domain:youtube.com
6tjk
3hr ago
I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.
AFAIK the reason the Maronites did not carve out their own state was because it would not have been economically self-sufficient, they even lobbied the French for the inclusion of Muslim-majority agricultural areas such as the Bekaa Valley into Lebanon in order to avoid a repeat of the famines that had occurred under Ottoman rule. That being said, Maronites and Lebanese Christians in general have a weird sort of self-conception as Lebanese, given that they were the ones who lobbied for their rapey Muslim Lebanese countrymen to come to Australia. I can't imagine Europeans feeling that kind of kinship to their foreign underclass.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
Those shirts looks badass.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
See the original comment, since we're talking about adopting out of foster care here:
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system.
NunoSempere
3hr ago
Relatively quiet week this time:
Anthropic has a $200M contract with the US DoD , as have a few other companies
A good roundup of rumours about Xi
OpenAI agent
Israel bombs Syria
Africa records over 4,200 cholera, mpox deaths in 2025
Gunmen Kill 1,111 Nigerians, Abduct 276 in June
Syrian troops accused of executing civilians in Druze amid Israeli strikes
IDF Ordered To Strike Syrian Regime Forces Invading Druze-majority Suweida
Syria Druze reach ceasefire with central gov, though a previous one fell. Israel also fired on the central gov in Damascus
They have been negotiating with the Islamist-led authorities in Damascus since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in an attempt to achieve autonomy but have yet to reach an agreement that defines their relationship with the new Syrian state. ...reports The Guardian. Btw, the Spanish federal system, where the central government defines foreign policy, and some formerly rebellious provinces (the Basque country) don't pay federal taxes and have special priviledges (fueros) could be a good model here.
Almost 300 killed in wave of violence in Sudan's North Kordofan
Israeli-linked ringleaders and elements arrested in southwestern Iran, says Iran's news agency
Israel launches airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon's Bekaa valley
US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?
That's not something that happens in America.
Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.
Poverty fetish again.
From the essay:
A scrub would not throw their opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize your chances of winning? It's "cheap," though, throwing is cheap. And it's not just throwing, it's also a long list of somewhat arbitrary maneuvers. If you keep a scrub away from you by zoning them with projectile attacks, you'll probably be called cheap. If you do one move over and over, that's cheap. If you get a lead, then do nothing for 30 seconds so that you can win by time-out, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.
Let's specifically consider the case where you do one move over and over. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Are they such a poor player that they can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't you be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.
... to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.
The scrubs' games might be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter their every move, even their every counter.
And if the two groups meet, of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it's not degenerate.
The thing is, this works okay if you can keep the low-level players and the high-level players apart. But a) that doesn't work for real-life friend groups and b) it means you're either stuck in the little leagues forever or you have a long, long, hard grind before you can play with the experts. Thus rafa's original point, which is that if you open everything up to maximum competition with everyone all the time, only the monomaniacal grinders will have any fun.
cae_jones
3hr ago
It's confusing, because it makes more sense if this is a foreign relations thing... but then why not just say that and only release the names of U.S. citizens and their role in the files? All the people want isto know who to send to the guillotines. We aren't supposed to be the world police according to Trump, so just leave the foreigners out of it. If that is impossible (I highly doubt, given the descriptions of the physical media involved), that would be ... troubling.
roche
3hr ago
This is why I guard against the idea that things have purely gotten worse over time, because from another standpoint 2009 or thereabouts was already well after the death of the 'net. So it helps a lot to define in clear terms what exactly you think the modern net is lacking, and in my case I'd say it's "learning and discovery". As a disclaimer, a young person is naturally going to have way more to absorb from their surroundings than an adult, so the kind of knowledge that impressed 15 year old me is now totally rote and mundane, and any space with that stuff will also seem really banal and empty. /caveats
What feels most different now is the lack of paths towards "secondary" or deeper knowledge. Once you discover something exists, that's usually it. The internet really used to be designed like a rabbit hole, where if anything caught your eye you could just go on a deep dive and find out progressively more about it until you exhausted the subject. Nowadays you can definitely still go down rabbit holes on Twitter, Insta, and Tiktok, but it's harder to learn things this way. I wonder if anyone gets exactly what I mean.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
They control an entire congressional district
This is an utterly ridiculous statement that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. Ilham Omar's district is 17.1% Black, which will include some pre-65 "native" Blacks as well as Somalis. She was sent to Congress by white liberals. There's an important theme here, a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.
cae_jones
3hr ago
Identity politics can't only go in one direction forever. :marseyshrug:
IDK, the Jews and the Philistines have been going at it for at least 3000 years with no signs of stopping ...
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
In his book Shadows of the Rising Sun, he detailed how he lived and worked in Japan as an adult, so he presumably went back at some point.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
3hr ago
I usually just play turbo as mid ogre and hit Q and 4x multicast
I hope I am never in the same game as you. Either with you or against you...
cae_jones
4hr ago
IDK, now I'm getting flashbacks to Calc 2 and how useless it was to ask the instructor anything in the interest of understanding. Then sequences and increasingly absurd integrals came along without explnation of the utility ... and that's how I got the worst grade in Calc2. F? OK, retake it. C? Eh ... maybe that's more poor study strats than lack of understanding. But D? They wouldn't let me retake the class and I had absolutely no business moving on because I learned ... hmm, as I remeber, I learned the professor's opinions on Liebnez Vs Newton, and there was something involving a log cabin pun.
Dude's office was right by the CS departments's offices. I frequently heard far more enthusiastic convos coming from there on my way to see a CS prof. Maybe the secret wasn't showing an interest in the subject, but to be a perky flirtatious student? It's been 19 years; just be glad you remember any calculus and hit comment ... ☹️
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
I agree our society is too credentialist. The issue is not "they're bad because they went to a third-rate university" so much as "they're bad because they have an inferiority complex around having went to third rate university, and that's where the fetishization of manual labor comes from."
TIRM
4hr ago
For what it's worth, people say she was lying about working at McDonald's. She may have performatively pretended to growing up middle class and working a summer job in college, etc.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
it’ll be all your fault when we come out brown on the other side
Lots of white nationalists are brown in more than one way...
TIRM
4hr ago
This is at least the second time you recently dropped a "3rd rate university" put down against those lowly conservatives. I think our society is far too credentialist and we should not look down on people who go to their state school. Almost no one gets into the purposefully restrictive self-described-"elite" universities. That does not put a stink on the other supermajority who went to regular colleges.
Your "3rd rate university" sneer says much more about you than about a conservative with a degree.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
Wait, where did my image go? I attached it, is it just gone?
Anyway, Kimi on OpenRouter:
Thought Process: To determine the vowels of "North Dakota" in order, we need to follow these steps:
Identify the word: The word in question is "North Dakota." Extract the vowels: From the word, we need to pick out only the vowels (A, E, I, O, U). Sometimes 'Y' is considered a vowel, but in this case, we will ignore it unless explicitly needed. List the vowels in order: Go through each letter of "North Dakota" in sequence and note the vowels in the order they appear. Step-by-Step Solution: Write out "North Dakota" and label each character with its position for clarity:
N (1), o (2), r (3), t (4), h (5), (space), D (7), a (8), k (9), o (10), t (11), a (12). Iterate through each character and identify vowels:
Position 1: 'N' – not a vowel. Position 2: 'o' – vowel (O). Position 3: 'r' – not a vowel. Position 4: 't' – not a vowel. Position 5: 'h' – not a vowel. Position 6: ' ' – space, ignore. Position 7: 'D' – not a vowel. Position 8: 'a' – vowel (A). Position 9: 'k' – not a vowel. Position 10: 'o' – vowel (O). Position 11: 't' – not a vowel. Position 12: 'a' – vowel (A). Collect the vowels in the order they appear:
o (position 2), a (position 8), o (position 10), a (position 12). Final answer: o, a, o, a
Kimi on Groq doesn't waste time:
The vowels in "North Dakota" in order are: o, a, o, a
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
then claimed the vowels of North Dakota in order were o, h, a, and o
Can't replicate even with quantized provider. Most people report very different experience.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
update: Kimi K2 ranks #5 overall on LMArena under style control.
- Tied #1 Multi-turn interaction
- #2 Coding, Hard Prompts
The top US open models are Google's Gemma 3 27b and Nvidia's finetune of llama 3.1, ranked #28 and #34 respectively.
ControlsFreak
4hr ago
I've thought about this for a long time, but have been dwelling on it more lately. You are absolutely right that no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. Back when I was teaching in university, many many experiences (often via my own attempts to teach the students to understand stuff) made that abundantly clear.
However, I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight. In many cases, you don't know how far along you can take the student. Often times, you have a known end point to a program, at which point, the vast majority of your students will simply not continue further. So you have to pick your battles.
Like, for example, I get why the intro calc classes for undergrad engineers do what they do. You've only got them for so long; many of them really only need so much; you have other things to get to. Of course, for me, it all seemed so absurd in retrospect. Why couldn't you have just started me off with Baby Rubin? It's really not that hard of an on-ramp; it begins with friggin' sequences! But it does take some time and growth, and let's be honest, the vast majority of the engineering students who go through the college will stop with a bachelors, and when you think of all the types, the chemical engineers, civil engineers, hell, the industrial engineers, etc., they'll probably get by without really understanding.
I never did any nuclear stuff, so believe it or not, I'm going through an MIT OCW nuclear course right now. I haven't "taken a course" in a long time. Wowza is there a lot of stuff in there that makes me want to say, "Ya know, if you had just had your students take a full set of quantum classes already, you could have actually done this right, in a way such that they could really understand what's going on, rather than being a bit handwavy and saying 'this is just what happens because of quantum magic that we don't know yet'." ...but how long would the curriculum take to get there? These kids have basically just taken ordinary differential equations! I honestly kinda wonder to what extent they get what proportion of their undergrads to really grok it within the four years, or if they still have plenty of clean-up to do in grad school.
As much as I often hate on the unis, I am sympathetic to their constraints here. I don't know what to really do to fix much of it, because I do think one of the roots may be the utterly disastrous K-12 situation from a long legacy of terrible public control with the primary mission of babysitting and only secondarily happening to have any learning going on (perhaps due in part to their own, must-take-all-comers constraint).
As I will never get tired of explaining - the fact that something is racist doesn't make it wrong or false.
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