ttctciyf

Yeah, TFA concludes that the whole range of scholarly thought on why the Iraq War happened can be boiled down to two schools of thought: "security" (part of a grand coherent plan to keep Americans safe) and "hegemony" (part of a grand coherent plan to spread American ideals and values).

There seems to be no extant scholarship adopting the view it was just an unfortunate outgrowth of, well, call it the politics of expedience following the tragedy of 9/11, for example, which merely utilized the notion of "grand coherent plan" for PR and window-dressing purposes, without entailing the actual existence of any substantial grand coherent plan.

The "cultural turn" section at the end holds out some hope for less entrenched scholarship, amusingly describing such marginalized views as "stovepiped [see: 1] from mainstream scholarship".

1: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/the-stovepipe

> The sooner you kill this beast within yourself, the sooner you can get to the real work of creating something that the market itself will validate

Highly anti-mimetic then, so long as you're committed to entrepreneuring and being validated by the market. Wait, what?

I think you're off by a couple of decades. The propaganda blitz got underway in the 30's. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger for example, or consider Prohibition (of the highly toxic and dangerous consciousness altering substance alcohol.)

Somewhat related, the anonymously sourced and unprovenanced document "PROTON, CLEARWATER and Lexis-Nexis"[1] provided to cryptome August 2013 in the wake of the Snowden revelation of "parallel construction" - though not itself from Snowden as far as we know - has the following:

> All members of the Intelligence Community have access to LEXIS-NEXIS. [...] All domestic law enforcement has access to LEXIS-NEXIS, its a fundamental investigative tool. IRS, DOJ, Treasury, Local PD, Sheriffs Office all have a LEXIS-NEXIS access or the means to pull data from them.

> [...] Imagine your a citizen in New York and you get surveilled by one of the numerous surveillance technicians the NYPD has fielded since 9-11 , a quick look-up via mobile device or WiFi and they know who you are now.

> So, a Special Agent or analyst simply runs the selectors in PROTON and CLEARWATER, then runs those names or other biographic/vital information again in LEXIS-NEXIS, all that data related to the TARGET is exported in Analyst Notebook format, those files are imported into the Analyst Notebook application and...viola!...a relatively complete social network and biographics of the TARGET. That could be you of course.

> [...] The DOJ and Intelligence Community access LEXIS-NEXIS through a VPN and a proxy (government). A DOD proxy is registered to the Virginia Contracting Office, but it's a non-logging proxy so, good luck in your discovery. LEXIS-NEXIS has no idea of the individual accessing it's database and, according to the spokesperson, does not maintain logs of government clients. A subpoena cannot discover what is not there.

"PROTON" and "CLEARWATER" are explained as follows:

> PROTON is a storage and analysis system of telecommunications selectors at the TS/SI/FISA/ORCON/NOFORN level of classification and handling. PROTON is the program name as well as the name of the technology. It has been described as "SAP-like", and I suspect that PROTON was once a DEA special program. PROTON is well known in HUMINT and DOJ clandestine law enforcement. It remains the primary, if not fundamental, tool of HUMINT and DOJ law enforcement operations, both of which have considerable overlap in phenomenology and methodology. PROTON carries the FISA caveat because Top Secret FISA collection is contained in PROTON's massive database.

> Through my professional associations within the Intelligence Community, I became aware of a Department of Justice (DOJ) system called CLEARWATER. CLEARWATER is similar to PROTON but at the SECRET/NOFORN level of classification and exclusively a DOJ program, where PROTON is CIA, DOJ and DOD. Most DOJ Special Agents and analysts do not have Top Secret clearance. Every informant is run through CLEARWATER, every witness gets vetted through the system.

Over the last 10 years I've sporadically searched for any sign this document has been investigated or debunked, with no result. I still find it pretty interesting.

1: https://cryptome.org/2013/08/proton-clearwater-lexis-nexis.h...

> I don't see any "debunking" there

You somehow missed the many instances of claims by Huffman contradicted by evidence given in the article?

Huffman:

> [Developers] are mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.

Article:

> I expressed this willingness to pay many times throughout phone calls and emails, for instance here's one on literally the very first phone call:

>> "I'm honestly looking forward to the pricing and the stuff you're rolling out provided it's enough to keep me with a job. You guys seem nothing but reasonable, so I'm looking to finding out more."

Huffman:

> Reddit is Fun, he never wanted to talk to us

Article:

> The Reddit is Fun developer shared emails with The Verge showing how he outlined many suggestions to Reddit, none of which were listened to

Huffman:

> Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million. This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us.

Article:

> I recorded the phone call and can show this to be false, to the extent that Reddit even apologized four times for misinterpreting it:

>> Reddit [during the same call] : "That's a complete misinterpretation on my end. I apologize. I apologize immediately."

AFAICS this is exactly what "debunking" looks like.

The text seems to imply the embedded video of Drake singing River Man is the self recorded demo version from 1968, but it is from a Tim Pope 2004 video containing a "remastered" version (with added sound effects and goodness knows what else) of the Island Records album version on Five Leaves Left

For anyone interested, the versions are:

Demo version (cambridge version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QDxEGmb0-U

Album version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ9JBwuO128

Tim Pope video version: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0QFDUXn1p9SLRMz623qn...

Bonus John Peel session version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2bbaa4qAh0

Googling your ratio 5.828427.. finds a seemingly related discussion[1] which identifies it as the square of the "silver ratio" i.e (1 + sqrt(2))^2[2,3]

The explanation at [1] looks ok to this non-mathematician, but best view it there I think!

1: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1651227/pythagorean...

2: (see calculator section at) https://www.google.com/search?q=%281+%2B+sqrt%282%29%29%5E+2

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_ratio

> load more comments (1007 replies)

was a belly laugh for me.

2011 discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2214158

I get 404 clicking on the posted link, but this link works for me: https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-people-are-starting-t...

Actual title: "Hey /r/piracy. Reddit admins de-modded the captain and put a sword to the mod-team's necks to re-open. It seems they really demand valuable input from pirates. I look forward to you to taking this tacit Reddit endorsement of digital piracy to heart in the coming days!"

But see also the discussion[1] of this u/dbzer0 reddit post on lemmy.dbzer0.com: "My /r/piracy troll post just hit reddit frontpage!"

1: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45776

A couple of weeks ago it stopped showing the search page numbers at the bottom for me, but didn't infinitely scroll. I went into settings and changed it to infinite scroll manually so I could get past the first page of results. Trying in a different browser profile, I didn't have the issue. I got used to infinite scrolling in my main profile.. and then it mysteriously went back to multi-page results with working numbered links all by itself.

I haven't dared go back into settings to see if it's still set to infinite scroll (I assume not) because I don't want to break it any more.

I'm used to things randomly breaking in youtube, in the play queue, for example, but I thought this was kind of a shocking level of breakage to find in an online behemoth's primary offering, especially given how essentially simple its presentation task is.

Seems they might be still fiddling with it, though - searched the term slashdot and found "About 14,000,000 results (0.28 seconds)", but the bottom of the page only shows links to three pages of results, expanding to seven when I click "next".

I wonder what they think they're doing? Probably too much remote working, I expect. That'll be it.

Reminds me that I've yet to see Chris Morris' 2019 film The Day Shall Come which satirizes the FBI's pathological shoehorning of hapless individuals into a paranoid narrative of terrorist cells plotting violence against the state, based on many instances (the number 100 is mentioned) researched by Morris.

Morris writes[1]:

> The US Attorney General is announcing the sensational arrest of an army based in Miami, about to launch a full ground war on America. The FBI had saved the Nation [...]

> Two years later in Washington DC I met a witness from the resulting trial and discovered this terrifying coup would have been pulled off by seven construction workers riding into Chicago on horses. The idea was a fantasy, spun to make money. They had no guns – and no horses. An FBI informant had offered them $50,000 to attack America [...]

> The government presented it as an Al Qaeda plot bigger than 9/11. These guys weren’t even Muslims, they were Haitian Catholics. It took three trials to find them guilty. They were all jailed as terrorists.

> “I discovered this was not a freakish one off. Since 9/11 it has become Standard Operating Procedure. Informants encourage a Person of Interest to break the law and when they do, the FBI arrest them. Each plan is put together with the federal attorney. Arrest is delayed until the case will play in court. So the conviction rate is 98 per cent. The typical sentence is 25 years.

1: https://lwlies.com/articles/the-day-shall-come-trailer-chris...

It seems like everytime I sort by new there's a different version of this story posted, for the last 5 days or something.

It is quite impressive to see the detailed intimate knowledge of the personality and inner landscape of reddit moderators shown by commenters in this thread.

Clearly the moderators have many psychological characteristics in common and are motivated by the exact same personality flaws and doubtless it is because of this that the commenters here are able to achieve such startling generality in their succinct evaluations!

Here's some other coverage of this. I bet there's more if you look hard!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348842 (17 hours ago, 18 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36340095 (1 day ago, 80 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307981 (3 days ago, 6 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 (3 days ago, 72 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294748 (4 days ago, 18 comments)

They have created a system for representing "narrative structures" as a set of connected nodes. The nodes are story elements ("tropes") like Hero, MacGuffin, etc., which they have taken from https://tvtropes.org. The connections represent the relationships between the elements, so that their diagram 1b represents:

> The HERO’s goal is to get the “Pendant of Courage” (MCG). However, the MCG derives from ENEMY and BAD, so the HERO must overcome them to achieve his goal.

This is the "narrative structure" (they say) of the Eastern Palace in Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. The CAPS words are tropes that you can look up in the paper.

Having established this graph representation of narrative structure, they create a set of rules for deriving other graphs, and so other possible narrative structures, from it (a "production grammar" for graphs, if you know the term).

They then use an algorithm called MAP-Elites[1] to evaluate the variations for fitness in various aspects such as "interestingness" and "coherence", with the aim of creating a system which can generate narrative structure corresponding to satisfying stories.

The structures thus produced don't unambiguously define one linear sequential narrative (because there is no direct temporal sequence given, only the temporal order implied by the node-to-node relationships which are causal in nature.) "The system is ambiguous by design" they say, and later: "the generated graphs could equally describe different stories".

They leave the subsequent "interpretation" or realization of the structure graphs as concrete stories to other systems (to be developed) or to human interpreters.

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909

I wonder if this will improve Linux Steam's video player performance which IME is awful at full screen res?

Yeah, I read this post as a dig at "cargo cult" programmers who read up on google-scale programming and best practice and unthinkingly apply those constructs to their own Bob's-Restaurant-scale task at hand where they are often at best an unneeded time and complexity overhead.

> current Reddit moderators are often very bad

Though I think a lot of the most notoriously awful moderation cliques (r/ukpolitics for example) have eschewed the blackout.

> assert the most inane drivel

Thank goodness that never happens here!

Also:

4. Having no legal accountability

(while arguably providing a means of avoiding or reducing accountability for those using them, "LLM says no" style.)

The quoted excerpt is somewhat uncanny: prompt engineering in 1964!

Also PKD's Ubik (1969) came pretty close to anticipating the newsfeed with his "homeostatic newspaper" or homeopape idea ("homeostatic" stood for "self-maintaining", I think.)

> In a corner of the large room a chime sounded and a tinkling mechanical voice called, "I'm your free homeopape machine, a service supplied exclusively by all the fine Rootes hotels throughout Earth and the colonies. Simply dial the classification of news that you wish, and in a matter of seconds I'll speedily provide you with a fresh, up-to-the-minute homeopape tailored to your individual requirements; and, let me repeat, at no cost to you!"

See http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=637

Contrariwise, I diagnose platform-management misalignment.

> it still being up

Must have gone dark in the last two hours, I guess. Clicking on your "context" link gets me:

> The moderators of r/programming have set this community to private. Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions.

The GPT astroturf fail seems like a worthy story in itself, if it could be stood up - amazing!

Let's face it: we were already pretty dumb.

Eric Rowland's introduction to the p-adics [1] was a bit easier to digest, for me!

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gyHKCDq1YA

Maybe they're hoping that future LLM trainers will cough up the crazy prices?

A committee of MPs has determined that while he was PM Johnson knowingly misinformed parliament, and they have recommended a suspension which, if implemented, would almost certainly result in a by-election and the likely loss of Johnson's seat.

However, the committee's recommendation has no force until it is voted through in the House of Commons, where Johnson's party has a working majority of over 60, though the current PM, sometime Johnson antagonist Rishi Sunak, has indicated this would be a free vote.

Therefore this seems like the result of a calculation on Johnson's part that he does not have the parliamentary support required to avoid a damaging by-election and has chosen instead to ostentatiously flounce in an effort to control the narrative.

As for Johnson's Trumpian "kangaroo court" claims and so on, IMO it has long been obvious to any serious observer that evidence already in the public domain left little alternative for the committee other than to conclude he knowingly lied, and recommend the appropriate penalty.

I realise your question is more of a commentary on MaTN's voiceover, but can't resist answering..

CouchWarrior on youtube has a vast oeuvre[1] of Bethesda letsplays with varying degrees of in-character narration and meta commentary which I find highly non-excruciating.

Most of it is (variously modded) Skyrim - here's one where a high level assassin mage gratifyingly takes out the Black-Briar household by commission which contains both a "silent" and a separate commented version: [2] (skip to 18:30 if you want the commentary).

There's also a partial Fallout 4 playthrough, mostly done with engaging in-character narration as "Saint Billy" [3]

It may not be for everyone, but the thoughtful, relaxed and character-based roleplay-centric approach beats out the squeaky-voiced minmaxing of standard letsplays every time as far as I'm concerned.

1: https://www.youtube.com/@couchwarriortv/playlists?view=1&sor...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OADtS8yAsCk

3: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq3QdWvJDnh024UmnWHvK...