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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

    "The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

    The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

    What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.












  • The goal isn’t to defeat Iran in a quick war, but to neutralize the nation’s long range artillery and turn it into a free fire zone for American and Israel armies.

    Ukraine isn’t Iran. It has a firm rear guard of support from the NATO block, supply lines that can re-arm and re-staff depleted arsenals and positions along the eastern front, and allied agencies ready to pick at Russia’s flanks - by seizing cargo shipping, assassinating ranking political leadership, and blowing up critical domestic infrastructure.

    What the Iranians lack, at the end of the day, is friends. Nobody in the Russian, Pakistani, or Chinese government is going to send saboteurs into Israel on their behalf. Nobody is going to help them keep the Straight of Hormuz shuttered. Nobody is going to blow up Saudi desalination plants or bomb peripheral American military bases.

    Once Iran military can no longer produce and deploy new ballistic missiles, the country just becomes target practice for its enemies. We (probably) won’t see a Rumsfeld-style blitz into Tehran, like they managed in Baghdad. But we will see Iranian airspace closed, critical infrastructure destroyed, and population centers targeted to effectively break up the political face of Iran into its component parts.

    What becomes of a nation without a central bureaucracy, an intercity municipal system, or a functional electrical grid? This was a country already in a water crisis months ago. It is a nation functionally under siege by the most sadistic and savage militaries in history. People are going to die by the millions before this is over, simply due to disease, drought, and famine. It’s going to be a country the size of Germany experiencing what Israel has done to Gaza.

    Quite literally bombed into the Stone Age.


  • I can explain in basic terms what is happening there. Does that help anybody?

    Really depends on where the bug lives.

    I would argue that it doesn’t because almost everyone writes code in higher level languages.

    Most people write mediocre code. A lot of people right shit code. One reason why a particular application or function runs faster than another is due to the compilation of the high level language into assembly. Understanding how higher level languages translate down into lower level logic helps to reveal points in the code that are inefficient.

    Just from a Big-O notation level, knowing when you’ve moved yourself from an O(n log n) to a O(n2) complexity is critical to writing efficiently. Knowing when you’re running into caching issues and butting up against processing limits informs how you delegate system resources. This doesn’t even have to go all the way to programming, either. A classic problem in old Excel and Notepad was excess text impacting whether you could even open the files properly. Understanding the underlying limits of your system is fundamental to using it properly.

    Similarly, I could explain to you how long division works but the next time you need to divide two numbers you’re still going to reach for a calculator instead of a pencil and paper.

    Knowing how to do long division is useful in validating the results of a calculator. People mistype values all the time. And whether they take the result at face value or double-check their work hinges on their ability to intuit whether the result matches their expectations. When I thought I typed 4/5 into a calculator and get back 1.2, I know I made a mistake without having to know the true correct answer.

    One of the cruelest tricks in the math exam playbook is to include mistyped solutions into the multiple choice options.

    What then is the point of lamenting the loss of knowledge that no one uses directly?

    It’s not lamenting the loss of knowledge, but the inability to independently validate truth.

    Without an underlying understanding of a system, what you have isn’t a technology but a religion.