Looks like the cheese is about to announce some dumb as fuck ideas around tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile in reality, we can’t compel Iran to stop attacking civilian shipping.

Ankit Panda@nktpnd.bsky.social · 4h ago

USDP speech on this in Omaha today at noon, FYI; BLUF seems to be *not* sizing up strategic forces for 2-front damage limitation ~2035 against Russia + China, but maintaining NST-ish strat forces while adding a whole bunch of theater stuff www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

50 is a goat tier hater

ae@aelkus.bsky.social · 13h ago

it gives me no pleasure to say this but: this is why we cannot afford to have AOC be the nominee in '28

Uncrewed@uncrewed.bsky.social · 18h ago

TRUTH NVKE

Oh hey, I remember that same narrative from Mamdani’s mayoral run. It’s almost like white pundits try to launder their own prejudices by claiming to speak for Black voters.

"we are blessed to not understand what a 1% fatality rate event looks like" This tickled a statistic in my brain. For a comparative baby shower CFR, it'd be like throwing a celebratory party for someone getting COVID in July 2020. (0.5% to 1.0% CFR at the time.)

Prediction: we will never see self driving cars in widespread use in lower Manhattan. It is more likely that either lower Manhattan ends up car free, or NYC ends up regulating them out of existence.

Oh my god I think I found the video.

CSketch@csketch.bsky.social · yesterday

WE HAVE REAL CAMPS YOU CAN BE OUTRAGED ABOUT

Jonathan Howard@joho.bsky.social · yesterday

These guys are freaking out over their own imaginations again.

I’ve made a career of dunking on RL stuff for high criticality engineered systems - where there is no opportunity to try it out and fuck up. Also, imo bio-mimicry is a wasteland. Billions of years of evolution and no wheels? Weak shit imo.

Both weapons are largely irrelevant to the China fight. ATACMs has a 300km range, and PRSM is 500km+ (but def <1000km). For China we need shitloads of 1000km+ missiles, which currently are cruise missiles (depleted but not zero) and LRHW/CPS, which they notably have _not_ used so far.

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · yesterday

I have zero knowledge about military stuff. So correct me if I'm wrong: Basically we spent decades building up a big stockpile of advanced weapons so we could be ready for any potential conflict with China or Russia? And then Trump used ALL OF THEM in a literally aimless war with Iran?

Calvin and Hobbes dad comic about the two ways to get rich: buy low/sell high vs collect premiums/deny claims used car dealers appear to be buy low/sell high but are actually collect premiums/deny claims (sell people loans to cars that you then repossess)

Chris Kluwe@chriswarcraft.bsky.social · 2d ago

I think the thing that really breaks my brain in this day and age is watching insurance companies continuously deny payouts in order to boost shareholder value while at the same time witnessing direct pleas from community organizations trying to help people survive disasters

The Second UN Charter must mandate markets be open 24/7 as a matter of global peace and stability and the fact I'm not *100%* kidding here scares me

Oh hey pop quiz The generation with the really bad lead poisoning was doing lots of crimes in the '70s and '80s, because that's when they were young adults, and that's who does crimes When were those guys in positions of political power?

Broke: is the Islamic Republic of Iran a rational actor? Bespoke: is the United States of America a rational actor?

Re: policy gradient and picking the perfect objective fn? Isn’t solving this equivalent to solving the alignment problem ? Optimization can only give _you what you_ ask for. The critical invention is to RETVRN to traditional operations research: and to implement constraints?

James MacGlashan@jmac-ai.bsky.social · 2d ago

But if asking the agent to figure it out results in an objective with an ill-conditioned Hessian, then isn't the dream hopeless? Or at least hopeless by just using policy gradient methods. So perhaps what we need is new kinds of objectives and problem framings.

“The next war is going to be nuclear. Once you can kill every soldier via remote control, your only hope is nuclear deterrence” Which is a sentiment so astoundingly grim and deranged (I think it’s cyberwar - as it enables you to attack economies without directly killing millions)

A retired infantry colonel, who post GWOT did nuke stuff, said to me in a depressed voice: “Afghanistan was the most fun an infantry soldier will ever have - everything war is going to be awful” which I thought was a truly deranged statement, only to be followed up with:

Palo Alto’s primary “density problem” is not having enough density

the closer you get to the end, typically the more you believe in (expensive) western medicine and if you don’t you die (eg Steve Jobs) MAHA is a luxury belief, and vaccine denialism inflicts a stupid choice on others

Mike Yass@mikeyass.bsky.social · 2d ago

a whole lot of people are very unhappy with the us healthcare system, Many dislike the cost, some feel ignored but many people’s entry into crank medicine/MAHA is folks being ignored that there is no cure for an aging body

I swear to god "professes to be radical left, but spends most of their time complaining about the cost of cheeseburgers and that their household wares are too cheaply made" is an unholy political chimera forged in the consumerist heart of American society to torment me, specifically

i freaked out about the crowds and left the george floyd protests early because I thought Trump was letting them happen to cause a super-spreader event among us libs 3wks later, when the DC hospitals didn't overflow - they needed to start stop yelling at people for hanging out in the parks...

George Pearkes@peark.es · 3d ago

This is a thing people get in to in markets and economy too, where people critique forecasts or trades in the rear view mirror. There are *absolutely* situations where “people should have known” is the correct take but they are a small subset of all failed predictions or blown up trades.

D’Angelo, shut your mouth.

Frank Capra answered the question of why we fought! m.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAs...

Why We Fight: Prelude to War

YouTube video by US National Archives

m.youtube.com

Anthropocene Datamaskin@anthropocenities.bsky.social · 5d ago

But from a US perspective, WW2 was about the threat of foreign invasion, not ideology or even morality. Americans supported the war because of Pearl Harbor. /1

sorry but it's a bit like doing on an RCT on "eating food" as the cure for being "hungry" - what exactly are the alternatives??? for most medicine - they don't do RCTs against *nothing* - it's typically a "standard of care" or at worst, a placebo the standard of care for *trash* is *trash cans*

RCTs on the administrative costs of *trash cans*? How about an RCT on the administrative costs of RCTs??

Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social · 6d ago

Important to remember that NYCs new innovation (trash cans) is an example of a scaled up RCT pilot. journal-bpa.org/index.php/jb...

It's kind of crazy, bc there's basically one major tech company making objects at scale, and they quite famously make 100% of them overseas. Like, there are few things SV knows less about than large scale domestic manufacturing.

I Will Give You Capitalism, and You Shall Be Destroyed.

ellie lockhart (she/they)@eleanor.lockhart.contact · 6d ago

Real capitalism has never been tried

Yeah so NYT asked me ~2 yrs ago to write an op-ed about how the Colorado is running dry, & what we should do to keep this exact thing from happening. I said "There's only one real answer. Bill farmers by how much water they use. Duh." NYT editorial staff freaked tf out & cancelled the piece.

Elias Thorne@truebe.horse · 6d ago

saw an article today about an az politician saying how great it was that we're now in emergency drought conditions because the farmers get automatic bailouts and I feel like way more Professional Rural Understanders just breeze by sentences like that. www.paysonroundup.com/news/arizona...

some legitimate violence on the timeline today

Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢@regimecpa.bsky.social · 6d ago

They need to release a site reliability engineer benchmark, then maybe Anthropic can get four nines of uptime

This MFer killed David Halberstam by driving recklessly www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

Driver in crash that killed Halberstam pleads not guilty

The UC Berkeley graduate student who was driving David Halberstam to an interview when...

sfgate.com

Theo Gordon@theogordon.bsky.social · last wk.

Move over zucchini lady, this guy calling 'bike lanes white lanes' and calling the Terner Center the 'Gentrification Center' is my new favorite Berkeley Council moment. #berkmtg