sh34r

I'd trust your instincts there. 9 times out of 10, it's not horseshoe theory, it's fundies in disguise. Fascism is syncretic. Christian fascists are more than capable of co-opting the vernacular of social justice for their radical agenda. These are the people who cancelled Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, for god's sake.

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism:

""" The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition...

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism. """

If Italian fascists could copy material from Gramsci (a famous contemporary communist), then fundies are more than capable of using feminist language in their quest to undo the 1960s sexual revolution.

It wouldn't be the first time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

The US is also extremely segregated, and a substantial percentage of black Americans live in those confederate states that have not expanded Medicaid yet. Texas has a higher maternal mortality rate than Iran.

Geography is a greater determinant of health than race. People die a full 7 years earlier on average in Mississippi than California or Massachusetts, and 6 years earlier in West Virginia.

There's a clear correlation with income here, but one can easily argue that both income and life expectancy are downstream of policy. Red state policies are simply bad for your health and your wallet.

I kept the same PCP at an Ivy League affiliated medical center. I had to see a couple specialists, no issues whatsoever with them accepting insurance. It might vary by state, but that's not my experience whatsoever. Private insurance plans are far worse in this regard.

It's really just mental healthcare and dentistry that are basically impossible, but again, not much better with a private health plan.

Take the blinders off, stop pretending you're not getting robbed, and maybe we can fix it. There is no silver lining to private healthcare. You're not getting better care. Social determinants of health are very real, but they're driven by those 9 states without Medicaid expansion dragging the averages way down, a lifetime of bad care before the ACA, and also that medicine can't solve the many problems caused by poverty.

We would all be better off in literally any other system. Everyone thinks they're an above average driver. Everyone thinks they'll live longer than average. The truth is, you're just not that special. Unless you're a politician that gets to go to Walter Reed, or you have a wing in the hospital named after you, you're getting the abysmal standard of care that everyone gets.

If you're unemployed, you almost certainly qualify for Medicaid in 41 states. It's the best insurance money can't buy. It covers everything. You pay for nothing. In fact, it's illegal to charge you for anything. Balance billing doesn't exist. You cease to be a mark for the healthcare racket if you can engineer your income to $0 on paper. The vast majority of medical providers will accept it. It is the best insurance I've ever had. If it were possible to get private insurance for $0 premiums, or pay $500 a month out of pocket for individual Medicaid coverage, I'd pick Medicaid every single time. I cannot overemphasize how much I despise the private insurance racket. The only reason we don't have a public option is because it would destroy the private racket overnight.

Mental healthcare is a different story, but it's not any better with private insurance. Every therapist or psychiatrist in the insurance racketeer's provider directory is either dead, moved out of state, or not taking patients. "Ghost networks," they're called...

The worst insurance I've ever had was at a FANG, via United Healthcare. It covered nothing. Hardly anyone accepted it, apart from the on-site health clinic. It was worse than a university health plan, for god's sake. As to quality, you say it's the best in the world, but the fact that the US now has a life expectancy lower than China, Cuba, and Albania determines that this is a lie.

Unpopular truth on this forum: the healthcare system in this country is owned and operated by organized crime entities. It is completely illegitimate. It consumes 19% of GDP of the richest country on the planet, and Americans are some of the least healthy people outside of active war zones. Unless you're using your doctor as your Xanax dealer (John Mulaney explains how that hustle works: https://www.tiktok.com/@funkytownmc/video/722624028419819447...), this system sucks for you too.

I would be shocked if the Mexican cartels weren't deeply involved with United Healthcare and all these other corporate gangsters. This industry is the greatest crime of all time.

I agree with you broadly, and despite their abhorrent reputation for sourcing unethical animal products, it does seem that you're right about McDonald's fish. However, on a larger scale, one of the hidden ethical pitfalls is that a lot of wild-caught fish comes from international waters, where there are no regulations whatsoever, or are imported from Asian countries with little to no regard for such things. Japan infamously still allows whaling. The global fishing industry is also rife with modern-day slavery.

Threads (1984) has the same effect.

On the bright side, it's a great antidote for anyone who's falling too deep into the prepper rabbit hole. YAGNI.

There are several doomsday movies that predate The Road, were better at the time, and hold up far better today, IMO. Children of Men (2005) would be my top suggestion. The rare movie I've gone back and watched multiple times. You know why it's good? Because the central premise didn't come true (humanity is infertile), but we live in that dystopia now anyway. It's like Black Mirror but for the police state. It didn't go into hyperbole like The Road or The Day After Tomorrow. It was a realistic, slow-motion apocalypse. Going out with a whimper instead of a bang.

However, Children of Men is admittedly not as bleak as The Road, so not a fair comparison. If you really want a film that produces bottomless despair in the viewer, I recommend Threads (1984) instead. It was produced by the BBC on a shoestring budget, and yet it's still a better film. I can't say I recommend it, but if you do watch it, the ending is on par with Requiem for a Dream for being memorable and filled with doom and horror.

The Road just wasn't very good IMO. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand? Same writer, different genre, but excellent.

The only similarity is that China holds corporate executives accountable. The idea isn't to backdoor every company like the CCP or the NSA and leave them sitting ducks, it's to make them close the backdoors.

The country I'd point to for inspiration on this is actually Israel, a country even less deserving of praise than China in my opinion, but hey, good ideas can come from bad places. There's tight integration between the Israeli private cybersecurity sector and the Israeli military. Israel had a very prosperous tech industry, at least until the present constitutional crisis. The IDF trains cyber soldiers for four years, then the private sector hires them.

You can't solve the cyber warfare problem without the military. Capitalism is structurally incapable of doing it alone, any more than Detroit's manufacturing plants could've defeated Japan without the military nationalizing them. Cyber policies and products without the military's direct involvement is like guns without bullets.

> You might as well be asking F1 drivers for tips to help you commute to work.

Boston drivers: "hold my beer."

But Halliburton got to plunder Iraq's oil, and that was all that mattered to Dick Cheney.

I think it'll be a lot shorter than 100 years. It didn't take 100 years for the British empire to collapse. It showed its weakness during WWII, and the Suez crisis put the old dog out of its misery a mere 10 years later. Chernobyl preceded the fall of the USSR by only 5 years.

How long after COVID will America fall? China's already brokered peace in the Middle East between our best friend and our worst enemy in the region. The Universe has a sense of humor. Given the historical precedent, will we mark the end of the US empire with China negotiating peace in occupied Ukraine or in occupied Palestine?

I'm clearly the furthest thing from a patriot, but I am fairly certain the history books will place our collapse somewhere between the Soviet Union and the British Empire on the atrocity scale. If we outdo Churchill's genocide in India, it's going to involve nuclear hellfire, and then there won't be any history books to remember it by anyway.

> MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.

In the grand scheme of American violations of human rights, MK-ULTRA barely even registers. I can think of a dozen worse things we know are happening right now off the top of my head. Trump and Biden's internment camps, the tent cities in every US city, kids as young as 12 working in slaughterhouses, solitary confinement in prisons... I'll spare everyone from this turning into a rant.

Good leadership is more art than science.

My critique of Taylorism was not directed at individual managers, by any means. It's firmly at that bean-counter view of the worker, as an input of "human resources" to be minimized at any cost. You'll note that Taylor was not the first person to call himself a manager.

If you want to see what Taylorism applied to war would look like, look no further than Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The spreadsheets said we have more ammo than Stalin did in WWII! It's impossible that they were all looted and all we have left are Mosins from the museum! What do you mean, sanctions prevent just in time manufacturing? We replaced all our professional soldiers with independent Wagner contractors on work release from prison and conscripted children. Why do they keep deserting? No one wants to work anymore!

You'll also note that the most famous military book of all time was not called The Science of War, but The Art of War.

> Can the lab be sued out of existence for damages?

It's in China, not America. Come on now.

The CCP might remove the lab from existence, but they're not gonna do it with a lawsuit.

I don't believe professional engineers are held liable for a legacy bridge that they can't get funding to repair, or a project that was built in violation of their specifications by a corrupt contractor. They're only held liable when the engineering work is flawed.

Security is generally considerably more challenging with containers than VMs.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/#docker-daemon-attac...

"Running containers (and applications) with Docker implies running the Docker daemon. This daemon requires root privileges unless you opt-in to Rootless mode..."

If they can log into the server and run docker containers themselves, you've probably inadvertently granted permissions that could be escalated to gain root access, if they were a sufficiently skilled adversary (or their user account is compromised by one).

You typically avoid this particular problem by having a CI/CD pipeline build, deploy, and run the containers. No one has permission to do this except the pipeline. Grant devs ssh access to the containers, using appropriate network rules to limit access to trusted IPs, and ideally behind a jump box in a VPC.

VMs give you a lot of OS-level protections for free. For one thing, getting root access to a VM shouldn't compromise the host or other VMs (in the absence of a 0-day, anyway).

Unfortunately, it sounds like you're pretty far down the Docker rabbit hole already. It's probably much more trouble to switch now than it's worth.

I'll take it a few steps further than you. Legislation won't fix it. Until the military is authorized to start up a new branch of the military to redteam corporations, nothing will ever change. If they don't patch immediately, throw the entire C-suite in Gitmo under suspicion of being enemy combatants.

Does that sound hyperbolic? It really shouldn't. These negligent corporate parasites are by far the greatest national security threat we've ever faced. bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US as they have. China will hand us our asses on a silver platter if we ever go to war with them, because these rootless global capitalists have betrayed their country with every budget they've approved with 100x more given to stock buybacks than infosec. Taiwan better start reading Mao's little red book, because we don't stand a chance.

Throwing the CISO in prison because the CEO/CFO won't fund infused isn't going to change anything. It's just going to make it so no qualified person will ever take the CISO fall-guy position, only exacerbating the problem further. It's not the CISO's fault.

Taylorism is a current problem. All "modern" management pseudoscience boils down to the same ideas Taylor espoused at the turn of the century.

His name lives on because this man was absolutely reviled by his contemporaries, even among his own class. He was investigated by Congress in 1912, and they ruled in favor of his striking workers at Watertown Arsenal, banning Taylorism at their workplace. Let that sink in: this man and his dehumanizing practices were so widely hated, Congress ruled in favor of workers in 1912. Today, in 2023, Congress won't even give rail workers a damn sick day. Taylorism was viewed at the time as an affront to the Protestant work ethic, and to God himself, for that matter.

Henry Ford was a contemporary of Taylor's, and if you know anything about Ford, well, he wasn't a saint, to put it mildly. And yet, we call these hated ideas "Taylorism" because even Henry Ford wasn't as awful as Taylor. It took another century of disempowering labor in this country to get to this place today, where the worst excesses of Taylorism are everywhere you look, Where delivery contractors are contractors for the world's richest man and are forced to piss in bottles. Where your boss is tracking your every move with spyware, and has bugged your home under the guise of "work from home."

We speak of management pseudoscience not as a wicked and depraved ideology now, but as a legitimate field of study, like math or history. What an unbelievable farce.

"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating." -Zizek

I suspect Apple would be perfectly content if they never sold another Mac Pro. I suspect most Mac Pros manufactured are for internal use. Their main products don't have a GPU, so neither does this. It already had an F-U price. Whatever customers use them for, it's an irrelevant side hustle for Apple.

I'd say they should just kill the product off to stop all the incessant whining about what a ripoff it is, but I'm sure they'd counter that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

If you're locked into containers as the solution, the answer to your problem is docker-compose. But verify that assumption first. Why containers and not VMs? VMs solved this particular problem years before anyone had ever heard of Docker. You don't need containers if you're just splitting up a single-server monolith. I don't know if I'd call them "friendly," but basically every VMM has a GUI. Docker's the easiest way to solve the runs-on-my-machine problem, but Vagrant isn't much harder.

k8s is a non-starter for this use case. So incredibly overcomplicated, and what did you think you were getting for that complexity? It's for large-scale deployments. You have one server. Resume driven development is getting out of control...

If you don't have a dedicated devops team, or you're not using a managed k8s service like AKS, just don't. Please don't. Stop spreading the madness to these beautifully simple environments. KISS: keep it simple, stupid. Running k8s because Docker CLI is too hard, is like learning to fly a F-16 because riding a bike is too hard.

I suspect it isn't so simple to fix the first example in the way you describe, because Python's a 30+ year old language with functions as first-class citizens. If we went back in time and built it from scratch to remove this wart, I'd vastly prefer we require all default kwargs to be immutable types, rather than allocate a new empty list with every function call. But doing that today would be an unacceptable breaking change.

The second one isn't a real issue IMO. It exists as an example of how closures and scoping work in Python, and as a warning to beginners to avoid doing un-Pythonic things with them. Python closures are late-binding. FWIW your JS example behavior works as you expect in Python, if you used a generator instead of a list comprehension, but why not just pass the variable as a parameter to your anonymous function instead? This is a silly, contrived example. Language designers can't fix stupid.

> subsequent ones a different exception? Like reading from a closed channel.

StopIterator is raised when you call next() on an iterator with no remaining elements. That's how it's defined. https://docs.python.org/3/library/exceptions.html#StopIterat...

Why no `close()`? Let me rephrase: why can't you use `with` on a generator? That's in their Design FAQ. TLDR: because it's an uncommon use case for generators, and if you really want to, there's ways to do it.

https://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-don-t-generato...

Changing the behavior of `for`, `in`, etc to call close() when the iterator is consumed, might seem simple, but do a little reading on coroutines and `yield from`, and you'll probably be convinced otherwise. Note that it's exceedingly rare that a Python programmer would want to use those two niche language features, but they're at the core of how certain standard library modules are implemented.

As for the last one, this is one nitpick I'm fully on board with. I always make a habit to break up boolean expressions, to avoid having to keep track of every language's boolean evaluation idiosyncracies. If I rewrote Python, I'd axe that chained boolean nonsense altogether because it's the kind of thing beginners will shoot themselves in the foot with over and over again, but it's another breaking change that would never be accepted.

Basically, don't use language features you understand, do a little defensive programming, and these gotchas aren't gonna bite you. JS, on the other hand, has numerous warts that are entirely unavoidable and far more frustrating, but even a broken clock's right twice a day.

I think there’s nuance to be had here. Terms have been overloaded, and individuals aren’t necessarily acting in bad faith. ML can be considered to be a subset of AI.

That being said, ML is extremely boring to me, and I really do think a lot of the research is an enormous grift. Hop on the bandwagon, read a stats book, flagrantly plagiarize it, submit to CS journal that no statisticians read, publish and don’t perish, rinse, repeat.

It feels like society has spent billions of dollars on bad academics continuously reinventing applied statistics over and over again, but now with Big Data and a brand refresh! It’s like a whole generation of academics watched one too many terrible Hollywood remakes. It broke their brains, and now they’re only doing remakes too.

They ran out of statistics content to steal, so now the latest and greatest thing is plagiarizing classical AI works from the late 20th century and calling it “reinforcement learning.”

It’s all very frustrating. We could’ve funded a Manhattan project for fusion power, but instead thousands of our most brilliant people are wasting their time and humanity’s carbon budget to create the most powerful spambot ever.

I have zero interest in putting where I’m at anymore on the map than it already is. Such places are vanishingly rare in the US, and incredibly common in Europe. It’s very frustrating.

However, in the interest of shaking everyone off my trail, I will mention that there’s many affordable, walkable towns and cities outside Philly and Chicago that were built up 100 years along the commuter railroads. In the absence of zoning-related tyranny, transit oriented development happens naturally. Look for towns and cities that were built before 1945, before we paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

I don’t like the idea of giving Reddit mods even more power, at all. I’d much rather see users empowered to share Usenet style kill-lists and whatnot. But I have a bad feeling that my desired Goldilocks zone between 2023 Reddit’s overmoderation and 2023 Twitter’s hyper-radicalization engine is very narrow. Social media moderation might be an intractable problem at scale.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m really rooting for Reddit to crash and burn. I miss the old internet…

It’ll be interesting to see how Blue Sky shakes out, if and when it opens up to the public.

I think it’s an asymmetric problem across areas of study. Including within math — there aren’t many amateurs who are going to try their hand at algebraic geometry, but number theory tends to be like catnip, because many wicked problems are very simple to state.

Math is not so different from computer science in that it seems relatively approachable to a layperson. But there are relatively few mathematicians out there. That same level of spam is being filtered by much fewer people.

To me, it’s akin to why the Linux kernel devs operate the way they do. No GitHub issue page, no Slack, no Discord, banning topposting and web email providers. It’s all based on old school mailing lists, because there’s orders of magnitude more amateurs than kernel devs and they don’t have time for handholding the unwashed masses.

Anyway, I think there’s some middle ground to be found between this extremely burdensome process to submit a paper for publishing, and making it as easy to publish as making a forum post…

I strongly believe the tech just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to make a modular laptop, but making some ten billion smartphones (and the constant drive to make them ever thinner and smaller) made it so we can pack far more power into a smaller space.

Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements.

People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.

Reddit is Digging its own grave. Eternal September awaits all the old school forums that still remain. But perhaps that decentralization will be a good thing in the end.

I think the network effects of Reddit are a lot easier to undo than that of Twitter. There is little core functionality that didn’t exist in forum software from the Naughties.

> I always assumed that this was a deliberate source of friction, slightly raising the bar of entry so as to discourage a certain sort of submission.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s intentional gatekeeping. There’s a reason why many papers are being “published” on Arxiv and foregoing all this boxticking.

The whole publishing process is fundamentally broken. Aaron Swartz (RIP) had the right idea all along. Get rid of the middlemen sucking up millions of dollars by paywalling government funded research.

It’s been proven time and time again that a shocking number of studies can’t be reproduced and that the traditional peer review process just isn’t working. It’s a good old boys’ club putting a stamp of approval on their friends’ work and keeping the outsiders away.

When it comes to Math though, I do have some sympathies. There are so many cranks that think they solved Collatz or a millennium problem and don’t even know what they don’t know. It must be exhausting to sift through all that noise in a volunteer, unpaid position. These shibboleths might be a necessary evil.

Stability and update frequency are inversely correlated. It’s largely an unavoidable trade-off.

It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you.

Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons).

I’m just stating the obvious here, really.