I love TwixT, I discovered the Bookshelf Games version of this recently (a friend of mine's parents had an old copy at their beach house). Also a big fan of Alex Randolph's Ricochet Robots.
Dieter Stein's games are also supposed to be wonderful abstracts (Urbino, Fendo, Tintas) though I haven't had a chance to play those yet.
Actually what he said was "The MAGA Gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." and it's been taken for granted that what he meant is that Tyler Robinson is MAGA, but that's not strictly what he said.
1. There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.
Look, I'm not a Trump apologist. But if you're going to condemn Trump for what it sure looks like he's saying (but he technically didn't quite say), then don't be surprised when other people get condemned by the same standard.
2. If I understand correctly, the shooter's family was fairly conservative. So the right's reaction of "no, he was left" was, at the time, a baseless deflection of baseless accusations.
> There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.
The people doing this kind of reframing of Trump's statements are typically doing so to make them seem less inflammatory, usually in response to those who take him at his literal word. 'It's just a joke', 'an exaggeration', 'he didn't mean it literally'. Given how things have been going, it's clear he hasn't been joking.
Kimmel's monologue, taken literally, is completely benign.
At this point his political views are still not clear. You can be pro-trans and pro-Trump at the same time. See: Caitlyn Jenner, who supported Trump in the 2024 election.
Even more so given that all of this pinning on extreme-left groups started before they even found Tyler Robinson and that they did the same in Minnesota a few months ago. I think it's basically accurate: they are desperately trying to characterise it on anyone but their own, and have no regards for any facts. Even if Robinson really is far-left in every way (certainly a realistic possibility), they will be "correct" merely by accident in hindsight.
> At this point his political views are still not clear.
Clear as day. Deranged leftist. No question. As someone who is even now wrong for the right reasons, I wonder if you think maybe the right-for-the-wrong-reasons crowd might have heuristics that are useful and lead to good decision making, and that you have rejected.
Waymo would not fight against "people getting rid of their cars", many people in NY who use the incredible public transit system would like to see more car-free streets, which they absolutely would fight against.
The ideology of SV will only get more dangerous the more government contracting becomes ingratiated into the business models there. Extremely scary in our world of Palantir, Anduril, NSO group, etc.
All the #[derive(Clone)] does is generate a trait impl of Clone for the struct, which itself can be bounded by trait constraints. It doesn't have to know that every use of the struct ensures generic parameters have to/don't have to be Clone. It doesn't have to make guarantees about how the struct is used at all.
It only needs to provide constraints that must hold for it to call clone() on each field of the struct (i.e. the constraints that must hold for the generated implementation of the fn clone(&self) method to be valid, which might not hold for all T, in which case a Struct<T> will not implement Clone). The issue this post discusses exists because there are structs like Arc<T> that are cloneable despite T not being Clone itself [1]. In a case like that it may not be desirable to put a T: Clone constraint on the trait impl, because that unnecessarily limits T where Struct<T>: Clone.
After Israel assassinated Haniyeh in July and launched an air strike on Beirut that killed 30+ people, some of which were civilians. Keep going on with this game though.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make here. Do you think it's not public knowledge that Iran finances and orchestrates Hezbollah? Or is this the terrorism card? Maybe it's different when the US supports al-Zenki et al (or the many years of financial support and hands-off permission Israel gave Hamas and then encouraged Qatar to give Hamas).
I think Hezbollah has done some truly disgusting things and I have no delusions about the ill deeds of Iran's regime. But I think it's extremely fair to say that Israel is an even more egregious perpetrator of murder, displacement, and apartheid and Iranians have every right and reason to see themselves in solidarity with Palestinians and the people of Lebanon.
If it helps understand where I'm coming from, I don't think Hezbollah is (was?) a terrorist force at all. It was designed to be a near-peer military adversary against Israel (on paper) and Sunni militias (in reality). It is (was?) an instrument of the IRGC, with very little of its own agency; a genuine part of the Order of Battle of the Iranian military command.
I think this is all common knowledge? A brigadier general of the IRGC was in the room with Nasrallah when he was killed IIRC. I might quibble with "militia", which has legal ramifications I'm sure you're aware of. Maybe there are conspiratorial cranks who deny that's what Hezbollah is, but I'm not sure I know any people who would disagree with this. I believe Khamenei called Hezbollah and Nasrallah "his children" with pretty clear connotations being conveyed after Nasrallah was assassinated.
Right, so stuff about how terroristic Hezbollah is/was isn't motivating to me. I'm not more OK with strikes on Hezbollah because they were "terrorists"; they were a military force, the largest in Lebanon, operated by Iran, launching a continuous stream of rockets (several per day) into Israel. By any normal standards, an act of war by Iran.
I don't think "acts of war" mean much in real statecraft; there's no referee, things are what people say they are and outcomes are determined by military and economic power. But anyone going down that path has to recognize the hole Iran dug for itself here. They didn't have to do any of this.
But the people of Iran, for very obvious reasons, do not like the real leadership of Iran, and Iran does a lot of things just to keep that leadership structure intact.
Finally, and super-importantly: I think HN is just a weird place to have these kinds of discussions, and I'm very sure nobody who's angry at me about my takes on these things know what I actually believe about any of this stuff --- and why should they? What I believe about any of this is immaterial. Like every nerd, I'm motivated to comment when I see something I "know" to be wrong; that's all that's happening on these threads.
In this particular thread, I only appeared because I think the GBU-57 is a very goofy munition. I had previous to last week thought it was like some ultra-explosive "close as you can get to nuclear without being nuclear" kind of weapon. But nope, it's just a normal bomb strapped to a giant anvil. That's weird! Seems HN-y to comment on.
(But now I'm here and I see things like "the SL of Iran has declared nuclear weapons Haram" and, like, I'm not going to let that fly past! But also: not pretending there's anything useful about this discussion. If it's annoying to you, stop engaging! That's what I'm doing.)
> I don't think "acts of war" mean much in real statecraft; there's no referee, things are what people say they are and outcomes are determined by military and economic power. But anyone going down that path has to recognize the hole Iran dug for itself here. They didn't have to do any of this.
I'll preface this by saying I understand fixating on a small detail, and as evidenced by this thread, I readily engage in that. I also think the thing about the fatwa against nuclear weapons is a little silly, it seems like there are incredibly obvious, rational reasons for Iran to want a nuclear arsenal.
To back up to Oct 2024 (to make a different point, I'm not trying to take us further down the rabbit hole), I think it's worth pointing out how arbitrary it is to choose this moment in time as a point where Iran "dug a hole for itself". Presumably a moment of intervening agency that breaks from what came before and after. It's a vantage point that has no real significance to the broader conflict, doesn't tie to the beginning or end of anything significant. It's unclear why that moment in particular is where Iran could have set us on a different course, and why we should consider jettisoning the rest of historical baggage that lead up to that moment. And it has the whiff of being chosen arbitrarily to exculpate (or sideline any notion of) the United State's involvement in this conflict. It's the kind of detail I expect to see fixated on CNN, without any mention of events like Israel's former invasion of Lebanon, the impact of the Nakba and the One Million Plan on the surrounding Arab states, the Dulles brother's lead coup in Iran that deposed a secular, democratic leader, etc. Not that you even really need to go back that far, there's plenty of events proximate to 10/1/24 that lead to Iran launching missiles, like Israel staging a land invasion outside Lebanon.
I don't think that's what you're doing (I'd rather not speculate on why that moment is significant to you, and would be curious to hear your own take), but I want to explain why discourse like this becomes touchy. For some of us millennials, our defining political experience was seeing the United States become an incredibly sore loser via a problem of our own making (and infuriatingly, we apparently learned nothing from the consequences of funding the Mujahideen). We are obviously, also a victim of our own circumstances, no less than Iran, but we are also an agent of incomparable power in world events. And for many of us it became clear how carelessly, callously, and selfishly that power is wielded and how quickly we victimized ourselves and were unwilling to tolerate criticism. Aaron Sorkin wasn't even able to make the movie that depicted how much of a problem of our own making this was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)#...
All this to say, if you feel ganged up on, I get it and sympathize. I think you have good intentions here, and I'm sorry if I came in too hot. Some of us are just nauseated by our position in the world and culpability for all this harm, and are constantly frustrated by the hegemonic political discourse that is adamant to deflect criticism and prioritize American exceptionalism above all.
Oh, no, not at all. I don't come to HN to reconcile myself to what's happening in politics and foreign relations (possible exception: zoning; I'm a housing activist). I generally feel like in these kinds of discussions, I'm doing things right if neither pole of the argument happening on HN thinks I'm on their side; the only thing I'm sure about is that this stuff is complicated.
Thanks for the detailed response! I could pick at it, but that's not the spirit of where we're at at this point in the thread.
Oh, by the way: Charlie Wilson's War --- the book is much better than the movie.
> Whether this understanding of engineering, which is correct for some projects, is correct for engineering as a whole is questionable. Very few programs ever reach the point that they are heavily used and long-lived. Almost everything has few users, or is short-lived, or both. Let’s not extrapolate from the experiences of engineers who only take jobs maintaining large existing products to the entire industry.
I see this kind of retort more and more and I'm increasingly puzzled by it. What is the sector of software engineering where we don't care if the thing you create works or that it may do something harmful? This feels like an incoherent generalization of startup logic about creating quick/throwaway code to release early. Building something that doesn't work or building it without caring about the extent to which it might harm our users is not something engineers (or users) want. I don't see any scenario in which we'd not want to carefully scrutinize software created by an agent.
I guess if you're generating some script to run on your own device then sure, why not. Vibe a little script to munge your files. Vibe a little demo for your next status meeting.
I think the tip-off is if you're pushing it to source control. At that point, you do intend for it to be long lived, and you're lying to yourself if you try to pretend otherwise.
Dieter Stein's games are also supposed to be wonderful abstracts (Urbino, Fendo, Tintas) though I haven't had a chance to play those yet.
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