JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Since publishing and readership overwhelmingly lean female
Why? Males stopped reading? I certainly didn't, and I know many people who are male nerds like me and who read. Is it the millennial/gen Z thing? Are males only doing tiktok or games now?
so I'm not super bothered by it.
I'm not bothered at all - my concern is not having time to read what I already want to read, not to find more reading based on somebody's opinion - I am just curious as to what is going on.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Yes.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Well, I know about all the Puppies saga and that stuff. I have some idea how that mechanics works. I wonder if it's the same in this case.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was an interesting ride (pun intended) but the end was kinda disappointing. After all that buildup, suddenly they just cried together and that was all? I mean I get it that real life has no "endings", but that's what I expect from fiction, however old-fashioned it is. Maybe it's too much to expect. But, I think I get what Pirsig was going for, and likely will read the sequel at some point next year.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
I was on goodreads, and out of curiosity, I took a look on final 10 Readers' Favorite nominees in SciFi category. I generally never use contests like that as a guide, but I saw an ad and I was curious about what I'd find there and if I recognize any names (spoiler: I recognized one). What I saw made me ask some questions. Out of 10 top candidates, 8 are female authors. I read the descriptions - I have never read the books themselves and likely never will, so that's all I have to go on - and in 7, the main protagonist(s) are women, in one they are bots, one had a mixed crew and in one I couldn't determine it. In young adult SciFi category, all 10 nominees are female. So my question is - why? I also checked last year winners - 11:4 female authors.
Since we're living in a clown world in clown times, I must post a disclaimer that I have no problem with either female SciFi authors or female sci-fi protagonists, and enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) books with either. Yet, somehow I didn't expect this situation. Why is it so - is it the case that 80+% of SciFi writers are now female? 80+% of good ones? Goodreads sample is skewed? Vote is rigged or meddled with somehow? Note I am not seeking a value judgement on this situation (as ultimately I personally don't care at all who is nominated or wins), but would like to understand its genesis.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Of course, it does not cost a lot for the military to give access to their facilities and conduct tours and so on on any particular case - maybe some personnel/organization costs but compared to trillion-wide budget, it's not even a rounding error. However, the military is not providing those services to every comer, and can not do so - because then the cost will eventually become noticeable, and again, it's not the military's business. They are and have to be selective in this. And once they are selective in this, it only makes sense for them to select to cooperate with groups that share their values and goals. There's no reason why the Army can't give free use of their facilities to the local ukulele club, it indeed would cost them nothing. But it's not their business to do so, so if they choose not to do so, it's completely appropriate choice.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Just in case somebody is dense and doesn't get the message, they are now saying it openly: https://notthebee.com/article/psaki-and-guest-explain-that-following-orders-from-trump-to-investigate-mark-kelly-should-result-in-nuremberg-style-trials
And that's a solid strategy - they are saying if you act against us, we will retaliate powerfully and personally against anybody working for Trump, using the whole force of the Federal Government. It is a credible threat because that's exactly what they did in Biden years (and, partially, in Trump years too). The similar threat from the Republican side, however, does not look credible - not that they are even trying, beyond emptily yelling "lock her/him up" on social media - because they are completely unable to deliver on it. Thus, for Democrats it is a winning move - unless Republicans find any way to counter it. Which they currently don't seem to be able to.
Most successful Democratic politicians are not terminally stupid.
Not sure what this is arguing for. Nobody argued they are.
they have long thrived under the present political system
And they created, in many states, a political system which is essentially one-party state, with zero chance for a non-Democrat or non-Leftist to be ever elected to any position of power. The Republican party is not banned, but it does not exist as a political entity. They would very much like to create the same situation nationwide.
Anyone who has heard of the French and Russian revolutions
You do not need a revolution for that. Revolutions are messy and unpredictable. Change some electoral maps, change some demography, change some laws, allocate some budgets, jail or bankrupt a couple of people who are too dangerous - and you get a uni-party system with all the external trappings of a democracy, but without any chance of anybody on the right to ever get any power.
If moderate Democrats (think Hillary) coordinate with DSA and commies to get rid of the Republicans, the next act in the play will inevitably be SJ Democrats and the far left coordinating to get rid of the moderates
It's not "will be", it is. Look at New York, Portland, Seattle and so on. Surely, the left will fight among themselves. But they will destroy the Right first, and then will fight among themselves.
Russia and the USSR are/were in fact one-party systems where elections do little to influence policy.
And yet, even they had "elections". So surely there's nothing that would prevent having "elections" between islamo-communists and trans-socialists. That's exactly my point - there's no need to cancel elections. If that's the only choice you'd ever want to have, then there's no reason to worry. If you'd like some more choice, you are already out of luck in all the blue spaces, and very well soon may be out of luck nationally. You will have plenty of elections, without any real choice.
JarJarJedi
24d ago
I really, really don't get it.
I don't see a problem here. I didn't see it, and don't intend to. I have a list of approximately 100+ books to read, about a year worth of already existing movie and video material to see (not counting the rewatches), and I have other stuff to do. At this point, for me to even pay attention to something new Hollywood (taking it expansively) produces they need to work really really hard to sell it to me. Why even care?
JarJarJedi
24d ago
None of those four, but they promised to Nuremberg anyone working for Trump, once they came back to power. Of course, it's not really feasible to prosecute every single person who worked for Trump - an in fact, in Nuremberg and after, not every single Nazi had been prosecuted and many, especially low-level ones, comfortably re-integrated into the society later - but it would certainly be a serious escalation. And I don't see why not do it at least to some measure - it's not like the Republicans are going to retaliate in kind. And tbh they don't need to escalate beyond that - while some totalitarian regimes descended to the point where the life of every single citizen was in peril, in most of them, day to day, one was relatively safe if one conformed and did what they are told. There's no need to murder or outlaw or bomb every single opposing person - it's enough to destroy a tiny active part and credibly threaten that the same will happen to any single person that makes trouble. And no need to suspend elections or anything like that - I mean Russia has elections. USSR had elections. As long as you control the counting process, the press, the narrative, can import voters by millions, and can occasionally just ban candidates - there's no risk in holding as many elections as you'd like. There's not even a need to have a dictatorship - DSA, Communists and Democrats can duke it out while successfully excluding anybody to the right, see California for example.
JarJarJedi
24d ago
Good luck. As somebody who went through it twice a couple of years ago, it's gonna suck, but it will likely be temporary. Take care of yourself, physically and psychologically, and let your wife and others help you. And just grind through the tedious and sucky part, eventually something will come up.
JarJarJedi
24d ago
JarJarJedi
24d ago
I put something like that in my custom prompt, and it helps to some measure. But I'm not sure it's introspection capacities are strong enough to even know it's fabricating.
JarJarJedi
25d ago
Why is it petty and stupid? The Military is not a general charity or some kind of all-around governmental funding/hosting agency. It has a very specific (though complex) goals and needs certain means and instruments to achieve these goals. If the army would suddenly declare it is founding a set of scholarships for people to learn play Ukulele while walking a tightrope, I'd be surprised - it doesn't seem to be aligned with the Military's mission at all. That doesn't mean I think playing ukuleles or walking tightropes is evil - it may be wonderful, but it's not what the Military is supposed to concern itself with. It used to be that Scouts embody all those qualities that the Military does concern itself with, so it made a lot of sense for them to cooperate. But Scouts are a separate organization, and they may decide they want to do some other thing now. Maybe concentrate on ukulele playing and tightrope walking, maybe on learning all the pronouns, maybe evaluating all the ways to be maximally safe and inclusive and writing them down in the notebook. The organization does what it wants to do. If that happened, and the goals of Scouts and Military are no longer aligned, why is it stupid to recognize this fact and part ways?
JarJarJedi
25d ago
Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.
There was a time where "not anyone was actually arguing" for open borders, welfare for illegal immigrants, on-demand access for men to women spaces and women sports, teaching in elementary schools about gay sex, declaring "whiteness" a root of all evils and many other things that we are observing today. Slippery slope exists, and is very slippery. So if some people saw this discussion and thought "if we don't object, in a short time we'd have public schools with Ebonics as primary teaching language" they may be right or they may be wrong, but they certainly weren't out of line to suspect a possible trend.
I understand how it may be frustrating to actual linguists that didn't want to play politics, but the reality is the science is now serving the politics, not the other way around. And the science community, in the search for power and influence, largely made it so. So now those are the rules by which they'd have to live - the rules of politics.
JarJarJedi
25d ago
On confrontation ChatGPT crumbled, apologizing, saying "because the text was hard to read" it simply pattern-matched the writing with similar writings it had been exposed to and extrapolated the entire remainder from that.
That's what happens every time it hits some complication. LLMs are psychopaths, they are trained to give you what you expect to hear from them, so if they can't give a satisfactory answer they will invent some lie that sounds plausible because something similar happened in their training corpus. If you catch them, they'd say "you are absolutely right, let me try again!" - and you can't even be mad, there's nothing there to be mad at. You can force it to make any kind of apology you want to hear, but it's all pointless because there's nothing in there that could apologize - it's just an engine whose whole purpose is to produce an answer you'd most likely expect to receive. If that's where they are looking for GAI what they will find if they succeed is just a lie machine that is lying in so sophisticated ways that nobody is smart enough to catch it.
JarJarJedi
25d ago
As if no one has ever advised Zelensky how to talk with Trump.
Maybe they did, but it certainly looks like he didn't listen. If Trump indeed were so easy to manipulate - I'd expect Zelensky, having not many other levers, to solicit every advice in existence on how to do that and manipulate the heck out of him. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
JarJarJedi
30d ago
I'm now looking for a git frontend that doesn't completely suck balls
I've been working with git for a long time, probably over a decade. Never seen a frontend that would replace CLI for me. And in fact I don't think there exists any frontend that would deliver on what you're asking for. It's just not how git is meant to work. You have the right to want to do different things, but I don't think any git frontends would deliver them to you, because they are mostly paving the walkways, not trying to make git look like not git.
For (1), git is usually pretty conservative about touching your files, unless you tell it not to. But yes, each command has a "force" flag which will completely ruin your day if you force something that wipes your files. I feel like asking for a tool that can't do that is like asking for a safe knife - the only safe one is a useless one, as it won't cut.
For (2) if you have one remote, you should be fine, if you have multiple ones, there some setup is requires, probably some custom scripting and hooks would help. Unfortunately, that part of git UI is not excellent - I have occasionally pushed and pulled from a wrong remote and it's confusing as hell.
For (3), by default that's how git treats it, if you're in the main repo, the submodule diffs would only be shown as "modified" without any details. If you need more stuff happening there, probably hooks could help.
For (4) that's not really how git is supposed to work, but if you never use "add" command and only use "commit" then it should be like that. Of course, some more advanced command may have implied "add" so it again can get confusing.
For (5) unfortunately I don't think it's possible, at least not with how git models the universe - it keeps the state in files themselves during merge process, so if you are in the middle of this process, that's what you'd get and I don't think any frontend can change that, unless it basically reimplements a lot of it in a different way.
JarJarJedi
30d ago
While putting full or even equal responsibility on Poles would be ridiculous, it is also an historic fact that Poles (e.g. Armia Krajowa) were not exactly friendly to Jews and committed various atrocities (not at the level the Nazis did). Example: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/1946-us-document-reveals-poles-treated-jews-as-badly-as-germans-did-543940 (I don't necessarily agree with the title, but it contains some evidence to that) So the claim underlying the offense is real, and that's something the Poles, understandably, are not very happy to discuss. Bit it's a part of history too. It doesn't remove any responsibility from the Germans, there is a lot of blame for everybody to get their part.
JarJarJedi
30d ago
I am not sure who to believe because in my area (very red state with a lot of Mormon and Evangelical presence) there are virtually no presence of groypers or groyper-adjacent propagandists, as far as I could see, but I am not sure who to believe about what happens in DC - and what happens in DC may have much more influence on the national politics.
I'd like to read Ross Douthat's view on that (link?) but I think it won't be able to convince me, on this stage, that groypers aren't a problem for Republicans. I may be very wrong on the size and importance of that problem, but it is the problem nevertheless. And it's not only a problem from my POV (which is obvious - I am not going to vote for a politician that genuinely considers me subhuman evil monster, whatever other position he could hold, I am only a human and have my limits) but from purely practical purpose - most of the normies won't flock to a platform that enables edgelords so far out of the consensus. At least unless they have something very attractive to offer, which groypers don't. And, also, if you want to bank all in on hating the Joos, there is enough competition to vote for on the other side, so you don't have any advantage even if you embrace that oldest of all low roads. Maybe if they ignore them enough they'd just wither away. Why couldn't we get lucky just this time?
JarJarJedi
30d ago
That could be so, but to change them, you will need to make those people active and on your side. And to make homeowners actively on your side with the message "you home price just dropped, we will make it drop even further!" does not look like a winning strategy.
JarJarJedi
30d ago
The local zoning codes are as they are not because of some random accident. They are such because usually people want them as they are - or are ok with them as they are. What would make them change their minds? If housing markets suddenly drops - e.g. because it became harder to get a mortgage - then they are unlikely to say "well, let's make it drop even further by increasing supply now!".
JarJarJedi
30d ago
The main question is: did you pay for accessing that platform?
The main two reasons why trackers are used are actually same reason, but in two instances. It's behavioral tracking. Internally, it is used to see how the site performs, which functions are used and which are not, what links are clicked, which options are selected, etc. etc. This happens in every single project I've ever seen, and it can be (actually, will be) both client-side and server-side. The former is visible to you, the latter is usually not, but it's always there. If it's a paid product, it will be used to make more people pay more money for the product - and for the provider to spend less money on providing it (e.g. by optimizing it or shutting down options that aren't used). Some of it can also be outsourced, because not everybody is an expert in properly doing that, and there are shrink-wrap solutions that can do a lot of it for you.
If you didn't pay for it, then somebody else did. Usually via ads, which serve two functions - one obvious, exposing you to the information the advertiser wants you to see, another unobvious, collecting the same behavioral information, for the same purposes, but for third-party advertisers or marketers. This also has a lot of specialization, so ad platform may have its own tracker and also use a third-party tracking solution to track some aspect that their own tracking doesn't provide. Finding high level of third-party tracking on a private paid platform is usually a case for a beef with the provider - though some providers are big enough to pull it off (like ads on Netflix - what you gonna do, stop streaming?) I.e. if you have no alternative, then why not make a quick buck on the side?
That said, 230 sounds like a very high number - even with what I said, that many separate tracking items look excessive. Though if it counts tracking events then it's plausible - depending on how much things are being tracked and how diligent are the tracker developers on optimizing the performance (not always their best suit since their competitive advantage lies elsewhere) it certainly can get that far.
JarJarJedi
30d ago
Of course. But the politicians who don't offer the voters some goodies also wither away and are replaced with ones that do. It's easy to discuss theory but when the question is "do you have a chance for your family to have a home or you'd need to move to some bumfuck place in the middle of nowhere to afford it, or rent increasingly shittier apartments for your whole life" - how many people would be disciplined enough to still maintain "the government should not have any role in it"? Sadly, not so many. The politicians successfully sold the nation the dream of "every family can own a house" (with some sad exceptions of course, but you don't want to be a sad exception, you want to be a normal family) and now it is expected to deliver on it, and if certain politicians don't, then others will replace them who do.
I mainly use goodreads for cataloguing my reads (since it has a list of books and UI to manage reading lists, and I am lazy enough to use whatever is there instead of building my own) and seeing what my friends (people I actually know, not facebook kind of "friends") are reading. I sometimes also review, but definitely not all books I read.
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