Rohit Patnaik

@Dmg_Cntrl tbf "drones" can mean USVs as well as UAVs. When Ukrainian USVs hit Russian ships in the Black Sea they're colloquially referred to as "drone attacks" as well.

This strike, according to initial reports, wasn't conducted by drone but by "suicide boats", i.e very small vessels ladened with explosives. Those you can't shoot down with anti-air systems.

@MartinSkold2 Malthus was writing about the imminent mass starvation of humanity at a time when the Industrial Revolution was about to deliver unparalleled prosperity to Great Britain, which, in turn would go on to literally conquer the world. Some people are just pessimists.

@MartinSkold2 People have been celebrating the potential extinction of humanity since the Christian millenarians of AD 1000. This isn't a new phenomenon. It's not caused by environmentalism or Marxism or whatever.

When considering almost any political or policy question, remember: This is a significant part of the zeitgeist. Sick societies act a certain way.

@the_engi_nerd What is it, and is it nuclear powered?

Asked around a bit on Discord: • Ballistic missile defense can't possibly work • Missiles obsolete carriers • Drones obsolete tanks • "The bomber will always get through" (1920s) • All future wars will be nuclear (1940s) • Rams are the future of naval combat (late-1800s)

@MuseZack "Ballistic missile defense is a giant waste of money on a system that can't possibly work"

Is there any bit of conventional wisdom in military/tech journalism that aged worse than "The F-35 is a boondoggle and giant waste of money that can't actually do its job?"

@DGinOTC @ChrisRMcGuire @DavidAFrench This is akin to the government imposing the same sanctions it levies against state adversaries, like Russia or Iran, but against an American corporation. What has Anthropic done to deserve this kind of treatment?

@DGinOTC @ChrisRMcGuire @DavidAFrench The government isn't just barring contractors from using Anthropic tools for government business, it's barring them from doing any business whatsoever with Anthropic, even for unrelated matters. That is a huge intrusion into private enterprise.

There is no defense of the admin’s AI policy. It is literally destroying American AI companies, while exporting AI chips to Chinese AI companies. Incoherent, catastrophic, and unprecedented. Xi’s early 2020s crackdown on the Chinese tech industry wasn’t even this self-defeating.

@jd_pressman wsj.com/tech/ai/what-y…

@jd_pressman This is interesting, because the market has come to the opposite conclusion re: SaaS firms. The current bet appears to be that large software firms will rapidly be outcompeted by a combination of small software firms and in-house development, both enhanced by AI.

AI mostly benefits incumbents. 1. As the cost of software goes to zero the value of branding, marketing, and distribution becomes the primary value prop of software. 2. The Bitter Lesson means that the fundamental technology ends up dominated by hyperscalers with Ph.D's.

@jajcatsc1 @Vondyispog These are the wrong questions to be asking of anything produced by KelTec. The correct question is always, "Why not?"

@Vondyispog What does this bring to the table? Seriously, what niche does it fill?

KelTec announces a new pistol and it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen Most unsurprising thing of all time

@authentickemp @cruelseanthesis @Aella_Girl You're white, Western educated, and fluent in English. The People's Republic will be happy to have you, if you're so tired of living in a constitutional democracy.

@cruelseanthesis @Aella_Girl Give me the button, and I'll press it

I've been getting real into history in the past few years, and have been real humbled at how many incorrect assumptions I held. 1. I sort of assumed people in the past had more freedom from their governments, but they absolutely did not. The people with the guns consistently oppressed people without, basically as much as they could get away with. 2. Democracy is an insane invention. It feels sort of default or obvious now, and I sort of assumed that... people in the past all kinda wanted something like democracy but were oppressed by their monarchs, but this is not the case. Much of the time, calls for democracy were radical, even among the suffering unrepresented lower classes. If you went back in time and said "every man should have the right to vote" people would go 'whoah there are you insane? that would absolutely destroy civilization!' 3. Most big moves to make things better were way less radical than you think. People would get very mad at the king for being terrible, but instead pushing to overthrow the king, would just... want the king to sign a nice constitutional document or something. Progress was mostly made in smaller increments; people generally did *not* think big at all. And even when radical moves did happen, people just sorta quietly waited until everything died down and reverted them. Like, you know how they guillotined the King and Queen in the French Revolution? Well basically as soon as it all died down (and uh, post napoleon) they just put the monarchy back on the throne and continued onwards as usual. It took like another four revolutions and almost a century to actually get to a stable republic. 4. Things were local. Today I have a concept of large cause areas like 'the environment' or 'war crimes on the other side of the world', but in general, pushes for change were extremely local. People really do not see beyond what will benefit them and their own communities. The entire 'working class' would ostensibly want the same rights and seem to united, except the artisan class would dump the farmers the instant it was convenient, etc. Like, at one point one of the lead slaves of the Haitian revolution, who helped start the whole thing and led an army, tried to sell his fellow slave fighters back into slavery in exchange for getting special treatment from the rulers. 5. The US revolution was way derpier than I thought, but also way more impressive compared to how derpier everything else was. the US is actually an extremely special and anomalous thing in history, and "selecting for intense high-risk people away from the control of established governments" was a magic spark that almost never happens. The key people somehow seemed more intelligent and principled than most other people in history who ended up in decisionmaker chairs. 6. Sometimes history feels inevitable, like someone would have filled the role of 'conservative chancellor' vs 'charismatic revolutionary' no matter what, but it really struck me how much history occasionally just got curbstomped into a different dimension by individual people or random happenstance. Like, assassinations (Aurelian, Caesar), powerful people suddenly becoming mentally ill (Robespierre), and just crazy high powered superpeople (Napoleon, Alexander the Great). 7. The mobs and common people are often very stupid. They get paranoid, they believe completely ridiculous conspiracies that were obviously not true if you thoguht for two seconds, they misinterpret normal facts as evidence the ruling class is evil. e.g. at one point a mob was tryin to send representatives to the king with a petition, then they saw the doors getting locked, and flipped their absolute shit. But - the doors got locked at that same time every day, it was routine and had nothing to do with their representative, but the mob didn't care, didn't stop to think critically, and just exploded. 8. Mobs are really hard to predict. Things happen fast, tensions are high, and they might switch their allegiance, suddenly become violent, or just get tired and disperse. It's super high variance. 9. You can just abuse the people you rule over for a really long time. I sorta thought you had to be careful with how poorly you treat your peasants or they'd revolt, but revolts are kinda uncommon? and the common people can just absorb a shockingly high amount of mistreatment. Probably this is happens during slow boils - the taxes are raised very slowly, the regulatory policies are a gradual squeeze. Cruelty does actually pay off sometimes. You can terrorize a populace sustainably. 10. There was often a tension between freedom and order. Lots of people justified tightening the hand of the rulers by spreading fear about lack of order. Sure, man should be free - but obviously not free enough to cause chaos by failing to respect the law, or social propriety, or those above him, obviously. 11. Competent people often didn't last long in positions of power, because their competence threatened people around them. If a general started winning too many battles and getting too much love from his army, then the rulers back home would start getting antsy and worrying about a coup. This was justified, because powerful, well-loved generals did in fact tend to do a lot of coups. 12. Militaries were not aligned with their governments, often. In the US the concept of the military acting independent of our government is pretty foreign, but much of history was plagued by the armies going rogue, doing their own assassinations of rulers, putting their own guys on thrones, etc. And sometimes oppression of the common people was downstream of rulers having to basically bribe their armies to let them stay in power. 13. I was surprised by how much monarchies were not dictatorships. I'd assumed that kings basically could tell people to do whatever and those people would have to do it (and sometimes this was the case), but often the king would have to get the support of key influential people beneath him, and sometimes follow laws to do this. Like the english revolution in the 1600's iirc had the king repeatedly trying to follow laws to raise tax and the influential people refusing to vote to allow him to raise the tax, and the king got really huffy. 14. Absolute power really, really does corrupt. People in power often forgot their past allegiances and lost moral compunctions after attaining power. They tend to go to extreme lengths to hold onto that power, and often would rather die than give up that power. Most people's kindness is actually just a cope for weakness. 15. But every once in a while, you do find the rare person who lets power go voluntarily; e.g. George Washington, or Diocletian who resigned his emperorship and then retired to grow cabbages. 16. The common people often would get shafted on economic policy, they'd suffer, and then would often make very stupid demands that would not solve their suffering whatsoever. To be clear, the ruling class did also pass stupid economic policy, but my point is that suffering underneath the consequences did not necessarily give people better insight into what economic policy would be better. 17. Humans intentionally operating selflessly at large scales is basically not a thing. History is just what happens when each piece on the chessboard fends for itself. Sometimes a piece can do it more cleverly, in a way that appears to coordinate with others, but it will abandon that coordination as soon as it's no longer useful. The punishment for failing to jump off a sinking ship is usually death. 18. Everything is so, so complicated. Basically no single ideology value set today really feels like it would cleanly be the right option to take in the past in all cases. For almost every value you hold, you can find instances in the past where holding that value would have gotten you and everyone you loved killed.

"You can just build things," the AI tells me as it slowly takes away my ability to build anything.

@Scholars_Stage I think Computer Science reverts to being a branch of mathematics. A lot of mathematics (abstract algebra, group theory, topology, etc.) doesn't really have practical applications, but people still study it because it's interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

What happens to the academic field of computer science—as an academic discipline focused on the formal study of the theory of computation, algorithms, and information theory—in a world where no one learns to code anymore?

@tynan @DonnieLH14 Because debt peonage is worse than simple poverty.

@DonnieLH14 Why not, if someone's willing to loan them money at 20%?

Such a bad idea. What this actually means is that people who aren't currently offered 10% rates or lower can't get credit.

@enggirlfriend Instagram and OnlyFans influencers think it's easier to get the O-1 (extraordinary person visa) than finding an American boyfriend and marrying him: ft.com/content/8816fc…

engineers think it’s easier to get the o-1 visa (extraordinary person visa) than finding an american girlfriend and marrying her

@Scholars_Stage Literally enough maps to wallpaper a room, which is something that I actually did, to my parents' chagrin.

@Scholars_Stage What would such a magazine cover? What I remember most from old-school National Geographic are the photographs and the maps. Oh so many maps.

I wonder if there is a market for a print magazine patterned off of the old school National Geographic’s of decades past. I’d like to say “yes” but would any of you actually buy it?

@Scholars_Stage Do most majors insist on teaching coding themselves? I only know about my university, but there, quite a lot of degree programs outsourced their coding to an intro course taught by the Computer Science department. Has this changed over the years?

One other question: why do most majors export calculus, linear algebra, basic physics, and basic chemistry, but insist on teaching statistics and coding themselves, when those could also be exported? What accounts for this?

Many majors make a distinction between a BS and a BA. Usually the difference is 20-25 credits in ground level mathematics and science outside of one's core discipline. Compare: Geology BS requirements: Chemistry 2x, Physics x2, Calc I-II. Biology: Chemistry 2x + Organic Chem, Physics 1x, Calc I. Environmental Science: Chemistry 2x + Organic Chem, Physics 2x, Biology 2x, Calc I. Neuroscience: Chemistry 2x, Physics 2x, Biology 2x, Calc I. Pre-med (not a BS but relevant here): Chemistry 2x + Organic Chem, Physics 2x, Biology 2x, Calc I. Atmosphere and Ocean Science: Chemistry 2x, Physics 2x, Calc I-III, Differential Eqs, Linear Algebra. Most Engineering disciplines: Chemistry 2x, Physics 2x, Calc I-III, Differential Eqs, Linear Algebra. Computer Science: Calc I-III, Discrete Math, Linear Algebra. Economics: Calc I-III, Linear Algebra, Real Analysis. Chemistry: Physics 2x, Calc I-III, Differential Eqs, Linear Algebra. These will differ from school to school. Some schools have a three course physics sequence instead of a 2 course one; some environmental science programs ask you to pick 4 curses between chem, bio, and physics, and so forth; some chemistry programs also allow you to swap in bio classes for physics, etc. Most of these programs also require 1-2 courses in statistics, but they usually teach these statistics in house instead of farming it out to the math department. Likewise for basic coding. Three big patterns. The core is the engineering requirements: Chemistry 2x, Physics 2x, Calc I-III, Differential Eqs, Linear Algebra. The life and environmental sciences reduce the math down to Calc I, but add on additional requirements in chemistry and biology. Computer science and economics jettison the physical sciences entirely, and switch out differential equations for something more proof based. The core cross-science competency is chemistry. The core cross-STEM competency is mathematics and coding, though the level varies between Calc I+Stats through Calc+Stats+Linear Equations+Real Analysis(!) on the part of the economics students. It is also interesting to consider when elements of this curriculum came together. Linear algebra, for example, really only seems to have been taught at the 200-undergrad level since the 1970s-80s, and was not made a mandatory part of the curriculum until sometime later. I am a little familiar with the early history of stats but I do not know when "bio statistics," "geo statistics," etc became standard course offerings, then requirements for graduation. It would not surprise me if the timing was close to the linear algebra stuff but I have not done research on that yet.

@acrognali When selecting a Macbook, take whatever number you had in mind for your budget and double it, then double that - still won't be enough.

when selecting a macbook, take whatever number you had in mind for storage and double it, then double that- still won't be enough