Wade Henderson

Husband. Dad. Techie. Musician. Veteran. Canes hockey. Panthers football. WITH.
"You sound best when you sing tenor, ten or eleven miles away..."

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

👇👇👇

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Okay, time to explain the Imperial system, the metric system, and why attempts to replace either with the other are all retarded.

They have two different purposes.

The metric system is designed around precise measurement of objects. Its goal is to make engineering and scientific calculations simple.

The Imperial system is designed around humans. Its goal is to make calculation unnecessary.

100 degrees is really hot. 0 degrees is really cold. Anything that starts with a 5 is cool, anything that starts with an 8 is warm. No computation.

6 feet is tall, 5 feet is short.

100 pounds is light, 200 pounds is substantial, 300 pounds is heavy.

A 1000 square foot house is small, a 2000 square foot house is medium, a 3000 square foot house is large.

1 mile is a short walk, 2 miles is a medium walk, after that it takes a while.

1 acre of land is a homestead, 10 acres is an estate, 100 acres and up is a ranch or a farm.

Do you see now why it is so strange and awkward to convert from miles to feet?

It's because converting from miles to feet is not something you're supposed to do in the first place. Yes, they are both measures of length, so they are technically convertible, and yes, on rare occasions, you might need to do that.

But feet are for measuring humans, and things built around humans, like doorways, and mattresses. Miles are for measuring travel distance.

You wouldn't measure the distance between Seattle and Portland in feet for the same reason you wouldn't measure the distance between Tokyo and Osaka in mattress-lengths.

It would be silly.

This is why Americans so fiercely resistant to any notion of "conversion" to the metric system. Because it makes no sense. We already use the metric system for what it's good for, which is doing physics and chemistry and whatnot.

But converting everyday measurements to the metric system would be less useful, generally inconvenient, and serve no purpose other than to make petty government bureaucrats happy that everything is now tidy, orderly, and worse, three qualities that bureaucrats love.

I thought about this carefully when I wrote my first science fiction novel. In the world of the 22nd century, extraterrestrial settlers ("Orbitals") use three systems of measurement.

They measure themselves in feet, inches, and pounds.

They measure the spacecraft and habitats they build in meters and centimeters, grams and kilograms.

And they measure space travel distances in light-seconds and light-minutes.

Each system has its own natural scale.

The sole exception to this is when Marcus doses himself with drugs for high-g resistance, Miranda objects that he has taken too much, and Marcus responds by stating his mass... in kilograms.

Why?

Because they're talking about drug doses, a engineering measurement. Drugs are dosed in milligrams per kilogram.

So, yes, the Imperial system makes perfect sense when you understand what it's for, and no, we ain't changing.

And, as a general rule, when an entire civilization of smart people does something for centuries, and it makes no sense to you, they're probably not being silly.

It's more likely there's something you don't know.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

84 years ago today, four Japanese aircraft carriers were burning in the Pacific because of a man who went to work in a smoking jacket and slippers.

Washington took his job, buried his name, and blocked his medal for 44 years.

This is the story of Joseph Rochefort, the codebreaker who saved Midway.

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor burns. Rochefort, head of a Navy codebreaking unit on Oahu, takes it personally. He tells a colleague that an intelligence officer has exactly one job: to tell his commander today what the enemy will do tomorrow. On December 7, he believes he failed at it.

He decides he will never fail at it again.

His unit is Station HYPO, hidden in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor that his men call "the Dungeon." It is cold, damp, and lit like a morgue. Rochefort wears a smoking jacket over his uniform to fight the chill and slippers because the concrete floor wrecks his feet. He works 20 hour days, sleeps on a cot in the basement, and lives on coffee.

His team is just as strange. Brilliant misfit cryptanalysts like Joe Finnegan and Ham Wright, plus the surviving bandsmen of the battleship USS California, sunk on December 7. The musicians turn out to be naturals at running the IBM punch card machines. Sailors who played trombones in November are reconstructing an enemy cipher by March.

Their target: JN-25, the Imperial Japanese Navy's operational code. Tens of thousands of code groups, layered with additives, changed regularly. On a good day HYPO can read maybe 10 to 15 percent of any message. They rebuild the rest from fragments, traffic patterns, callsigns, and Rochefort's freakish memory. He had spent three years in Japan learning the language. He could hold months of intercepts in his head at once.

By May 1942, processing up to 140 decrypts a day, HYPO sees something enormous taking shape. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is massing nearly 200 ships for one decisive battle. The target appears in the intercepts as two letters: AF.

Rochefort is certain AF is Midway Atoll.

Washington is certain he is wrong. The Navy's own codebreaking office, OP-20-G, argues for the South Pacific. Others fear Hawaii again, or even the West Coast. The Army wants planes held back to defend San Francisco. If Nimitz bets his last carriers on Midway and Rochefort is wrong, the Pacific is lost.

So HYPO sets one of the great traps in the history of intelligence.

The idea comes from staffer Jasper Holmes. The order goes to Midway by undersea cable, which the Japanese cannot tap: broadcast by radio, in plain language, that your water distillation plant has broken down.

Midway sends the fake distress call.

Two days later, HYPO decrypts a Japanese intelligence report to fleet commanders: AF is short of fresh water.

Two letters, confirmed. The argument is over.

Now Nimitz goes all in. The carrier Yorktown, mauled in the Coral Sea and given 90 days of repairs, is patched up in 72 hours and sent back out. Three American carriers slip northeast of Midway and wait at a spot on the map they name Point Luck.

On May 27, HYPO cracks the Japanese date and time cipher, the final piece. Nimitz's intelligence officer Edwin Layton, Rochefort's closest friend and partner, gives Nimitz a prediction of nearly insane precision: the Japanese carriers will be spotted on bearing 325 degrees, 175 miles from Midway, around 0600 on June 4.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, a PBY scout plane radios in the sighting. Nimitz turns to Layton and says: well, you were only five minutes, five degrees, and five miles out.

What follows are the most consequential ten minutes of the Pacific war. American dive bombers catch the Japanese carriers with fueled planes and stacked ordnance on their decks. By nightfall, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, four of the six carriers that hit Pearl Harbor, are gone, along with thousands of men and the irreplaceable core of Japan's elite naval aviators. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's advance across the Pacific is broken. It never recovers.

A basement full of misfits had handed the US Navy the greatest ambush in its history.

Then came the knives.

The same Washington officers who had called Midway wrong now claimed the credit. They whispered that Rochefort was difficult, an ex-enlisted man without the right pedigree. Nimitz recommended him for the Distinguished Service Medal. Washington killed it. Nimitz tried again. Killed again.

In October 1942, four months after the victory he made possible, Rochefort was pulled from HYPO. The man who outwitted Yamamoto spent much of the rest of the war commanding a floating dry dock in San Francisco Bay.

He never lobbied for himself, never wrote a self-serving memoir, and rarely spoke of it. He said his real reward came at Midway itself. He died in 1976, unknown to the public, medal denied.

His old shipmates refused to let it go. Layton and others fought the Navy bureaucracy for years with the declassified record. In 1985 the Navy relented, and on May 30, 1986, President Reagan presented the Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort's children in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

44 years late.

One man in slippers, in a basement, out-thought an empire and was punished for being right.

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

@DonnellySports Worth. Every. Penny.

[Jordie @jordiebarstool]

This is an absurd stat for Rod the Bod

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

AI will create more jobs than any other technology in history.

The doomers' fundamental error isn't just the lump of labor fallacy. It's deeper than that.

They assume a finite problem space.

This is the fundamental error of AI and job doomers. They look at the economy and see a fixed amount of work to be done, a pie that can only be sliced thinner as machines take bigger bites. They see humans a competitive resource for a finite amount of work and a finite amount of problems to solve that must be eliminated.

This is fundamentally, totally and completely wrong.

The pie isn't fixed. It never was. And the reason it isn't fixed is baked into the very nature of technology itself.

Technology is nothing but abstraction stacking. And abstraction stacking is infinite. Therefore the work is infinite.

The hammer didn't reduce the amount of work. It moved the work up the stack. And the new work was more complex, more varied, and more interesting than the old work.

Complexity breeds more complexity and more variety.

Once you have houses instead of mud huts, you have a cascade of new problems that didn't exist before. Plumbing. Wiring. Insulation. Roofing materials that don't rot. Drainage systems so the foundation doesn't flood. Fire codes so your neighbor's bad wiring doesn't burn down the whole block.

Each of those problems becomes a job. A plumber. An electrician. An insulator. A roofer. A civil engineer. A building inspector. None of those jobs existed when we lived in mud huts.

They exist because we solved the mud hut problem.

Think of all of human technological development as a stack of abstraction layers, each one built on top of the ones below it.

At the bottom: raw survival. Finding food. Building shelter. Making fire. These are the base-layer problems.

Each major technology wave solved a base-layer problem and in doing so created an entirely new layer of problems above it:

Agriculture solved "how do we reliably eat?" — and created problems of land ownership, irrigation, crop rotation, storage, trade, taxation, and governance.

Writing solved "how do we remember things across generations?" — and created problems of literacy, education, record-keeping, law, bureaucracy, and literature.

The printing press solved "how do we spread knowledge at scale?" — and created problems of intellectual property, censorship, journalism, publishing, public opinion, and democratic discourse.

The steam engine solved "how do we generate mechanical power without muscles?" — and created problems of factory design, worker safety, urban planning, railroad engineering, coal mining, labor relations, and environmental pollution.

Electricity solved "how do we deliver energy anywhere?" — and created problems of grid design, power generation, appliance manufacturing, electrical safety codes, utility regulation, and an entire consumer electronics industry.

The Internet solved "how do we connect all human knowledge?" — and created problems of cybersecurity, digital privacy, online commerce, content moderation, network infrastructure, cloud computing, social media dynamics, and an entire digital economy that employs tens of millions.

Notice the pattern?

Each solution didn't just solve a problem.

It created an entirely new problem space that was larger, more complex, and more varied than the one it replaced.

The stack grows. It never shrinks.

It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.

[NHLonTNT @NHL_On_TNT]

Biz was NOT happy with Greig's sucker punch in the scrum... 😳🥊

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

@SensBuzz Swept.

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

@SickoSens @SensBuzz Swept.

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

The reaction people are having to AIs that can find bugs in code is fascinating. Finally, we have the capacity to fix the crisis in computer security we’ve had for decades, and everyone is treating it like it’s a tragedy.

A central mistake here is that people regard this as “no one will ever be safe again” rather than “there will be a brief period when we get rid of most of the problems.”

People seem to be acting as though there will always be more security holes for these systems to find, forever, and so there can never be safety, but that’s not the way this works at all.

There are not an infinite number of computer security bugs in existence. It is only felt that way because we haven’t had the ability to carefully audit absolutely everything. There are also techniques that we could never afford to use before, like formal verification, that will let us vanquish a lot of the problems forever, but which require AI to really take advantage of because they are simply too labor-intensive for human beings.

This is not the beginning of some era of permanent insecurity where no one can ever feel safe again. It’s the end of a long period of insecurity where no one had any safety.

The problem is, certain companies are hyping this as “these tools are too dangerous to let anyone have!” Which of course means that people won’t be able to audit their own code to get rid of their bugs before they release software. Hopefully that too is also temporary. It would indeed be tragic if it wasn’t.

[𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗼𝘀 𝗔𝗱𝗮𝗺𝘀 @carlosadams]

> Un tío usa ChatGPT Pro y Claude Opus para analizar 100 PDFs de historial médico de una paciente con cáncer metastásico
> Unifica todo en un solo archivo con OCR
> Lanza el mismo prompt en ambos modelos a la vez
> Luego enfrenta un modelo contra el otro: "otro comité de expertos opina esto, ¿cómo lo ves?"
> Repite 5 veces hasta que ambos dicen que no pueden mejorar más
> El resultado: tests adicionales, pruebas nuevas, una dimensión del caso que ningún médico había visto

La Sanidad Pública debería estar invirtiendo miles de millones en esto. Pero por suerte tenemos a leyendas de internet como Javi haciendo su trabajo.

[Jeremy Trimble @jeremytrimble]

Nathanael Greene was an apolitical iron merchant with no military background. A confrontation with a rogue British naval officer radicalized him into the Patriot cause. When he tried to join the militia as an officer, he was rejected as unfit and unworthy of command. Eight months later he was appointed brigadier general in the Continental Army.

This is a thread about Greene’s rise to high command in the Continental Army for the 250th anniversary of American independence.

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

@DonnellySports Gassed at the end

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

@corylav Regression to the mean…

[Walt Ruff @WaltRuff]

Tonight marks Rod Brind'Amour's 600th game as #Canes head coach.

Already with 366 victories through his first 599, he owns the NHL record for most wins by a head coach through their first 600 games. 👏

[Peter Savodnik @petersavodnik]

If you call yourself a progressive, and you’re not even a little excited by the prospect of a woman-hating, gay-hating, Jew-hating neanderthal regime that in no way represents the will of its people being crushed, you’re not actually a progressive.

[Hater Report @HaterReport]

USA vs Canada 🥇

[Team USA @TeamUSA]

CONSIDER THE BIRD FREED. 🦅🇺🇸

#WinterOlympics

[Michael McNair @michaeljmcnair]

Why has the US assembled the largest naval force in the Caribbean since 1962? It's not about drugs. It's not about oil. The real explanation involves a new technology that could cripple half of American trade. I lay out the case in my latest report.
https://t.co/h0haSPZ137

[Sassington, M.C. @MissSassbox]

your brain wants to hear your newest favorite song over & over, not just because you like it, but because it's fixing something

[Wade Henderson @tenor11]

@DonnellySports Pay the man.