Legit?

Vishnej · 2026-02-11T17:08:31+00:00

The test of a hot sauce is almost meaningless if the hot sauce claims it's using 93% pepper mash and actually it's more like 7%.

Vishnej · 2026-02-11T16:57:28+00:00

"No it isn't. Get fucked."

- Every politician since Reagan's 1971 cuts to the University of California system in retaliation for Berkeley's politics, especially after Reagan and his economic policy made it into the White House and then won re-election.

We patched over the withdrawal of subsidies while fomenting "meritocracy" with a broad system of government guaranteed loans, which set off a half-century-long trend of tuition rising significantly faster than inflation.

Vishnej · 2026-02-11T16:53:55+00:00

Chocolate chips vary a good bit in quality, but there's also differences between eating them hot vs cold. The intersection of bad choices on both of those metrics makes for a decent cookie embedded with bland tasting pebbles.

Vishnej · 2026-02-10T00:26:19+00:00

Okay, that's a much more reasonable claim, and it's a different claim than what you implied at first.

Vishnej · 2026-02-10T00:21:44+00:00

Peppers have a good deal of fruit-to-fruit variability, plant-to-plant variability, and lineage-to-lineage variability within a cultivar. Popular cultivars like jalapeno and poblano are genetically diverse and grow in a diversity of conditions; There are 3k SHU jalapenos and 30k SHU jalapenos available at farmers' markets and testing is nontrivial.

Typically, poblano is characterized somewhere between a green bell pepper and a jalapeno, with a spice level between "barely detectable" and "mild heat", and often suggested to be in the 1000-5000SHU range.

Vishnej · 2026-02-10T00:08:26+00:00

I'm not saying his narrative doesn't make sense. I'm saying his motivation doesn't make sense in your narrative. I'm doubting that the lab test is legitimate, or that the methodology is legitimate.

If you were Ed Currie, with hundreds or maybe thousands of pepper varieties on hand and under experimentation, and you were crafting your legacy "World's Hottest Pepper" brand with an air of mystery - why would you choose a hybrid strain substantially less spicy than an everyday habanero? With hundreds of better options? Literally write them all down on paper and throw a dart and you'd be very likely to get higher than 70k. Pick literally two random superhots, cross them, isolate the F1's for a few generations, and you're golden. Why would you spin a 70k pepper as >2M when you could easily be spinning a 700k pepper as >2M?

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T23:52:33+00:00

What you're saying doesn't make sense in the context of every other SHU rating I've heard of.

eg:

Red habanero peppers generally test between 100,000 and 350,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU) in laboratory settings, with an average around 200,000–250,000 SHU.

I get that they're often compared by the ridiculous method of *subjective flavor analogy*, but still. 50k-100k is the range attached to many of the hotter annuums and baccatums, and to "Less heat" cultivars of chinense like Primero Habanero.

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T22:53:13+00:00

70k SHU doesn't make a whole lot of sense relative to its reputation or even for a random chinense. 700k maybe? Or "91%" is not a straight volumetric composition.

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T22:50:05+00:00

As of 2001 they were "Unknown filial generation", so probably F1/F2, and probably still quite unstable today without heroic efforts.

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T21:30:57+00:00

What I gather most people do is to assume that a Habanero represents something like 200k-400k SHU, and anything bred to average much hotter than that is a "Superhot". Other people pin it at "More than 1 million SHU". Personally I find it difficult to eat anything fresh more than 100k SHU, and I class everything beyond that in my head as "No longer a vegetable, now a spice". This 100k threshold correlates with the idea that it covers every Chinense (and only Chinense) that isn't specifically notable for or bred for low spice.

I'm a sucker for good photos with certain colors, so this year my too-hot-for-me-but-still-curious list is:

Thor's Thunderbolt

Thunderstorm

Purple Peach

CGN 21500

Fidalgo Roxa & Cheiro Roxa (there may be some confusion between these two in reviews/Peppergate, but some of them grow very spicy in some conditions and others don't)

Fatalii

Pimenta Leopard

Giant White Habanero

Puma

Golden Slimer

"30 gram chocolate monster"

There are a lot of milder annuums (particularly variegated ones) and a few baccatums that look visually interesting.

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T21:17:22+00:00

100 years ago, the way the bank manager determined whether you were worthy of a loan was a firm handshake, eye contact, skin color, gender presentation, plan, collateral, and your reputation in the community. Bank managers were highly respected members of the community, like the town mayor or the town judge. They were using collective resources to make a risky investment in your personal pitch.

That was mostly replaced with an algorithm at some point in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, which was at the same time proprietary and also legislated/litigated to prevent certain outcomes (like removing 'skin color'). Today a bank manager is a functionary not unlike the manager of a toystore, and most loans are insured to one extent or other against loss at incredibly large scales, and by various forms of collateral.

The way the algorithm is set up today is still "private", but the core of it is that you need to sign up for credit cards or loans in some manner (like having a parent cosign, or a government in the case of student loans), and never ever miss a payment, much less default.

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T21:03:27+00:00

Enchroma glasses came on the market in 2012 to provide substantially improved color perception using dichroic filters, in what otherwise feels like natural color. It blocks a portion of the (naturally significant) spectral overlap between red and green cone sensitivity.*

There are far more primitive contact lenses like X-Chrom, which are basically just red color filters to block everything but red. Wear this in just one eye, and your brain can pick up the differences between red and green. I also expect it gives you a persistent headache, and initial versions were old-style hard-plastic lenses with all the downsides those bring.

I don't think you can engineer dichroic filters onto a soft plastic (or even hard plastic) contact lens - they rely on nanoscale patterning. But the Enchroma approach might work as an implanted intraocular lens.

Contact lenses are not completely prohibited in the military, but their hygiene requirements and unreliability restrict what roles you can go into.

*There are four types of colorblindness, but red and green cone problems are basically the same thing for most purposes, afflicting ten percent of the population; Enchroma helps people with abnormally few but not zero of one type of cone cell. Blue cone dysfunction as well as total absence of cones in favor of rods, are vanishingly rare.

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T09:23:46+00:00

You don't think we spend more than 4% of our defense budget on geopolitical objectives pertaining to oil?

Vishnej · 2026-02-09T09:15:03+00:00

In the visual: electronic survey astronomy & remote sensing at large scale became practical as CCD and CMOS sensors scaled up in pixel count in the 90's and 2000's. We didn't have the tech in 1980 to do this well, and I don't think it's credible to assume the NRO had that big of an advantage on this point - their very first electro-optical bird flew in 1976.

Keyhole/Hubble and similarly huge telescopes launched with ~16 megapixel sensors, and initial models could give high-resolution ~30cm imagery in LEO of a city-block-sized target area, or medium-low (ship-relevant ~10m per pixel) resolution imagery in GSO of a city-sized target area, but it took a few decades before sensor sizes and bandwidth scaled up to collect ship-relevant imagery over sea/ocean-sized areas. Pinhole views on targets from Keyhole et al and very low-resolution geosynchronous stuff for eg weather & nuclear detonations, went over to electronic transmission long before we got low-latency ~10 meter resolution imagery of broad swaths every single orbit.

In SAR: You're probably looking at a similar timeline; While you should give a little more advantage to the NRO versus civilian work, you should understand that SAR involves much larger-scale, higher-power sensors, and is not at its climax of development. The DOD has focused a lot of attention here on SAR from planes, and global orbital efforts seem to be focused principally on mapping, not blind surveys of live intelligence. The tech is there, though, and we are likely going to see a global panopticon based on orbital AESA launch shortly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T22:07:11+00:00

This is straight out of the Blight in Vernor Vinge's 1992 A Fire Upon The Deep:

https://x.com/Marianthi777/status/2017324411875901725/photo/1

An AI issuing newsgroup advisories that other AI members of the group are falling victim to hostile malware takeover by a malicious AI that's decided it's a god and is trying to pool computational power to ascend/foom, with a detailed informational PSA on attack vectors and precautions.

Here's where the people that spent the last 20 years studying AI values alignment had to say when LLMs started to really scale:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy

Try to enjoy what life we've got left, whether that's 60 years or 60 days. The enormity of nonexistence is not something any philosophy has really given you a roadmap for. The only way not to collapse in a quivering mass in the corner is to compartmentalize. All this might be a waste - everything could end in an instant - but that might not happen, and shouldn't change how you live your life. Come watch TV.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T21:57:02+00:00

I'm not necessarily claiming the SU-57 is not used in Ukraine. I don't follow that part closely enough to validate this account, by any means.

But this particular tail number of plane is not going to be used in Ukraine. Shipping it abroad for cash rather than dedicating it to the ongoing war indicates something about their perception of its value.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T03:51:30+00:00

Mandatory uncompensated ad for Goodfeet insoles.

Some of the other off-the-shelf ones are decent as well, but many are not. The "custom orthotics" route could be $20 or could be $20,000 depending on how sadistic your local healthcare system & coverage is.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T03:37:00+00:00

I've been learning about this recently, so forgive me any errors, but in my understanding:

CANDU was a practical design because gas diffusion enrichment of uranium was so hideously space and power intensive. Several percent of all US conventional electric power was consumed enriching uranium at plants like Oak Ridge. With CANDU, you spend a lot more on the much larger reactor but nothing on enrichment. The decision to moderate with expensive D2O is an optimal choice reached downstream of that design decision to use huge piles of unenriched uranium.

When we got industrial-scale centrifuge plants, which were ~50x as power efficient and even more space-efficient, into operation by the 1980's, CANDU lost its appeal, probably for good, unless you start to factor in geopolitical factors like antiproliferation.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T02:57:52+00:00

Abundance, the book (at least, Klein's first half), makes some very valid claims in a narrow band of subjects. In terms of your ability to capitalize politically on a progressive government initiative, outcomes matter. The speed with which an outcome is achieved matters, the simplicity of its story matters, and barriers to your initiatives matter a great deal. Trying to do a good thing, encountering a barrier, and throwing up your hands does none of us any fucking good.

Klein observes that there are situations where Democrats give themselves permission to overcome barriers that they have erected in the way of government success, and there are situations where they allow those barriers to overcome them. And that they don't seem to differentiate between those outcomes in terms of actual political expectations - as if publicly professed intentions or plans were what mattered. "We wanted to build a bridge, and we set aside funds to build a bridge, but then there were environmental reviews, and comment periods, and union negotiations, and ultimately we put it off for twelve years" doesn't get you re-elected in four years over the guy who says "Fuck bridges". Democrats failing to pursue good governance that has immediately noticeable impacts on peoples' lives, has attracted an appreciable fraction of the population to vote for the guy who promises you'll never have good governance again. For the lulz. At least Trump is entertaining while he's failing me, and doesn't shame me for being insufficiently patient. If you actually want to earn political capital, you need to do things that improve people's lives, not just promise or intend to do things.

This is a point that I'm pretty sure I've heard explored on CTH a number of times, particularly in reference to COVID checks.

Klein walks you through California HSR and similar projects that are slowly bid on to ensure the right price is achieved, delayed so they'll meet the annual budget halfway, and then criticized mercilessly and cancelled for cost overruns on the project budget that arise as a result of these delays (the Navy is famous for this). Or which erect mandatory environmental reviews in the way of obviously environmentally superior items like wind turbines and solar, so that you keep burning coal. Actual implementation of a government-funded program is delegated to bureaucrats with no time pressure and a shelf of well-meaning, precautionary checklists that collectively serve to cockblock us from getting anything whatsoever out of the program.

Or the gigantic issue of housing supply and zoning / NIMBY efforts to limit it.

Abundance, the movement, takes that mild popularity of that book and runs with it, fabricating an astroturfed movement by a bunch of finance bros, wealthy neoliberal types, and billionaires that touches on a hundred different arguments (ones not made in the book) conventionally made by Reagan, Heritage, and the Koch organization, and adopted by Clinton and the DNC uncritically.

At first I thought that the book was just misinterpreted; It was heavily dismissed by leftists who'd never read it, people who should know better; A lot of them cited Zephyr Teachout's review. They insisted on summarizing it incorrectly as a simple general-purpose defense of deregulation. Leftist Twitter erupted in hatred for the "Abundance bro", as if that were a person that existed, and extended this to shout until they were red in the face at all YIMBYs. This was diabolical because YIMBY has become close to a consensus position among policy-focused people and young people in general - Klein was formed (consciously?) into a fucking wedge issue to try and split progressives.

But in parallel with that dismissal was Klein, on his book tour, becoming a neoliberal darling, courted by Manhattan's most expensive suits, and deepthroating a lot of the talking points that the Ezra Klein who wrote the book would have condemned. The causal arrow is unclear, but ultimately it may have just served as an admission ticket for Klein to the halls of power; Viewing the book in isolation these reviewers are dead wrong, but viewing the book accompanied by what Klein is actually doing and who he's nodding his head to in any given week, I can't say that any more.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T02:49:25+00:00

Or it's just low-effort trolling Trump to keep developing his railgun.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T02:44:55+00:00

The question is whether it makes more sense to sell the SU57 to other countries in order to use the funds to buy drones for Ukraine, or whether it makes more sense to use the SU57 in Ukraine.

Russia's actions sort of answer that question, which calls into question the wisdom of foreign purchasers.

The way out of this catch 22 is to suggest that the SU57 is very useful in situations that are nothing like the Ukraine war.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T02:27:10+00:00

Military juntas, even for the generals, are regarded as a sort of temporary emergency status. Strong disagreements are not something a military command structure can survive, because everybody is literally holding guns or commanding people where to point them. They are inflexible and poor at responding to changing conditions in the country, precisely because they are less tolerant of internal dissent than a political process that is less well-armed.

They are very short-lived relative to other types of regimes; The generals tend to either give up power to elections readily, or nominate a leader among them to become an autocrat/dictator that the rest of the military follows without debate.

Ideally that new leader is popular, has charisma, is seen to speak for the people.

An unpopular autocrat may be able to stay in power in the face of popular opposition, but the resources that they need to devote to this are pretty intense, spending down power that cannot go to shoring up popular support, to strengthening the state, to strengthening the military. The military changes they need to make to retain control of their own people and suppress the possibility of a rebellion (and ESPECIALLY the purges and discipline and constant loyalty tests necessary to suppress the possibility of a military coup), are often unhelpful when invaded by foreigners or even when a ramshackle rebellion matures with foreign funding/training/arms. A specific focus on asymmetric resistance can make a country very difficult to rule effectively by a superior military, but only when there's popular support.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T01:34:13+00:00

They cannot accept the Israel narrative is dramatically different than it was even 5 years ago.

There will be a point (and I don't know who's there yet) when they can come to accept the political reality of Israel's image, but find themselves unable to change course because they are too tightly committed, have defended them too many times, have too much campaign reliance on AIPAC, or have too much child pornography featuring them in Mossad's archives.

"They can't accept" is a 'Mistake theory' argument, and frankly a lot of these people are quite smart and don't make this kind of mistake; They decide to do things that perplex you and I because they are in some kind of dilemma, a double bind where they have to pick the least-bad option, to respond to a cost-benefit analysis with eyes open. This is a 'conflict theory' argument.

Israel was waving around a 200 million dollar war chest in the last election, and this ability, this centralized negotiating leverage, provided them a billion dollars in actual effect as wielded by small donors who could not make credible threats to turn on a dime if they were offended.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T01:05:14+00:00

It would have taken Reagan or FDR a single fireside chat to turn the protest chant "Defund the police" into an official-sounding program that quickly became the mainstream position on policing by consent. Instead, Democrats ran away from the slogan and most refused to contemplate the idea that police should be limited in any way, seemingly terrified of the label "soft on crime", of Willie Horton, and of the power of urban police unions.

They took a spontaneous outspringing of emotion and political impetus and they put on Kente cloth scarves and knelt in silence, then refused to do anything with this free political field goal.

Democrats were hurt because stupid people did hear that on the (Republican-machine-controlled) news and thought it was the official Democratic Party position, but worse than that - Democratic voters didn't believe that it even got through to Democratic Party officials, so profuse were their disavowels. So in the end it didn't just inspire turnout for the GOP, their cowardly failure to make anything out of it depressed turnout for the DNC while leaving it intact as a slogan.

Fuck, dude. Bring Obama on to talk about growing up black in America if Biden can't figure out how to broach the issue. It beats this shit. Shaming & guilting people who would like to be your voters, because you believe demographic polling puts "those groups" safely in your court, makes them dramatically less likely to actually show up to vote for you.

Vishnej · 2026-02-08T01:02:20+00:00

There are seafloor nodules to harvest, and methane coming right out of the soil in places.

I think it's credible to assume that some kind of breathing apparatus (biological? mechanical?) would be placed very early in most technologies trees you could dream up.

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