swlabr @ swlabr @awful.systems

Only Bayes Can Judge Me

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2 yr. ago

I recently searched “shtetl” on facebook to see what my friends had ever shared from the blog, literally only three posts:

• A 2014 post titled “eigenmorality” which I skimmed just now, appears to be a rationalist coded social credit system, this is probably not what students are looking for
• A post titled “NSA in P/poly: The Power of Precomputation”. This appears to have useful information about cryptography that I don’t have the expertise or energy to parse, also it’s from 2015.
• A 2016 post about the 8000th busy beaver number, bringing us full circle.

So in terms of the content worth sharing and alternatives, it appears it’s just the CS based stuff.

E: Joke answer: clearly the go-to contrablog is Scott’s nemesis Arthur Chu’s archived twitter feed, or just watching Jeopardy episodes.

and I have always suggested we keep away as he seems to need therapy not a debate

Zionists are fascists and do not deserve peace.

Here's the update Scott posted, with my comments interspersed:

This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7

Ah yes, October 7thism, the belief that the universe began on October 7th of 2023. There was nothing before this time, certainly no such thing as "palestine" or "gaza", and Israel just materialised, only to be set upon by some real stinkers and meanies who attacked for no reason whatsoever. And then Israel definitely didn't invoke something they named the "Hannibal Directive" to kill their own people.

to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me

Dear everyone who emailed Scott: please don't try debate fascists. They will only try and normalise their fascism to you.

messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“

Yes, Hamas needs to be defeated so that the Israelis can finally leave Palestine alone, a thing they will definitely do and not just continue with their genocide.

—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground.

This is approaching self-awareness, in that Scott is discovering that as a fascist, he doesn't have common ground to share with non or antifascists.

With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—

Helped in part by the Israeli media that gleefully report the results of their genocide and their ongoing plans to continue said genocide—

i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today.

Damn those anti-Zionist sharks and their opposition of genocide! And damn those people that have only recently found it politically convenient to denounce genocide, and damn those that still aren't willing to call it a genocide but are willing to compromise on famine. Damn them all!

And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response, or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?”

This is hearsay; I reject this outright. I do think that Israel needs to be dismantled, but not for the bullshit strawman reason he's given.

And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.

This does not justify genocide.

To say that this experience radicalized me would be an understatement.

Actually, it would be an overstatement. Scott was already Zionist before Oct 7th, so he was fully radicalised as Zionist/fascist before "this experience."

Indeed, my experience has been that even most Israelis, who generally have far fewer illusions than we diaspora Jews, don’t understand the vastness of the chasm that’s formed. They imagine that they can have a debate with outsiders similar to the debates playing out within Israel—one that presupposes basic factual knowledge and the parameters of the problem (e.g., clearly we can’t put 7 million Jews under the mercy of Hamas). The rationale for Zionism itself feels so obvious to them as to be cringe. Except that, to the rest of the world, it isn’t.

Yes, to a lot of the world, colonialism is objectionable. And to the rest of the world, genocide is objectionable.

We’re not completely on our own though. There remain decent people of every background, who understand the stakes and feel the weight of history—and I regularly hear from them.

The Nazis had sympathisers too!

And whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics,

Not putting it lightly at all.

so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters.

Once again, this does not justify genocide. This does not justify zionism or fascism.

It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.

More like fascist to fascist.

This is Uzumaki by Junji Ito but computers and stupid

You can pull a lever to divert the train and save your daughter. But there’s a catch, as there always is in these moral dilemmas: namely, the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks, in such a way that, if you divert the train, then it will kill his children.

Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob.

I deal with emails and social media posts day after day calling me a genocidal baby-killing monster.

I mean this is all just textbook zionism. Zionists are openly genocidal and proud of it, and are aghast that anyone might oppose zionism.

E: to be clear, zionist propaganda gets regurgitated by western media outlets to try and hide the genocide; this is a tactical measure as israel relies on international support to continue its genocide. Internally, israeli news outlets openly celebrate genocide.

I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game

I think there’s room for both approaches simultaneously, especially at universities/colleges where you could offer multiple intro courses.

RE: (meta?)speculation about the quantum bubble. So the preceding two tech bubbles tried to worm their way into the arts: NFTs, and slop. How do we think the quantum hucksters are gonna try co-opt craativity?

KP writing a paper for the journal “New Frontiers In Gaslighting Children”

There is nothing wrong with learning python in general or as a first language. My gripe is more that if you self teach it with no software engineering thought, you end up with some real bad habits that lead to bad code, like:

• not documenting code with comments etc.
• not testing
• not understanding data types
• RE: micropython, and other python wrappers: not understanding the underlying wrapped thing.
• complaining when other languages are as easy or convenient as python

So as long as you avoid that you might be good.

Also specifically with micropython: it’s good to get something working, just don’t expect it to be fast. And if you want it to be fast, you’re going to have to learn C.

Great question that I don’t have a good answer to. My bit about python was more just a throwaway joke that was also supposed to indicate that my own opinions aren’t sufficient to write the linked article.

Here are some wrong answers, but with reasons for and none against:

• Assembly: really gets you to understand that you are contending with a computer chip, and that anything interesting that you want to do requires abstraction.
• C: similar to the above, but also gets you to understand some of the fundamental aspects of programming languages, mostly memory.
• Perl: if you’re willing to teach python, why not Perl? Less readable, more magic, fun language to play golf with, so tutorial exercises could be fun.

By coincidence, these are the first three languages that I encountered as a CS student with no preexisting knowledge of programming (not in this order).

Anyway, for something approaching a real suggestion: Dart/Flutter could be an interesting choice, for some of the reasons given in the article for HTML. I haven’t given this much thought so this might still be a bad answer. Also this is the language I’m using at work right now.

Short version is that 10-15 years ago, when I was a student, it had the same “vibe” as vibe coding has today, i.e. the promise of easy implementation, but with the final product being sloppy, unreadable and buggy.

All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys

I thought she had stolen a vaguely Asian sounding last name for some reason. Same with Richard Ngo

Communism is when no Venti latte

I completely agree with this. Good, lucid, concise commentary on CS/SE education and how to improve it. If I had written this article I’d just be telling people to ban python in coding education.

I haven’t clicked on any links here yet, this sounds like a bit, but because it’s LW I have to assume bad faith and that this is real.

E: lol real. Why wouldn’t they go for apes lol

Putting the “manic pixie” in manic pixie dream girl

roy_batty.aac

Ah fuck. I didn’t click it cos I assumed it was the original tweet. I’ll just leave it there so you can all witness my crimes