Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.
By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.
I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Yes I am aware of that but one country having a slightly higher rate of a single metric really doesn’t indicate an evolutionary process
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
This is a strange statement. German armies of 1914-45 were massive military overperformers who fought much better than almost all their enemies. The problem was that they kept taking on very powerful enemies and failed to sustain the military industrial base.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
4mo ago
I can’t imagine that with the current pace of development at cheap conversational LLMs, soon we won’t start seeing RPGs that are truly open world with actually intelligent NPCs or strategy games where the AI controlled opponents are truly strategising and conspiring etc.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
5mo ago
Right now I am rather wealthy in both aspects but this is a while ago and I was just a broke backpacker back then
Pasha
Defend Kebab
5mo ago
How is this different than just going to chatgpt.com?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
Incidentally, divorce/family laws of similar vein (i.e. practically written by feminist activists and applied very unfairly by a judiciary motivated to protect women at any cost) caused the most major fracture in Islamist politics in Turkey since Erdogan's rise 20+ years ago, with a promising new party (led by Erdogan's old mentor's son) spawning around it.
I don't think almost anyone in his cabinet personally would agree with these laws or their applications personally, but even after achieving near-dictatorship level control of the country, Erdogan and his Islamists have been seemingly powerless to stop this drift.
Non/anti-Western politics are often really brain-dead and are starved of human capital. They are really bad at actually articulating and planning for a society that escapes the slow but steady drift towards the latest Western fashions.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
Are you aware of any reliable write-ups about pregnancy/childhood vaccinations?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
7mo ago
I have volunteered in a bunch of elections in Turkey. I find it mind-boggling how it is to possible to NOT count and report almost everything in 1-2 hours max after the polls close. It was always really easy to do the counting and just wrap up the reporting after a long and sometimes annoying day of explaining to public again and again how to vote and what they can't do in the booth etc.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8mo ago
if you’re the kind of Ghanaian wealthy enough to go through 10+ years of tertiary education in the US
Yes a lot of such cases are already local elites, but not at all. Scholarships can do wonders in this category if you were a bit savvy as a teenager (or your parents were)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8mo ago
That is correct. The unvoiced assumption of my post was that Taiwan is not self-sufficient and cannot survive without open shipping lanes and so any technology that makes it easy to sink ships is very bad news for it
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8mo ago
I saw a coworker take notes with one and found it super cool and looked into the models a while ago. Ridiculously expensive. These devices basically cost iPad prices. And many seems to not be even that good for their most basic use case of functioning like an e-notebook.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9mo ago
Safari + Perplexity.
Safari is simply because it works great on the iPhone and I like the syncing functions enough to endure the somewhat worse desktop browsing experience.
I am surprised nobody mentioned perplexity actually. It works great for a certain type of query especially with the pro mode enabled.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
I will free-form list my thoughts:
The current Ukrainian retreats do look more like a rout than an orderly retreat, and there is talk of quite a lot of operational chaos in Ukrainian command at the moment. Pro-Russian opinion sources are definitely very gleeful in a way I haven't seen since the well advertised Ukrainian offensive imploded with massive casualties. In a couple days we will get a better view into how much of this is true.
Ultimately it is very difficult to predict anything about the future of this war (without clowning yourself) without a good insight into the casualty rates of both sides and Russia's military production/import ramp-ups.
I suspect that Ukraine is actually facing a low ceiling in its overall conscription capacity. I base my suspicion on increasingly brutal videos coming out for months where conscription officers are beating up men unconscious to drag them to the barracks or having to fight a large community resistance. We simply don't know how many eligible Ukrainian men are even left in the country at this point.
I suspect that Russia is having some problems ramping up and adapting its military production. I base my suspicion on its constant reliance on North Korean/Iranian weapons imports and inability to scale up precision bombing campaigns to truly devastating sizes and the fact that they appointed basically a logistics czar as the Minister of Defense after spending years failing to adapt their hardware to the battlefield conditions.
I still expect that a Ukrainian front collapse is very much possible although I am impressed by how long they held out. They have relied heavily on "ideologically motivated" brigades (other words might apply), a general manpower advantage over the lean professional pre-war Russian army, and Russia's slow adaptation to the drone/precision-guided dominated war. Those troops are dead, Russian military recruitment seems to have equalized things, and Russians more or less adapted to these technologies and even gained an upper hand. All these observations support the theory that Kursk offensive has been a failed Hail Mary attempt to trigger some black swan event through forcing a massive error from the Russian command.
I think anyone who still word-cells "this is how Ukraine is actually winning" theories are basically delusional or worse. The war perhaps developed as a win for the NATO command (debatable imo), but Ukraine is a dead country busy with auto-cannibalization in the hands of a desperate leadership.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
then focusing really intently on how my own head and body feel afterwards
What does this mean in practice?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
Today is still better than tomorrow. I have very low confidence that the US can really “win” in a war against Iran if winning is defined as occupying Tehran and installing a new regime. But they can totally break the country until Israel doesn’t have to worry about it just like how it doesn’t worry about Saddam or Syria anymore. Albeit at a very very high cost. To the US.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Because it means the remaining Arabs will have to either be somehow deported, or live under a permanent apartheid/occupation regime.
No Iran doesn't want a 20% Jewish population I am sure. But then Iranians didn't settle in a land exclusively inhabited by Jews in the 20th century and then spent the last century in a struggle to take over the said land. So the comparison is really pointless and distracting.
In fact there are approximately zero comparable cases to Israel's ethnic problems in the last century which is the exact thing that makes it such a hot-button issue.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Fair, I applied the European salary scale in my head and misjudged the class of people you are targeting. High 5 figure salary easily gets you into 2-3% income percentile or so in most of Western Europe and is only attainable in very expensive cities.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
I have no opinion whether Anatoly Karlin is correct or not, but what sort of problems are you imagining?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
While I find Patrick Mackenzie’s writing very insightful sometimes, he also really makes me question if I am as competent in English as I think so. Sometimes I just really can’t parse the guys sentences
Pasha
Defend Kebab
16d ago
white woman victim, black man murderer?
yes
Are you thinking that the bystanders were poor black people who thought the white woman had it coming?
yes either that and/or people who were too afraid to confront black criminality as something might happen to them too and/or people who thought police wouldn't care or be useful
Is getting into 3D printing something you would recommend? I don't have any specific things I want to print. I am not into any figurines or any other such nerd table-top hobbies. I have some professional experience with microcontroller development and robotics but don't do it as a "hobby". But it feels like I would probably find interesting things I could do if I started digging into this
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