HN user

probablybanned

63 karma
Posts1
Comments48
View on HN

Obvious prima facie. If we don't agree on this we don't inhabit the same intellectual universe.

Maybe your issue isn't the claim that the editorial slant is anti-white, but with my use of the term propaganda? Don't take that to mean much, I view most media as propaganda of one kind or another.

You know what? I'm glad you asked because I actually can't. Donald E. Graham is apparently not Jewish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Graham

So that was definitely a bit of embarrassing, misremembered narrative overreach on my part. The point is that a lot of what these alt right guys are doing is a kind of cultural criticism, and if they can make a case for an overarching anti-white narrative in popular media it's a pretty short hop from there to the JQ.

Particularly when there are things they can point to and say "look, this is what your beloved minorities say about you behind your back" - it's a huge recruitment tool. That's why it's rational to hope that white people do not discover The Root.

It's as though nobody remembers the Syrian ambulance boy who seemed to hit every single Western publication at once. Or the fawning PR pieces for the "White Helmets."

The insinuation that Forbes is not part of the propaganda conspiracy is absurd. This is exactly what it looks like when an NGO is peddling a narrative.

The gp isn't expressing fear, but annoyance. As you well know but choose to misrepresent.

You are a nuisance. Your comment reminds me of a two year old's reaction to being asked to stop running around screaming.

Engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs because you have multiple objectives (e.g. high performance and loose coupling) and it's not possible to be optimal in all of them simultaneously. However, it is easily possible for a poor design to be way, way off the Pareto frontier and not particularly good at anything. So everything is a tradeoff, but things can still be bad or good.

That's not even meant to be a comment one way or the other on Javascript, although I will not voluntarily adopt node.js for server side application development.

There are essential comms problems that will face any unmanned system that tries to take over the F-35's role. In the absence of a solution that is extremely low latency, immune to interference, and undetectable as radiated emission, you'd have to lean on computer AI to run the bulk of the mission autonomously. Nobody is ready to throw the switch on that.

A possible solution is to augment flights of manned fighters with unmanned drones as missile/bomb trucks. This gets you the force multiplier while keeping all communication short range and within line-of-sight. But you still need a stealthy, survivable manned fighter.

Overall it's a bit like saying why bother with a new generation of conventional cars when universal self-driving is right around the corner. Maybe it is, or maybe it isn't quite as close as you think. These are questions that are more appropriately asked of the N+1 generation fighter that may or may not be on the drawing boards at this time.

P.S. I've noticed the F-35 takes flak from both the extreme technological pessimists (drones/fighters can't take over the A10's role, low & slow manned flight is the only way to do CAS) and the extreme optimists (drones will make all manned flight obsolete next year). Seems to me neither faction has a very strong grasp of the state of military tech.

For what it's worth, the F-22 has a similar system. Perhaps it's not such a problem because the aircraft is significantly larger.

I don't know why the cannon door issue is taking so long to rectify but I can guess: Whoever is responsible for the weapons systems can't fix this themselves, it requires a modification to the flight control law, which is handled by a different team and any modification to that system requires extensive testing. That team is likely to prioritize work items that actually impact systems they're responsible for, so the cannon languishes at the bottom of the queue, doing nothing but attracting a storm of blog commentary.

One ought to keep in mind when reading the DOT&E report that it's their job to tear the fighter limb from limb and take the program administration to task for every problem. Of course the general tone is going to be negative, we know the program is behind schedule and over budget. They still seem to be on track to build a multirole fighter that is at least tolerably competent at all of its assigned tasks (even CAS) and that's a win. Maybe it's not the best possible solution but it's what the Pentagon wanted.

I'll never understand the impulse to cancel programs when they're just turning the final corner to completion. I guess that's when they start to gain the highest public profile. There is no magical second system that will solve every problem, and at this point the thing to do is apply lessons learned from the procurement and R&D processes going forward, maybe plan a Block II to smooth out the rough edges. We're about a decade too late to flip the table in a fit of rage and start over.

It's very likely to be down to differences in temperament, although I don't think it's self-assurance precisely. Typically, men are more driven to compete for status and place their career at the center of their lives, while women evaluate their situation more holistically.

This means they're less likely to put up with bullshit, and are more likely to be lured away to places that are less prestigious/competitive but allow them to actually have a life.

Generally speaking! I enjoy being pitchforked and set on fire, pseudonymously at least.

After thinking it over a bit, I'm going to take the other side of the bet.

We agree that power consumption is a limiting factor no matter what. In my imagined system, only something on the order of 1W would be delivered to the glasses. Delivering 1W over 10cm with large-ish coil area at >50% efficiency using NFMR isn't really a breakthrough, but it's only a way of eliminating the LiPo bulk and nothing more.

The thing is, I don't think we're near the boundary of power efficiency even with today's silicon. The way forward is to push all the feature tracking and other low-level vision tasks down to the ASIC level, while accepting some strict limitations on the rendering side. So a lot of it comes down to scope of features. Its most immediately useful applications are little more than a glorified HUD -- project some GPS data here or an info overlay there. Blit a video source on top of a marker, that sort of thing.

This sort of practical product, by 2027, I'll say yes. Mindblowing, transform-your-world stuff? No. But let's see what happens...

What do you think about solving this with wireless power transfer? There has been some promising research recently into extending the range of resonant inductive coupling.

It's nobody's ideal, but a clip-on/necklace style power solution might be sellable to the public if the value proposition of the glasses is good enough.

I'd expect Snapchat users to discuss politics on the platform. I wouldn't necessarily expect Snapchat to expend their own resources to explicitly push an issue-driven political agenda that is unrelated to their own line of business.

Most people can decide whether to "continue doing consumer culture stuff" or to freak out about politics without the help of Snap or any other corporation. There's an odd sort of corporate worship/megalomania that makes people think they're morally obligated to "weigh in" on an issue. They're not, and their constituent individuals are more than capable of pursuing their own political activism and/or creating more appropriate vehicles for voluntary cooperation toward those ends.

The other employees in his business were donating the services of the business to their pet political causes. Saliterman was trying to make money for the shareholders. It's an advertising business: that means everyone pays.

If Snapchat's board are all in agreement that that's where they want the money to go, fine --- but they should also realize that Snapchat is a social network, and the appearance of fairness is probably a reasonable thing to aim at. If the DNC or RNC launched a social network, they would find themselves somewhat hampered in their ability to grow, and with good reason.

I disagree that we have "competing wikipedia definitions," I don't find that argument convincing and think you're just refusing to admit to being mistaken about what a word means. I hope that's not too sharp of a barb.

One reason I want separate the easily proven falsehoods is that the people who fall for that stuff are not very persuadable anyway, and the damage to the body politic is not very great, and I think that the real goal of the censorship crusaders is to shut down competing worldviews.

Being sued or prosecuted by your government for "propagating falsehoods" would be awful obviously. What else is there to do with that thought experiment than to recoil and place it in the bad outcomes bin?

The thing about recommender systems really is an interesting question and a legitimate gray area but I'm personally not interested in pursuing it at the moment. In fact I'm going to stop replying to this thread, but if you think theres a way to incorporate some sort of unbiased veracity estimate into such a system, by all means go for it.

Amendment I:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That is not a definition of censorship. Nice try, though.

Regarding your first thought experiment, we already have that in the form of libel law. If you have standing to show that you are harmed by what is said and can show it to be intentionally and substantially wrong, you have a good case. Who brings the suit against general purveyors of fake news in your thought experiment? The United States Government?

The bigger problem is that when you move beyond the trivial, the dumb garbage that some people believe because it suits their biases and they don't care to find the truth, you quickly get into territory where people simply cannot agree on the facts. I believe that the truth can only be arrived at in an environment that allows free inquiry and open discussion. If you really think that the truth is a clean thing, and can't name at least a half dozen "open questions" in current world affairs, then you are not paying attention.

I guess I'm using the Wikipedia definition of censorship which diverges from yours somewhat. To quote, because it's short:

Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

I think suppression of public communication by a monopoly corporation like Facebook does count here. And to be clear, yes, I am arguing that the value of being able to have fake speech outweighs the damage it does. As soon as you begin on the mission to suppress "fake" speech, you have to elevate some person or institution to the role of deciding what is fake and what is real, and that's far too much power to give to anyone. That power must remain with the individual, as imperfect as we all may be.

I'm glad I was able to come across civilly. I'm at the limit of my patience on this topic with people who on the one hand claim that the freedom of the press to speculate wildly about Russian hooker piss is "vital to the functioning of our Democracy," while at the same time claiming that the Pizzagate rumors are "undermining the foundations of the Republic."

You're right, I do see censorship as categorically a bad thing and not worth exploring. I think if you did manage to create some sort of light-touch, objective, fact-based system of fake news suppression it'd be hijacked by ideologues faster than you could believe. But that's a place we can agree to disagree.

I expected the cry of false dichotomy. Here's the thing: all simplifications are inaccurate because they involve a loss of fidelity. Simplifications that are tolerably inaccurate but useful are the basis of clear thinking. When you resist simplification, ask yourself whether you are seeking to avoid inaccuracy or seeking to avoid clear thinking. People tend to resist clear thinking when it leads to difficult decisions.

I'm not sure what you mean by bringing up a hypothetical "censorship apparatus that allows only fake news" -- my contention is that you cannot "beat" fake news without a censorship apparatus. Of course you can have a "good" censorship apparatus that only allows things you believe are good and true or you could have a "bad" one that only allows fake news. I'm sure yours would be very, very good indeed. But I think it's much better not to play that game at all.

This is different from what 60 year olds were doing with e-mail a decade ago in what way, exactly? As someone who grew up around AM radio and gun show culture, the sudden pearl-clutching is amusing, but also disturbing since it's so coordinated and with clear political motivations.

The question is this: Do you support fake news or do you support the construction of a censorship apparatus? For me, there is a very easy answer.

Good points, but also consider the question of survivability in a world with increasingly sophisticated anti-aircraft threats. One F-35 might be inferior to four F-16s militarily speaking, and more expensive to boot, but are you willing to lose pilots in the latter scenario to accomplish the mission?

Additionally, are you factoring in the cost in training, maintenance and fuel for the larger force?