2023-11-11
(this week’s is a little rough because of travel)
Readings
The long-beaked echidna of Indonesia is apparently not extinct: https://phys.org/news/2023-11-bizarre-egg-laying-mammal-rediscovered-years.html
Vaccinating males for HPV, despite them not being capable of getting cervical cancers, may reduce prevalence of the disease and protect women: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-cervical-cancers-immunize-boys-hpv.html
Chewing on the fact and consequences of robotic enforcement of laws: https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/under-the-watchful-unblinking-eye-privacy-implications-of-the-new-york-police-departments-deployment-of-autonomous-robots
Long-view history of the origins of medicine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/modern-medicine-traces-its-scientific-roots-to-the-middle-ages-180983213/
A more careful analysis (still very negative) about the assembly-theory article I grumbled about 2 weeks ago on my Wall of Shame: https://theconversation.com/a-new-theory-linking-evolution-and-physics-has-scientists-baffled-but-is-it-solving-a-problem-that-doesnt-exist-216639
An often underexplored topic in engineering: the cost of complexity and the need to push back on good ideas that add complexity when the benefit isn’t strong enough to justify it: https://thenewstack.io/tim-hockin-kubernetes-needs-a-complexity-budget/
Thoughts
In the video game “The Witcher 3”, there’s a character called Detlaff, a nonhuman highly-powerful vampire, and in one of the longer game stories, he’s courted, played with in love, tossed aside, and then manipulated into becoming a tool for murder by his country’s royalty. The series touches on a lot of interesting moral questions; I sometimes peek at content creators who talk about morality (even though I’m almost always disappointed); the rest of this is commentary on this video (and its comments section):
Absent a functional enough legal system, which we won’t imagine this primitive society handling (even a modern one would struggle with these particulars), we consider more primitive legal morality
The issue was definitely not, contra the comments section, Sianna’s ghosting him. It may be understandable to react violently to such things, but it is not moral and society must not accept such a response.
What might justify such a response was her use of him, through blackmail, to commit murders.
For humans, it is easy to insist on universal systems of laws - we know humans can live in a society, and it is important to force outliers in unless they isolate themselves. For other species, this may not be viable, which makes it hard to weigh these things
So, if we let Detlaff kill her, even if her death is justifiable, he would be doing so for the wrong reasons, with his reasons (being jilted) an unacceptable norm. This introduces an uncomfortable dissonance - the consequences may be acceptable, but the morality of the actor is defective.
But separately from all that, his mass-slaughter of the townsfolk would be immoral if we consider morality to apply to him, which perhaps it does not given that the purpose of morality is to shape the minds of full members of society, which he doesn’t seem to be interested or capable of being
Recently SAG-AFTRA (actors guild) had a big strike and negotiation with the suits (represented by AMPTP), and an interesting sticking point in their discussions was how to handle the desire of studios to get likenesses of actors and use them, through ML techniques, longer-term. SAG-AFTRA was presumably worried that this would result in a lot less employment of actors for non-starring roles because with such models, it’d become often unnecessary. Increasing the efficiency of labour is generally something we celebrate in society, although in cases where it eliminates jobs, things get touchy. Particularly for creative work - the jobs we wish humanity could focus on if all the drudgework is someday automated away.
Current Events
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, with Russian presently on offense, causing explosions in Kyiv and continuing to flatten the remains of the town of Avdiivka in order to solidify its plans for Donetsk. A puppet leader in Russian-occupied Luhansk was assassinated by Ukranian intelligence operatives
Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza is underway and apparently will be for months, despite pressure from even its closer allies to reduce the scope of its actions because of the widespread civilian misery it is causing. There’s a chance Bibi will lose his PM role once this is over because of the security failures, while a fascist in Bibi’s cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich, has been pushing for something closer to a fully genocidal response: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/11/06/bezalel-smotrich-israel-s-agent-of-chaos_6231784_4.html
A corruption investigation in Portugal toppled its prime minister, leading to early elections
Iceland evacuated a town over concerns of a possible large volcanic eruption in the near future (we’ve come rather far since Pompeii)
Content
I made a video on how I intended to vote in NYS’s elections on 2023-11-07:
Polls
A set of questions on tipping culture ( https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/11/09/tipping-culture-in-america-public-sees-a-changed-landscape/ ) in the US, measured by Pew; I generally accept and sometimes appreciate cultures of tipping as a way of providing extra price-signalling on optional levels/quality of service someone might give me, as well as a way to ramp up or down a desired level of familiarity with a business. If I like how things worked out, or want a better chance of being remembered, I tip more. Being able to do that is nice; I think it should come in the context of workers making a decent (at least minimum, ideally more) wage though, and it should be clear where tips go (does it get distributed to other workers?). I recognise the possibility of bias in tipping, but I don’t care.
Pew datasheet on newspapers ( https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/ ) ; I don’t subscribe to any physical papers, but I pay for a few online subscriptions and I sample the news from papers all over the world. I think it's important to fund mainstream news media (and I appreciate/trust them, mostly), but it’s hard to square this with the ability to read very broadly (maybe microtransactions are not that bad, at least for this)
The Wall of Shame
Apple is trying to piss on our boots and pretend it’s raining, and even an editor at Macworld is calling them on this nonsense; the background is that Apple keeps selling new generations of systems that have one configuration with far too little RAM, made worse by their unified memory architecture (which is a terrible idea, not unique to them), and they’re telling the most ridiculous marketing-style lies to pretend these failings are a good thing: https://www.macworld.com/article/2130071/m3-macbook-pro-8gb-memory-too-little.html
A shame on PLOS for backing down when faced with a ridiculous lawsuit, and shame on Soudamani Singh, a sham academic at Marshall University for filing that lawsuit when a problem with one of her papers would’ve resulted in an expression of concern being attached: https://retractionwatch.com/2023/11/03/plos-backs-down-from-expression-of-concern-after-authors-lawsuit/
Reviewlets
Pixel Watch 2 - The device is attractive and powerful, but it’s hampered by an install process that easily goes off the rails (e.g. if you have your phone pair using the normal OS-managed pairing rather than through the guided app) and the problem I had the last time I had an Android watch: terrible battery life. The UI is also not well-suited to the small screen. I’m not sure I’ll stick with it; I’ve had it for less than 24 hours and I’m already tempted to switch back to my aging Fitbit watch because its battery can last a few days
Pappe (Indian restaurant in DC) - Not a very expansive menu (although they can make some things not on the menu), and they require reservations to get good dinner seating, but the food is pretty good (the garlic naan was exactly as I like it). They have an admirable selection of whiskeys visible in the bar, but I went with a mocktail called “The refresher†(I haven’t had a drink with pomegranite and lime mixed before and it was a nice new experience).
Ebenezers Coffeehouse (coffeeshop in DC) - This is my go-to anytime I visit DC as it’s comfortable and a short walk from DC Union Station. They have reliably good coffees and snacks and are cozy - not quite cozy enough to have what looks like a consistent crowd, but reliable enough to de-stress a visit to a city where one doesn’t have a home base
Amusements
A tragic amusement - a convention for people who bought into the NFT craze (both the sellers and their victims come from the same weird subculture) had a severe design flaw with some lighting causing UV burns to attendees: https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/bored-ape-creator-says-uv-lights-at-apefest-burned-attendees-eyes-and-skin/
An attempt at a Star Trek communicator badge? https://www.inverse.com/tech/humane-ai-pin-hands-on-demo-voice-assistant
Fairly nasty variants of common alcoholic beverages:
Pope Bergoglio removed a right-wing nutjob from his Bishop role: https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-francis-sacks-bishop-strickland/
Recent Music
Under pressure - Queen/Bowie - One of those great collaborations that produced a lot of musical memes
Walts - Elliott Smith - A weird mishmash of Beatles sounds and discordant experimentation, reminds me of a mix of a dance and a limp. Has a deeply, deeply satisfying ending.
Der letzte Tanz - Funker Vogt - A fun 12 beats per measure (or 4, depending on how you count) piece