@pluralistic i used to watch a lot of SerpentZA—a South African Brit who had emigrated to China—and one of the things he pointed out was that basically everything was illegal, but it was rarely enforced. Only if you were “annoying” would they throw the book at you.

But if everyone is always breaking the law, they have the legal pretense to arrest anyone they want at any time—that kind of arbitrary violence is the crux of authoritarianism.

The authoritarianism has already infected the GOP, deeply. Removing Trump alone will not solve the problem. The GOP was leaning towards more moderate positions in 2016—their policies are widely unpopular, and bending looked like the way forward.

What Trump showed them was they didn’t have to bend; they could double down by any means necessary—including usurping the rule of law if needed. This will not go away.

@inthehands sometimes, you just gotta tap the sign for them

@inthehands

There are a lot of very weird units, when you stare to hard at them. For example, the Hubble Constant is (70 km/s)/Mpc -- that is, a speed per Megaparsec, which checks out. but the distances technically cancel out, so the result is a *frequency.*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkfIXUjkYqE

@inthehands

I'd make the case that it's not really the same "distance" being cancelled out. even though they're both the same kind of unit, one is a distance related to the galaxy's motion and the other is a distance *to* the galaxy.

I think the same reasoning would apply for the lengths composing fuel volume and the distance of a car traveled.

@h2onolan it’s a good question

@panos @atomicpoet by restricting the size of posts, it leaves room for more voices generally. This was something I realized when I first used Twitter:

https://blog.thedansimonson.com/twitter-takes-characters-gives-access-in-return/

Also, when the infrastructure isn’t in place for longer posts—e.g. Read More buttons—it can be really irritating when an entire blog post is pushed into my feed.

@inthehands fwiw, they largely developed GPS to get nuclear weapons on target.

really great video on Polaris and the technical challenges needed to make it happen back in the late 50s: https://youtu.be/dSih6Ch0Hzs

@fgcallari @inthehands yes. from a cost perspective, a lot of applications of older techniques are simply ignored. the problem space wasn't exhausted, but few were willing to invest in fully exploring it from a commercial perspective.

@inthehands one of the big assumptions behind AI hype -- the unspoken presupposition -- is that the 99.9% reliability of traditional software will be complemented by the apparent capacities of generative systems and all the exponential possibilities entailed therein

in practice, because the generative systems are making stuff up, they're going to pollute traditional software into uselessness with absolute garbage inputs.

they're fundamentally two different things, and they cannot interface

Has anyone been brave enough to say “the Alabama Supreme Court sucks??” I’m gonna say it. I’ll do it. I’ll be brave enough.

You think you’re the greatest species to ever live and can do anything, yet you cannot and will never even take a nap inside a flower

@javi I think we’re mostly right there with you—but the Supreme Court can and does just make up stuff, and we have zero control over these fucking clowns.

@TonyJWells @paramnesiac @SidFudd @tdriley @pluralistic

Y’all, that’s nothing. Have you been to Seattle? They make poles out of a composite of flyer and staple there.

@emilygorcenski I miss Tegel—incredible airport, unlike any other.