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> Interestingly enough, the act of writing notes is evidentially a very effective learning method.

In case you don't know, CliffsNotes isn't you writing notes, it's using someone else's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CliffsNotes


Cannot tell if you're a parody account or not[1], but if so, well done.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785627


I cannot believe there is a 200k job to write selenium tests.

well i am the only qa engineer i do all the cicd too and load testing - the company only had manual testing and I wrote the framework that we use today - but it is easy work yes - and it's 150k - um i guess i thought a bigger number would sound better

There are 200k jobs fixing the “frameworks” AI-slopped into creation at the very edge of Dunning-Kruger competence, maybe?

> edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".

I don't think we should pat ourselves on the back too hard for milquetoast takes devoid of any specifics.

(also I think you misread the responses to your post)


You're too kind, he hallucinated harder than an LLM on that one.

> All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.

"There are five actual Marxist-Leninists you need to be paying attention to in the US but we can't even name one relevant actual fascist, so the symmetry isn't there."

That was my initial reading, and it's because I've encountered numerous people who sincerely believe that. Using sarcasm in posts subject to Poe's Law is a good way to be ambiguous.


Lets start: you. Followed by Stephen Miller. Trump, per the assessment of his own former chief of staff. Josh Hawley. Leonard Leo. All the "Dark Enlightenment." Your initial reading is tendentious and of little value. Are you seriously going to challenge the notion that American politics has a spectrum from center right to fascists-would-blush ideological crackpots like the dark enlightenment?

> Quick reminder, the only humans to ever make it to the moon did it due to “barbaric tribes showing who’s better”.

Weird to quote that when that's not what the GP said and appears to be a paraphrase that loses quite a bit of specificity and so misses the point:

> We need more “for all of humanity” mindset instead of this “barbaric tribes beat each other over the head for sticky oil”

Being realistic about the species is useful, but let's not be disingenuous for imaginary rhetorical points.


I slightly corrected it not to trick op. But to clarify their position was naive. Sorry about that.

It still is naive no matter the quote though.

It’s also naive to dump down the conflict to being over oil. Oil is being used as leverage. But it is not the cause of it.


What is the cause then?

Roughly, trying to keep it with minimal judgement, as hard as it is: - since 79 Iran is marking the US and Israel as enemy countries. (The US due to the 50s revolution, Israel because of the Palestinian problem?) - Iran has been developing nuclear weapons, and using dangerous rhetoric threatening those counties, form Iran perspective this is a defensive measure. - after recent happenings in the Middle East Iran directly attacked Israel (non direct attacks have been commonplace for a while now) making Israel stand to w 12 day war. - the conclusion of this war put both sides in an arms race. - finally, the Iranian protests ending in supposedly 30k dead citizens within about a week changed the perspective of western intelligence about the risk of Iran. A regime willing to kill so many of its citizens and building nuclear weapons is a problem hard to ignore.

Negotiations were clearly Stuck between the sides, forcing the obvious next stage.

This is simplified. But I think touches the core events.


> If that's true, then we're following the timeline

Literally just a citation of Meta's Coconut paper[1].

Notice the 2027 folk's contribution to the prediction is that this will have been implemented by "thousands of Agent-2 automated researchers...making major algorithmic advances".

So, considering that the discussion of latent space reasoning dates back to 2022[2] through CoT unfaithfulness, looped transformers, using diffusion for refining latent space thoughts, etc, etc, all published before ai 2027, it seems like to be "following the timeline of ai-2027" we'd actually need to verify that not only was this happening, but that it was implemented by major algorithmic advances made by thousands of automated researchers, otherwise they don't seem to have made a contribution here.

[1] https://ai-2027.com/#:~:text=Figure%20from%20Hao%20et%20al.%...

[2] https://arxiv.org/html/2412.06769v3#S2


> I'd say it's a very human mistake to make.

>> It'll take you under a minute, and driving 50 meters barely gets the engine warm — plus you'd just have to park again at the other end. Honestly, by the time you started the car, you'd already be there on foot.

It talks about starting, driving, and parking the car, clearly reasoning about traveling that distance in the car not to the car. It did not make the same mistake you did.


> I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web tech at that time, I remember the general feeling is that it was pretty obvious there was tons to do

Almost definitely professional ragebaiters in Wired or Time or whatever, yeah.


> No. I'd actually say freedom of navigation is almost the definition of a Pax

like, say, across a civilian bridge?


> like, say, across a civilian bridge?

Cute. But no cigar. Point is if you put a random assortment of countries in a series of rooms, more of those rooms will agree on freedom of navigation than they will on what bridge can be blown up when. In part because the former is a bright line in a way deciding what is and isn't a military target cannot be.


You should mention that USA does not believe in the freedom of navigation.

Before starting the war with Iran, USA has instituted a blockade of Cuba, intercepting the oil tankers going there and causing thus a severe fuel shortage in Cuba.

Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz was just doing the same that USA has begun doing. So USA has no moral authority to say that Iran should respect "the freedom of navigation", which is a thing that USA does not respect.


Weren't those tankers operating under false flags? Additionally, the US action in Venezuela led to that stream ceasing. I'm not sure what the deal was with Mexico, I read that the US asked them to stop doing business with Cuba but they didn't seem entirely willing to cooperate.

When a properly flagged Russian tanker came through it was left alone.

My impression is that the situation with Cuba is much more complex than the mass media portrayal of a straightforward blockade. Not that I believe the US is free of guilt here; clearly harm is being caused and the motivations seem suspect at best.


If freedom of navigation is so fundamental, why does it depend on flags?

Interesting question. I assume piracy and smuggling and various other law breaking but I'm not certain. AFAIK the only requirement is a legitimate registration. Again AFAIK the vessels that were directly interfered with (ie by force) all had either falsified registrations or were flagged under countries that aren't currently in any state to actually manage registrations.

Then there's also their participation in what's been termed a shadow fleet, the associated falsification of origin of sanctioned oil, the accessing of ports where they otherwise wouldn't be permitted berth, the lack of insurance in case of environmental damage, etc. As I said previously, much more complex than the mass media portrayal.


As you say, the shadow fleet exists because of sanctions. In other words, because the biggest bully on the block is committing de facto piracy with their navy. Pretty much the definition of blocking freedom of navigation. Their insurance paperwork not being in order justifies their seizure?

That's a half truth at best. The sanctions in question are hardly unilateral, particularly in the case of Russia. The shadow fleet exists due to a combination of factors; dodging the sanctions is only one of them.

As I understand it (but I'm certainly no expert) the insurance paperwork isn't in order and the fleet not properly registered as a result of the general state of the vessels involved. The US is hardly alone in this - the UK has also recently taken to seizing such vessels that pass too close to them. But generally yes, if due to the risks no country wants to officially register a vessel and no insurance provider want to cover it then it seems entirely justified to seize it in order to protect the commons. These aren't pleasure boats we're talking about here, they're ridiculously large merchant vessels. There's approximately zero legitimate excuses for them to be flying a fraudulent flag.

Ponder for a moment why it might be that the countries involved don't want these vessels flying their own flags and don't want to extend them insurance policies themselves.


Freedom of navigation is a right of countries. Spanish ships have the right to freely traverse the seas next to Greece, etc. So ships have to identify themselves as belonging to a country so that they can benefit from it.

This is such a made-up idea.

The various treaties about freedom of passage exist precisely because, before the last 200 years, everyone did whatever they wanted with straits and other natural chokepoints, including closing them at will. Freedom of navigation is not an obviously natural right nor one universally accepted, before colonial powers effectively invented it and enforced it with guns. If somebody shows up with bigger guns, it might well disappear again.

Also, I wish the expression "close but no cigar" could be banned on the internet. Unless you're a professor of international relations at a renowned university, you simply don't get to gatekeep what reality is - particularly when making up arbitrary principles like these.


> colonial powers effectively invented it

“In both Roman law and Islamic law, notions of a commonality of the seas were firmly established” (Id.). (It’s also weird to describe a custom of commons as colonial. European colonialism was about the opposite, turning historic commons into private rights.)

As a normative concept, you’re right, it’s new. But the notion that a great power would protect sea access for a variety of groups is old. More as a practical matter, granted—it’s hard to project enough power onto an ocean to control it.


What is the source?

Roman and Islamic law were also pretty much "colonial", even though the term is used of modern European empires, Rome was also an Empire, and the Arab Empires were also aggressively imperialist and maritime traders.


> The notion of the commonality of the seas is firmly established in Roman law, which formed the foundation of early modern European discussions on the right of navigation. A series of passages from the Corpus iuris civilis state that the sea, like the air, should be considered, by the law of nature, a res communis – a thing common to all, which cannot be claimed or usurped by anyone for exclusive use. Islamic law, which had a wide impact from the early modern Mediterranean to Southeast Asia, also considers the sea a boundless entity that is common to all mankind and not subject to private appropriation.

— "The Right of Navigation" <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-o...>

> Roman and Islamic law were also pretty much "colonial", even though the term is used of modern European empires, Rome was also an Empire, and the Arab Empires were also aggressively imperialist and maritime traders.

The difference between European empires and Islamic/Roman ones would be what JumpCrissCross advanced + the extent to which the conquered inhabitants are incorporated into the state, no?


Thanks for the quote and source. I believe Corpus Juris Civilis was based on existing law so the concept goes back much further, and I would guess was incorporated into Islamic empire's came from Roman.

> The difference between European empires and Islamic/Roman ones would be what JumpCrissCross advanced + the extent to which the conquered inhabitants are incorporated into the state, no?

Is it not rather more complex than that? The Roman Empire eventually granted citizenship to conquered people's but after centuries and gradually - all free men getting citizenship was 3rd century. When initially conquered a lot of people were incorporated into the state as slaves. AFAIK the Islamic empires were similar, and the price of being treated equally was to adopt the conquerors culture and religion.

The European Empire I am most familiar with (the British) only wanted the ruling class of its colonies to adopt its culture (with consequences such as speaking fluent/native English being a class marker that last to this day). It also (at least later on) gave colonies increasing autonomy.


> I would guess was incorporated into Islamic empire's came from Roman.

I'm uneducated on Corpus Juris Civilis and have a basic familiarity with Islamic law/history but I'm inclined to think that any similarities between the two would be less a product of diffusion than the result of the tangential relationship between Christianity as understood by the Romans of the time and Islam as understood by classical Muslim jurists.

> Is it not rather more complex than that?

Ha! For sure.

I need to do more thinking about this part, re: colonialism/imperialism.

What I had in mind was the distinction between

a) A state/power that conquers a land without integrating the land and its peoples into it

b) A state/power that conquers a land and integrates the land and its people into it

The Islamic empires I'm most familiar with implemented the second form of conquest.

The concept of equality is an interesting one to think about because I'm not sure whether how we envision it today was common anywhere in the pre-modern world. But non-Muslim subjects were afforded their own set of rights and were not incorporated into the state as slaves (the practice of slavery not withstanding, my point is that it wasn't the same case as how you've described Roman civil integration). Additionally, the land was subsumed into the Islamic state.

But I think we are splitting the main argument into two separate (very engaging!) discussions.

The original argument alleged that "colonial powers effectively invented [freedom of passage] and enforced it with guns". Freedom of navigation in the seas was common to both Roman and Islamic law. Whether Roman and/or Islamic empires qualify as "colonial" or "imperialist" is one thing, but they cannot be the colonial powers that the user who made that argument had in mind.


> weird to describe a custom of commons as colonial

When you point at a resource under my control and force me to share it (or else), it's not "a custom of commons" - it's a classic colonial appropriation.

Which is also how Rome and (initially) the Islamic kingdoms saw the sea when they were upstarters - Rome was very much not a naval power to begin with (or ever, really) and Islamic kings resorted to piracy to match Italian and Spanish powers.

Beyond lofty words, when they finally ended up controlling the straits, both empires definitely treated them like personal possession ("mare nostrum", Ottomans closing the Bosphorous...). Like everyone else, in practice.


> Some people are great at self promotion.

We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.

I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.


What’s the another way?


You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.



> She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?

To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.

To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".

The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.


Jesus! Why is there a presenter? Why isn't it just a livestream of the mission control radio chatter? That sort of shit belongs on some 24/7 news broadcast.


Same reason the livestream mentioned jobs about a dozen times in the 10 minutes I watched, NASA is in a fraught position and this is their way of fighting for some continued funding. A 'mass media' event captures more attention than a minimalist stream of chatter. (And a less cynical interpretation is also that getting the public interested in and engaged with space missions is part of their mandate.)


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