troutwine

Alex is the frontman for the "cabal" (he admits his dad was in DARPA and Intelligence).

Alex Jones is a severely damaged man and a known liar. His story about his father has changed radically over the years and within days of his telling, each time mythologizing his Dad by way of making Jones himself special, or from special people. Was Jones’ grandmother psychic? Is he himself? Does God give him downloads of information over chicken sandwiches and in the middle of the night with clock time ‘proofs’? Why did Jones receive the download to go rescue Gene Hackman and then just not do so, if the battle against the Actual Devil is so important?

So as he is quoted at the top "Something I talked about like 15 times, six, seven, eight years ago." This appears to be true when he said it, judging from the rest of the site's content.

I haven’t reviewed the site but Jones was the head of a whole media operation that knowingly defamed these people in a bitter time, and to sell dick pills. The depositions for these things are public and you can watch them yourself. Jones himself admits in these depositions his role behind the scenes, sending Halbig on his mad journey and what not.

The $1B judgement is startling but it’s based entirely on Jones’ own statement of impact in the depositions. If you’re being sued for the profit you made from lies, maybe don’t claim the majority of humanity tunes into your show and website every day.

They’ve bounced around in time — and across InfoWars adjacent shows — for a good chunk of their run so far. I suspect they’ll be okay. Worst case the world suddenly becomes much kinder and gentler and there’s no new content being made in their wheelhouse, which seems like a win still.

Also, Jones has already set up a new media company he totally doesn’t own, no sir. He’ll move his operation when he finally loses InfoWars.

There's a roughly contemporary book "Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough that I recall being somewhat controversial when it came out but also very carefully reported. I do recommend it still.

You might find your rhetorical success is improved if you, in general, say what you mean instead of what you don't mean.

If I'm a US citizen what right does ICE have to my tax information? The article states that ICE made a request for 7.3 million taxpayer's information, citing ongoing criminal investigations. Given how this administration rides roughshod over the law it beggars belief that this dragnet hasn't also caught up "law abiding" people as you say.

But, more importantly, there's an underlying assumption to your question: the sharp end of the law only strikes people that have done wrong _and_ the laws won't shift to put you on the wrong side of it. Authoritarian governments redefine legality at whim. Compliance is a moving target: think of all the law abiding Japanese folks that were suddenly in internment camps in 1942.

In the United States we have historically accepted the dictum that the best government is that which governs the least. For a good, pragmatic reason: the concentration of power is corrupting to those that wield it and the actions of a government of the corrupt will not be square to the will of the people. Limiting what the government can do, especially those parts that seek to act in secret, is in the service of liberty for all.

Alright, even if I were to grant this without reservation this doesn't get us back to the GP's assertion that electric vehicles are luxury cars for a select segment of the population.

At least in the Bay Area it’s pretty common for people to park their car on the curb in front of their house and run a charge cable out over the sidewalk. Mostly just works.

“C++ Templates are Turing Complete” by Todd L. Veldhuizen has the history of discovery, early elaboration.

It's a fun route! If you give it a shot and have a bike that fits you good you'd be amazed at how quickly you can build up fitness for cycling, heavy or not.

My wife has a sense of fashion and I do not. When we go out she's always dressed precisely and, left without guidance, I look like a hike might break out at any minute.

Relwen's excellent. Sturdy clothes with utility -- my concern -- good looking for a variety of semi-casual to formal occasions. I wear their hunting jacket as a general purpose blazer.

It's busy-work that provides no business benefit, but-for our supplier's problems.

I dunno, if I were paying for a particular quality-of-service I'd want my requests authenticated so I can make claims if that QoS is breached. Relying on public pulls negates that.

Making sure you can hold your suppliers to contract terms is basic due diligence.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

At my university, performance. The CS department was clued into Linux development but also the Haskell world so darcs use among students was high. Our underpowered lab machines and personal devices struggled with darcs for reasons I no longer remembered and a group of us made use of mercurial for an OS project and had a rough go of it as the patch sets got more and more convoluted. Back in those days the core was C but a lot of the logic was Python which struggled on the memory constrained devices available. Some one of us learned about git trying to get into Linux kernel work, told the rest of us and it was just comically fast, is my memory. I spent a tedious weekend converting all my projects to git and never looked back, myself.

Some years later Facebook did a lot of work to improve the speed of mercurial but the ship had sailed. Interesting idea though.

I'm not tracking how your question follows. If by garbage collection you mean a system in which resources are cleaned up at or after the moment they are marked as no longer being necessary then, sure, I guess I can see a thread here, although I think it a thin connection. The conversation up-thread is about runtime garbage collectors which are a mechanism with more semantic properties than this expansive definition implies and possessing an internal complexity that is opaque to the user. An allocator does have the more expensive definition I think you might be operating with, as does a filesystem, but it's the opacity and intrinsic binding to a specific runtime GC that makes it a challenging tool for systems programming.

Go for instance bills itself as a systems language and that's true for domains where bounded, predictable memory consumption / CPU trade-offs are not necessary _because_ the runtime GC is bundled and non-negotiable. Its behavior also shifts with releases. A systems program relying on an allocator alone can choose to ignore the allocator until it's a problem and swap the implementation out for one -- perhaps custom made -- that tailors to the domain.

I agree. If we were to try and pin a thought process to an additional level of systems programmer it’d involve writing an allocator that’s custom to your domain. The problem with garbage collection for the systems’ case is you’re opting into a set of undefined and uncontrolled runtime behavior which is okay until it catastrophically isn’t. An allocator is the same but with less surface area and you can swap it at need.

I can’t speak to the Wikipedia page as I have not read it but the biographical material in my Norton Critical Moby Dick and Delbanco’s Melville line up: Moby Dick was a flop and ruined his reputation in society, Pierre not selling further precipitated the crisis built from choices made while riding a high into The Whale.

Melville bought many things with debt: his farm, his rare books, clothes. I don’t find it unimaginable that he paid for the grand tour with debt spending either.

Melville was a prominent author, an early sex symbol even, owing to the success and popularity of his novels before Moby Dick. That novel was hugely controversial in its day -- perceived as blasphemous, overwrought -- and it ruined his reputation as an author. Also, he'd spent money he didn't really have during the writing of Moby Dick so that when it flopped he couldn't survive on the famine part of the feast/famine divide.

Point being, had Melville continued writing south pacific adventure novels he probably would not be remembered today but might have died a well-off man.

From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are.

Even granting this premise, which I don't, the interpretation you are operating under -- all but the 1% or 10% or whatever get get crushed -- is not realistic. Folks live happy, contented lives today in community with others. Many species other than human care for the elderly or their sick and long-term disabled. Keeping with the evolutionary model why would altruism continually evolve into species without utility?

I guess, on a personal note, I hope things improve for you.

Is this meant to be a game? I am unable to type my own prompt, the site is filling its own prompt in and then requesting that I press enter to allow it to do so again. I figured there was an intro but the self-play is more and more elaborate without handing it over to the player.

Having been around at that time, I suspect a lot of that behavior was period specific — “quirky” as a character trait was big then — or a put on to fit in socially. Lifted trucks that never see so much as gravel in one place, unicycles and learning functional programming language from comic books in another.

I think your distinction would imply that Facebook/Meta was not venture backed, which it is, since Mark Zuckerberg has always held a majority stake?

No, the claim is still wild. Ignorance of chemistry in one person or woo-woo beliefs is not an indication for the article's general claims about humanity. You also do not know me or my social circle. There's a cynicism in your post that says maybe more about you than about the claim in the article, friend.

It is a wild claim. I think it's important to understand that LessWrong -- whatever it eventually became -- comes out of the SF Bay Area "Rationalist" community. Despite claims to generality, it's a narrow way of reasoning about the world with some odd outcomes. Personally, I think the notion of an "information hazard" is a fine story point in a Neal Stephenson story but taking the idea seriously enough to have nightmares about Roko's basilisk and to ban discussion of it[1] is pushing past the bounds of 'rationality' I think. That a chunk of the core LessWrong crowd went into Effective Altruism ends-justify-the-means think or into neo-reactionary circles -- to a less degree -- is also worth noting: despite claims with regard to general well-being both political ideologies are more than happy to cause mass suffering so long as the expected outcomes are good, eventually, maybe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk#Reactions

No one's dictating your choices? If you thought eating glass was tasty it wouldn't be factually inaccurate to tell you that it's bad for you. Same idea for hyperpalatable foods.

Strictly speaking, I'm not sure that the US is founded on doing what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law but I do think that's an increasingly common understanding. A nation state does have some stake in maintaining the basic health of its people, whether you agree that's desirable or, if it is, to what degree.

I think what the OP is getting at is that not knowing about something in great detail doesn't mean it's not important. Folks'll hew to what they find immediately pressing or have an inclination toward. Which is to say, the world is monstrously complicated and we are small and there's only so much an individual can focus on in their life. The collapse of fish populations due to overfishing will cause starvation, a lot of it. The erosion of personal privacy will abet a certain kind of tyranny. I don't think these are different scales of important but they are different problems that require detailed knowledge to comprehend to a good degree, which implies time and interest.

I would argue that the fix is for the software to refuse to function if it can detect that it's in an environment where it won't function safely, to fail-closed rather than fail-open.

It didn't make the transition to 64 bits worth of memory with the record intact. https://lwn.net/Articles/820969/ Although the CVE _is_ from 2005 so perhaps it doesn't count.

That’s… what I’m arguing? There’s a hard problem to be solved with uncertain paths toward a solution — or uncertainty of what “solved” means in this case, maybe, depending on whether endemic is an acceptable outcome — and every attempt at a solution that doesn’t work out, or doesn’t work out sufficiently well, is data added to the project of getting better outcomes for all. I’m not entirely sure what you’ve read in my comment but I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t view things plainly.

I would also challenge your implicit notion here that there is a binary pass/fail solution to societal levels of drug addiction. Like any seriously hard problem there are policies that have been proposed and implemented around that world that have some positive outcomes in some regards and negatives in others. Incarceration (the Drug War) theoretically makes serious drug addiction absent from public life, a positive, but with the result of growing the police state, a negative. Vice versa for Oregon’s policy, now that it’s run for a while. I think we’re recently finding that Portugal’s approach which Oregon based their policy on also does not have better than expected outcomes, although the data is early yet.

Sure, and if you're ideologically opposed to a policy you can make a comment like this. What's needed is data on many alternative approaches, what policies _and_ executions taken as one promote better outcomes? Over what timeframes? Otherwise it's just all shouting into a windstorm.

Indeed, this question of morality and arbitrating it is not alien to the Bible itself. It's the animating point on which Job turns.