imperialismus's recent activity

  1. Comment on ”Whiplash” gets jazz all wrong in ~music

    imperialismus
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    Reminds me of this neologism by Michael Crichton:

    Per your last thought, I’ve taken to calling it the “Stuff You Should Know Experience."

    Reminds me of this neologism by Michael Crichton:

    Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

    In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

    16 votes
  2. Comment on ”Whiplash” gets jazz all wrong in ~music

    imperialismus
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    Just for context, as someone who knows next to nothing about jazz or its subculture, when I watched the movie, my first instinct was "this is dysfunctional af and probably not representative." I...

    Just for context, as someone who knows next to nothing about jazz or its subculture, when I watched the movie, my first instinct was "this is dysfunctional af and probably not representative." I get it though. I have the same feeling when I see pop culture/mainstream media depictions of something niche that I have a personal connection to and I can't relate to it.

    14 votes
  3. Comment on Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued in ~sports.football

    imperialismus
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    This isn't the case. It's true that VAR continuously monitors the state of play, but not that it will respond to any small offense. The rules aren't that dense, at least not the basic gist of it....

    This means it's continuously monitoring the state of play and will respond any time any small offense has been made.

    This isn't the case. It's true that VAR continuously monitors the state of play, but not that it will respond to any small offense. The rules aren't that dense, at least not the basic gist of it. It's at the top:

    A video assistant referee (VAR) is a match official, with independent access to match footage, who may assist the referee only in the event of a ‘clear and obvious error’ or ‘serious missed incident’ in relation to:

    a. Goal/no goal

    b. Penalty/no penalty

    c. Direct red card (not second yellow card/caution)

    d. Mistaken identity (when the referee cautions or sends off the wrong player of the offending team)

    This means there's an array of minor offenses and referee calls VAR isn't allowed to weigh in on, unless they have a direct bearing on a goal scored. And only in cases of "clear and obvious error."

    Of course, that's the principle, not always the practice. But that's not a core issue with any and all forms of VAR, it's an issue with the current implementation of it. It shouldn't and doesn't microanalyze every single thing that happens, by design. And that's a good thing.

    7 votes
  4. Comment on Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued in ~sports.football

    imperialismus
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    I'm not anti VAR, but there are some legit complaints. The most cited reason is that it kills spontaneous joy for fans. Sometimes a goal check takes minutes, during which time fans have to temper...

    I'm not anti VAR, but there are some legit complaints. The most cited reason is that it kills spontaneous joy for fans. Sometimes a goal check takes minutes, during which time fans have to temper their celebrations, and supporters physically present in the stadium generally get very poor communication. TV watchers at least get to see what the video referees are looking at, usually. There's also concerns about it affecting referees on the pitch, making them overly hesitant to go with their instincts on calls that aren't super obvious, relying instead on VAR as a crutch.

    Of course, there's also the fact that it's still a system of technology-aided human judgment, rather than an unerring machine. Which means there will still be human error, but tolerance for it on the part of fans is much lower since the video refs have so much technology to help them make the right call. Some top leagues use goal-line technology, which is an automated system that only determines if the ball has been over the line (a goal can still be disallowed due to a foul, which is a human judgment call, but with goal line tech, the question of whether the ball actually was over the goal line or not is automated). This system has worked very well. I think in the English Premier League, there's only been a single instance where the technology clearly made the wrong call. It's much less controversial because it's so damn reliable.

    I believe the most commonly used goal line tech is, as you say, "AI processing the feeds" - it's called Hawk-Eye and is also used in other sports like tennis. But the scope of it is much more limited and much more objective. Whether something is a punishable foul or an allowable incident in a contact sport is much broader and more subjective than "did the ball pass fully over the goal line within the posts".

    On top of all that, this article is specifically about the Norwegian league, and VAR as implemented in Norway has been particularly bad. Small countries and smaller leagues struggle to recruit enough competent referees in general. And doubly so with a new technology - people are learning on the job, and that causes additional frustration. That plus the technical side of things hasn't been perfect either. Even the clubs that are pro VAR in general agree that the current implementation needs to be improved going forward.

    10 votes
  5. Comment on Bluesky advertises itself as an open network, they say people won't lose followers or their identity, they advertise themselves as a protocol ("atproto"). These three claims are false. in ~tech

    imperialismus
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    You just reminded me of the endless discussions about Linux on the desktop in the early 2000s. Every year was predicted to be the year when finally Linux on the desktop breaks through into the...

    People don't care about your tech, they care how it feels to use it, and unfortunately UX isn't often a FOSS developer strength. Usually the process relies on someone else coming along and wrapping the FOSS project in an accessible UX. Without that step mastodon never had a chance.

    You just reminded me of the endless discussions about Linux on the desktop in the early 2000s. Every year was predicted to be the year when finally Linux on the desktop breaks through into the mainstream. What happened instead was something nobody really predicted back in like 2003: Linux did become the most popular consumer OS, but in the form of Android. Beause Android doesn't feel like Linux and only 0.1% of users -- that's probably a generous estimate -- even care that it's based on Linux under the hood.

    And that initiative didn't come from the FOSS world, it came from one of the world's largest tech companies.

    9 votes
  6. Comment on Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud in ~health

    imperialismus
    Link Parent
    I suggest using PMs next time. It's a bit uncomfortable to sit there wondering if people are mocking you in a cryptic way.

    I suggest using PMs next time. It's a bit uncomfortable to sit there wondering if people are mocking you in a cryptic way.

    4 votes
  7. Comment on Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud in ~health

  8. Comment on Finnish state should invest in a new nuclear power plant, according to Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Kai Mykkänen – electricity needs are expected to double over the next decade in ~enviro

    imperialismus
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    Seems to be a game of telephone. After diving just a little bit into the rabbit hole, it appears that: Vaantan Energia is a Finnish renewable energy company that at least based on 15 minutes of...

    Seems to be a game of telephone. After diving just a little bit into the rabbit hole, it appears that:

    • Vaantan Energia is a Finnish renewable energy company that at least based on 15 minutes of Googling appears to be real. They have both a pilot geothermal plant already running, which produces about 2,600 mWh/year, and are planning an underground storage project that will store heat in the form of pressurized water, but the latter hasn't been built yet
    • Separately, they mention a somewhat fantastical and definitely speculative plan supposedly proposed by a French company, CGG. This plan is to exploit thermal energy from hydrothermal vents under the North Sea. They say that this (supposedly) could provide energy for 20 million years, and also, vaguely, that the conditions under the North Sea resemble those in Finland
    • This has then morphed from "vague comparisons between the geological conditions of Finland and the bottom of the North Sea" via "fantastical plan to exploit undersea thermal vents for energy" to "a 20-million-year source of energy has been discovered in Finland"
    5 votes
  9. Comment on Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud in ~health

    imperialismus
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    When people get to be 100 years old, 105, 110... They often get interviewed by local (and sometimes even national) media as a human interest story, and they're always asked the question: what's...

    When people get to be 100 years old, 105, 110... They often get interviewed by local (and sometimes even national) media as a human interest story, and they're always asked the question: what's the secret to your longevity? Over the years I must've read dozens of interviews with people aged 90+ who were asked that question, and there's no pattern to their answers. Most of them have a theory, but none of the theories line up! Some are basic common sense, some are old fashioned "salt of the earth" type morals, some is random dietary advice, much of which doesn't line up with modern science based nutritional advice... I don't recall ever reading about anyone who said "honestly I just got lucky" or "I don't know."

    Obviously, a single individual's life story can't possibly be enough evidence to uncover the secret of how to live a long life. But it strikes me that this paper might just have uncovered that kind of thinking writ large. I've seen a lot of speculation about why certain places tend to produce such long-lived individuals, but if it turns out the reason was just clerical error or plain fraud, maybe it's not so different from asking any random centenarian the question of why they think they're so old.

    25 votes
  10. Comment on What significant dates from fiction have we reached? in ~books

    imperialismus
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    Surely one of the most prominent ones has to be 2001: A Space Odyssey.

    Surely one of the most prominent ones has to be 2001: A Space Odyssey.

    18 votes
  11. Comment on Exit Generation Alpha, enter Generation Beta in ~life

    imperialismus
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    I think there's plenty of millennials who will have children in the next few years that still remember a time before the internet was a part of their daily lives, even if it technically existed....

    As a generation, stories of a pre-internet time (especially in Western countries) will be relegated to their grandparents

    I think there's plenty of millennials who will have children in the next few years that still remember a time before the internet was a part of their daily lives, even if it technically existed. After all, the trend is people becoming parents later in life, and plenty of people born in the 1980s and early 90s could still have children. I found a US Census survey from 2000 that said only 30% of children aged 3-17 used the internet at home at the time. And the US was one of the earliest adopters of private internet access. The internet has only been available to the general public since around 1990, and didn't really become an everyday fixture of most children and young adults' lives until the early 2000s. Even in highly developed countries.

    5 votes
  12. Comment on All main Disney animated canon films are going to be destroyed and you can save five, which five do you pick? in ~movies

    imperialismus
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    I think so too. I suspect there's basically two periods when you're primed to really connect with Disney movies: when you're a child, somewhere between kindergarten and the start of puberty (old...

    Also, I feel like you can dial in on exactly how old a person is by what movies they pick.

    I think so too. I suspect there's basically two periods when you're primed to really connect with Disney movies: when you're a child, somewhere between kindergarten and the start of puberty (old enough to fully appreciate the narrative but not so old as to be embarrassed or watching it ironically), and whenever your own children are that age.

    I don't have a definite list, but it would be a mix of older titles I watched as a kid in the nineties and the ones that were actually released in the nineties. I pretty much stopped watching Disney movies once I hit my teens, initially because I thought it was embarrassing to watch children's movies at that age. As a grown ass adult I'm not embarrassed, I just haven't kept up with them as they released, and I suspect I'll never be able to capture that magical feeling I had watching those movies when I was, like, eight years old. Maybe if I was watching it with a child, or on certain drugs...

    1 vote
  13. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    imperialismus
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    Of course it's Nigel. I don't play or follow competitive Scrabble, but there's an excellent youtube channel that occasionally pops up in my recommends that covers it, and has many videos about...

    Of course it's Nigel. I don't play or follow competitive Scrabble, but there's an excellent youtube channel that occasionally pops up in my recommends that covers it, and has many videos about Nigel Richards' best plays. Of course there's a video about this one as well.

    4 votes
  14. Comment on Ten years ago, one of the uber-wealthy predicted "the pitchforks are coming for us" in ~society

    imperialismus
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    I didn't forget that two people tried to kill Trump, and one guy almost succeeded. I just think that goes into the same basket of isolated extremism on the part of singular individuals. Especially...

    I didn't forget that two people tried to kill Trump, and one guy almost succeeded. I just think that goes into the same basket of isolated extremism on the part of singular individuals. Especially when it's unclear what their actual motivations for doing so were. Let's remember that there were a number of plots against Obama too. The Secret Service and FBI were simply more competent at sussing them out before they got close to succeeding. I don't think the incompetence of the security apparatus in one instance should be the determining factor when we consider the question of whether this is truly the actions of a few isolated crazies, or a forecast of impending revolution.

    A crapton of people support Trump. Many hate him but have no interest in political violence. Many who hate him, hate him for reasons other than his wealth or belonging to a ruling class of capitalists. I don't think it requires any mental gymnastics to express skepticism about assigning too much importance to an isolated data point.

    I don't want to dismiss your opinion out of hand, but I think you could strengthen your argument a lot by framing it in terms of broader trends in society, rather than relying so much on the example of a couple of angry men with guns. Like I said, one individual's actions can trigger a cascade of major changes in society, given the circumstances are ripe for it. But that's just step one. You mentioned a couple of examples that could potentially be inciting incidents. Now where's the follow-up? Where is the evidence that there will be any serious follow-up? How is this different from previous examples that didn't lead to impending societal collapse or revolution? Weren't the conditions for a violent uprising against the ruling class of capitalists to erupt even better 15 years ago? Why didn't it happen then, but it will now?

    3 votes
  15. Comment on Ten years ago, one of the uber-wealthy predicted "the pitchforks are coming for us" in ~society

    imperialismus
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    I feel like an isolated incident of some dude with a vendetta shooting a CEO isn't much of an indication of an actual large scale socioeconomic revolution brewing. A better example would be a...

    I feel like an isolated incident of some dude with a vendetta shooting a CEO isn't much of an indication of an actual large scale socioeconomic revolution brewing. A better example would be a broader movement like Occupy Wall Street, which fizzled out after the economy started improving post Great Recession.

    Of course, it's possible that a single individual's act catalyzes a huge array of changes that have been brewing for a while, just waiting for a trigger. An example would be Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire in 1963, which caused a huge political chain reaction. The fact that people are buying merch celebrating a cold-blooded murderer's message is certainly something. But somehow I feel like this isn't going to lead to all out class warfare.

    14 votes
  16. Comment on Norwegian payment service Vipps becomes world's first company to launch competing tap-to-pay solution to Apple Pay on iPhone – follows agreement with European regulators in ~tech

    imperialismus
    Link Parent
    For context: this is basically the Nordic CashApp. It's the biggest payment app in Norway and also big in Denmark and Finland after a merger with another similar company called MobilePay. This...

    For context: this is basically the Nordic CashApp. It's the biggest payment app in Norway and also big in Denmark and Finland after a merger with another similar company called MobilePay. This isn't some obscure startup, it's an app that most people already use. Now they just offer an additional service. It has way more users locally than Apple Pay does. In fact many banks don't even offer Apple Pay.

    5 votes
  17. Comment on South Korean president declares emergency martial law in ~society

    imperialismus
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    This is wild. It's easy to think of South Korea as a bastion of democracy, especially in contrast to its neighbor. But the country has only been a democracy since 1987. Hopefully it will remain one.

    This is wild. It's easy to think of South Korea as a bastion of democracy, especially in contrast to its neighbor. But the country has only been a democracy since 1987. Hopefully it will remain one.

    10 votes
  18. Comment on Fragile promise of psychedelics in psychiatry in ~science

    imperialismus
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    It's discouraging to hear that many studies are flawed. But at the same time, there's a bunch of things to unpack here. I would write a longer comment, but I don't have the time, so I'll summarize...

    It's discouraging to hear that many studies are flawed. But at the same time, there's a bunch of things to unpack here. I would write a longer comment, but I don't have the time, so I'll summarize my feelings in a few bullet points:

    • Their general statement about "psychedelics" being a popular term for hallucinogens is concerningly off the mark. Psychs are a subset of hallucinogenic drugs, and most people who use them would agree that they don't even have to be hallucinogenic at all to be psychedelic. The purpose of the trip is to induce the psychedelic headspace. Ketamine is a dissociative; MDMA is a stimulant and entactogen; LSD and psilocybin are psychedelics; and something like Amanita muscaria is a deliriant. All of these are distinct subclasses of drugs that can induce hallucinations.
    • This point is important because there are different approaches depending on the class of drug and mechanism of action. In ketamine treatments, the "high" is often seen as an unintended side effect; some companies are trying to develop NMDA antagonists that don't produce any kind of high, because the downstream effect on BDNF is seen as the desirable effect. This is a lot more of a "treat issues with chemicals" approach like SSRIs and less of an "enhance therapy with drugs that allow one to alter and re-examine thought patterns" approach like LSD or MDMA.
    • This field is a huge argument in favor of publicly funded research. The article mentions ketamine nasal spray, which is making a very cheap and commonly available anesthetic very expensive. Pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in patentable drugs, and these drugs are so old that they can't be patented, but you can patent specific formulations of the drug or isolated isomers of the drug like esketamine. There's no guarantee that these are necessarily better for the patient, but they're definitely better for the drug company's finances.
    • The article recommends active placebos, but it's hard to find convincing active placebos that aren't, you know, full-blown drugs that might work for the same reasons that the drug under study works. For similar reasons, they recommend using a different therapist in follow-up from the one who was present at the treatment sessions. This is good from a scientific methodology standpoint, but these experiences are, to put it mildly, intimate, and from a patient comfort perspective, I imagine a lot of patients would prefer to stick to one therapist through the active treatment sessions and the non-drug followup sessions.
    • Concerns about patient safety from transgressions by therapists are very valid. This is quite shocking and obviously way out of line. These drugs make already vulnerable patients more vulnerable.

    Unfortunately, the overblown hysteria about these drugs that got all research shut down around the 1970s has perhaps caused an overreaction in the opposite direction: suppress all negatives, to prevent another complete shutdown of all research. The fact that a lot of pharmaceutical research is funded by private companies is a huge issue. As mentioned, these drugs are generally not patentable. In addition, they're usually intended to be taken infrequently, not daily like traditional psychiatric drugs, again cutting into profit margins. It's not a big conspiracy theory to suggest that companies might want to focus research on avenues that make them more money. This is why this kind of research should be publicly funded.

    For the record, I've tried to use psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. Didn't do jack shit for me, but it didn't have any long-term negative consequences either. Unfortunately, this wasn't in a controlled medical setting, because that wasn't available to me at the time. I'd be interested in trying again in a medical setting, but unfortunately it's very expensive and/or plain inaccessible at the moment. I'm on the fence; I've heard too many stories of people successfully using these drugs for long-term mental health gains to dismiss them as useless. But I definitely don't think they're a panacea, a miracle cure for everybody. As I've said, my own experiences were disappointingly ineffective.

    11 votes
  19. Comment on US President Joe Biden pardons son in ~society

    imperialismus
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    Probably a hot take on tildes, but I don't think presidential pardons based on personal discretion should be a thing. It's far too abusable. It literally circumvents the justice system, and if you...

    Probably a hot take on tildes, but I don't think presidential pardons based on personal discretion should be a thing. It's far too abusable. It literally circumvents the justice system, and if you or a loved one was in prison for something that someone more well connected had gotten wiped away by a penstroke, how would you feel? This is a principled stance and has nothing to do with Biden, jr or senior, specifically. Trump already abused that power and will probably abuse it again in the future.

    I just really don't like any system that puts some people above the law.

    If the American justice system is so fucked that these special powers are needed, you might as well make the office of president into one entirely dedicated to issuing pardons. I guarantee there's thousands of far worse cases that go unresolved because nobody important gave a damn, or even knew about them.

    52 votes
  20. Comment on World Chess Championship 2024 - Ding Liren vs Gukesh Dommaraju in ~games.tabletop

    imperialismus
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    I haven't been as hyped about a chess game in a long time as after Ding's victory with the black pieces in game 1. I recommend GM Daniel King's recaps. Ding is such a soft-spoken, introverted, shy...

    I haven't been as hyped about a chess game in a long time as after Ding's victory with the black pieces in game 1. I recommend GM Daniel King's recaps.

    Ding is such a soft-spoken, introverted, shy character, he's never involved in any drama, and has seemingly struggled with mental health issues the past few years. Meanwhile I have nothing against Gukesh, amazing player and not at all arrogant or conceited, but Gukesh has many years ahead of him as an elite player. I was afraid this match would be a complete blowout, and I still expect Gukesh to bounce back shortly, but I'm just happy that it seems we have an actual match on our hands, not just a steam train of the younger generation overrunning the old.

    6 votes