Marc Kwiatkowski

How can one ground any statement of the form "It is right to do X" in anything firmer than the quicksand of bare reiterated assertion? - Arthur Leff

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@uscfan981 The player who would rather have an Olympic gold medal than an NBA Championship Ring; IOW none of these professionals.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@CSMFHT Polycarp - sounds more like a situationship than a name from antiquity.

[Handre @Handre]

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output.

This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest.

Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose.

You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes.

Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning.

Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@WeatherProf Weather Channel predicts 35 for Bordeaux and "near record" temps. For Madrid, max is 34 and "Pleasant weather for the next 7 days". Apple Weather's forecast is similar. Are they wrong?

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@yishan AI slop. https://t.co/tEVkI0cgHp

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@iowahawkblog Not sure about Van Allen; but the other three -💯

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@peterrhague In terms of doing science, unmanned space exploration leaves manned in the dust.

What is the fascination with say - establishing a colony on Mars? It'd be far easier to establish one in the Marianas trench and leave Mars to robotic explorers.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@bryan_caplan By "unaccented" I assume you mean without and English/American accent.

Have you never heard this white son of a Galician and Canarian speak?

https://t.co/eqrNKog7S9

[Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ @estherzelda0514]

My conclusions on Israel's conduct in the Gaza War re: genocide is very simple.

At worst, war crimes may have been committed, if targeting decisions were suspect for failing to be adequately based on sufficient intelligence and/or failing to adequately discriminate between invalid civilian targets and valid military targets. All of that requires evidence, however, and I'm not interested in specious conclusions by the peanut gallery.

However, there is no evidence of genocide, and there never will be evidence of genocide. Legal precedence is clear, there must be specific intent to eradicate an ethnic group, and there must be no other reasonable explanation of the conduct observed, it must be explainable only by reference to that specific intent. That does not exist because of the very obvious reasonable explanation of Israel's conduct in Gaza: October 7, the hostages, the indiscriminate firing of missiles at civilian areas, and Hamas's documented history of embedding itself in civilian areas, not wearing uniforms, booby trapping civilian infrastructure, and using human shields.

I'm completely and wholly uninterested in discussing anything with people that do not recognize such basic fundamental principles of international law, because they operate on a level of profound ignorance, and lowering myself to that level of stupidity means I surely will be beaten by experience.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@robsmithonline https://t.co/faUQHnAT8j

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@walkmanF29 @DannyDeraney Given that I’ve been watching this toon for 50+ years, not so great. I only realized this in the past year.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@rohanpaul_ai I think the main problem w this thought experiment is that it would be nearly impossible to prove the training data quarantined everything after 1911. That is, you’d depend on AI to verify the dataset

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@soleio Serious question. What was accomplished - besides dealing with equipment needed to keep humans alive - that couldn't have been accomplished with an unmanned mission?

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@ThrillaRilla369 All the Prodigy, AOL and Compuserve people trying to assert seniority.

You were all walled gardens that existed outside of the internet (dial-up hubs) until they reluctantly realized internet was the standard and made bridges to it. You are as annoying now as you were then.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@ThrillaRilla369 My first UUCP email was a bang path (i.e. uunet!foovax!barvax!fbmarc!) , before google, yahoo, msn, or even DNS - i.e [email protected].

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@liron @DavidDeutschOxf Also, twenty years ago was yesterday. I'd hazard a guess that Unix, MS and Apple OSes, relational DBs like postgres, mysql et al, and editors like vim and emacs have code over 20y.o.If someone found a zero-day in any of those, it would be a huge security win.

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@liron @DavidDeutschOxf In terms of advancing human understanding of our world, no. But in terms of discovering something hitherto unknown, absolutely yes! If a human found a zero-day in twenty year old code would you not consider that creating new knowledge?

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@marc_donato @Yazgur @ThoNg676733 In a just world we’d still be talking about Billy Preston and the four Liverpudlians doing a bad impression of Chicago blues would be a footnote in his biography

[Marc Kwiatkowski @fbmarc]

@mkhammer I see no charcuterie in this picture.

https://t.co/e0Sq6pdrDC