domain:alakasa.substack.com
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
I don't think there was ever anything in the comics at the time, i.e. the 1940s, indicating how Captain America voted? He's always been a character deliberately open to interpretation - he stands for the best vision of what America can be, but he shifts over time and is often strategically vague so that readers can project their idea of what that means on to him.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6hr ago
Firstly, their influence is grossly overblown, as outlined by multiple commenters here. A few thousand neo-Nazis aren't a particularly big threat, Ukrainian civic governance seems strong enough that in the event of a peace (of whatever kind, barring Russian occupation), the state machinery is at minimal risk of being overthrown and the country thrown into internecine fighting where such paltry numbers would make a difference. There are plenty of hardened combat units in Ukraine who have only fervent nationalism in common with Azov.
Secondly, there's always the pragmatic option once employed by Hamad to deal with the Al-Qassam brigades. What do you do with a group of fanatical (and exceedingly so, even by Hamas standards) Jihadists who went into every mission accepting death with equanimity if it spread their ethos?
You marry them off, going to refugee camps and selling impoverished women on the honorable prospect of marrying a glorious almost-martyr. Give them a pension and sinecure too, and they won't need to resort to violence as the only way they know to make a living, or as their first choice of livelihood.
Circa 2008:
Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza, has been observing a truce with Israel since June, allowing its underground fighters to resurface but leaving them without much to do. At the same time, hundreds of the group’s women have been recently widowed, their husbands having been killed either in confrontations with Israel or in the fighting last year between Hamas and its secular rival, Fatah.
Taking advantage of the pause in violence, the Hamas leaders have turned to matchmaking, bringing together single fighters and widows, and providing dowries and wedding parties for the many here who cannot afford such trappings of matrimony.
“Marriage is the same as jihad,” or holy war, said Muhammad Yousef, one recently married member of the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas underground. “With marriage, you are producing another generation that believes in resistance.”
About 300 Qassam members, mostly in their 20s, signed up with their new wives for the most recent celebration, held at a sports stadium in the Tuffah district, east of Gaza City. Local mosques spread the word about the event and offered to help find spouses for single men whose families had not yet managed to arrange them a match.
As an added inducement, couples were promised a cash grant in lieu of a dowry, which few families could afford.
Turns out that a lot of angry young men with extremist tendencies rapidly cool down when confronted with a wife and kids they love and are responsible for. You're not going to dissuade them from their ideological tendencies quite so easily, but that's effectively de-fanging them.
In other words, deal with people with nothing to lose by giving them something to lose.
If/when this war cools down, well, there's plenty of Ukrainian women abroad, and at home, and it won't take all that much to either 'encourage' them to marry a dashing young fighter, while also giving them cash/jobs, and effective indemnity from political retribution when they cease to be allies of convenience. Provide the latter two and there's almost certainly going to be women wanting in regardless.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6hr ago
I wrote a fucking book because I'm tired of plot holes and shoddy world building, it grates like diamond dust beneath my eyelids.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
6hr ago
whereas in Russia the defining feature of Nazis is their hatred of and desire to displace and kill Slavs
Which makes the Azov's "Ukrainians are the real Slavs, Russians are Finno-Turkic mongrels" ideology even harder to square with neo-Nazism.
The defining feature of neo-Nazis in Russian discourse is being a Russophobic nationalist while being white. Since there are no countries that draw a meaningful distinction between Russians as an ethnic group and Russia as a state, Russian propaganda doesn't have to distinguish between instances of both either. With one exception: if you're a Russian ethnic nationalist living in Russia that hates the multiculturalist message of the Russian state, you're definitely a neo-Nazi.
ToZanarkand
7hr ago
Not surprising, given they're a Germanic people.
sliders1234
7hr ago
I mean I don’t claim it’s a good thing that the only way to control immigration is having the POTUS.
The bill does nothing. I hope Trump actually does coup so we can protect the border long term.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7hr ago
I definitely agree with this. Especially for franchise films, they want a simple non controversial film that nobody in the audience can find a reason to dislike. It’s one reason I’m mostly over big franchise movies and TV — they’re so busy protecting their brand that they’re mostly bland and boring with very few things that are difficult to understand or too political. Making people think often means some in the audience might get confused (even more likely with the international audience) and if you say something political (outside of DEI inclusion) you run the risk that someone in the audience might disagree which would mean that person will not be there for Big Franchise: Subtitle. Most of them have become so overtaken by corporate that they’re paint by numbers, cohesive stories, good actors, or realistic fights be damned. They’re McDonald’s or Burger King at this point, and you won’t find anything that has a strong taste because there’s a chance someone might dislike the taste.
DradisPing
7hr ago
Can someone clue me in on what actually happened with the Adopt Indian Métis program and programs like it? In the show, it’s implied (I think) to be literal kidnapping of Native American children by the Canadian government, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.
The view of natives by educated liberals was very different at the time. Now people think of them like wood elves with a sacred culture. At the time they were viewed more as backwards illiterate hillbillies who needed to be brought into the modern era.
So there were no foster homes in native areas. If a child needed to be put into the system they were shipped off to a city and adopted. This was before birth control pills so young mothers having children they couldn't take care of was more common.
There's still a lot of debate about how aggressive social workers should be, so I'm sure it is easy to find cases where the child should have stayed in the home.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
7hr ago
I use Phind, and it's usually hopeless at debugging the errors I get. But it was the same with StackOverflow: by the time I resorted to asking there, two times out of three I was probably the one with the most knowledge about the problem.
On the other hand, Copilot is quite good at writing literal boilerplate code.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
7hr ago
It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.
For those that haven't seen it, here is a recent sitting Australian PM getting booted off a citizen's front lawn.
KingOfTheBailey
8hr ago
Why is Cap on the side of the libertarians? Because you'd expect Cap to be on the "trust the government" side so we have to invert that to make it more "interesting". It's just expectation subversion, Rian-style, with no thought about whether it's consistent for the characters.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
8hr ago
ChatGPT now serves GPT-4O for all users, paid or free, and while the paid tier has access to additional goodies, I'm pretty sure you're not missing out on anything substantial, including for programming purposes, by using the free tier. It's not like the old days, when there was a massive delta in usefulness between GPT 3.5 and 4, with the latter being doled out to paying users.
SteveKirk
8hr ago
I haven't had any buffering at all, except when accidentally running at 4k 2x speed, which is 100% my browser's fault. Isn't the premium just higher bitrate at 1080?
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
8hr ago
Like his business dealings, I'm continually surprised at how little dirt they've managed to pull up on him. In NYC real estate work I'd assumed he had at least a few skeletons in the closet/at the bottom of the harbor.
I'd expect that there are more people out there under NDA's or he otherwise has some sort of kompromat on relevant associates. Also I think his reputation as 'Teflon Don' and not backing down in the face of dirt being used against him limits the perceived effectiveness of (and thus motivation for) those kind of attacks.
SteveKirk
9hr ago
I still get a lot of clickbait thumbnail spam in recommend, but you're right it does get a lot better when you're judicious and slam clickbait channels with "do not recommend"
Mottizen
9hr ago
I've always wanted to see a detailed side-by-side analysis of life outcomes for the 'stolen generation' versus those who remained in remote communities. I've got a sneaking suspicion that the stolen generations actually benefited from the transaction
HalloweenSnarry
9hr ago
AIUI, the Civil War comics came out years before the current zeitgeist was born. Bizarre that they chose to adapt the story for the MCU, given that I was always under the impression that Civil War was one of the weakest storylines to come out of 21st-century Marvel.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
9hr ago
I think only the 5% of the population in the INTJ/INTP area really cares about having plots that make sense.
I regularly get told to stop thinking so much when I point out plot holes in movies. I'm probably not the only one here.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
9hr ago
Can someone clue me in on what actually happened with the Adopt Indian Métis program and programs like it? In the show, it’s implied (I think) to be literal kidnapping of Native American children by the Canadian government, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.
There apparently was encourage adoption by white parents back in the 60's which was later called the 60's scoop. I tried to parse the article about why the kids were taken (eg was it from abusive or neglectful families?), but the article states it was just to place indigenous kids with white families to raise them with white culture. The article also makes reference to a program in the 50's when children were taken from single mothers to place with families.
Similar policies happened in Australia until the 1970's leading to what is now referred to as the Stolen Generations. Even though anyone involved in decision making on the policy is either long since retired or dead and the federal government issued a formal apology in 2008, it keeps being brought up in media by the usual issue motivated groups as an example of modern day racism. What is ignored though is the high endemic rates of child abuse, sexual abuse and neglect that are rife in indigenous communities even to this day.
If the current topic is SD3, they lobotomized it at every level from excluding all "problematic" pictures of women from the training data, to hard-coded crimestop termination
I dont think it's "plateauing" so much as the predictions of the skeptics like Phil Koopman have been born out.
When gpt first came out there was a lot of talk within the industry about "the hallucination problem", about how unlikely it was to be solved through incremental improvement or better training data, and about how this made it unsuitable for any use-case where testability and precision were significant concerns.
However this sort of skepticism doesn't attract venture capital dollars and ars-technica clicks the way articles with headlines like "I asked gpt to write code in the style of John Carmack and it did!" do, and thus the skeptics were shouted down and ignored.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
9hr ago
I'm straight, but my understanding is that the gay community in Australia/NZ revolves around the larger cities. In Australia this is Sydney and to a lesser extent Melbourne (particularly inner city). If you want access to a larger dating pool (particularly to find guys that want a relationship rather than casual sex) you might want to consider moving. I've heard from friends that Grindr is a bit of a casual dating cesspool, so you might want to try out Bumble or Hinge.
FYI gay public expressions of affection can lead to harassment in country towns in the region, but cities seem to be more tolerant. I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.
EverythingIsFine
9hr ago
My understanding is that current AI models aren't actually lobotomized very much. Most guardrails seem to be just very large and lengthy if-else brute force programming layered on top of the model's interaction. Things like, if bomb question, say no. If blanket topic mentioned, say generic thing. I guess there's a little bit one layer deeper, where non-PC responses are penalized in the training phase even if they are thoughtful, but I think this probably doesn't spill over into unrelated areas as easily. Maybe a good analogy is this is not affecting the brain itself, it's raising the kid different.
It's actually the newer research that's looking in to the possibility of doing lobotomies, like the golden gate bridge Claude thing, where they are trying to identify concepts, or something like them, which are (for lack of better vocabulary) highly correlated neural groups within the model. After locating undesirable concepts, they then brute-force excise or shrink the concepts. Or, they might expand something they like. That's actually almost literally lobotomization of the model, in that it's more of a brain surgery with imperfect information.
TIRM
10hr ago
Point taken. But "my personal Vietnam was dodging STDs" Trump publicly presents himself as the sort of guy who does that. Which could also be a ruse.
We don't really know, but I rather suspect that Trump has made unwise sexual decisions. As plainly stated by himself and at least one sexual partner.
He is still marketed as a counter-culture guy after getting canned by SNL. You might not agree that he is actually counter-culture or whatever but he is undeniably the face of counter-culture comedy.
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