JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
For me, using brave + privacy badger I haven't seed utube ad for ages.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
It could be worse. Couple of days ago I sat down to watch my daily dose of old comedies on Hulu (T-mobile gives it to me for free, so why not make use of it?), and what do I get instead without any warning if not a visage of a certain presidential candidate spilling the bullshit right in my face. I decided to avoid Hulu at least until mid-November.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I read the books (some of them) and I don't see anything bad in Cavill. Of course it's different - TV and book are different media. But I think for the series he is fine.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
The San Francisco guy preached to birds and animals, but didn't hit anybody with flaming logs. That's much better IMHO.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Irianians are much meaner to gays than Russia has ever been, but the Left is just fine with Iran. Despite Iranian agent (Arianne Tabatabai) working in Pentagon, nobody shows even 1% of the paranoia directed towards "Russian influence" right now. So the gays thing didn't help, but if they had a gay parade in Kremlin every Sunday, it still wouldn't change anything.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Sounds like an extreme maniac (of course, it's probably false anyway). I mean, if the prostitute has already been paid, all he had to do is to tell her "go away, I don't want your services" (or, maybe, just have her sit in a corner for 10 minutes - though for a virgin probably even 5 minutes should be enough - just to be believable and then make her go away) and she would - who wouldn't be happy to get paid without doing any work? If she hasn't been paid (in which case, wtf was his father is thinking?), then pay her and see above. WTF does he need to do with the flaming sticks and what exactly she got beaten for? She was just doing her part of the deal, she didn't do anything wrong. It's not even claimed she was the devil or sent by the devil or anything like that - she was just a hired worker that came to do her work, what the heck she deserved to be beaten with a flaming stick for? This is an insanely messed up story!
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Laptops have been screened since forever. As were any container that is enough to pack enough explosives to hurt a plane. Including every cellular device, of course. I'm pretty sure if Hezs put their pagers through the airports scanners, stuff would light up - but most of them probably were too busy with other things to fly to an international vacation, or they left their work pagers at home.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
If you work for Hezbollah, that is a smart precaution. If you don't, you are just being silly. Which is of course your right, but the thought that Israel would waste top intelligence talents and years of intelligence work to target a random guy on the internet is hilarious. Maybe they'll start with stealing one of your shoes?
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
That's all? Young female journo infatuated with an older high-status male? And they didn't even have sex? Pfui!
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I think with the affidavit signed by a whistleblower it's more than a "theory" that she had the questions. That's more proof that was enough to impeach a President. More precisely, she had been given "example questions" - which were supposed to be "a kind of" questions she is going to be asked but not exactly those (we can't verify it of course because we don't have the questions they were given, but it sounds believable). Of course, we have no indication the other side got the same deal IIRC.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Russia is kind of an anomaly here. I think the Left has been generally rather friendly towards Russia (remember "the 80s called and want their foreign policy back"?) until somebody thought it'd be a brilliant move to declare Trump a foreign agent (which is BTW so Russian thing to do it is not even funny) and whose foreign agent could he be? Iran and China obviously don't fit, but Russia fits just fine. Trump was not openly hostile to it, nobody in the US knows much about Russian politics, and Russia is big enough that they have spies in the West (as do Iran and China, of course, but it's not the time to talk about those) which could be revealed at the right moment as a proof of whatever nefarious plan is necessary. I think that's when Russia suddenly became a huge enemy of the Left.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Depressing is not that big of a deal, a lot of genres (horror, noir, catastrophe, etc.) aren't exactly sunshine and puppies. It's just that the source material is sometimes a bit dry for general audience, and the fun parts aren't often spelled out but only implied, so the movie script needs to add a lot of things that make it a movie attractive to a modern audience. And this needs to be done very tastefully because the original is not of that nature at all. And "tastefully" does not seem to be something the people in (extended) Hollywood are capable of doing. Thus, abominations like ROP are born. Is it possible in theory? I think it might be. But it requires a lot of skill and love and integrity, and I don't expect somebody with all these qualities to be able to pass through the gatekeepers of Hollywood and be able to actually execute such project.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Yeah, Cavill leaving The Witcher was kind of a bummer. I'm not sure whether I'll keep watching.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I'm not sad, if needed, I could spend 50 years rewatching old movies. I was just wondering - could I be missing something? The Rock is 52 by now, not sure if it's "old" but definitely not "young" anymore.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
when he was 15 years old
That kind of changes the whole picture. It's beyond idiotic to hold a grown man, years later, for shit he did on the internet when being a horny teenager. Ever more idiotic, they apparently allowed him to work for 2.5 years, presumably accessing all that top secret information, and then suddenly they started digging into his behavior as 15 years old? So many levels of pure dumb.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
What a perfect illustration. Just an ugly box next to perfectly nice buildings would be an injury, but they had to add an insult to it by adorning it with a massive penis. So everybody knows what they meant by it.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist.
That's probably what I hate the most in the modern art criticism. Nothing against you personally, but this is so unsatisfactory and lazy. I mean I get all the things about "everything can be art" and pop-art and readymade and stuff. But when a seagull pooping on my shoulder is art (it certainly makes me feel emotions!), I think this makes the whole thing meaningless. Maybe that's the goal, but I know it is not meaningless. I have been to the museums. I know how art can make me feel, and I know it is something. Something that "ha-ha, made you look!" is not. These two aren't just part of the same worlds, and maybe I can't explain with proper jargon why exactly, but I know it.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve.
Welcome to brutalism. Making nice things is boring and passé, proper architects hate your guts and let you know it.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Reading stuff on the internet, I was suddenly hit with a realization that Tom Cruise is over 60 now (looking ridiculously good for the age, btw). Which got me thinking - almost all the movie stars I am familiar with are officially old now. I am mostly into action movies (though not only, I like comedies and even occasional romcom) and it used to be that if the movie has, say, Bruce Willis, or Schwarzenegger, or Harrison Ford, yes, Tom Cruise, you get the idea - I'd at least pay attention to it. It may still be bad, but I'll at least bother to check (otherwise I'd have to hear some good hype from some respected sources to even pay attention, there's just too much junk around otherwise). So, my question is - are there any stars under 40 now that are worth paying attention to? Who are they? Obviously, it's very subjective criteria, a matter of taste, but I'd like to hear some opinions.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I'm skeptical of this blend, which seems to essentially just be false consciousness: if not for an external force you would see our interests align.
For people living in the Western countries, this is largely true. None of the people they encounter daily have fundamental differences with them that are irreconcilable. KKK-style racism is largely either dead or so deep underground that you're more likely to encounter 10 trolls mimicking them to piss people off than one geniunie article. Violent homophobia never has been truly widespread, but now is practically extinct. "Transphobia" has always been more of a slur than a description of something real and threatening. Most of the differences are about relative political power, policies, etc. which can be reconciled in a way that may lead some people unsatisfied - in a way that one would be agreeing to a salary less than they'd like to get, ideally - but not in a way that makes violent conflict inevitable. There are some enclaves where one could experience something approaching that, and there are individual psychopats and criminal groups, of course - but if you specifically don't go to those places, they likely won't come to you. In general, you can expect that vast majority of people you encounter do not have fundamentally irreconcilable interests with you.
These people mostly have no experience with conflict where the other side genuinely wants you dead. Not get 5% more in relative distribution of power, not some goods (physical or social) redistributed, but genuinely thinks each moment you exist is an offence to all that is holy, and each action that contributes to your destruction justified, not just practically, but because it is objectively Greater Good Thing. Such conflicts exist, and there's no way one can bargain your way out of it. There's no arrangement where the interests of the sides align, when one side's interest is seeing other side completely annihilated or enslaved. Not all conflicts - even in the Middle East - are of such nature, but some are. "Get along" people can not accept that, and the more evidence is piled up to support it, the more ardent they become in inventing complex structures that would justify why it is not the case.
Incidentally, there was just recently a book review - the "nine lives" one - that showed how some "irreconcilable conflict" people think. Thinking that you can get them to abandon their beliefs by just giving them more of something and making a bargain with them is completely idiotic. Of course, idiots is something that there was never a shortage of.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
simply boils down to people looking at which side has more people dying
I wish it was that easy, and maybe for some small part it is. I think for much bigger part it's either "look at which side is more Western and choose the other one" or just "look at what my cool friends are saying and repeat after them".
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Kinesis Freestyle2 Blue. Decided to try it out on a whim and turned out a split keyboard is surprisingly convenient.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I use LLM regularly to generate code. It's mostly useful when I'm dealing with repetitive code - like, copy this code block, but change a little thing in it 10 times, or produce a code that looks like this code, but with a little twist changed - basically, smart enhanced copypaste. LLM is decently good at this - sometimes you have to fix a couple of things, but can easily turn a 5-minute task into a 5-second task if you're reasonable lucky. I am working with Java, which traditionally has a lot of boilerplate code - and LLM is very helpful in speeding up producing such code. It also helps with doing standard things like "here I have this collection of values, I need to apply this mapping function to it, then filter it this way, then rearrange them in this way and then store them in this way" - I can write it all myself, but it'll require me at least one trip to the docs to remember the exact name and syntax of certain method, and LLM can deliver all that in seconds without switching context. Which is amazingly helpful when you're "in the zone" and don't want to ruin your flow.
It has also been useful for generating quick one-time tools - like transforming data in certain format in certain place (say, database) into certain other place using certain API. Basically the sort of thing you did with your proxy thing. I can write most of such tools easily, probably in 10-15 minutes, but instead if I feed description to the LLM, it can deliver the same in seconds, and again, I wouldn't even have to look up the docs. So, nothing I can't do myself, easily, but these tasks are boring and LLM can do it quickly without me having to do mental context switch. Not a groundbreaking capability, but a very nice convenience for me.
One has to be careful with it, because sometimes it has a penchant for hallucinating things that don't really exist but it thinks it may be helpful if they did. A good IDE though usually helps to fix that, but sometimes, if the actual task is not easily achievable, you can be lost in the labyrinth of LLM hallucinations and just waste your time.
I have not been successful in making LLM to produce something substantial and even moderately complex from scratch. That's where the fact that this thing doesn't really understand anything shows.
All in all, as a professional software developer, this is an amazing tool that provides me with a lot of convenience, but so far any talk of it replacing any of the professional engineers is a complete bunk. I can not say what will happen in 10 years (or even in 3 years) but that's what I am seeing now.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Sometimes I appreciate her steady self confidence. Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement.
If you expect to find a woman who would never frustrate you, will be perfect in every regard, who would never do anything to piss you off and do everything exactly right and exactly like you want it - that's not going to happen. People are imperfect, and they are imperfect in a myriad different ways. There's no way a real person would be exactly perfect complement to all your wishes. The real test is whether you want to stay together despite all the rough spots. When it's obvious to you that what you're getting out of the relationship vastly exceeds the blemishes.
And yes, a part of you wants excitement and novelty. But you can find it in other things. Part of you would be scared at the thought of spending the rest of your life (or at least a very very long portion of it) with the same person. But if you feel good around this person, maybe it's not that bad an idea, actually? As a person who's been married for over 20 years, you can't keep the excitement of the first years on the same level, but you can transform it into different forms and different things. Of course, it's on you to decide if this relationship is what you actually want. But you should also be realistic and not expect things that can not happen, and be ready for work and frustrations which are a normal part of life and relationship. Don't be afraid of doubts, but also be honest with yourself and recognize what your true feelings and needs are.
Yeah I think 50% is about right. On one side, the only way for Israel to make the north safe again is to kick Hezbollah out over the Litani river. Where they should have been since 1980s if UN decisions weren't worth shit, but since they are, here we are. For Israel, the moment would never be as good as this again - they have the best casus belli ever, Hezbollah unquestionably started the fight, and with the Operation Grim Beeper being resounding success, the time is to strike the iron while it's hot.
On the other hand, Israel government is kinda shaky, and a lot of politicians there are itching for the opportunity to blame Bibi for "getting us into another war". And if it will be the full-scale war, there would be serious casualties - Hezbollah has a lot of rockets, and at least some of them will get to Tel-Aviv and other very densely populated areas, no defense works 100%. And Bibi's enemies will blame him for that (yes, they are definitely this cynical and more, politics is a very dirty sport). And, of course, the casualties on the IDF side will be way more than in Gaza too. Don't get me wrong - IDF is more than capable to kick Hezbollah's ass, but it won't be free, both in lives and in economic harm, and Israel is not eager to pay it. So if there's any glimmer of hope that there might be some other, cheaper, solution found, even if temporary, they will delay and hesitate for as long as possible.
More options
Context Copy link