This is from memory. RIP to the author.
A frog walks into a bank to get a loan. The loan officer, Mrs. Whack, says "what's your name?" the frog says "Kermit". "You're not Kermit the frog!" says the loan officer. The frog says "No, no, I was named after Kermit. I'm Kermit Jagger. My father was Mick Jagger." You see, Mick Jagger had fucked a frog. So the loan officer says, "Ok, do you have any collateral?" and he pulls something out of his pocket, a shiny irridescent unicorn statuette and hands it to her. She says "I don't know I have to talk to the manager." So she goes into the manager who says "Hi Patty!" and she and tells him the story and holds up the statuette and asks "what is this?" The manager says "That's a knick nack Patty Whack, give the frog a loan. His old man was a rolling stone."
I should have auto-tuned it. I don't have any real gear setup anymore, nor that plugin. But years ago I used autotune on our lead vocalist, back before Cher turned it into an effect. I also used Fraunhaufer IIS to compress our recordings (mp3) before people were sharing mp3 files on the Internet. I think it is cool I was using that stuff before anybody knew about it. Did everything with an 8-track ADAT and a Mackie 16 channel mixer, plus a 8-track digital audio card for my computer that used lightpipe to the ADAT, and various software like Cakewalk... and Neumann U87ai microphones, plus a bunch of other specialized mics for drums, etc.
But now I don't have any of that stuff. Well, I have some but it is packed away and runs on 115V (NZ uses 230V).
So I just used Audacity on my linux box with my Yeti microphone.
Here is what got me out of bed to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jMPgvaOXH8
I think if I were gay I could hit the high note🤣
"A good deal of the nebulosity in the world scene is produced by a more or less constant factor: each one of the three agents tends to interpret in its own terms the plans and actions of the other two, partly for deliberate propaganda purposes, partly due to genuine misunderstanding of the situation." - Olavo de Carvalho
I'm just starting to read this alleged "fascist" and already it is clear that he has a good head on his shoulders.
When someone like Scott Ritter wants to travel to Russia to speak at a conference, he isn't technically aiding and abetting the enemy because the US has not declared
Russia to be an enemy (despite all that has happened so far). But if he was a former intelligence agent, restricting his travel is understandable.
But the kremlin spokesperson has now called the United States an enemy nation. I do not know if that is equivalent to declaring war. But if the US declares war on Russia, my language about this conflict will change because under wartime, free speech can be far more supressed and and consequences for speech can be far more serious, and I'm a practical kind of guy that doesn't walk in front of tanks (no disrespect to Tank Man). Call me a coward, I'll call myself "still alive".
Anyhow, here is my question. Russia has sent ships to the Caribbean to do "drills". But Russian ships in the Black Sea have been somewhat easy to sink with surface drones. Couldn't the US sink Russia's ships in the Caribbean with Ukrainian-level low-tech surface sea drones? That would be kinda funny if the US did this and acquired the drones from Ukraine.
Not really, no.
I suspect the people in charge are older than I am, and their "memory" of Russia being the enemy during the cold war defined how they permanently think about Russia.
Once you setup an organisation, even if its purpose ceases to exist, that organisation takes on a life of its own. NATO is one such organisation. Nobody chooses to terminate their own job. So NATO just grew and dreamed about controlling everything, making the whole world peaceful eventually.... but except not Russia, Russia wasn't allowed (they are tricksters! can't trust 'em! or so some people think).
Russia will escalate in the smallest way possible that is still effective. Launching nukes from those subs would not be a small escalation and it would be retaliated against while those nukes were still flying upwards.
But I agree with you that the US won't react to the provocation by attacking Russian ships, but they probably will shadow their ships with ships and airplanes of their own.
Scott seems suspicious to me, like he did exactly that. His rhetoric is too far one-sided, and apparently that kind of disinformation works on far too many people.
After comparing NATO expansion to the Cuba missile crisis and talking about the Monroe doctrine for YEARS, the West remains deaf, completely ignores it. So I think Putin can't "talk" to the West anymore. They don't hear him. The only thing they hear is the movement of weapons and ships, etc. So he is basically saying the same thing he has been saying since at least 2009, just with ships this time.
Yes I heard this too. I think it is a very reasonable response because it doesn't risk direct conflict, but it is clearly Russia hurting the West in retaliation for the West clearly (though not directly) hurting Russia, so it would be an effective deterrant towards further Western escalation and something to put on the negotiating table.
I'm not an anarchist. I think we can have a sane and effective "establishment". But the establishment is going to need to learn some new tricks; they are very slow on the uptake.
It used to be they could lie to us, they could "control the narrative". That is no longer possible due to the Internet and our "back channel" communications. However, their techniques have not changed. They continue to try to deceive and to control the narrative. This is not working anymore and just causes massive lost of trust and social cohesion. It is not working for them (we see through the bullshit, and/or we start believing in buillshit because we don't trust them) and it is not working for us (we lose trust in them and cannot work together to save our lives).
They will never achieve control of the narrative again. That world is strictly in the past. That assumption should be abandoned.
The new reality requires any effective establishment to be up front and honest with it's constituents. Shocker, I know, but it turns out that this actually works better in the long run as trust can be reestablished, and conversations (under the rubric of free speech) and edify all parties once again.
The larger the establishment, the slower they are to change.
Gossip fails for at least 2 reasons, probably more.
* The loading spinner hides the 'load more' button so you can't look back further
* I never finished and merged the code that loads N events (instead of a time period)
Can't find relay list for gitlost. Have no idea where the notes are published. Not sure why gossip isn't finding it I haven't investigated.
I see screenfuls of one-liners from 10 months ago. But only after I reverted a commit and then pressed the Load More button 11 times.
I worked on code to fix this (load a count of messages, not a time period) but never quite finished it and then it has languished. I need to get out my necromancer manual and reanimate that code.
For a lot of different reasons, gossip's code is not structured in a way that my (or your) mental model would suggest. Partly these are for performance or ease of coding (earlier), and partly because it developed along a certain path which created a lot of technical debt. Refactors are in order.
I've tried to fix this issue several times under the title of "load more" and each time I've gotten so tangled up and confused that I backed out and attempted to attack the problem from another angle (usually being able to apply some small set of safe steps first). 90% of what I need to do is understood by me, but it's hard to find a way to do it which doesn't become a mess as I start tripping over the 10% that I haven't completely realized from the outset was going to trip me up.
I'm well down a path of fixing this now which has a good chance of actually succeeding. The general plan is like this:
1) Keep an 'anchor' time for the feed (just one, it resets when you switch feeds).
2) The first subscription to the feed you switched to starts a long-term subscription that loads events from the anchor forward, and continues to listen after the EOSE.
3) Start a short term subscription that loads until the anchor, limit some number of notes (call it N).
4) When you scroll to the bottom and press 'load more', then anchor shifts to the created_at of the oldest feed event, and then this subscription is rewritten to load the next N events (the long-term subscription doesn't care about the anchor shift as it doesn't change).
5) Whenever you shift to a different feed (inbox, a different list, My notes, etc) everything is reset and it starts over. This means is goes back to the relays again and often loads things from them it already has.
6) I will then create some kind of caching (not of events which we already cache, but of knowledge about which time ranges have been loaded with which filters) so that it doesn't reload the same events from the relay over and over.
Once this is done, it should be easier to modify from that point than from the current point, so if I discover this is hard to do I can work backwards somewhat.
Ok I fixed gossip on the 'load_more' branch. It still needs testing and some more changes before it gets merged in, but you can try it now if you'd like (no schema changes, safe to switch back and forth).
Some of these results indicate bugs in chorus. For example when we get "Timeout: deadline has elapsed" that means we never got the OK response, but usually instead a NOTICE delivered the error (something I will have to fix).
France is planning to send instructors to Ukraine to train the Ukrainian soldiers. I think this is appropriate. There are no better experts in retreating and surrender.
Truth is a claim about the relationship between some statement that describes objective reality and objective reality itself. It says that a statement is true if it correctly reflects objective reality. But what does that mean exactly? Can any statement correctly reflect objective reality, or are statements too simplistic and poor to do so? In many cases, statements have a VERY hard time being absolutely true. You might think the sky is blue, but maybe not to a mantis shrimp.
It would be more useful to argue about whether there is a single objective reality, about which statements can reflect to some degree and be verified against to some degree.
War Theory #875?
Russia gather evidence that strikes from Ukraine in Russia are being done by non-Ukrainians, e.g. the U.K. and presents this evidence to the United Nations, declaring their right to retaliate. Russia retaliates on the UK with a single strike using conventional weapons claiming this should not trigger NATO article 5 since it was a declared legal retaliation under the rules based international order.
War Theory #874?
Precondition: NATO goes into a hot war against Russia backed by (and maybe eventually including) China, and nukes are never used by either side.
Result: Under this likely scenario, there is a good chance that NATO countries would be defeated after a very long protracted war of attrition where the NATO side runs out of ammunition and perhaps hundreds of other supplies that are necessary to maintain a large long hot war, because NATO countries lack the industrial base, that base having moved to China long ago so that gamblers could get richer. They think they are OK because they have plenty of money, and they don't think too much about whether it is possible to convert that money into product since it always has been possible before.
I'm remindded of Rudyard Kipling's poem, part of it goes:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
___ I didn't respond to your post because you made the most perfect post and there is nothing left to be said
___ I didn't respond to your post because while I completely disagree, I dont have the time to defend my position
_X_ Both of the above
Gossip does not use pocket. I built things in this order: nostr-types, gossip, chorus, pocket. I backported pocket into chorus so now chorus uses pocket. But pocket only has a very simple interface, just enough for a relay, not nearly good enough for a client to use. That may change but I'm not working on such.
Gossip uses it's own LMDB storage which is a tad less efficient but much more fully fleshed out for client usage.
Also Gossip isn't interacting with it's local database in the same manner it would with a relay. I know that some other clients create a local relay style cache, but that is not what we are doing. We have a custom internal API that is nothing like querying a remote relay.
I think a client has more things to store than just events that came from relays. So it makes sense to store those in something that doesn't reflect a relay's storage system. But when it comes to fetching events from local storage, I think having a similar interface to fetching events from a relay makes sense. Pocket-db provides sucn an interface where you pass in a Filter (like you would in a REQ) and it returns the matching events. At some point gossip's internal database changed its interface over to the same kind of thing.
But we also extract data out of events and store it into faster access structures. If we had to parse events every time we wanted to know who you follow, or what somebody's metadata says, etc, that would be too costly. You can think of this local storage like a cache, but the interface looks like a custom set of tables.
I haven't used noStruedel.
Gossip avoids the web stack to avoid attack surface. That may matter to you, or it might not. And there are lots of other factors to consider when choosing a client.
Now you devs should all check whether the hashtag you parsed from my note was 'butterines' or 'butterines!' and then you can argue as to which it should be.
Imagine if you could buy a box of a dozen butterines for $14.99, would that sound like a good deal to you? Luscious cripsy butterines!
What are butterines you ask? I don't know yet. But with a name like that, people are gonna buy 'em.
Since my brother works for EnterpriseDB on commercial extentions and support for Postgres, I'm gonna have to say SQLite is worse. I'm sure you understand.
But what if the robot dogs are ethnically Ukrainian, and they built themselves? Even if every man woman and child in Ukraine were killed, the ethnically Ukrainian nazi robot dogs could keep on fighting the war with NATO funding and targetting, with homages to Zelenskyy projected against piles of rubble that once were buildings while T2 robots rise from the ashes and join the new generation skynet-connected drone fleets to take out Russia. Russia has no chance against the Terminator! Ukraine wins!
(ok it is late, i'm just typing the next crazy word that pops into my head)
More seriously, as long as Ukraine refuses to talk to Russia, the fact that the war continues instead of settles somehow is now their doing isn't it? And that has been the case for a long time now. This is the main reason I don't see Ukraine as defending itself anymore.
So Western-backed Ukraine is low on soldiers, but it's not low on funding. The West could out-spend Russia and win in a very long war of financial attrition. But could it happen without non-Ukrainian soldiers coming in to backfill? This is what I was pondering when I thought about AI and robotics. I think we are near the tipping point where the West could provide a fully robotic army to continue fighting for Ukraine. And in that situation the strategy and calculus flips and Ukraine becomes the 'favorite' to win. I'm I too far out in speculation left field on this, or is this quite possible? Thoughts?
If you want to understand the threat of WW3 better, this video of a meeting of the International Peace Coalition by the Schiller Institute is very enlightening.
Among other things:
* Russia does not have launch detection satellites, they rely on ground radar to detect incoming ICBMs
* Taking out their strategic defense radar has shortened their decision making time, perhaps to the level that they will turn on an automated response (no human decision necessary)
* Politicians are almost completely focused on politics and don't know the technical details about what they are ordering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrpXtDiJjgA
The Russian Nuclear Doctrine allows the use of strategic nuclear weapons to respond to any attack aimed at crippling Russia's nuclear forces. That requirement has already been fulfilled, via the strikes on it's strategic defense radar and strikes on the Engel's airbase hosting Russia's strategic nuclear bomber fleet, and destroying multiple bombers. According to their doctrine, Russia could launch nukes at any time. They aren't doing it presumably because they don't want to end the world. But this is encouraging the West to continue attacking Russia's nuclear infrastructure.
I don't think this state of affairs can possibly last much longer. I think we will have a nuclear detonation within 30 days.
I'm not saying it, I'm expressing what I heard in this video meeting.
It was a suprise to me to hear that, and I certainly would have presumed otherwise, and that they would have had such systems at least since the 1980s. They shouldn't be hard to acquire or design/build and then launch. So like you I'm skeptical of that statement, and maybe the people in this meeting aren't vetting their sources well enough.
I don't think it will lead to all out nuclear war. I think that will be avoided. The reason I said "detonation" is to leave open various possibilities such as a nuclear test run by Russia in order to send a strong signal (in violation of a treaty), or a tactical nuke launched against Ukraine which also probably wouldn't escalate, at least not rapidly.
I'm annoyed by the fact that I see replies to fully muted posts that have a link in the header to the muted post that if I click on I will never see. But this isn't as easy to fix as I had hoped as we have to check every post's parent to see if it is muted which is not a cheap operation currently.
Let me try to make this easy for you to understand.
If you run 10 studies, and 2 show that a medicine works, and 8 show that it doesn't, and then you take those 2 that show it works and present it to somebody and say "Occam's razor. What is more likely, that the medicine works or doesn't?" then you are not using Occam's razor properly.
The news media have programmed your brain with biased cherry-picked information. If you actually cared to know the truth, you wouldn't have the opinion that you have. Listen to Glenn Greenwald, Alan Dershowitz, or Jonathan Turley about this case. I defer to them.
You are programmed by their programming and that programming's targetting system has misfired because I don't like Trump. Trump would turn Gaza into a real estate development. He gave part of Syria to Israel (as if it was his to give!). He would start a war with China. And he would be manipulated by everybody since his narcissism knows no bounds. Plus he would pile more money into the military.
What I care about is a functional civil society.... well I don't care anymore America can burn in hellfire at this point and I would just go on living my happy life. But what I used to care about was that laws were followed, that judges were fair, that people did the right thing and defended the constitution instead of using laws as a cudgel to hit people they don't like the spray tan of.
Since you have been short on facts about this case, let me give you a few (I'm not even trying here to make a defense):
Hilllary Clinton commited the same crime as Donald Trump. She put down in her ledger a false entry about purchasing the "Trump-Russia" dossier from Fusion GPS as opposition research. She was fined $8,000 by the FEC. Donald Trump should also have been fined $8,000 and the matter should be closed. Trump also put down a false ledger entry. It was false because the whole point of the entry was to "hush" something. If he had written down what he was hushing, it wouldn't have been hushed would it? It wasn't something illegal he was hiding, it was something embarrassing. This case has set a precident that you cannot have privacy in this way, which is a precident you (not I) are going to have to live with because Trump haters don't care about the collateral damage they are causing.
Consider that the E Jean Carroll case was brought because NY changed their statute of limitations for JUST ONE YEAR so that she could bring the case against him for a crime allegedly committed back in 1995 which was far beyond the statute of limitations. Changing the statute of limitations just to "get Trump" is the kind of thing I say is corruption that is killing America. It was also "ex post facto" which violates the US constitution article 1 section 9 clause 3. He had to pay her $5 million dollars even though she didn't establish that he raped her. They levied the fine entirely on the basis that he called her case "a hoax" calling that 'defamation'. That is corruption.
Mischaracterizing January 6 is corruption.
You know, you are going to have to live in the system of wonky made up change-on-a-whim rules that these things have created. Good luck figuring out what is and isn't allowed.
By hating on Trump so much, US democrats are flat out destroying the democracy that they think they are saving. THAT is what is so sad about this and why I take my position.
ALSO, all rhetoric is rhetorical whether or not it is a question.
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by Magister Michael Dilger M.Sc. | export