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petsfed

1,712 karma · joined May 16, 2017

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petsfed··on Just let me select text
Yeah, because fuck people who require additional accessibility options, right?

On top of the real concerns around otherwise selectable text in a writing system not supported by the user's keyboard, there's also the issue of whether or not they can even operate enough of a keyboard to transcribe whatever text they want to translate.

petsfed··on Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
I mean modern day. What I'm trying to express is that "nobody today would be racist against $whateverGroup$!" has precisely zero bearing on what absolute batshit lunacy people were racist about even 50 years ago.

Its also the case that even in the 1920s, while there was a lot of anti-Italian racism, people generally saw that Italian heritage was better than African heritage.

petsfed··on Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses.

Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc).

To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.

petsfed··on Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency.

There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white.

If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", you'll note shocking similarities to how they talked about Africans, Native Americans, Asians of all stripes, etc etc. Explicit skin color rarely came up.

Racism, especially old timey racism, is all about "how do I define my group as 'good' and everybody else as so bad that I can treat them worse?"

petsfed··on Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine
The problem with this line of thinking is that home invasion is a different kind of crime from breaking and entering.

With breaking and entering, the goal is to get what they can with a minimum of fuss. Locked doors, barking dogs, automatic lights, security systems, etc are all great deterrents, because the goal is to get as much as possible while avoiding capture. The table stakes are that the burglar can get in and out without getting caught.

With home invasion, the whole threat profile is different. The operating premise is that the invader will use violence or the threat of it to brutalize the home occupants into facilitating the theft, the escape, and avoidance of prosecution.

Think of how wild animals engage in violence: they will not enter into a violent situation unless trapped (either physically, or by circumstance - e.g. fight or starve), or they think they can win the fight without sustaining any substantial injury. In the case of a home invasion, you are trapped, but the other guy has chosen the fight.

All of that to say, compliance should be done in the light of keeping yourself and those around you together and unharmed, and not willy-nilly. Obviously, don't pick a fight over a TV. But understand that if they continue their breaking-and-entering after they know you're there, compliance may be insufficient to protect your life.

petsfed··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
I misunderstood you then. I wholeheartedly agree with you.

Even so, most folks who carry prefer concealed carry for tactical reasons, one of which being that unless you have your rifle in a ready position, its not very useful in a self-defense situation, and simply marks you as "shoot this one first". And it turns out that walking around with a rifle in a ready position is generally perceived as aggressive, regardless of actual intent, even by those comfortable with firearms (consider a police officer approaching with a holstered weapon vs one in their hand).

So in the context of this shot, it ought to be relatively easy to pick out the shooter in the moment, the problem is that a ~200m radius around the tent where Kirk was speaking covers a lot of territory, and that's a lot of ground to cover effectively without obviously interfering with students' free movement about their college campus.

petsfed··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
Reports are that the single shot came from ~200 yards/meters away, which is basically the worst case scenario for good-guy-with-a-gun. In an active shooter situation, an armed bystander could in principle stop an attacker from continuing, but the only way that an armed bystander could hope to stop an assassination is if they were walking around looking for trouble.

Regardless of where you stand on the subject of concealed carry, I don't think its controversial to say we shouldn't be encouraging untrained/unvetted folks to go seek out would-be assassins before they have demonstrated themselves to be a danger. That's exactly how "armed security" shot and killed an actual bystander at the Salt Lake City 50501 demonstration earlier this year.

petsfed··on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves
When my cat was stolen, I was living in California, where only state-certified exhausts will pass emissions testing. And to date, the state has only certified OEM exhausts for Priuses.

So in my case, it was especially egregious (seriously, people have been petitioning Toyota for decades to recall Priuses to make the cat harder to steal), but in general, if you’ve got the OK to sell exhausts in California, you’re not going to endanger it by coming anywhere close to an illegal platinum/palladium fencing operation.

petsfed··on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves
Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.
petsfed··on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves
Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.

Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.

petsfed··on I should have loved electrical engineering
The actual electrical engineering involved there is the sort of thing that an early-career engineer could bang out in an afternoon. Maybe a day or so for the PCB designer. The more time consuming part might be managing the regulatory compliance testing.

Most of the orgs I worked in building simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller either farmed out the actual EE work to contractors or design houses or had 1 EE for like 20 different projects.

petsfed··on The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.

I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.

I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.

But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".

petsfed··on The Folk Economics of Housing
I suspect that people conflate "buying a house as an investment" with "investors bought a house", which is leading to the incorrect idea that hedge funds or private equity are somehow cornering the market.

I think the reality is that the main component of investor pressure is from people who hold onto an overly large/well placed home far past the point of utility, because they want to sell as late as possible and maximize their return. Follow that with small-time landlords, and then finally actual explicit investors buying homes as some kind of commodity. A lot of the dysfunction of capitalism (so-called "late stage capitalism") is induced by people trying to outsmart the market, time the market, etc. when they really don't have the knowledge or information to play such games.

petsfed··on Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness
I think "innocent" and "guileless" also bracket the sense you're going for, but they don't quite fit either.

Like, he doesn't see the malice in other people, but its not because he's innocent/naive of such intents, nor does he lack the skills to look for it (guileless), but because (as you say) he doesn't care if people take advantage of him, up to a limit.

Properly calibrated, that's really admirable.

petsfed··on My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading
Its definitely not stable, because the nuclear-armed countries' only arguments against nuclear proliferation are "trust us, you don't want this" and (said quietly) "if everybody has these, we'd lose a lot of power". So non-profileration efforts are a game of cat-and-mouse. We needed to have an ironclad "we are demonstrating that nobody needs nuclear weapons by doing x,y and z", and instead, Russia and NATO both said exactly that, then kept provoking each other to see who would flinch first over Ukraine.

And I agree, nuclear power is a ridiculous casualty of that scramble for power.

petsfed··on My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading
It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets things done, and that fades the more countries have nuclear weapons. So, insofar as there is a sinister motive to Hiroshima drumbeating, it's specifically to preserve the viability of the nuclear threat. Consider how different the current war in Ukraine would look if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. How different would the situation in Gaza look if any of Israel's immediate neighbors also had nuclear weapons?

I'd also argue that the correct emotional response to the destruction rendered by a single airplane (vs. the 325 used for the Tokyo Firebombing) is abject horror, and that should cause any person to seriously question their use.

I'm not here to dispute that nuclear power is good or that the alternative to bombing Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki was worse than the bombings. It's that while Truman et al may have understood the extrema situation the Allies were in, that's no guarantee that future users of atomic weapons would be so deliberate.

petsfed··on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible
Is Logitech not a major company, backed by decades of experience building these things? Its not MadCatz, that's for sure. I mean, logitech is the undisputed king of low-to-mid-range joysticks, and has held that title more or less since microsoft stopped making joysticks and gamepads in 2002. Microsoft didn't make a PC-friendly controller again until 2005. They basically ceded the market during that period of time. Of course, logitech hasn't sold as many units. But they know what they're doing.

Granted, a Logitech controller not the first party controllers, and I'm prepared to believe that the Xbox people made a generally better controller, but I'm not convinced it was so much better as to be an actively bad idea to use the Logitech device. Like, once you get to the "pretty good, people won't return it" phase of controller development, its just fine tuning for gameplay performance, and there's absolutely nothing about controlling a tourist submarine that makes e.g. controller latency or even signal integrity above and beyond the baseline the bottleneck. I'd wager that the real reason they picked it likely devolved down to "what driver is our embedded controls engineer most comfortable integrating into our system?", which has a much larger impact on system safety.

I agree with a sibling that there's an argument for using a wired controller. But that's pretty much as far as that criticism goes for me, speaking as someone who writes firmware that does need to be reliably low-latency and responsive, game controllers barely even register on my radar, except that I wouldn't do it myself if I didn't have a specific use case for it.

petsfed··on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible
>The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

Emphasis mine.

Everybody hammers on the controller like using a gaming controller was somehow more indicative of the unseriousness of the endeavor than, you know, the firing of the guy who said the hull was unsafe. Based on what I've read, that was one of the few authentically competent design decisions of the whole bloody thing. Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US?

The US Navy has been using off-the-shelf game controllers for years now[0], because they work. And as a bonus, the submarine designers can be confident that if Stockton Rush or Seaman Manchild or whoever throws his controller in a fit of rage when his submarine doesn't work right, the controller will still work afterwards.

Absolutely, there were problems with the control scheme (reportedly, the motors were wired into the control board wrong, so the x- and y-axes were reversed). But that's not the fault of some usb controller communicating with the control box. That's the fault of the people working on the actually bespoke portions of the submarine.

0. https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-mane...

petsfed··on Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
The scenario to address is people who are forced to move (via e.g. layoffs, company relocations, industry collapse, etc) who are also suddenly saddled with a mortgage far higher than they can realistically payback while still moving on to whatever opportunity necessitated the move in the first place.

The first order consequence of treating housing as an investment vehicle is high prices, sure, but the second order consequence is that you dramatically increase the stakes when individual people buy any house whatsoever.

I would much rather give checks to every homeowner whose home value falls than to force even a single laid-off autoworker or whatever into bankruptcy (good luck buying a home after that) if they elect to move somewhere else for a new job and can't sell their house for enough to pay off their mortgage. If the consequence of a government policy to build more housing is that more people become homeless, then its failing.

petsfed··on ‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]
You understand that you just said "they're the monsters for using human shields, but not us for shooting through the human shields", right?

Make no mistake, its 100% a war crime to use civilians as human shields. But that doesn't magically absolve the IDF of also committing a war crime. And if they can't meet their military objectives without committing war crimes, maybe that's a sign. In any case, bombing a hospital to kill a terrorist is a very efficient tactic if your goal is to create more terrorists. If you learn nothing else from the UK's administration of Mandatory Palestine, learn that.

petsfed··on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
Some quick googling suggests that 80% of California's land area is rural, compared to 39% of Germany's. Considering they're very nearly the same size, that's considerable. And also understandable, considering that Germany has more than double the population.

At no point did I say "don't try to solve the drug problem". I even said as much when I said "help the homeless get their life back on track". What I'm trying to say (and clearly failing at saying) is that "don't even bother with 'x' until we accomplish 'y'" misses the fact that at least as it pertains to dealing with making cities people want to live in, its a complex, interrelated system. In my, highly limited experience, for instance, homelessness drives drug use, because its a relatively cheap escape from the desperate reality of homelessness and long-term unemployment. I'm not here to make excuses for people, but I am here to say that its a lot more complicated than "get rid of the drugs, and people won't be homeless". If it were that easy, then Reagan's War On Drugs would've actually, you know, worked.

You should educate yourself on the root cause of the US's opiate problem. While there a lot of recreational drug users who went off the rails, virtually all of the addicts I know personally were initially wildly over-prescribed opiates for a legitimate medical reason, and in trusting their doctor, got addicted. There was a big court case around it. I know, the plural of anecdote is not data, but there is in fact data about it.

petsfed··on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
So, do you live in a country that is notoriously designed almost exclusively for personal automobiles? Whose cities' growth was informed as much by lobbying from the automotive industry as by a desire to use personal automobiles? Do you live in a country where prison sentences are applied in such a way that meaningfully decreases the recidivism rate?

I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right?

And to be clear, I'm not saying my brother-in-law doesn't need to quit drugs. I'm saying that the in the US's justice system, just putting him in prison until he's clean will just guarantee that he's in and out of prison until he eventually overdoses, all the while dooming his 11-year-old daughter, my children's beloved cousin, to a life of addiction and abuse herself. Moreover, even if he does get himself clean, because of his criminal record, he's doomed to working those same shit jobs, living at the ragged edge of the poverty line, for the rest of his life, because very few will take the risk of hiring an ex-con. Nobody ever relapsed in those conditions, no sir.

Maybe its different in Germany. Maybe getting yourself clean and sober will allow you to live a productive and happy life, and once you've served your time, you're free of the stigma of being an ex-convict. But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions. Which, I recall, Germany has some experience with.

petsfed··on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
>Have you ever been around homeless people?

Yes. At many stages of the descent from "I'm just crashing on your couch until I save up enough for another deposit" to "I'm sleeping in my car until I can find a job" to "I'm living in a shanty and rummaging through the trash to turn in aluminum cans for change". Both whilst living in the Bay Area, but also in Oregon and Washington.

You're complaining (rightly) about the end stage. I'm saying that nobody starts at the end stage.

Hell, I'm actively watching my brother-in-law and his baby mama descend through the mental illness and addiction process, and even though they've been evicted and are now dragging their daughter through the couch-surfing phase, they still aren't at the living-in-tents-shitting-on-the-street phase of that descent.

And a major factor, for them was that neither of them could get the kind of jobs that would allow them to both have a stable living situation and do anything but work (because of criminal history resulting from addiction). Its a cascading series of problems that when he lost his license (due to his addiction), he could only work where he could walk, or where he could realistically ride a bus. And in most of the country, if you can't find work within those two ranges, you're shit out of luck.

And to be clear, I'm not proposing we just throw up our hands and say "I guess they're just addicted and this is our life now". I'm saying that "just lock up the homeless people" is as much a solution as "well, we've got seatbelts" is for a hydroplaning car. We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless, and 2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.

petsfed··on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
Not the parent, but weather resistant bus shelters take up a lot of space. So you're essentially trading sidewalk space for bus access.
petsfed··on A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
You're not wrong that such things make a city less walkable, but there's also a strong argument that just punishing people, instead of, you know, addressing the underlying problem doesn't solve the problem either. It just sets up a situation where people bounce from jail (due to the realities of living on the streets) to the homeless encampment (due to unpaid fines preventing them from earning any money).

Like, the whole reason the West Oakland homeless encampment has such an enormous garbage pile problem is because nobody living there can sign up for trash service, since they lack an actual address (and likely can't afford trash service anyway). So as soon as the single 30-gallon courtesy trash can gets filled up (within hours of delivery, if experience is any guide), they're on their own until that that can gets emptied. And they provide that single can for all the trash needs of the 30 or so people living adjacent to it.

One of the core drivers of homelessness is the absence of affordable housing within efficient reach of public transit to get to where people work. So by setting up communities that are designed specifically for walking and public transit and are affordable for most directly addresses the main driver of homelessness, which in turn starves the friends-couch-to-homeless-encampment pipeline. Nobody goes directly from evicted to homeless encampment. Its a long fall from grace. Preventing the first step, by ensuring there's adequate housing near where the jobs are, helps prevent the final step.

petsfed··on Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos
I suspect its because when conditions are right to actually see color in deep-sky objects, its confounding that it doesn't look the same as the pictures. Especially if seeing the colors with your own eyes feels like a transcendent experience.

I've only experienced dramatic color from deep sky objects a few times (the blue of the Orion Nebula vastly outshines all the other colors, for instance), and its always sort of frustrating that the picture show something so wildly different from what my own eyes see.

petsfed··on Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
I'll respond to this on its face, because its important:

The "socialist" part of the moniker was 2 things.

First, it was misdirection. Hitler believed that Bolshevisim, and left-wing revolutions in general, were Jewish plots. He was stridently anti-communist, yes, but also anti-socialist, and anti-democratic. The party he took over called themselves "socialist" because they needed a way to telegraph that they were the party of the workers, and at the time, workers' parties were socialist parties, at least in name. Mussolini did the same thing (although, he did start out as a socialist, so that's a bit more complex).

Second, the nazis were all about socializing the property of the outgroups. Vis the banning of Jewish businesses, the confiscation of Jewish property, etc etc. Several pretty prominent Nazis were tried, convicted and imprisoned or executed for stealing Jewish property for themselves (Amon Goth was dismissed from his role as commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp of Schindler's List fame over exactly that). The Nazis considered such theft to be stealing from the Reich.

All of that to say, fascists are happy to exercise socialism, provided the people they are taking from are part of the vilified outgroup that the fascist identity opposes.

petsfed··on Nvidia Becomes First Company to Reach $4T Market Cap
Thing is, NVIDIA ships waaaay more than GPUs. Or, perhaps more accurately, NVIDIA ships chips. Other manufacturers install those chips. Sitting in my office right now, I have 5 computers, and between them I'd estimate I have 15 NVIDIA chips, minimum. Maybe more, I haven't carefully examined my NVIDIA-based, ASUS-manufactured graphics card to see how many name-brand chips it has.

That's to say nothing of all the other products and services they build. I just visited their website, clicked on "solutions" at the top, and there's waaaay more there than just desktop GPUs. And its worth noting that NVIDIA doesn't manufacture or sell any of the down-market NVIDIA-based boards.

Given NVIDIA's role in data centers, I think the 4T market cap is, while probably still somewhat inflated by speculation, not so inflated as to be a bubble ready to pop.

petsfed··on Peasant Railgun
There's also an opportunity for essentially an Oppenheimer-type NPC to explore it, but then at the end of 2 miles of ladder-brigade, it just falls disappointingly on the ground, and you have a battalion of thoroughly demoralized peasants in a combat zone to contend with.
petsfed··on Peasant Railgun
Obviously it's octopoxen

Like the inspiring concept, I think part of the joy of DnD is that it's often an invitation to discussions about irrelevant minutae. Provided the rules-lawyering doesn't take up all the oxygen in the room, it's a fun diversion.

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