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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I should clarify. I’m not saying that most people who distrust the justice system are going to like Trump more after his conviction. I’m also not saying that I think he’s likely to reform the justice system in a way that helps people affected by racial bias.

    However, many of Trump’s supporters consider his conviction evidence that he’s genuinely an anti-establishment candidate rather than proof of wrong-doing. (See the variety of “I’m voting for the convicted felon” merchandise.) This attitude requires a distrust of the justice system. We’ve already seen that Trump’s conviction hasn’t hurt his poll numbers very much and that he currently has more black support than he did in '16 or '20 so I’m saying that his conviction might actually lead to a small increase in support for him from black people (the majority of whom are still never going to support him) because more of them distrust the justice system.










  • For journalists, it raises a question: Should a public official’s family be held to the same standards as that official themselves?

    Bullshit. It raises the question: Should a Supreme Court Justice be believed unconditionally when he offers an excuse for what really looks like inappropriate bias? The discovery that another flag associated with the January 6 attack flew in front of Alito’s beach house has shown that the NYT was correct not to accept his story about his wife. I’m honestly surprised by the discussion of how a judge’s family is expected to behave - it’s as if a dead body was found in Alito’s house, he said that he had no idea how it got there, and the press started talking about whether or not he had a responsibility to monitor access to his property more closely.


  • Their problem:

    So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

    The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

    It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

    As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.