Erminfare

@nickbernstein @unclebobmartin How could anyone not agree with Uncle Bob when it comes to coding?

@unclebobmartin I don't necessarily agree with you on everything when it comes to coding, but this means a lot to me, Bob. There are a lot of Jews in tech, and a lot of silence from our colleagues. Thanks.

I've heard people say that it's not anti-semitism, it's anti-zionism. I don't buy that for a second.

@esrtweet So who is going to use an LLM to translate the Linux kernel to Rust?

A few days from now I'm going to ship my first program written in Rust. But I don't actually know Rust. Strange days have found us. The astute among you will already have guessed that I used an LLM to translate to Rust a program I originally wrote in C. And that would be correct! But there's a bit more to the story, and some heavy symbolic freight. For, you see, to me this isn't just any C program. It's the very first one I wrote, back in early 1983. It marks the point where I was able to stop farting around with OSes and tools that were doomed to rapid obsolescence and become a Unix developer It's hexd, my humble little hex dumper that has survived four decades and is packaged by several Linux distributions competing with od(1) because it emulates the more pleasing and ergonomic dump format now associated with CP/M. (The style actually goes back further to the PDP-11 and very old DEC operating systems.) That year, 1983 was approximately the beginning of the long dominance of C as a systems programming language. It have been in use at Bell Labs earlier than that, of course, but not until the early 1980s did it escape containment and begin to steamroll every other compiled language and use at the time. And in a few days I'm going to ship a Rust translation. Alongside the C, giving distribution makers a choice between memory safety with a large binary made from Rust versus a small but very well tested binary without those guarantees. So one could argue it's a half step. Still. The portents are clear. The old order passeth. C being replaced by languages with stronger memory safety guarantees. But in a twist nobody anticipated, this won't happen because developers are changing their manual coding habits. It will change because increasingly, automatically moving code between languages is nearly trivial. Not long ago I LLM-lifted another ancient C program I maintain, cvs-fast-export. That one went to Gol. I do know Golang and I like it. So, why move hexd to Rust? The answer is: automatic memory management. cvs-fast-export needed that capability rather badly; hexd does not. I think this is the big fork on the road when it comes to moving stuff out of C, because in 2026 what candidate l C successors other than Go and Rust would one realistically choose for serious production use? I was there at the beginning of the long era of C. I believe now that I will live to see its end, and the large language models will be the instruments of its demise. Somebody should write an elegy.

@ProfDBernstein The real goal is to be edgy. "Global the Palestine Solidarity movement" isn't very edgy. A slogan that is deniably antisemitic is edgy.

If the "Palestine Solidarity Movement" doesn't want people to think it wants Jews murdered on the street, and it knows that a very large % of people think that's what "Globalize the Intifada" means, why don't they come up with a different slogan? The logical answer is that they at the very least want to preserve ambiguity as to whether they are endorsing violence.

@ProfDBernstein @modadGeoP If you asked a Chabad shaliach to sit down with you and study Tanya, he would almost certainly be enthusiastic, and you would learn about what the Alter Rebbe wrote about nefesh habehamit and nefesh elokit. Chabad takes Tanya very seriously.

@Erminfare @modadGeoP Lots of stuff is "written in holy books." The way religion works in practice is that humans decide which of those writings are emphasized, and which are explained away or ignored.

This particular attacker was a student at a Salafi institute called the Murad Institute. He had received an award for his studies of Islam, and his teachers had a great library that includes a multitude of Islamic classics, including from ibn Hanbal, ibn Abdul Wahhab, al-Dahabi, ibn Taymiyyah, ibn Baz, ibn Uthaymeen, and others. Salafi Islam is heralded as the one with the least accretions and additions, and claims to be the purest Islam. Only subversive Muslims and socialists deny the clear connection between Islam and the Bondi attack. The target of the attack was an event organised by Chabad. Chabad teaches that non-Jews have lesser souls than Jews, animalistic souls, that is. They are Jewish supremacists by any reasonable definition. They operate throughout the West.

@ProfDBernstein @modadGeoP Chabad has their own holy book, Tanya, which includes stuff like that.

"Chabad teaches that non-Jews have lesser souls than Jews, animalistic souls, that is. They are Jewish supremacists by any reasonable definition. They operate throughout the West." My kids have attended Chabad camps for a total of 25 years, I have attended dozens of Chabad events, and I have never heard anything remotely like that. Now, I don't know enough about Chabad to know whether there is a "teaching" somewhere that says this, but I can tell you that they don't "teach it." The way to judge a religion is not by what some religious leader or book says or said, but what is actually taught and practiced day to day.

@academic_la @afalkhatib Why do you think Israel should avoid attacking Hamas leaders when it can? There are some possible reasons for avoiding attacking them, what is the reason you would give?

@afalkhatib It is also a violation of the ceasefire.

The assassination of Hamas’s senior military commander, Ra’ed Saad, who is second-in-command after Izz al-Din al-Haddad, is a significant blow to the group’s efforts at rearmament after the October 2025 ceasefire. Having occupied multiple senior roles within the terror group, he has vast experience in manufacturing weapons and was likely spearheading efforts to collect unexploded Israeli munitions from the war to make new bombs, IEDs, and rockets out of the explosive materials. He’s also credited with having helped form the Nukhba, al-Qassam’s elite troops, who played a major role in carrying out the October 7th attack. Importantly, he is believed to have been a key technical architect in planning Hamas’s surprise attack in the early stages of the preparations and training for the deadly offensive, which triggered the two-year war in Gaza. Saad has been moving across the Strip to take stock of remaining inventories, assess the condition of the remaining Hamas fighters, identify areas of greatest need, and develop plans to operate in an austere, complex environment where maintaining secrecy at scale is nearly impossible. Unlike initial suggestions, his elimination was likely due to a unique and rare opportunity that was available to the Israeli military, rather than in response to the IED attack this morning that wounded two IDF soldiers in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Hamas is unlikely to respond aggressively to the assassination, given its desperate desire to prevent the return to war and need to replenish its ranks. In the absence of Hamas’s disarmament, the establishment of a viable stabilization force that enforces the peace, and the perpetual state of stagnation, Israel is likely to recreate a reality similar to what exists in Lebanon. In such a state, a fragile ceasefire will hold. However, Hamas will continue to face attacks, strikes, assassinations, and hits against any attempts to rearm, replenish, or reposition fighters and assets in a way that could ever truly threaten Israeli security requirements, which will continue to be aggressive until Hamas is no longer on the scene.

@Aella_Girl And then he should be required to pay punitive child support and forbidden from seeing his kid if the woman later decides that's what she wants?

I kinda think if a guy inspires the child-urge in a woman for the first time in her 30s he should be legally required to impregnate her

Often a woman who doesn't want kids simply hasn't met the guy who magically sparked the child-desire in her, the 'i NEED to replicate this man' urge. It's rare and precious! And the most tragic storyline is when a man inspires this in a woman, but doesn't want kids himself.

@EVKontorovich @RepBrianMast @RepMikeLawler @BradSherman Israel doesn't claim to be the successor state of the British Mandate. Clearly Israel itself does not consider Judea and Samaria its sovereign territory because it doesn't apply its law although it has had plenty of time to do so and has done so in the past with other territories

What is Judea & Samaria - and what is its international legal status? My testimony Wednesday in the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. Thank you @RepBrianMast @RepMikeLawler @BradSherman

@ginacostag_ @grok summarize this thread

STOP TELLING CHATGPT “Summarize this.” That’s why you get bland, generic summaries and still don’t know what really matters. Use these 14 prompts to extract key ideas, arguments, insights, and actions from any book, paper, article, report, or transcript every time:

@robinhanson My guess is that more accurate news is not the real purpose of having fact-checkers.

@Erminfare Few care much about accuracy?

Huh. Apparently even though many news sources use fact-checkers, supposedly to make their news more accurate, no study has actually checked if news from such sources is in fact on average more accurate.

@ForCognition @robinhanson The point of the article is the reaction to claims of different atrocities. The accuracy of the claims is not necessary to the point of the article. In any case, you do a great job of illustrating that when you bemoan the sullying of the reputation of Hamas rapists.

@Erminfare @robinhanson great article sullied by the claim that "terrorists clearly raped" on 10/7 hyperlinked wiki includes insufficient evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt, & Caplan ironically mentions the incentive to fabricate such claims: w/o them, "revulsion...would be noticeably less"

"I’m an editor for the New York Times Opinion section. And recently I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the malaise that women are feeling about romantic relationships, particularly the heterosexual kind. In articles and podcasts there’s been a slew of deep dives into the emotional labor of dating men, the problem with marriage, and how dating apps are leaving women feeling hollow." Why do we not hear of articles on the malaises that men are feeling?

@robinhanson "Human beings have a deep pro-female bias." betonit.ai/p/murder-rape-…

@Erminfare seriously

@EVKontorovich The building plans for E1 that were approved was in response to the wave of recognition of the Palestinian state.

So it looks like the U.K., Spain, and France recognized a Palestinian state, and Israel failed to respond. Their illegal consulates in "Jerusalem, Palestine" continue with business as usual. The Israeli gov't has a lot on its plate, but this weakness will only lead to greater diplomatic attacks.

@robinhanson Stealing from a firm is less personal.

There are far more heist movies about stealing from firms, than stealing from billionaires. Suggesting that viewers see theft from firms as more legitimate somehow. Yet most billionaires made their money from firms.

@shulgasser @EPoe187 The problem isn't that it justifies unequal treatment (which, as you say, it doesn't), but that lack of knowledge leads to the assumption that historical and present-day racism is the only possible explanation, and that leads to bad policies (based on incorrect assumptions).

This entire debate is scientistic bs. There is no overweening necessity to 'understand the world' that justifies an impertinent mania for measurement. That there is racial disparity in IQ is a given. That it might have some genetic component is likely. But neither genetic inheritance nor IQ are thoroughly understood. To say that this justifies unequal treatment is immoral. Doesn't society generally attempt to aid those who are genetically impaired? Why are 'we' responsible to explain racial disparities to 'the morally sensitive (straw) person' who has supposedly just 'discovered' them and has wandered in unknowing until Binet came along with answers? Aren't history, culture and prejudice a sufficient explanation? And those influences are subject to change though time and policy, while genetics are (theoretically) not. Is it necessary that the disparity be explained to a scientific 100 percent, and with whatever measurable component given priority?

1) In his new book, Steven Pinker presented his best case against free intellectual expression about race and IQ. Unsurprisingly, I found his argument unpersuasive. aporiamagazine.com/publish/post/1…

@yosoybrett @TheOfficerTatum 1% of GDP is a huge amount and would be totally unjustifiable. It's 0.013% of GDP.

Out of curiosity, what is your rationale for why 1% of our GDP is okay for supporting them? That is sort of an absurd number to me. Putting it at 1% makes it feel very low as a percentage, but I’m sure the $ value is incredibly high. I don’t currently have a stance, but rather truly interested in your perspective.

This is why I despise Tucker. Why is he not mentioning that Israel has to spend all of that money on US contractors and equipment. Bolstering our economy. Why does he not mention Israel's strategic positioning in the middle east fighting enemies so we don't have to. Why is he not pointing out that our support financially is 1% of our GDP. Its not just what he says. Its what he leaves out. Does he expect us to do nothing. Let Muslims extremists take over Israel? Then we end up fighting the wars Israel is, with our own troops.

@MAG40444 @yosoybrett @TheOfficerTatum It's about 0.5% of the defense budget of $820 billion.

@yosoybrett @TheOfficerTatum It's not 1% of gdp. It's 1% of defense budget. If you don't think access to the intelligence and weaponry coming out of israel, nothing will convince you.

@esrtweet Have you heard what Jordan Peterson says about polytheism and monotheism? What is your interpretation of that?

Quoted thread is absolutely fascinating. Like many American gentiles who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I have a fondness for Jewish culture as it manifested in this country. The food, the humor, the intellectual tradition. I read Mad Magazine as a kid and "The Joys of Yiddish" as a young man and cheerfully adopted some Yiddishisms into my idiolect. It's always been slightly difficult for me, though, to reconcile my fondness for the Jewish influence on American life with what I believe about monotheisms in general and Abrahamic monotheisms is in particular. Which is, basically, that they are pits of evil. Infectious insanities that bring mob violence, horror and death whenever they have actual power. Judaism looked like an at least partial exception, a monotheism with a curious lack of horrific violence in its backstory. I thought this might be explained by its absence of coercive power ever since the destruction of the Second Temple - 2000 years of oppression by others teaching Judaism the virtue of tolerance the hard way. Now comes Israel Shahak to tell me it wasn't like that at all. That until historically recent times - basically, post-1800 - Judaism wasn't tolerant and rational. Not even close. These are virtues of the secularized Jew, in reaction to traditional Jewish shtetl and ghetto communities that could best have been described as violently evil religious despotisms. Shahak says gentiles - and many Jews - don't know how terrible life was under pre-modern rabbis because Judaism has done a bang-up job of expurgating and sanitizing its own history. Nobody talks about the fact that until the 19th century, rabbis routinely used the self-governance afforded them by a lack of state interest in universal secularized justice to abuse, torture, and often murder Jews they found to be in violation of religious law. I certainly had no idea of this, despite being quite well read in history and comparative religion. Thought control, too. We think of Jews as readers and scholars, but it turns out the pre-modern rabbinate deliberately kept communal Jews ignorant of history, geography, science, and indeed all secular literature. Shahak brings the receipts, with extensive quotation from primary sources. Even his critics - and there are many - can't accuse him of making up these reports. They claim he misinterprets the evidence. But they can't make the evidence go away. In a way this comes as a relief to me. I no longer have to wonder why Judaism looks like an exception to the general evil of monotheisms. Because it isn't one - like Christianity, it looks benign only to the extent that it's been denatured by modernity and secularism. On the other hand...I miss the Judaism I thought I knew. I'm disturbed that the evidence was so effectively suppressed, and that it took reading excerpts from Shahak to clue me in. Damn shame copies of Shahak's book are so rare that you can only find them for over a grand each. I'd like to read the whole thing, but everybody should read the excerpts in this thread.