we got rid of Flock" by switching to Axon.

More like "go woke because you've run out of ideas." The only "woke" thing about Whittaker was that the doctor was female, something they would have done in earlier episodes (in fact, did do) and wouldn't have made a big deal about it.

But they had no reason for people to watch Who by the time you got to Whittaker, and the show should have been cancelled already but it was making too much money, so they treated her like a Cousin Oliver and made the fact that she was the First Female Doctor (not even true) into a huge thing because they had nothing else.

Maybe Capaldi ended on a high note. I was done with the show after the moon episode and quit watching. I couldn't keep suspending disbelief after that. It wasn't just one bad episode the whole thing felt tired.

Capaldi was a great actor and it was nice that he got some good scripts (I really liked the one where he was in Doctor Prison, great concept), but his run felt to me like a show running out of ideas.

I didn't watch the Whittaker doctor. Heard it was awful and wasn't surprised. I eventually saw the pilot and it was indeed, awful.

This person may be an expert but I have no way to assess that because this low-effort garbage comment provides absolutely no evidence their background and no effort to back up their claims.

Most of this comment, after saying I'm "not informed" just repeated everything I said in my comment with less details.

This seems to be a comment where someone started with a prompt of "no ur wrong" and had AI elaborate it out into something less juvenile.

It fell apart in the Capaldi era. The "kill the moon" was the "jump the shark" of neu-Who

I once changed a person's mind on flock cameras by showing them the More Data music video.

A huge part of the Soviet period before Stalin was the civil war and minimal efforts to do anything other than fight it ("war communism"). After that you got the NEP and things going traditional.

Stalin pushed classical and actually within the soviet union Stalinst buildings were considered the best. These are called Stalinka.

Khrushchev embarked on a massive post-war building campaign in an effort to improve living conditions within the USSR by providing millions of new housing units.

These were modernist mid-rise and high-rise buildings and were designed for mass production and efficiency above everything else. These were regarded as considerably lower quality buildings than the Stalinka and were called Khrushchyovka. The Krushchyovka were the classic "commie blocks."

I actually think this is a big part of nimbyism. People know that whatever is built is going to make the neighborhood uglier because they have no faith in architecture, so they start opposing everything.

I think Cal's point is that while dogs may do these things it reduces to a set of behaviors where maybe 90 percent of them are beneficial to the dog-weedwacker system and the remaining 10 percent are really unfortunate.

We can't really know the dogs inner life so we just kinda have to reduce it to a set of behaviors selected stocastically.

The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker or what it's doing on its back.

So when the guy puts the weedwacker on the dog and the dog predicably does dog things and that results in disaster the guy isn't able to clutch his pearls and say "I guess the system broke containment!"

Cal Newport has an analogy to "putting a weed wacker on a dog's back to mow your lawn." The dog will wander around the yard and it may mow the lawn, but the dog will also chase after birds or run up to visitors for pets and the weed wacker could do a lot of damage.

It's not the weed wacker's fault or even the dog's fault when someone got hurt, it's the fault of the guy who put a weed wacker on a dog and let it run wild.

OK understood. But you understand this makes them sound like the type of person who doesn't believe any of the "worldly concerns" are worth addressing because "the end is near" right?

Yes El Niño creates sheer in the tropical Atlantic inhibiting tropical cyclone formation in that area

The problem is the "AI Safety" people seem entirely focused on a sci-fi "the computer is a vengeful god" plot and not at all on the AI talking people into suicide or ruining children's educations. This makes them seem unserious and out of touch.

They can get a "government mandated freeze" on the grounds that "ASI is at hand" then they IPO promising to deliver right after the freeze ends and you, lucky investor, will be able to take advantage of the pause to get in right before this thing roars past Pluto!

Dragnets have been constrained on both fourth and fifth amendment grounds. It's not merely the inconvenience of being stopped and questioned that makes a dragnet illegal, it is also an illegal search.