psi's recent activity

  1. Comment on What it takes to be a revolutionary war enactor in ~humanities.history

    psi
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    This article is informative but also, like, really funny. It literally had me laughing out loud at times. For those unconvinced, I'd recommend reading at least until the bit with Cam's boots (only...

    This article is informative but also, like, really funny. It literally had me laughing out loud at times.

    For those unconvinced, I'd recommend reading at least until the bit with Cam's boots (only a handful of paragraphs in).

    3 votes

  2. Comment on JK Rowling dismisses Emma Watson as 'ignorant' over trans rights row in ~lgbt

    psi
    Link Parent
    It is really quite ironic for billionaire JK Rowlings to cast aspersions about Emma Watson being sheltered and privileged.

    It is really quite ironic for billionaire JK Rowlings to cast aspersions about Emma Watson being sheltered and privileged.

    11 votes

  3. Comment on US Supreme Court upended the constitutional separation of powers on Friday afternoon with a brief order allowing Donald Trump to unilaterally cancel $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress in ~society

    psi
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    Link Parent
    The issue with staying the preliminary injunction is that it is, in fact, the final word on the matter of this $4 billion in aid (Kagan elaborates in her dissent). The deadline to spend the monies...

    The issue with staying the preliminary injunction is that it is, in fact, the final word on the matter of this $4 billion in aid (Kagan elaborates in her dissent). The deadline to spend the monies is today (Sept 30), so when the Justices released this order on Sept 26, they certainly would have known that it would be impossible for the case to be briefed, argued, and decided before the Sept 30 deadline.

    Which only makes this order that much worst. The justices have, in effect, made a final decision on the matter without even bothering to explain their reasoning. It begets the question of whether they even have a principled consensus on why the President can do this, or whether the Justices simply like the result and are still trying to backwards-formulate the justification.

    17 votes

  4. Comment on Horror games to play during October in ~games

    psi
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    I am quite fond of the vibes in Withering rooms. I bought it on a whim during last year's spooky season and it definitely hit the mark. To quote myself:

    I am quite fond of the vibes in Withering rooms. I bought it on a whim during last year's spooky season and it definitely hit the mark. To quote myself:

    Withering Rooms is technically a side-scroller horror roguelite, but I think roguelite might be a misleading description. Roguelites tend to be grindy affairs that relegate the story to the background. In Withering Rooms, however, the story is the hook: you are trapped in a dream, set in the grounds of a Victorian manor. The dream is based on the real world, yet magic and monsters run amok -- why? In atmosphere, characters, and quests the game drips aesthetic.

    Beyond the first five or so hours, the game isn't that difficult, which is why I again resist labeling Withering Rooms a roguelite despite it technically being one. Instead, it quickly evolves into a sort of power fantasy, allowing you to equip spells and guns that will make short work of most enemies and bosses. Moreover, most items tend to be unique rather than mere stat upgrades (in the spirit of Dark Souls), which makes exploration feel meaningful. And there is a great deal to explore, with new areas of the manor grounds revealing themselves in each new chapter.

    Unfortunately first impressions are probably the worse, as you start rather squishy and have to hide from most enemies, making the game feel much slower and grinder than it ends up being. But on the flip side, this means that once you've cleared the first chapter, the game only gets better.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on US President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 labels common beliefs as terrorism “indicators” in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    Well, this is why I wrote that the memo is meant to "establish pretext". I think it's pretty obvious that this administration wants to delegitimize and defund its ideological opponents, which...
    • Exemplary

    Well, this is why I wrote that the memo is meant to "establish pretext". I think it's pretty obvious that this administration wants to delegitimize and defund its ideological opponents, which would include much everybody left of Trump (so both mainstream Democrats and also Trump-skeptical Republicans). But it's not like Trump can just announce on Truth Social one day that all his enemies in Congress are terrorists and then have his goons corral them into a gulag. Maybe one day, but not today.

    As for an overall strategy, I would guess this administration is still figuring out the specifics (we're still in the early stages of shuttering opposition). Nevertheless, I assume it goes vaguely like this:

    1. establish a pretext for investigating Democratic organizations;
    2. begin fishing expeditions, looking for any sort of criminal connections (which they will inevitably find);
    3. freeze the organization's bank accounts and indict the organization's leadership; and finally,
    4. capitalize on the chaos to sweep the midterms.

    In particular, its worth keeping the midterms in mind. If Democrats take back either chamber of Congress, the Trump administration will be subject to an endless amount of investigations (and, if Democrats take back the House, impeach proceedings). It's not like Democrats will have to look hard to find damning evidence of misconduct. A possible future Democratic Congress remains the only existential threat to the Trump administration, so from Trump's perspective, it must be prevented by any means possible.

    32 votes

  6. Comment on US President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 labels common beliefs as terrorism “indicators” in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    I don't think this move is meant to target particular individuals. Rather, it helps establish a legal pretext for opening investigations into ActBlue and other democratic funding apparatuses.

    I don't think this move is meant to target particular individuals. Rather, it helps establish a legal pretext for opening investigations into ActBlue and other democratic funding apparatuses.

    24 votes

  7. Comment on The video-game industry has a problem: there are too many games in ~games

    psi
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    For those who aren't aware, Steam's Interactive Recommender is a useful albeit hidden tool for discovering games. I would suggest moving the slider to "niche" and sorting from there.

    For those who aren't aware, Steam's Interactive Recommender is a useful albeit hidden tool for discovering games.

    I would suggest moving the slider to "niche" and sorting from there.

    9 votes

  8. Comment on Flight fares surge after US President Donald Trump's surprising H-1B visa move; ‘Extremely bad situation’ in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    Probably relevant: "America’s Future Is Hungary." The Atlantic. It might difficult to build a business off of an exception, but it's definitely feasible to build a business based off this...

    Probably relevant:

    Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)

    That story is just one of many that Hungarians recount to one another, just not in public. The Dynasty also describes the Kisfaludy Tourism Development Programme, which distributed 316 billion Hungarian forints ($860 million) in grants. Two-thirds of those grants went to 0.5 percent of the applicants; almost one-fifth of them went to projects that were, or later became, connected to Tiborcz. Not that Tiborcz is the only recipient of government largesse. Lőrinc Mészáros, at one time the richest man in Hungary, a gas fitter turned entrepreneur who is an old friend of the prime minister’s, once attributed his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.” Other beneficiaries come and go, depending on Orbán’s whim. One Hungarian businessman told me that “you can tell who is in, who is out by seeing whose companies begin growing. If you are in, then your company is growing. If you’re out, your company goes from this big to this small. You see it in a year or two.”

    It might difficult to build a business off of an exception, but it's definitely feasible to build a business based off this administration bending the rules in your favor.

    10 votes

  9. Comment on The rise of 'conspiracy physics' in ~science

    psi
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    I would recommend visiting Peter Woit's blog Not Even Wrong for another discussion of this article. Not because I agree with Peter -- I think Peter missed the point of the essay -- but because (1)...

    I would recommend visiting Peter Woit's blog Not Even Wrong for another discussion of this article. Not because I agree with Peter -- I think Peter missed the point of the essay -- but because (1) none other than the writer of the piece (Dan Kagan-Kans) shows ups to defend himself and (2) there is a rather ironic twist as the thread develops, which speaks to an even larger epistemic failure.

    A hint

    Note that Daniel Kagan Kans is not Dan Kagan-Kans.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Conservative activist Charlie Kirk shot and killed at Utah college event in ~society

    psi
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    I can't help but see the parallels to the October 7 attacks. On that day, Hamas carried out a monstrous act of violence against civilians. It was terrorism in its most brutal, unforgivable form....
    • Exemplary

    I can't help but see the parallels to the October 7 attacks. On that day, Hamas carried out a monstrous act of violence against civilians. It was terrorism in its most brutal, unforgivable form. Yet it was also the inevitable consequence of Israel's inability to address the Palestinian people in any meaningful way.

    Kirk's murder is a smaller scale version of the same underlying dynamics. Murder is wrong. It is unjustifiable except in the most extreme circumstances, and being a right-wing provocateur certainly does not meet that threshold, as much as I thought Kirk a net drain on society. Certainly his children, reportedly also in attendance, do not deserve the lifetime of trauma.

    Yet we cannot understand this moment without understanding how we arrived here, an era in which the legitimacy of our political opponents is routinely questioned (in both directions). With each election, our polarization has only become worst. Now at the helm we have our commander-in-chief who regularly dumps jet fuel on the flames. To temper his worse impulses, we have the Supreme Court, which has succumbed to the temptation of an unassailable conservative offensive, allowing for an unprecedented expansion of executive power that would have been unimaginable under any Democratic administration. Meanwhile, Congress shrugs. It's difficult to understand these moves as anything other than a pure political power grab. So if the opposition has no legitimate way to express their grievances, how else can they respond but violently? It is not right. It is not justifiable. Yet it is the inevitable consequence of refusing to acknowledge your political opposition.

    In principle we know what we need to do, or at least we know in which direction we need the rhetorical landscape to shift. We need to defuse and de-escalate. We need to be willing to compromise, or at the very least we need to make an earnest attempt to listen to our political rivals. This is, admittedly, much easier said than done.

    Unfortunately, this administration's response so far has been to double-down, promising to investigate all liberal "organizations that fund [...] and support [violence]." In blaming democrats for Kirk's murder, Trump cited the attempt on his life as well as the attempted assassination of Republican Representative Steve Scalise in 2017. Yet he didn't mention Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives murdered in June, nor Nancy Pelosi, whose husband was hospitalized by an act of political violence in 2022. That is, this administration does not see political violence as a bipartisan issue. They see it as a cudgel to further disempower the left.

    In the universe of all possible responses to this tragedy, Trump's response is among the worst, as it will do nothing but exacerbate tensions. And until our government is willing to face the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue, tragedies like this will only become more common.

    51 votes

  11. Comment on Pentagon authorizes up to 600 US military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges in ~society

    psi
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    Link Parent
    Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, being employees of the Department of Justice and appointed by the Attorney General. That's not to excuse this action but to emphasize that...

    Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, being employees of the Department of Justice and appointed by the Attorney General. That's not to excuse this action but to emphasize that regular immigration judges are already subject to similarly perverse incentives.

    If you haven't read it yet, I strongly encourage you to read this article on the dual state model, which is (unfortunately) perpetually relevant when discussing immigration courts:

    9 votes

  12. Comment on Why do so many people think US President Donald Trump is good? in ~society

    psi
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    Brooks seems to be conflating moral relativism with a loss of shared culture. We haven't lost sight of some "objective" moral standard because such a thing has never existed; if it had, we would...
    • Exemplary

    Brooks seems to be conflating moral relativism with a loss of shared culture. We haven't lost sight of some "objective" moral standard because such a thing has never existed; if it had, we would still be practicing slavery and stoning gay people. Even his own examples don't past muster with a little more scrutiny: Did serfs really tend to the fields from a sense of moral duty, or did they do it because they were literally the property of their feudal lords?

    Focusing on moral frameworks misses the larger picture. Yes, people have different opinions on diversity and trans rights, but virtually everyone agrees that corruption, theft, and murder are wrong. Trump's enablers do not argue that Trump's conflicts of interest are moral; they argue that he's too rich to have conflicts. More to the point, liberals and conservatives have not lost a shared sense of morality so much as we've lost a shared sense of reality. We read different newspapers and occupy different spaces on the internet. It's not just that we don't agree on the same facts; we don't even know what the other side considers important. How many people on the left would have recognized the name Ashli Babbitt if Trump hadn't repeated it so many times?

    So I don't know how Brooks managed to write this essay without addressing the elephant in the room. Every issue Brooks describes has been exacerbated by platforms such as Facebook, X, and Truth Social. We were filtered into different content bubbles, we went along willingly, and to be frank, I don't even think we were wrong for wanting it. (Why should I regret limiting my exposure to bigotry?) Unfortunately for us, the new fourth estate has become social media. We no longer rely on journalists to do our fact finding, thereby establishing a foundation for which ideas can compete; instead we start with the theory we like and follow the blogger or influencer who spouts it.

    Our failure is not moral but epistemological. In today's media landscape, there are no facts. There is no debate. There are only unchallenged, unsubstantiated theories.

    40 votes

  13. Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games

    psi
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    I am amused by the idea of a "wildcard" month, so I thought maybe I should clarify exactly what I'm proposing. Essentially, for the wildcard month, one would choose a game per a categorical...

    I am amused by the idea of a "wildcard" month, so I thought maybe I should clarify exactly what I'm proposing.

    Essentially, for the wildcard month, one would choose a game per a categorical distribution, with the probability of drawing a particular title T given by

    p_T = N_T / N

    where N_T is the number of votes for title T and N = sum_T N_T is the total number of votes cast.

    However, the simplest implementation might give too much weight to unpopular choices, so one could additionally introduce a reweighting function f to minimize/eliminate the chance of selecting especially unpopular games. For example, one could consider the reweighting function

    f(p, N) = {0 if p*N < 15, p^2 else}

    which eliminates titles that received less than 15 total votes and gives a quadratic preference to more popular choices. In principle, the only restrictions on the reweighting function are that it be (1) non-negative for all inputs and (2) non-zero for at least one input.

    To choose a game using a reweighting function, one would again draw per a categorical distribution but with new probabilities

    p_T_reweighted = f(p_T, N) / A

    where the normalization constant is A = sum_T f(p_T, N).

    Here's a python script that reads "tally.csv" and simulates a random draw per the reweighting function above. (Note that it uses numpy, so you would need to add `numpy` to requirements.txt.) 
    import csv
import numpy as np

def choose_wildcard():
    # get titles, scores from csv file
    with open("tally.csv") as f:
        cf = csv.reader(f, delimiter=',')
        next(cf) # skip header
        
        titles = []
        scores = []
        for row in cf:
            titles.append(row[0])
            scores.append(int(row[1]))

    # calculate probabilities for each title
    N = np.sum(scores)
    p = np.array(scores) / N

    # apply reweighting function
    def reweighting_func(p, N):
        return np.array([0 if pi*N < 15 else pi**2 for pi in p])

    p_reweighted = reweighting_func(p, N)

    # check pathological cases
    if (p_reweighted < 0).any():
        raise ValueError("Probabilities must be positive!")
    elif (p_reweighted == 0).all():
        raise ValueError("Must have one non-zero value!")

    # normalize
    p_reweighted = p_reweighted / np.sum(p_reweighted)

    return np.random.choice(titles, p=p_reweighted)


def main():
    print("Wildcard!", '\n ->', choose_wildcard())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
    1 vote

  14. Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games

    psi
    Link Parent
    Wind Waker, The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls, and Lufia II were all chosen because I haven't played them. However, I would like to specifically single-out Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger was a...

    Wind Waker, The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls, and Lufia II were all chosen because I haven't played them. However, I would like to specifically single-out Chrono Trigger.

    Chrono Trigger was a generational JRPG that helped popularize the genre in the West. Its influence remains so great that games today are still referenced against it, so much so that for a certain style of game -- JRPGs with pixel graphics -- it is almost impossible to escape the comparison. But amazingly, even after 30 years of progress in game design, Chrono Trigger hardly feels dated, with many of its spiritual successors (e.g. Sea of Stars) feeling hollow against it.

    Being one of the greatest games of all time, I'm sure many people here have already played it. But for our inaugural CGA thread, what could be a better fit than one of the all time greats?

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games

    psi
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    Chrono Trigger (5) The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (5) Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls) (5) Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (5)

    Chrono Trigger (5)
    The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (5)
    Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls) (5)
    Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (5)

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games

    psi
    Link Parent
    Alternatively, rather than pick the most popular title, one could pick a title at random with weights assigned according to the number of votes. For example, given three titles A, B, C with...

    Alternatively, rather than pick the most popular title, one could pick a title at random with weights assigned according to the number of votes.

    For example, given three titles A, B, C with corresponding votes 10, 5, 15, one would generate a random number r between 1 and 35 (inclusive), then choose a title based on the value of r,

    01 - 10: A
11 - 15: B
16 - 35: C

    To prevent truly unpopular titles from spoiling the selection, you could either use a nonlinear weighting function (e.g., square the counts then normalize) or require that a title have at least 6 votes to qualify for the selection procedure (meaning that at least two people have voted for it).

    3 votes

  17. Comment on Google will require developer verification for Android apps outside the Play Store in ~tech

    psi
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    Link Parent
    The UK isn't in the EU, and for all the complaints about chat control, it (thankfully) hasn't passed. Mind you, the EU is also responsible for the GDPR, a regulation specifically crafted from the...

    The UK isn't in the EU, and for all the complaints about chat control, it (thankfully) hasn't passed. Mind you, the EU is also responsible for the GDPR, a regulation specifically crafted from the ideal of privacy as a human right. And one of those EU member states is Germany, which is among the most privacy-conscious countries in the world. So I don't think the EU's anti-anonymity streak is as clear-cut as you're depicting it.

    But to @Bullmaestro's point, a one-time $25 fee is categorically different from Apple's core technology fee, so it might withstand regulatory scrutiny.

    12 votes

  18. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    psi
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    Neat! The developments aren't really relevant to my research, but given that there are now workshops dedicated specifically to applying machine learning to lattice QCD, I would definitely consider...

    Neat!

    The developments aren't really relevant to my research, but given that there are now workshops dedicated specifically to applying machine learning to lattice QCD, I would definitely consider it a thriving subfield. And there are some seemingly useful applications, e.g. training neural nets to reproduce costly correlation functions [1].

    Regarding ensemble generation in particular, I think it's still an open question as to whether such a program is actually feasible. Unlike image generation, which has a nearly limitless number of images available for training, we are in much shorter supply of independent ensembles: there are only about O(100) - O(1000) ensembles that have ever been created. And even assuming one could generate an ensemble, we would need to be absolutely sure that we had the bias under control, i.e. that we were actually simulating QCD and not some partial facsimile.

    1. Machine-learning techniques as noise reduction strategies in lattice calculations of the muon. Blum et al.
    1 vote

  19. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    psi
    Link Parent
    Do you mean lattice QCD specifically?

    Do you mean lattice QCD specifically?

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech

    psi
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    Link Parent
    People are conducting research into the applicability of generative AI in various scientific fields; those applications just aren't widely known because they're extremely niche. For example, in my...

    People are conducting research into the applicability of generative AI in various scientific fields; those applications just aren't widely known because they're extremely niche.

    For example, in my field (lattice QCD) we use massive amounts of computational resources to generate "ensembles", which are essentially simulations of hadrons in a discretized, finite boxes at non-physical values of the quark masses. And when I say massive, I mean truly mind-boggling numbers -- we're talking computation time of the order O(1) - O(100) million core-hours and with disk usage measured in the petabytes.

    So you can imagine the amount of money that is spent on these projects. Now comes along diffusion methods. Some people realized that image generation doesn't look that different from ensemble generation, and that if you could simply generate an ensemble via diffusion you could drastically reduce your computational requirements compared to conventional techniques.

    An ongoing research problem in my field is determining to what extent these diffusion techniques are viable.

    3 votes