Jules Verne wasn’t a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don’t underestimate a keen and observant imagination.

that is so fetch

I’ve always viewed this as a politics problem in disguise.

The cook wants to oust the king. He has no allies and no claim, but swears profusely that once he is king, every person who failed to back him is going to pay. Do you back the coup? What if you say yes and the cook’s assistant, who overheard you, proclaims that whatever punishment the cook had in store for your lack of cooperation, he’s going to do even worse? Do you switch your allegiance to the assistant then?

What if this is a hypothetical cook, who the assistants are speculating they could bring over from abroad and are also speculating would mete out the punishment to end all punishments to his non-backers, because he is petty like that? They haven’t even met him, but they figure surely a petty enough cook to fit this description has to exist out there somewhere, and inevitably someone will find him, and bring him over, and he will surely attain power once everyone understands that this is inevitable? Do you throw yourself behind their coup and challenge the king? What if the jesters overhear you and proclaim “oh wait until you hear about our hypothetical jester, he is even worse than that hypothetical cook” – do you switch your allegiance to the jesters then?

If implicit, empty “once I have power!” threats were horses, beggars would ride

unauthorized bread

I haven’t seen that “all opinions are equally valid” take since, what, 2012? Wow

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I’ve heard the writing advice about staying away from adverbs all my adult life, but reading that headline was the first time I have felt the justification behind that advice in such a visceral manner

War of the nine speakers

The 0th order Dunning Kruger effect is mere stupidity. The n+1 order Dunning Kruger effect is the observation that the more you are subject to the nth order Dunning Kruger effect, the less you believe yourself subject to it. The observation that the effect holds true for all n > 0 is itself the ω order Dunning Kruger effect, and so on. There is a Dunning Kruger effect for every ordinal.

“God that asshole douche Kazuya is so hot… ugh what is wrong with me”

Let X equal the number of cans of spinach in the known universe. Let Y equal the number of times the Hulk can possibly get “angrier” without succumbing to an aneurysm. Since the Hulk gets stronger when he gets angrier (designated [Zi r = Zf]) and Popeye’s spinach ability allows him to attain a level above his opponents strength ([Zi+1 = Zf],) the only way one of these combatants is going to lose is if the source of their power gives out. Thus if X is greater than Y, Popeye wins. If Y is greater than X, the Hulk wins. This is relatively untenable until one realizes that Olive Oyle is present in the room. Since that is the case, and theorists have speculated that Olive is in fact Female, there will be twice as many X chromosomes in the Room as Y chromosomes. Since X > Y, Popeye wins.

(World Wide Web Fights Grudge Match, ‘Popeye vs Hulk’)

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Here’s a pro-Palestinian argument I find compelling. Israelis like to talk up and down how much they love peace. They say fine, there’s settlements eating up the west bank, and a siege on the Gaza strip, and all of that, but how is that justification for violence? Peace is better than war! We love peace! Let us have peace. Palestinians find this laughable: first you kill and conquer, then with the boot comfortably on the neck you talk about peace? There can be no peace without justice.

I don’t know if I agree with the conclusion all the way, but it certainly is a compelling argument. And I find that it is compelling as it applies across the board geopolitically. Too many times “peace, peace” is used as a rallying cry in support of whatever bully already used their power to tread, create facts on the ground and declare fait accompli. You hear the same about Ukraine: how immoral it is of Zelensky and Biden to insist on war where it would be so much more peaceful of them to accept what Russia has taken by force and seek a diplomatic solution. Anyone who supports the push to undo the partial conquest of Ukraine is therefore, by definition, argued to be a bloodthirsty warmonger.

That’s not how the world works, or should work. Conquest and bloodshed is not a game of tag, for agents to escalate at their leisure and then shout “time out” when they are done extracting value from it. In accepting such a “humanitarian” point of view we maybe choose peace now for the people embroiled in the current conflict, but choose bloody war for countless innocent souls in the future who will come under the baleful eye of some geopolitical bully or robber baron who will inevitably reason, “we live in a world where I can go in, slaughter, conquer and philander, then when I’ve had enough and it seems things are turning against me, I shall weep that peace is preferable to war, and the world will listen”. This is not an endorsement of an endless cycle of revenge, but it is an endorsement of the idea that nations should be allowed to retaliate against acts of war in ways that make the original act, in retrospect, not worthwhile. In civil society we have courts for exactly this purpose.

With turn-based RPGs being in fashion again now thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3 I would really like to throw in a recommendation for Wasteland 3. First of all it’s a riot (as the image demonstrates). Second of all it’s well-built and satisfying RPG-wise; usually in this kind of game you get fighters and wizards, and it’s refreshing to deal with a serious RPG system where all the roles are completely different and modernized, like hacker, sniper or brawler. Usually it’s either your characters are modernized or you have a proper RPG system, but not both. Finally, the game is notable for flipping every RPG cozy moral cliche on its head. The usual RPG rewards you by producing outcomes more optimistic and idealistic than what you’d get in reality; Wasteland inverts this, and produces equal and opposite cynical, pessimistic outcomes. Nearly every time you try to negotiate as an alternative to violence, this just results in the other guys shooting first. No good deed goes unpunished and you’ll say “come on, in reality that could have gone better” often. Even most other bleak RPGs respect your choice in some sense: “here, you got what you asked for, the good and the bad”. Wasteland instead says “here, you got what you effectively asked for, you idiot”. The moment the penny drops and you understand that you are operating in a crapsack world and start behaving accordingly, you are in for a very unique roleplaying experience.

1. f is a real function from the xy plane to the reals
2. draw a horizontal-ish band (that is, two lines) creating your favorite wobbly band shape
3. the integral of f along a single vertical line within the band is itself a function of the line’s x coordinate. Call the function g(x)
4. What is dg/dx in terms of df/dx? lf the band were perfectly horizontal, it would just be the integral along the vertical line of df/dx within the band. But it’s not, so you add a term to account for the band lines moving
5. all this assuming f and the band are pretty enough (this is 80% of the theorem statement)

Based on the 1 shitty course in applied mathematics I nearly flunked, I imagine the velocity of wind is a solution to some kind of differential equation induced by the temperature, and since the sun’s heat is moderately spread around (like you don’t get a hyper-heated cmxcm square or something) these solutions have reasonable continuity properties, so that with ‘one step to the right’ you can feel slightly less wind, but not a huge difference. Maybe five thousand of these can take you from strong wind to no wind at all.

Yes, definitely. It instigated a lot of turmoil and a gamut of spicy takes regarding the fundamental question of whether password managers as a model “work”. On the one hand some people laughed at the idea of putting your password on the cloud and touted post-it notes for being a more secure alternative. On the other hand people extolled the virtues of the cryptographic model at the base of password managers, claiming that even if tomorrow the entire LastPass executive org went rogue, your password would still be safe.

As far as I understand, the truth is more nuanced. Consider that this breach took place 9 months ago, but you’re only reading about cracked passwords now. It seems like the model did what it was supposed to do, and people behind the breach had to patiently brute-force victim master passwords. This means they got to the least secure passwords first: If you picked “19 deranged geese obliterating a succulent dutch honey jar at high noon” or whatever, you’re probably safe. But it doesn’t strike me as too wise to get complacent on account of this, either. Suppose next time the attackers get enough access to “tweak” the LastPass chrome extension to exfiltrate passwords. Now what?

The thing is we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place with passwords. We already know it’s impractical to ask users to remember 50 different secure passwords. So assuming we solve this using a password vault, there’s no optimal place to keep it. On the cloud you get incidents like this. Outside of the cloud one day you’re going to lose your thumb drive, your machine, your whatever. “So keep a backup” but who out of your normie relatives is honestly going to do this, and do you really trust a backup you haven’t used in 5 years to work in the moment of truth? I don’t know if there is any proper solution in the immediately visible solution space, and if there is, I don’t know if anyone has the financial incentive to implement it, sell it, buy it. People say the future is in passwordless authentication, FIDO2 etc, but try to google actually using one of these for your 5 most-used accounts, you’re not going to come out of the experience very thrilled.

Red Ed Redemption 2

After Liz Truss’ 50-day tenure I truly believe anything is possible

How did the hipster burn his mouth?

He drank his coffee before it was cool

Aloy: No, listen, for the final time, there is no all-mother. You are all in space being threatened by an omnicidal AI and you are still talking about this all-mother. No I am not keeping the all-mother on a podium in my base of operations, those rumors are unfounded. Let’s just focus on not being massacred by the omnicidal AI, ok