61

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: October 25, 2022, 05:44:16 PM »

here's the state of the nfl today. fyi, negative numbers are good for defense, so the upper right quadrant is the good quadrant, and the lower left is the bad one. the jets are probably frauds. philly's defense has to come back down to earth sometime, but their offense may be legit. the giants may be getting mildly lucky.

The primary peak sitting at ~ -0.75 EPA seemed a bit weird that it was so consistent

i was puzzled by that, too, but i guess when you think about all the incompletions and run/pass plays that only go for a few yards or less, probably most nfl plays have a slightly negative EPA. i think the other thing that's happening is that it's difficult to judge the relative heights of the primary peaks with respect to each team. i'd expect buffalo and kc to have smaller peaks there than, say denver and carolina.

62

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: October 21, 2022, 04:47:59 PM »

thanks fam

i got the data from some shit called the nflverse, but i made the plot myself. lol most of my time has been spent tweaking the colors. it needs a caption for sure.

i'm most surprised that nfl passing across the board is dominated by low epa plays. the distributions in general are a lot more similar than i would have expected. like i think if you just showed me one of the distributions at random, i wouldn't have any idea if it was associated with a good offense or a bad one. i'm looking into the data more carefully to see if i'm making an error in the way i group them. lol that is entirely possible.

63

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: October 20, 2022, 11:29:22 PM »

i found a treasure trove of high-quality nfl data. i made a plot. it's not especially informative, but it looks neat imo. go chefs.

64

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Russia doesn't invade, they recognize Donbass Republics: send in peacekeepers !

« on: October 16, 2022, 08:11:35 PM »

i'm actually curious to know how cruise missiles help in a humanitarian crisis. was the crisis a lack of explosions?

65

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Russia doesn't invade, they recognize Donbass Republics: send in peacekeepers !

« on: October 10, 2022, 02:35:22 AM »

call me crazy but i feel like if you declare war on a sovereign nation then you are the one who caused a war with a sovereign nation. especially if you follow it up by sending a few hundred thousand troops across their borders to start killing people and capturing cities and such.

"but they wouldn't let us dictate their foreign policy!!!!!!!!" is a justification, i guess, but it's kind of a bad one imo imho.

lol let me guess — you're a huge fan of neville chamberlain

66

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Russia doesn't invade, they recognize Donbass Republics: send in peacekeepers !

« on: October 09, 2022, 11:05:21 PM »

yeah it's super weird that ukraine doesn't want to reward the nation that is illegally annexing them with a treaty to cede sovereign territory and let them dictate ukraine's foreign policy. so weird. i simply can't understand why z is being so unreasonable.

67

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: October 08, 2022, 12:38:30 AM »

i am extremely here for watching the broncos collapse just four weeks into wilson's contract

68

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: September 28, 2022, 01:52:00 AM »

severance

i fucking loved every single thing about season 1. it was as spectacular as helly's pencil skirts.

69

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: The Queen

« on: September 12, 2022, 02:26:21 PM »

i realize i am of course doing major mental gymnastics here (probably because i just don't understand politics on your level), but do you think it's possible that these constitutional monarchies all function along similar lines because they share a common cultural and developmental heritage? like maybe the fact that they are all european is not a complete coincidence? i could be wrong, but it just seems like they're all pretty closely related to one another in space and time, so maybe we should be cautious about overgeneralizing from what is clearly not any kind of random sample.

I'm not sure what point you think you're making. Like, yes, political culture is a very important part of any political system that relies heavily on convention? Did that need to be pointed out?

perhaps i am misunderstanding your point in general — and of course please point it out if i am — but imo you seem to be making the claim that constitutional monarchies are very democratic because they always have impotent executives, and impotent executives are good. others have pointed out that this is not a necessary feature of a constitutional monarchy. we can easily imagine a constitutional monarchy with a strong executive.

your argument, then, was that all current constitutional monarchies have this feature, and we can/should generalize from this fact — after all, what are the odds that they would all share this feature by accident?

this brings us to my argument above: the fact that those governments all share a similar heritage/culture/time in history/etc means that we ought not generalize from their shared features. they aren't random and independent measurements. there are clear covariances.

70

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: September 12, 2022, 12:13:25 AM »

71

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: The Queen

« on: September 09, 2022, 10:44:41 PM »

The UK is not the only democratic constitutional monarchy. There are six monarchies in the EU alone, and several more elsewhere in Europe. With the exception of the absolute monarchy of the Vatican, they all function along similar principles of limited power granted to the sovereign, whether through legislation or convention. It takes some mental gymnastics to suppose that they have all simply been fortunate for the past century or two.

i realize i am of course doing major mental gymnastics here (probably because i just don't understand politics on your level), but do you think it's possible that these constitutional monarchies all function along similar lines because they share a common cultural and developmental heritage? like maybe the fact that they are all european is not a complete coincidence? i could be wrong, but it just seems like they're all pretty closely related to one another in space and time, so maybe we should be cautious about overgeneralizing from what is clearly not any kind of random sample.

p.s. sorry in advance if my question is meaningless wink emoji

72

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: September 05, 2022, 02:13:33 PM »

this is just a straight-up lie. an easily falsifiable lie. https://www.lawfareblog.com/can-trump-just-declare-nuclear-secrets-unclassified

Did you even bother to read through your link?

The author says that the matter is unclear. The author only points out that the law on nuclear secrets doesn't specifically give the president blanket power to declassify. The law does not specifically prohibit the existing declassification powers of the president. The law doesn't talk about it.

"there are shitloads of regulations regarding declassification that ostensibly apply to everybody, but the degree to which executive authority mitigates this has yet to be tested in court" is a very far cry from your false assertion that "the courts can't convict trump because there are no declassification standards that bind the president."

maybe you should have bothered to read the next paragraph:

Unlike National Defense Information, the procedures for identifying and declassifying Restricted Data are defined in statute, not in executive order. Whatever assumptions one might make about whether presidents need to follow their own executive orders (or the executive orders of previous presidents) or not thus get thrown out the window here as well. That doesn’t totally resolve the constitutional situation: Maybe you could try to argue that Congress doesn’t have the power to punish presidents for releasing Restricted Data, because that might interfere with their operations as commander-in-chief. Or, one could argue whether the Restricted Data clause is inherently unconstitutional, which as we’ve seen is not a new argument. Either way, it is a different issue at heart with Restricted Data than it is with National Defense Information.

73

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: September 04, 2022, 02:43:22 PM »

all the kerfuffle over classification misses the point entirely. the search warrant specifies that the fbi was looking for evidence of crimes relating to three different statutes:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1519
• 18 U.S.C. § 2071
• 18 U.S.C. § 793

notice that literally none of these mention classifications or anything of the sort. all that controls is whether or not the information is vital to national security interests. because, as others have pointed out, these documents belong to the usfg, not trump.

that said, i think it's extremely unlikely that trump will ever be charged with anything. welcome to politics.

There are no written checks or procedures on the President's power to declassify. This is why the courts will never convict Trump of this. There are no written presidential regulations and no standard to follow.

this is just a straight-up lie. an easily falsifiable lie. https://www.lawfareblog.com/can-trump-just-declare-nuclear-secrets-unclassified

74

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: August 26, 2022, 07:27:33 PM »

for anyone interested, here's a good primer on these issues as they related to declassification laws: https://www.lawfareblog.com/can-trump-just-declare-nuclear-secrets-unclassified

As this article was going to press, ABC News published a report that weeks before the Mar-a-Lago search, former President Donald Trump’s associate Kash Patel “vowed to retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website.”

fyi that's called espionage.

75

Technology & Information / Re: machine-generated art (DALL-E, Imagen, Midjourney, etc.)

« on: August 24, 2022, 07:50:15 PM »

i think i'm kind of rooting for these tools to become sophisticated enough to be funny, but not sophisticated enough to replace journeyman artists. it would be rad if the end result was simply a tool to help augment an artist's brainstorming and rough-drafting.

76

Technology & Information / Re: machine-generated art (DALL-E, Imagen, Midjourney, etc.)

« on: August 21, 2022, 08:04:00 PM »

It is ridiculous to demand that you are paid for the things you enjoy doing.

no one is suggesting otherwise, and you already know that.

dude can you please just take your bad-faith arguments to another thread? i started this one for genuine discussion, not for more "tim says silly thing and everyone takes the bait." we've got like a dozen of those threads already.

77

Technology & Information / machine-generated art (DALL-E, Imagen, Midjourney, etc.)

« on: August 17, 2022, 03:43:07 PM »

for those who don't already know, machine-generated art is experiencing its first renaissance. two years ago, i'd have said that i wouldn't see this level of sophistication in text-to-image generators in my lifetime. if you want to see some examples, check out a few of these:

https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
https://imagen.research.google/
https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/

some interesting questions come to mind.

• given that these models are trained on art from living artists, is it fucked up for people to use them to generate art for commercial purposes?
• hell, is it even okay to use them to make some art for my home? normally you'd have to commission an artist for custom work. this is basically free. and, again, trained on living artists' works.
• how far will this tech develop? how long before i can use them to produce music and motion pictures?
• how long before they can produce images of real people that are indistinguishable from genuine images?

anyway, i'm just curious to see what people think.

78

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: August 12, 2022, 04:53:02 AM »

i just watched Prey. i can't believe i'm saying this about a predator sequel, but it was really good.

the pacing was nearly perfect. the audio mixing was literally perfect (i didn't have to adjust the volume at all). the action scenes were tight with very few quick cuts, and they didn't drag on and on.

my only real beefs are that the ending was kind of dumb, and that the main character looks so much like aubrey plaza that i couldn't stop seeing april ludgate.

79

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Old Politicians

« on: August 05, 2022, 04:35:05 PM »

tom i hate to burst your bubble, but people born in the first half of the 20th century didn't actually invent books, libraries, and post offices. those things have been around for some time.

80

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Are the American police out of control?

« on: July 19, 2022, 02:30:38 PM »

Yeah, it’s there to keep those tea-drinking red coats off your farm too!

don't be daft. it's also so southern states can secede and get their asses absolutely handed to them by the union.