JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
12hr ago
Actually, yes, absolutely unironically. Despite all the stink raised by Trump, pretty much no consequence happened to it, despite massive evidence of irregularities, and a lot of the dissent suppression effort had been by Republicans themselves. If you want to see how "not accepting" looks like, look at Portland. Or LA or Seattle riots. The right did nothing even close. The only serious protest was Jan 6, which was immediately squashed with unprecedented force and cruelty (that was the point, of course) - and the Republican establishment did absolutely nothing to stop it, until Trump came in with pardons. So yes, despite grumbling and whining and grandstanding, which happens after every single election in the history of all elections, the right absolutely accepted 2020 election results as fait accompli. That doesn't mean they didn't think there was cheating, but they largely accepted that they can't do anything about it and moved on. They didn't refuse to pay taxes, didn't refuse to follow the laws, did not set federal buildings on fire, did not attack federal officers (obvious exceptions excepted), did not form domestic terrorist movements, the governors did not declare war on the Federal government, they did not shoot prominent leftists, did not declare courts illegitimate, did not assassinate the President, etc. That's how accepting looks like.
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
When I read stuff like that, I remember that SQL was created as a "natural" language (originally named Structured English Query Language) which would allow anybody without any programming or database experience to just ask the database and get the result. Needless to say, it's not exactly what actually happened.
JarJarJedi
14hr ago
I recently read a book that started with "My mother was late to my birth". I remember thinking "ok, that's a pretty decent starting line, good job!" Also, recently read this: https://gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-care which I think makes a lot of sense.
JarJarJedi
14hr ago
That's not true, I talk to people of very liberal persuasions all the time. Not about politics, of course, and they don't know that I am a vile deplorable (that's not accurate either but that's what they'd think if they knew). It's not a symmetric "polarization".
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
If that's the case, I totally understand. He's about my age, and at this age your family takes the priority. Especially if he discovered he's getting nowhere and may just end up divorced for nothing. We do need heroes on this stage but I don't thing we have any right to demand from some particular person to be a hero.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
He learned something that made him decide covering up Epstein was better than releasing it and can't grok the cognitive dissonance.
I think the whole Epstein thing is way overhyped by now. If the infamous "lists" ever existed, they are probably destroyed or lost now. We know who was friends with Epstein socially, and some of them will suffer for it, but some won't. The chances we would know who shared the sex crimes with Epstein, beyond vague unprovable accusations, are very low by now. It looks like Republicans oversold this story to their voters and weren't able to deliver, and now Democrats are exploiting it by pretending to be outraged by Republicans "hiding" some huge secrets, while the biggest secret is that what we have is what we'd ever get. Of course, nobody wants to be responsible for this overpromise and under-delivery, and somebody eventually will be appointed as a scapegoat.
He found out that leading an organization from the position 3-4 levels removed from the actual information and not being able to absorb all of the root information but still being responsible for the decisions sucks
That sounds plausible. FBI rot is probably very deep, and even Trumps considerable political power is not enough to bring on real reform. And without real reform all is left to make waves on the surface while the deep state life is unaffected in their depths. But he likely can't say it aloud because it'd sound like "Trump is weak", which Trump would not tolerate. The same happened with Musk and DOGE - the rot is just too deep for a quick victorious campaign, and Trump doesn't look like a person who can organize prolonged campaigns (neither he likely has resources for it anyway).
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Yes, but my experience is that generic coding bot does not go from "please accept this pull request" to "we must overthrow the oppressive heteropatriachical capitalism!". Somebody must configure it in a very non-generic way for this to happen. Maybe the bot was trained exclusively on reddit or something...
JarJarJedi
1d ago
What's the story with Dan Bongino? The guy was super-excited to become deputy FBI director, and then 9 months in he just resigns without explaining anything and goes back to basically venting on the internet. What's up with that? Did something nefarious happen on the background? Did he bite off more than he could chew? Does he just prefer talking to doing?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
hope you like дедовсчина
It's дедовщина and that's for young recruits in the peacetime army. What you'd get in the current army is way, way, way worse (but probably won't last long - people who don't know anybody and can't contribute much to their unit materially or otherwise are the first to be used in the infamous "meat assaults").
JarJarJedi
2d ago
If the Big Woke Cleanse comes, first thing they'd do is debank you. So no SSI check for deplorables. The Party will find a better use for that money.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
In some cases I've heard stories of people pulling it off despite not being halachically Jewish, just having a Jewish grandfather or something like that.
Under current laws, Jewish grandparents are enough if you don't belong to another religion (or shut up about it if you do, they have no real way to check if you're not a church official). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return If you do, you probably still qualify to live in Israel, but getting citizenship would be more complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Rufeisen
Proper Orthodox conversion would work too, but a sham one probably won't - they are not born yesterday and all the tricks that can be tried had been already tried.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Finished Shards of Earth. A bit too slow-paced for my taste, but excellent world-building. In fact, it feels a bit like a waste to build so many possibilities and variety into the world for just three books. Will pick up the next one for sure sometime this year.
Picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being - this time it worked much better for me, I must have been in the wrong mood for it before. Went through 2/3 of it so far, and enjoying it a lot.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Technically true, but you'd need to chew down hundreds of apple seeds to feel any effects, and probably thousands to die from it.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Getting from under the US financial boot is one of the reasons, but I suspect the control that CB would enjoy over any digital currency is another (actually very similar - EU doesn't like US controlling their finances, but they very much would like the same power for themselves).
JarJarJedi
3d ago
There's a lot of numismatic coins US Mint is producing. Most of them AFAIK has a nominal value, and I am sure anybody would accept them at this value, without even needing to consider if they are legally bound to do so, given as their actual value is hundreds of times more than nominal. Here's a dollar coin: https://www.usmint.gov/american-eagle-2026-one-ounce-silver-proof-coin-26EA.html sold at $175. If anybody is willing to give me that one for a dollar, I'd take as many as they have.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
That is 100% what they want. In the US there's still that old anarchistic streak alive, but in Europe push for digital money (controlled by the governmental Central Bank, of course) is in full swing. Not sure it'll be successful - when I was in Berlin some years ago, I was astonished how many places didn't accept anything but cash - but they will definitely try to push cash as much to the sidelines as possible.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
That isn't exceptional. For example, Asimov was an extremely prolific writer - probably the most prolific out of well-known ones, and wrote for over 40 years - and yet the stuff he's most remembered for now are the things he wrote in the 1950s - robots, Foundation, etc. It's not to say the rest of his writings were bad or completely ignored - they enjoyed their success, but they weren't the best.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Many suspect the bot has at least some human guidance, which I find plausible, how often do bots lash out like this?
You can make a bot do things like this, but you should prompt it accordingly for that. I suspect that's exactly what happened in this case.
the last article is The Silence I Cannot Speak.
This pretty much seals the matter to me. I can stretch my credulity to admit the idea the bot could react to pull being rejected by composing a blog post. It would be a mighty stretch, but theoretically you can get there. I do not believe it could get from there to concept of "being silenced" and "not belonging" in general - how would it even know? There must be some input that prompts it to this direction. And given how ethical is the behavior of AI-bot herders been of lately, concocting a fake scandal like that would be very on brand. I mean at least it's not hiring a bunch of guys in Bangladesh to pretend to be AI...
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Yeah, I'd pay money for it to happen, but it's not likely it ever would. And unlike some authors that shall remain nameless, we can be sure JMS had the story planned and it did make sense. We'll never know, sigh.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Eat the whole damn thing, core and all!
This is the way. Never understood people that need to do complex manipulation with an apple before eating it. Just dig in! You can spit out the seeds if you're inclined too, and the stem is useful for holding it, but otherwise it all goes in.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Some varieties are peel-able by hand if you're strong enough (ok I guess all of them are peel-able by hand if you're strong enough, but I'm talking normal human range).
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Wow that's awesome. I just finished my regular rewatch last year, and it was as good as ever. I wonder whether they'd put the films and the Crusade up too...
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Looks like they did change something - they are trying subs now: https://x.com/RickyDoggin/status/2021711954600157185 - obviously, this one didn't work out that well.
How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life
I see quite a few, but I live in a very quiet suburban community and seeing kids out and about the community is not weird. In fact, they often leave their stuff (like bikes, etc.) on the street, and then could pick it up next day (or their parents do). Nothing happens to them or their stuff. When I lived in CA, however, I don't think I ever did see kids just roaming around - given how many homeless camps I had in immediate vicinity, it's no wonder.
It's not comparable to my childhood, but that was different times in different country, and having 8 year old walk 15-20 mins to school through the neighborhood was normal (how would one get to the school otherwise anyway? nobody owned a car and public transport didn't exist within the neighborhoods, and there was no such thing as a "school bus") and leaving the teen like 12 yo for a whole day to care for oneself was also completely normal (and inevitable - the parents are working, grandparents live far away, there's no such thing as a babysitter for teens, and nobody has the money to pay anyway if it were a thing). Sometimes it led to kids doing extremely stupid things, which occasionally (quite rarely, fortunately, on my experience) led to bad long-term consequences, but mostly everybody survived fine.
How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10?
That was one of my chores for a long time. You couldn't just go to the store and buy what you want. You had to stand in line (not always, but a lot of times). And adults have work. So who stands in lines a lot? Kids and retirees. I'm not sure at what age exactly it started, but likely sometime around 10.
I also spent a lot of my time outside with friends (without any adult supervision) - though not as much as others, I was an introverted nerd (still am) so I preferred my books to the company of other stupid kids, but occasionally my parents kicked me out, or my friends convinced me to come with them to play or do something stupid. So a lot of time without any adult supervision, whether family or not. That was the standard.
You confuse the government and the system. It's a common mistake, and the whole effort of having The Constitution and writing a lot of paperwork before, during, and after it was to avoid it. You see, the government is only part of the system, and is designed to be a limited and constrained part. A very important one, but still one of the parts, not the goal, but the means to the goal. And that's exactly what a lot of conservatives (and many non-conservatives) believe in - the government has it's legitimate function, as as long as it is performing it, it has its place and should be supported. As soon as it departs from this function, it ceases to be legitimate and becomes evil. The system is where The People can prevent the government from becoming evil (or at least minimize it) and that's what was the goal built specifically into the American system, and yes, the right, largely, believes in it's legitimacy - at least while it is working at its purpose, stopping the government from descending into evil.
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