> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale
The lengths some people willing to go just not to use the metric system
Any tips or reading you would recommend about organizing the workspace to improve focus?
I recently switched from a self-imposed 5 days in the office (obscenely short commute, homeschooled kids) to a mostly WFH arrangement (the commute to the new office is two hours each way) and despite having an office with a door lock at home, my productivity could be better.
The deconstruction of falling stars.. the jailbreak plot device was implausible to me when I was younger, somewhat plausible when I was introduced to VMs, and now with LLMs we're probably already there.
There were various internal Quality of Life modules during my time at amzn, but nothing public. I suspect that given enough time working with Lua, each team will create an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of python.
My reading of what laeri wrote is "you seem to be proud of the work you did on that project so I'm not sure what is hindering you from talking about it".
Not "you seem to be proud of not talking about it".
I'll be generous, and assume that. I tend to get a lot of young folks, telling me that I'm an empty boaster (spoiler: I'm not). Some of them actually seem to be obsessed, which is sort of flattering (I guess).
If that's the case, then I'll certainly apologize. Maybe I'm a cynic.
I don't really have a desire to be BMOC. It's just that this is the only place I engage in any kind of social media, and most folks seem to like what I post.
I've done a lot, over the years. I've worked amongst some of the best and the brightest, and I'm fairly used to being the dumbest guy in the room.
I know that there's many folks, out there, that make me look like a knuckle-dragger, and how ridiculous it is, for me to act like I'm King Shit. Maybe those folks don't feel the need to chime in, around here.
In the case of this posting, a question was asked, and I answered it, in what may actually be too much detail. The company I worked for, had (still has) a real paranoia, when it comes to intellectual property.
I just figured that folks might want to hear stories from the trenches (I have a lot -many that can't be told). That was what I assumed, from the question, and was merely participating in the community.
Slightly tangential to the discussion, but are there any readings you would recommend on moral decision making?
Background: I am(was?) a left-leaning israeli jew, and Oct7 and the subsequent IDF response make me feel as if I can hang up my moral compass on the wall as a non-functional vintage decoration.
Sorry, I saw that a bit late. I don't think I can recommend any reading for your particular conundrum. That falls into the area of general normative ethics. My area is formal axiology in metaethics, which concerns the structure and logic of "good" and "better than" comparisons. That area of inquiry is neutral about what values are the right ones, it concerns how to make decisions on the basis of given values, and what structural constraints these values have. Such a theory has normative components, but these are very abstract. For example, I have defended a theory of value structure according to which values come in different qualities; some values can outrank other values, which has far-reaching consequences for decision-making (e.g. expected utility can no longer be used, even if one is willing to endorse it otherwise).
As you can imagine, there are many approaches to normative ethics, international law, and the ethics of the rules of war. I'm by no means an expert in any of them and also do not believe that moral philosophers have authority regarding specific normative judgments. When I said I feel obliged to say something about the topic, I was more or less talking about a personal feeling of responsibility rather than claiming any moral authority. What I can recommend is to not be a consequentialist in moral evaluations of specific decisions, though consequentialist considerations are important in policy-making when statistical data is available. Motives and intentions matter a lot, and their roles are also codified in international law.
My personal take on the subject is that the military intervention in Gaza so far is morally justified. Deaths per bombings are low (not high, as some people claim) if you take victim numbers provided by Hamas and numbers about target bombings by IDF. Civilian:combatant casualty ratio is alleged to be around 2:1, which is also low for urban combat. But the main reasons why I believe it is justified are that there is no other alternative to put Hamas out of power, or at least substantially reduce the power of Al Qassam brigades, no past actions of Israel could in any morally relevant sense justify the Hamas terror attacks, I see no compelling evidence that the IDF or Israeli government wants to commit genocide (which, by definition, requires intention), Hamas endorse terrorism and self-portray as jihadists, there is an ongoing hostage crisis, Hamas has often attacked Israel in the past, and Israel has a right to prevent future attacks. Consequentialist counting of the number of victims plays only a minor role and, as far as I know, is also not very relevant from a legal point of view. Commensurability in the rules of war is relative to the military goals, and must be judged on a case by case basis. I've read and agree with how this is defined in the Geneva Conventions.
Neither that Palestinians are oppressed (or feel that way) nor whether some land belongs to them or not plays any substantial role in my personal moral assessment because these do not justify terrorism and hostage-taking.
Anyway, that's just my personal take on it. Sorry I'm unable to give you any good reading recommendation.
Thank you for the reply. I did learn a few new words such as "normative ethics" and consequentialism. I'll start with googling them and see where it leads me.
Although in the end only primary sources count in philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good resource for getting into specific topics.
