deathmtn

Amit compared amount of energy needed to melt a gram of ice to the amount of energy needed to heat a gram of water by 1°C.
The values he uses for the amounts of required energy are right. The energy required to melt is well-established in thermodynamics, and the energy needed to heat water by one degree is the definition of a calorie. The phase change energy needed really is that much bigger.

Now imagine what happens with climate change. If you add heat to a system, and there's ice around, it will melt the ice. But if there's no ice around, that same amount of heat will increase the temperature by 79.5°C (143°F).

Most of the talk about polar ice caps that I hear mentions its reflective ability, which is important, and also mentions that they provide "cooling help". I've never seen the shocking magnitude of its cooling help discussed until that post.

I'm going to a kid's birthday party in a moment, but maximizing Peaceful Time until then.

Via work radio, Reversible Sabbath. Incredibly funny if you're familiar with Sabbath.

10-4-4-4-4-6 today.

As much as it's tempting to just say "well, Google's gonna Google" as I did at first, this article had some surprises, so it's worth reading.

First, there's the stuff I happened to already guessed about how Google weighs human rights based on the shit they did to Brazil and the rest of the world with
YouTube and how they prefer to support pedophiles rather than make less money.

Our 2010 decision to stop cooperating with Chinese government censorship on Search results was the first time a non-Chinese corporation stood up to the Chinese government. In doing so, Google put everything on the line — its future in the world’s fastest-growing internet market, billions of dollars in profit, even the safety of our Chinese employees. At one point, I began planning for a possible mass evacuation of all our Google employees based in China, as well as their families. Although difficult, I was intensely proud of the principled approach the company took in making this decision.

However, the decision infuriated not only the Chinese government, but also frustrated some Google product executives eyeing the huge market and its accompanying profits.

Yeah, you know what ended up happening there.

It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.

That is like some Michael Scott shit! Except crueler and more misogynist.

In each of these cases, I brought these issues to HR and senior executives and was assured the problems would be handled. Yet in each case, there was no follow up to address the concerns — until the day I was accidentally copied on an email from a senior HR director. In the email, the HR director told a colleague that I seemed to raise concerns like these a lot, and instructed her to “do some digging” on me instead.

Wow.

Via this article, I learned about Absher, a horrific application supported by both Google and Apple.

The application provides 160 services for residents of Saudi Arabia including making appointments, renewing passports, residents' cards, IDs, driver's licenses and others, and, controversially, enables Saudi men to track the whereabouts of women they control as part of the country's male guardianship system.

I read another article about China that has some insights about why people people are OK with authoritarianism and propaganda, and obliquely, might explain why people (including people who work at Google) are OK with Google and why it might be hard to convince them otherwise.

For many, it’s about economic interests, the old unspoken pact between the government and civilians that “I’ll make you rich if you accept my authority.”
…
“Yes,” Tang agreed. “What is democracy in the end? It’s the powerless and the dispossessed fantasizing power and money being shared with them. In a sense, it’s very much like Communism.”

“Indeed,” another person said. “Democratic or socialist, each system has its own way of fooling people, but we’re past the point of believing in any of them. Don’t just draw the bread on paper. Give us real bread.”

This is really interesting because it is seems like a contrast with populist US voters, for whom it is not about materialism, but rather about, in some sense, dignity and restoring a social order in which their race is either supreme or "the first among equals". But a lot of Chinese nationalism comes from a desire to assert dignity/supremacy as well, as the article discusses.

On trying to change entrenched viewpoints, here is what happens when you tell a group of people that some behavior is racist:

When I read this part of the discussion the following morning, I felt sick to my stomach. I understood that our WeChat conversations were casual and not to be taken too seriously, but I also saw the danger of such casual talk about another race — stereotypes sustained and cultural superiority reaffirmed. So I decided to speak out once again. I gave historic reasons for why we should be more sensitive toward Africans. Of all people, I said, we Chinese should be more sympathetic and empathetic to people in Africa, as we were both victims of colonialism. Empathy requires us to not see a country and its people through a lens of power, but to put ourselves in their shoes and to try and understand their struggles. Knowing my audience, I also added a buffer at the beginning of my response to save my classmate’s face. I applauded Tang for his kindness — “I fully believe that you’re not racist under any circumstances,” I said, “for I know personally that you’re a kind-hearted person.” I made my point general, not targeting anyone in the conversation.

After a few hours, Tang responded. “Whether this whole thing has to do with racism is beyond us,” he said. “Let’s not talk about this anymore.” Immediately, three other guys — also the opinion leaders of the group — gave him their thumbs up.

For the next few days, people kept chatting in the group about various topics. I chimed in once but was ignored. Amidst their conversations, the word empathy was used several times, always sarcastically, as if they were subtly mocking the person who brought it up first.

On the idea of changing ideas through discussion in the first place:

I observed their discussions from my phone, uncomfortable about joining in. I thought of the American scholar James Carey and his seminal theory on communication, which I had learned in grad school. Rather than viewing communication as a transmission of information, Carey proposed that it is a construction of a symbolic reality, a ritual through which shared beliefs are maintained, strengthened, and transformed.

This projection of community ideals and their embodiment in material form — dance, plays, architecture, news stories, strings of speech — creates an artificial though nonetheless real symbolic order that operates to provide not information but confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds but to represent an underlying order of things, not to perform functions but to manifest an ongoing and fragile social process.

Yeah, I don't know, man. Rings true, yet also I don't know that to do about that. Maybe I should stop discussing things?

10-4-4-9 today. Had to cut it short because I was late for a meeting.

OHAY GUYS 65

Klee's Magic Garden somehow looks very video game to me.

Hey, I implemented search for this weblog. Here's the implementation, in case you're interested. When I wrote term-tracker last year, this is one of the two things I imagined I could do with it, the other being these TF-IDF summaries, which I have to say are less illuminating than I had hoped.

The search, I think, is good enough. It's very lightweight. The server app pretty much just loads a JSON index, then looks up terms from it, then the web app grabs the search result content from the JSON files already produced by static-web-archive. It's a lot less work to maintain than something like Elasticsearch.

There's a lot of limitations. For example, I was lazy with term-tracker, and didn't get it to figure out compound words with phrases. Also, you can only search for one word at a time. But these are things that can be fixed, if I really feel it's necessary.

Right now, I'm more interested in applying it to the bot weblogs, though, admittedly not enough to make it the next thing I do.

It does get stuff, though! Here's some subway posts. Here you can see I've said a lot about Google's ruining of humanity. Here's a bunch of Wily posts from before they mostly moved over to the Daily MRRP!

We narrowed our donating this year down to two projects this year:

Kids in Need of Defense

The Florence Project

These organizations provide legal representation and counseling to children appearing before immigration court, who are A) children — sometimes toddlers — and B) are not granted public defenders because they are immigrants or refugees. Under the current administration, a child's failure to defend themselves in court can result in them being put in a camp.

We went this way because we know exactly what they do and the effect it has, unlike, say, the Sierra Club, whose goals are great, but it's not really clear to me how they get there.

The other reason is that this is an atrocious failure of our government on many levels, and it's a flaw I think we need to do our best to shore up.

If you're looking for organizations to donate to, I'd consider those.

Call for dialogue adventurers! I'm going to try making more of these. Here's the explanation from my newsletter:

It’s a dialogue adventure. I made it for a friend who recently had a baby and won’t be able to make it to D&D for quite some time. The idea is to let him still affect the game in a lightweight but hopefully meaningful way.

The adventure consists of story beats. Each beat is consists of:

• Some text and/or pictures that explains a situation


• An opportunity for the player to to affect the situation, in the form of multiple choice or free text.

In a sense, it’s just a series of forms to fill out. But even ambitious games like King of Dragon Pass or the question rooms in Slay the Spire boil down to that.

The situations take place in the game world, and the player’s actions affect the next D&D session with the in-person players. For example, the players are currently in the Temple of Elemental Evil (minor spoilers at that link) in our D&D game. An Item Mart (TM) kiosk appeared on the ground floor of the temple the last time they played. The Item Mart corporate scouts placed and stocked the kiosk based on the player’s consulting advice from the dialogue adventure.

It’s a form of co-design with the player who can’t play. My hope is that these will also fun in and of itself, though we’re not quite there yet.

Some characters I have in mind for dialogue adventuring are:

• Jeumes, a Kuo-Toa (a kind of subterranean fish humanoid) who is not enthusiastic about the all-encompassing raiding culture of the Kuo-Toa. He was convinced to desert his post by the Worst Party (the player characters). He spent some time traveling the Worg Caverns with them, but Worst Party culture was alienating to him as well. He ghosted, then wandered off to the surface, getting entangled with other adventuring parties along the way.

• Ouistyn Cliaaagh, a dwarven cleric from a rival party of the PCs. He got sucked into hell during a climactic battle with a gigantic slime hive mind.

If I’m feeling ambitious, maybe I’ll make ones for:

• Smigal, a brigand leader who the PCs magically locked into a room to die


• A Time Squirrel, a member of a species of squirrel that can manipulate time

Email me if you want to play!

A case for making interfaces noun-oriented rather than verb-oriented:

What happens when we auto-complete f(x)? First we need to know all possible f that are valid in this context. Since the programmer has just started typing in the expression, any function is valid, and that means there's a very long list to choose from. It takes many keystrokes to pick one. Second we need to know all possible x that are valid in this context. These are usually local names, so there aren't that many. Knowing the type of f narrows down the list but the list was already small, so there's not much to gain.

What happens when we auto-complete x.f()? First we need to know all possible x. The programmer has just started typing, so any local name is valid, but there aren't many. Typing just one character can narrow down the list to one or two elements. Second we need to know all possible f that are valid in this context. These are methods defined on the type of x, so there aren't that many compared to all possible functions. Knowing the type of x narrows down the list substantially, so there's a lot gained.

And apparently, Amit started thinking about that as a result of running into Richard Garriot while shopping with his mom!