THREAD, PT DEUX -- it was a lovely long weekend, I’m feeling rested and energized, and lucky for you I’ve got some more great criminal justice policy ideas to share. Real exciting stuff, I promise. Let’s flesh these out: 1/9

Ok, so to reduce unnecessary contacts between police and people/communities of color, here’s what we’re going to do: end the war on drugs. 2/9

Right now we needlessly make felons out of 10,000+ Virginians per year for narcotics possession, so for that we’re going to end the war on drugs. 3/9

Reduce court fines and fees, prevent disenfranchisement, demilitarize police departments, eliminate mandatory minimums? I’ve got a great idea for those, as well: end the war on drugs 4/9

Oh, and police and prison budgets are bloated, driving state and municipal governments into debt, with no societal benefit to show for it. So in order to save a crap ton of cash we’re also going to end the war on drugs 5/9

The Pandemic has got me thinking. On TV, people of the future are always very comfortable with data. They collect it. They analyze it. They adjust their strategies in real time. Not in days or hours or minutes but often literally in SECONDS.🧵👇

They run simulations of different outcomes. The simulations aren't always right but they seem to put them in the ballpark of what's reasonable. People take the simulations and data seriously. They factor them into their planning.

Even when the future government is evil, it's still smart. Even when the future government is rigid and uncreative in how it responds to stuff, it's responses are still logically related to the assumptions it has made, the data it has collected and the analyses it has performed.

Unfortunately, our civilization is NOT THAT. We collect data but usually haphazardly and in ways that make it hard to draw any conclusions. It often takes a long time for us to make sense of data. Politicians often throw out the numbers completely.

We don't seem to care what the probability of various outcomes are. We don't seem to use probabilities when making decisions. Perhaps, you're thinking about the election predictions and about how they were close but not quite right.

@JerryDyerFresno 9/ The staffs and management at Naomi House for women, the homeless shelter @PoverelloHouse were incredibly abusive. They constantly threatened vulnerable, mostly mentally ill women, with the sts for "disobeying" some new made-up rule(s). What jerks! -Michaela cc: @SoniaMDLR

@PoverelloHouse @SoniaMDLR @fresnoland @NAMICommunicate @FresnoNAMI @FresnoCountyCA @namicalifornia @ACLU_NorCal

IMHO, this article — https://t.co/wLiWDOZrvm — is an important corrective to fatalism about the new strain. As in, "welp, there are probably already at least a handful of cases of the new strain already here, so no matter what we do now, it's gonna spread." Not necessarily so.

"10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for...80 to 90 percent of transmission."

"An early run of bad [or good!] luck...can produce dramatically different outcomes."

New Zealand had 277 separate introductions; only 19% of them led to more than 1 additional case.

That's all referring to the original COVID strain, but I haven't read anything suggesting that the same pattern doesn't apply to the new variant. Not sure if we know yet, but it's at least possible a lot of people don't spread it (while the few that do, spread it *A LOT* a lot).

Here's what we know, or think we know:

* The new variant is here, with probably at least a handful of undetected cases.

* The new variant is so wildly contagious that, once it gains a foothold, cases WILL spike.

* Cases stopped rising steeply around Nov. 10 (by onset day).

It seems like 1 of 2 things is true:

1) New variant arrived in October or earlier, and helped cause our November spike. We then reined it in, without even realizing it was here.

2) New-variant community spread is low-level thus far, at least thru ~Xmas. No superspreaders yet.

1/ More thoughts on impasse over organizing Senate/committees. McConnell demands Democrats commit that they won't "go nuclear" to ban legislative filibusters. Schumer says no. The organizing resolution can be filibustered, hence McC's potential leverage. So what's going on here?

2/ Democrats are highly unlikely to make such a commitment, even if McC sees the ploy as a clever way to split the Democrats. Even if Dems *did* agree, both parties know it's not a credible commitment. The last time the party leaders shook hands on such an agreement (2011)...

3/ the agreement didn't stick. McConnell and the GOP's concerted effort to block judicial and executive nominees encouraged Reid and Democrats to nuke most nomination filibusters in 2013-- in a Congress that was covered by the 2011 agreement. Granted, that agreement was informal

4/ in the sense that it wasn't written into either the organizing resolution or one of the "standing orders" Senate agreed to in 2011. (Here, I highly recommend @ProfStevenSmith The Senate Syndrome. If we weren't in a pandemic, I'd pull out my hard copy to pinpoint the chapters!)

5/ Of course, even if agreement had been formalized beyond the 🤝, that wouldn't have stopped the Dems in 2011 (minor nuke of the cloture rule) or 2013 (major 💣of cloture rule) or the GOP in 2017-- once the party felt it could shoulder the political costs of bending the rules.

1/ How many times have u been told that ‘Imposter syndrome’ is an internal problem? That it’s your responsibility to make it go away from your mind. That it’s entirely a figment of your own imagination. Well I don’t think so, but the journey to this conclusion has been painful 🧵

2/ Let’s start with the definition of Imposter syndrome: it’s basically those feelings of inadequacy & doubt in your abilities to do the things that you’ve proved successful in doing by virtue of your achievements & qualifications. This in turn affects your confidence to do them.

3/We’re told women, particularly those from minoritised backgrounds, have this more intensely though it can affect anyone. I’ve certainly felt it throughout my life intensifying at times of stress and overload. But is it entirely internally triggered? Well, this is the narrative.

4/ You go to courses, you read articles, you speak to mentors and what they usually tell you is that it’s all in your mind. Perhaps triggered by your social upbringing & cultural background. So you must work on it. But I’ve realised recently that it’s not just that.

5/ Some people in your surroundings trigger this, to be fair to them perhaps unconsciously. They may have in their minds a stereotype of you that is inadequate & incapable of achieving what you’ve achieved in reality. So they do or say things that trigger the feeling in you..

The client was always a scary landscape to me. Not necessarily because of the many inconsistencies of the browsers. Not because of the idiosyncratic and plain silly parts of javascript, the chosen language of the client. Not even…

I don't trust the client. This, I always thought, is a good thing. A back-end developer should not trust the client. Every input should be validated and mistrusted, all possible interactions with that less (and less-than)…

I think some of the inherent conflict, not enmity - never that obvious, between front-end and back-end stems from such mistrust. How can we not mistrust them? To us they are a load of hippies using toy languages and eldricht incantations to work around…

But, something has changed. The browser-wars have quieted down somewhat. Javascript performance has begun to approach a qualitatively acceptable domain. HTML has matured and with FlexBox and Grid even CSS is starting to make some sense (if I squint at it).

And now we have Web Assembly. I'm not going to poke into that with my time and effort, I lost enough nights to assembly back at university. After that i took a look at Java and later C#, and decided that life is far too short to spend it managing…

For years, people would ask me how I do my research. Online and in radio interviews I always gave basic, vague answers because I was trying to protect my small market share. I didn't want to create my own competition because I was being selfish. It was a mistake. [Today's thread]

Market share is not the right term, really. I never received a dime for my years of conspiracy debunking and putting out truth to combat the world of lies people encounter online. Perhaps it is better to call it my niche.

I did it for free, in my spare time, while working two jobs and writing novels when the urge struck me. I did it because I was extraordinarily concerned with people being manipulating by the BS the find online.

So people often asked how I figured it out. How did you dig that up? Why wasn't that in the article I read? I've never seen that before! WHY haven't I seen that before?

I would give answers like..

You didn't look in the right places.
Or,
You need to double-check your sources.

Those sorts of answers.

"It's just a thing I do. I probably couldn't even show you how to do it."

It strikes me that much of the anti-CRT pieces that charge Black Christians with being CRT proponents go to great lengths to root CRT in European philosophical streams of thought. This despite actual proponents rooting their thoughts elsewhere in the Black intellectual trad.
/1

So one has to ask the question: Why this tendency? Why press a movement often self-consciously located in one tradition into a tradition it sees as foreign to its thinking?

I'm sure there are many answers. But one answer seems to me to be it's an attempt to control the debate./2

A lot of the historical and philosophical excursus, insofar as it overlooks what the actual proponents claim, is simply another effort at colonizing thought, of insisting on a certain philosophical priority, and of demeaning the constructive thoughts of a group being rejected.
/3

This is partly why so little progress is made or can be hoped for in these discussions. The critics aren't willing to take justice proponents at their word and engage their actual arguments and tradition.

/4

Some need to "other" justice advocates both by (a) alienating the advocate from their own philosophical and theological resources and (b) positioning them within rejected and anathematized streams of thought in western society. It's a double-alienation that rigs the convo.

/5

🚨🚨okay fine here what I got 🚨
You wait for a big drop from .@CodeMonkeyZ but if you want something serious to focus on, check this out. Who owns qalerts? Who develops it? Not 8kun. They have a role but not nearly as big as you think. How does Q relay intel? Have a gander...

A mini history re: AZ Senate Seat Politics:
McCain was an AZ Senator for 31 yrs over 5 terms.
In 2015 he was primary challenged by Dr. Kelli Ward, an AZ State Senator and tea party fav.
In a surprisingly brutal primary, where McCain poured HUGE 💰 into, he won. (Did he?🤔)

TELEPATHY - Lesson Two:

I'd like to expound a little bit more on a few little side notes that I feel are good to understand, although I am sometimes a bit hyperanalytical, and I can dive into more detail than anyone else cares to know, so feel free to just skim and take what you

A lengthy thread I wrote just to write. Feel free to ignore.

1/ The future of consumer GPUs is probably less ASICy than people think. I think we're nearing the end of growing non-general purpose compute/cache die utilization in consumer GPUs. Here's why:

2/ Real world RT core usage is far from peak theoretical perf. On Nvidia, they're cache starved. The way to improve performance for Nvidia is to add more cache to the die a la infinity cache. On AMD, it's just to improve their RT core design, which isn't great.

More importantly,

3/ real world RT core usage is very naive. It's often collect n sample per pixel with m reflections w/irradiance caching, & then run A-SVGF to denoise. This usually works well, but sucks w/moving objects, fine details like leaves on distant trees, and the combo of leaves in wind.

4/ But research already shows that you can get pretty drastic improvements w/adaptive sampling in that case.

Beyond that, adaptive sampling research usually focuses on general cases. But consumer GPUs use RT for e.g. games, Blender, etc. These aren't super general. The engines

5/ underpinning these applications have access to a lot of information. For example, developers can add hints to objects to suggest to the renderer that they be sampled more or less.

Better exploitation of temporal data and ray tracing statistics can make a lot of the rays cast

My friend @RiirReeRii comes out with another argument against The Trinity

P1) God exists a se (From the definition of "God)
P2) The Father begetting the Son/Generation is a causal relation.
C1) Therefore, the Son exists ab alio.
P4) The Son is God (From, "Trinity")

C2) Therefore, the Son exists a se (From 1, 4)
C3) Therefore, the Son is exists both a se and ab alio (From C1 and C3)
C4) Therefore, "The Son" Is self-contradictory
C5) Therefore, The Trinity is self-contradictory

By a se we are just referring to God's aseity (i.e, the term a se means "through itself"). Aseity refers to God's uncaused, independant, unconditioned, necessary, etc. Existence.

We are simply exemplifying how God's existence is independant from and unaffected by anything outside of him. It's important to note that "Aseity" doesn't just mean "metaphysical necessity" / "existence in every possible world", since we could have Ab Alio necessities as well.

Ab Alio simply meaning, "Through another." In contrast with A se.

The second Premise might seem a bit weird. Someone might argue that the relation between the Father and the Son isn't "causal" in any sense. But this is just heretical.