Joking_Phantom (u/Joking_Phantom)

Joking_Phantom commented on Manufactured consensus on x.com rook2root.co/articles/202... · Posted by u/cogitovirus

Every social media platform is manipulated by it's owners and elites. There's no way to get around it, not when your KPIs are user engagement and advertising dollars.

Twitter has become a particularly nasty version of it. In the before times, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. usually spent their efforts trying to manipulate things in a mostly benign way.

If you like free markets, then you must be opposed to Twitter. This is a market controlled by a few. Competition is rigorously hunted down. Lies and fake social proof packaged into "free speech." Only the chosen ones are allowed audience.

This is the opposite of capitalism. This is the worst of cronyism.

Force switching all accounts to unfollow Democracts and follow Republicans and Elon, signal boosting right wing conspiracy theorists, blocking or suspending left or liberal accounts, it's just naked power centralization all the way down...

Joking_Phantom commented on CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us... · Posted by u/doctaj

rayiner · 7 months ago

So I guess it depends on why you think the Iraq War was bad. To me, the Iraq War was bad because, even if the intel had been correct, the notion that you could create a democracy in Iraq was fundamentally foolish, along with the idea that it was America’s job to do it.

To me, the Iraq War was a predictable disaster rooted not in bad intel, but the mistaken concept of liberal universalism (emphasis on universalism, not liberal). Clinton is a smart, probably well meaning person. But what she shares with George W. Bush is liberal universalism, and that’s a bad and dangerous idea. It’s been a bad and dangerous idea that’s gotten us involved in countless non-defensive wars over the last 50 years.

In that respect, the Democratic Party today is a lot closer to the bad old GOP than it was 20 years ago. Between Ukraine, helping overthrow Assad, what Blinken allegedly did in Pakistan, rabble-rousing about “human rights” in Bangladesh—the Democratic Party today is full of liberal universalists. They’re not literally the same people who got us into the Iraq War, but the ideology isn’t any less dumb today, and will result in similar disasters.

What Trump understands that democrats don’t is that non-Americans aren’t Americans. The conceit underlying the Iraq war is that Iraqis were Americans. If you overthrew the dictator keeping them down, they’d build a democracy. And it was a monumental error. And the same is true for Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. This is a conceit that liberal universalists cannot let go of.

Joking_Phantom · 7 months ago

This is the only comment you made so far that made sense, with clear assertions and references. Everything else was unfounded or inflammatory without any concrete assertion, which is why it vibed like "Fox News talking points."

While I do think what you describe under the label of "liberal universalism" mostly makes sense, I do challenge it's consistency. By all measures, some countries are trending towards becoming liberal democracies. Why shouldn't we help them?

Ukraine being a viable liberal democracy, a useful geopolitical ally, and in opposition to a destabilizing and dehumanizing autocracy, makes for a perfect candidate for support beyond naive global liberalism. It is in our interests in many practical terms, separate from ideology.

Joking_Phantom commented on Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo? blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2... · Posted by u/terryf

walrus01 · a year ago

Do you actually mean battleship, or frigate, corvette, aircraft carrier, etc? Battleships in the sense of the Iowa class and similar haven't been a thing in the US Navy for a very long time, unless you were working on blast damage/effect simulations in the 1980s when Reagan reactivated them for a short time.

Joking_Phantom · a year ago

It seems likely that theoretical work would still be done on battleships, after we stopped using them in the real world.

Joking_Phantom commented on I Got Scammed pluralistic.net/2024/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

Fraud sucks and is ever evolving. Everyone gets hit in increasingly elaborate scams, and companies with degrading services makes it easier.

Some things I'm surprised weren't in the article, given that the author describes extensive background in security:

1. Suspiciously well timed fraud attempts happen when you are vulnerable, because the attacker is tipped off. Travelling and visiting unfamiliar locations raises a lot of smoke, information wise. Relying on secrets doesn't work, because information is leaked in an uncountable number of ways. You should no longer be thinking "did my card number, phone number, PID, or other secret get stolen?" It should instead be "given that my info was stolen, did anything bad happen and who do I need to securely talk to?"

2. Always blow off incoming calls, you can always get a callback or fix later, and check email, text, or other comms to see if something important is going on. Saying anything is information. As little as a few seconds of your voice being recorded can be used to generate a usable AI voice clone, and at worse it only takes a few minutes. The act of answering a phone call is information, confirming that your phone number is active and belongs to you.

Ironically, the reliance on a local CU also seems to be a miss. IME, big evil banks are more reliable in this area. They get scammed way more often, and as a result are much more resistant to these attacks via pure attrition.

Joking_Phantom commented on The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023) afterbabel.com/p/internat... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

mike_hearn · 2 years ago

This is a super interesting thread, but (un)fortunately Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics, weak signals and so on.

Unfortunately Haidt's initial response was to make a circular argument, saying you can't demand a high quality of evidence for the crisis because there's a crisis, and to engage in a subtle form of gish gallop by saying that surely not all 300 papers he selected can be bad even if a subsample were.

https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1641850836287356930

Still, to his immense credit Haidt engaged seriously with the criticism and so Brown wrote another response:

https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...

I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).

"A bad study is like a bad mortgage loan," I wrote in my original piece. "Packaging them up on the assumption that somehow their defects will cancel each other out is based on flawed logic, and it's a recipe for drawing fantastically wrong conclusions."

It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis.

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

This fits what I've read. Data driven decision making is the way to go, but good data is hard to come by in these fields. We have no baseline for many parts of physical health, let alone mental health. Every time a pop culture scientist tries to justify their world perspective without taking the source of data seriously, it does the field as a whole serious harm.

Joking_Phantom commented on The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023) afterbabel.com/p/internat... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

Not a big fan of Heidt. Way too much political, unsubstantiated and handwavy rhetoric from him. And his track record has been entirely unconvincing.

The only reasonable way I can interpret his work is that of a ideologically driven puritan, trying to make the data fit his perception. In doing so, he often misses the forest for the trees.

In particular, this interpretation of teenage mental illness is predicated on data. But the data sucks. Why should we assume we have accurate data on mental illness? It's ridiculous when you consider our society's terrible history in dealing with this stigma. Sexist notions like female hysteria, gross misuse of sedatives and psychoactive drugs by medical charlatans, repression of discussion about mental illness, bias/inexperience/abuse by governmental and health care institutions, horrible conditions at sanitoriums, the list goes on. Give it another 100 years and maybe we can draw some better patterns.

In no particular order, here are some highlights on medical data and institutions in history...

1. The consensus on normal heart rate is still erroneously assumed to be 60-100 bpm. For over 100 years, this myth was predicated on poor data and grossly misinterpreted literature. Our current, best consensus based on better data is 50-90 bpm, though virtually all textbooks and educational programs have failed to update themselves. If we can't even get statistics on heart rates right, how are we supposed to get statistics on mental illness correct?

2. There is no consensus on average breaths per minute. Textbooks often contradict themselves, quoting different fabricated ranges for respiratory rates within the same page. Data in this area is sparse and and lacks adjustment for demographics. The most comprehensive data is from a study done in 1846... We just don't know because we haven't put in the rigorous effort to definitively identify this range. Again, this basic measurement is much easier than mental illness, and we haven't done it yet.

3. The most established field of medicine is considered to be Obstetrics. That is to say, this is the medical field with the oldest depth of knowledge that we consider to be accurate or useful. Which makes sense given the significance of managing childbirth for societies. And yet there are still severe deficiencies in this field. We have a long way to go in the most mature field of medical science, and an even longer way to go in every other field. In comparison, mental health was not even mentioned in writing until 1946.

4. Prior to the gross misuse of opioids perpetuated by the Sackler family, was the gross misuse of benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium). Prior was of Barbiturates. Prior to that was alcohol. And countless more medications in between those broad categories. Humanity has abused substances to numb itself from crippling anxiety for centuries, and in the modern sense has almost always sought to mass market these drugs before careful consideration of their appropriate use. Each medication was so abused that each generation has their own idioms and memes regarding their misuse.

I'm certain that we can do better. It's just going to take time, and Heidt's work just seems like reading tea leaves and putting people in arbitrary pigeon holes.

Joking_Phantom commented on Invisible Bunnies That Power World of Warcraft (2017) kotaku.com/the-invisible-... · Posted by u/cpeterso

TeMPOraL · 2 years ago

Ah, ECS. The most ill-defined software pattern since IoC/DI. Everyone seems to have their own understanding of it, usually somewhere on the spectrum between "what if we kept the game state in a relational database"[0] and "what if we put any individual type of information into its own big array, so it's CPU-cache-friendly"[1]. I wrote several such systems for my own toy games, at various points of that spectrum[2], and I still have a bunch of open questions I can't seem to get my head around.

The biggest such question is: how the hell do you handle "cross-cutting concerns" in an ECS architecture, especially in the data-oriented programming version, where "cross-cutting concerns" are basically any kind of logic ("system") that needs to access more than one component of an entity at the time, especially if it does so conditionally? Like e.g.:

- Physics, rendering, animation, and game logic all need to access some subset of the same position, orientation, dimensions, velocity, acceleration, mass, tensor of inertia, etc.

- Any kind of logic that goes like "IF something(component 1) THEN doSomethingTo(component 2) ELSE doSomethingTo(component 3)".

How are you supposed to preserve data locality in such cases? Is it even theoretically possible?

I may have some fundamental misunderstanding about the definitions here[3], but I haven't found any clear answer to the questions above, whether theoretical or practical. Back when I last looked, couple years ago, I couldn't find any non-toy game written ECS-first and with source available to study. Maybe this has changed now.

--

[0] - Which, as far I recall, was the original idea behind the pattern. It's also a very interesting one in general - if you squint, a lot of code all of us write for our projects is just half-baked attempts at setting up specific indexes and hand-rolling queries to a bunch of vectors, hashmaps, or (gasp) object graphs.

[1] - AKA "data-oriented programming", in this case mostly preferring "Structs of Arrays" over "Arrays of Structs".

[2] - One of them was literally just "let's store all game state in an in-memory SQLite database, because guess what, it's actually fast enough to be queried at 60 FPS!".

[3] - In my defense, most of the guides, tutorials and articles I read back in the day were themselves confused between "SQL approach" and "SoA approach" (see [0]), or worse, mixed in "whatever abomination Unity passed as ECS back then" and even something semi-related from .NET world. It took me a lot of time to understand that everyone's using their own blend of all those ideas, and this left me unsure about what one's really supposed to do.

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

I think the answer is that ECS isn't supposed to solve those problems directly. It's just a framework that makes a certain class of problems very easy to solve. But big picture complexity is still up to the developer's skill and wisdom. Knowing which parts of the game should go into ECS, and which parts go somewhere else. Which systems flow from another system. Which system is allowed to manipulate the data directly and which systems are only able to read data reasonably, but not write. And how your design of the game may need to change to suit the limitations of your computer and your ability to program.

ECS is like any other framework. It is a tool or system, for organizing your efforts. Be very liberal with using it in its intended scope. Be judicious when its at the edge of its scope. Be very skeptical when its outside of its scope.

Joking_Phantom commented on An update on Twitch in Korea blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12... · Posted by u/zeroCalories

jinxedpenguin · 2 years ago

Actually found a pretty good source on what the Korean rules are (hint - it is about paid peering).

This is somewhat biased (it's from a Spanish telecom - actually editing this again, the style choice + date formatting makes me think it is from a Korean trade group/telecom but the only source I can find for this is Telefonica. Likely from the Korean telecom industry itself...).

Just haven't really seen a comment linking to anything substantial about the actual plans/rules/etc in Korea.

https://www.telefonica.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/202...

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

A corrupt Spanish organization, trying to support a corrupt Korean organization, only brings more credence to the argument that SPNP was a bad idea.

Joking_Phantom commented on LLMs confabulate not hallucinate beren.io/2023-03-19-LLMs-... · Posted by u/pella

pcblues · 2 years ago

I'm not sure whether neurofancy people confabulating should be given an honest bill of truth health based on their category.

Sounds like #believeallconfabulators :)

Honest communication is difficult for some people to assess, and not for others. But I think we should learn from any recent #believeall... that we shouldn't base trust ratios on categorisation.

Honest communication is difficult to do, like weight-lifting, and takes a lot of practise to do well.

It also makes your BS meter more finely attuned, so is a good practise.

With that in mind, you will think this is arrogant to say if you lie for a living but not if you regularly tell the truth: Liars lie with liars and lie to rid themselves of truth troubles.

Think about that when you next talk to a chatbot/human confabulator :)

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

I'm not really into Twitter, so I'm guessing there's some drama you are referencing that is topical.

But, I'm not talking about any society wide issue or philosophical treatise about trust and breakdowns in communication. Just talking about day to day interactions, where the stakes are completely different.

Trivial Example: If the sign on a mailbox says "Last pickup 5:00pm," what exactly does that mean? Will it be picked up, processed, and sent out of town that same day? Or just merely picked up, to be processed and sent the next day. This piece of written communication isn't a purely useful truth - it's ambiguous.

Pretend that this is an important behavior to know for your business, like if you were mailing huge checks for some obscure financial process. So you call up the local post office and ask. The worker who picks up the phone might know exactly what you are talking about and helpfully tell you the right answer. Or they might not, and tell you honestly that they don't know. Or they ask their supervisor, transfer you, make something up, tell you it doesn't matter, mail will get where it goes, or that you shouldn't worry about it, it's just mail.

ChatGPT could give you same distribution of answers as that worker did: helpful truth, meaningless equivocation, reassurance, redirection, confabulation, or lie to you. ChatGPT can be just as useful as talking to people in spite of those flaws, because people do the same thing.

This is reliant on the prior assumption that you gracefully handle unreliable communication, and that communication with people is useful. While this might seem a bit farfetched to some people, remember that we have a ready analog in computer science - networking TCP over UDP.

Joking_Phantom commented on LLMs confabulate not hallucinate beren.io/2023-03-19-LLMs-... · Posted by u/pella

Joking_Phantom · 2 years ago

I'm not sure if confabulate is exactly what LLMs do (though it seems closer than the implications of hallucinate).

But neurotypical, neurodiverse, perfectly functional people, etc. all confabulate or do something similar on a regular basis, in verbal and written mediums, and often do so in good faith. It's human instinct to communicate, even if you are uncertain and unaware of the full context of the discussion.

Teachers, customer service reps, executives, shop keepers, doctors, nurses, domain experts, authors of textbooks, it doesn't matter who it is, they'll probably confabulate or equivocate or do some other type of communication that isn't immediately useful. Yet it's still a useful activity to just talk to someone or read a less than rigorous book for the purposes of learning (discounting the relationship forming part, which is also useful). And so is using LLMs, even for casual users. So long as they understand that limitation, whether its with a chatbot or a real person. Not everything they say will be useful or truthful, but we are already capable of adjusting to that.