Friday
Celestial-body-NOS
Quod non licet bovi, non liceat Iovi.
8mo ago
I literally had fights with my dad since I wanted to stay home and play video games, he told me "what are you doing on a friday night at home? Go out and get drunk!"
There's always a relevant xkcd....
I wouldn't be particularly surprised if half or more of the frequent posters are young women without children, but some child-related degree/occupation that makes them feel like they know what they're talking about.
Or possibly having been a child....
yunyun333
8mo ago
Last Friday after several days of deadlocked deliberations, the judge agreed to the prosecutor's request to drop the most serious charge of manslaughter, and asked the jury to consider the lesser charge of negligent homicide. It's strange that the jury was so quickly able to dismiss this charge while spending multiple days debating the more serious one.
This case was pretty controversial but judging by the political temperature I don't forecast any major protests or riots.
RenOS
something is wrong
8mo ago
My kids are far too young for these particular topics, but it's pretty simple in principle: You decide beforehand where your red lines are (which should be mostly concentrated on whether something is time-consuming/expensive/impossible to undo) and communicate that as clearly as possible. If you get the impression they're trying to skirt the edges and/or rules-lawyer, you may let them get away with it the first time but with a warning, after the second you put your foot down. As usual when it comes to social topics, the trouble is in the specifics.
On drinking, I'll probably, like my own father (I literally had fights with my dad since I wanted to stay home and play video games, he told me "what are you doing on a friday night at home? Go out and get drunk!" - I was annoyed, but imo he was mostly right), actively push them towards going partying & drinking early-ish, but in environments I trust such as local fairs or the CVJM (I'm not religious, but I've had good experience with these kinds of organizations as a teen). Ideally I'm also present & available if they need me, but where it's too large and crowdy to have them in my sight all the time so they can goof of with friends, as they should. Also, imo as a parent you deserve knowing your kids friends, and they should only go partying with friends they've known for a while and which I know as well. So I know that somebody is looking after them and I know who to ask if they don't come back at the agreed time. Obviously, going to an entirely different place without telling me would include a strict punishment, since that's how teens go missing.
On internet usage, I really don't care much as long as it's age-appropriate, and I'm already even quite laissez-faire on what is "age-appropriate" to begin with.
On reddit, it is extremely lopsided towards the ultra-online with very large amounts of free time and has a strong tendency for circlejerks by basic design, and very biased towards progressive by moderator action. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if half or more of the frequent posters are young women without children, but some child-related degree/occupation that makes them feel like they know what they're talking about. So tbh I'd discount pretty much all opinions there as neither good nor representative of the average parent.
cjet79
8mo ago
Yay! Factorio Friday thread again!
Love the game, and love the expansion even more.
A few secrets to enjoying the game and avoiding optimizing away the fun:
- Try to avoid deleting old stuff that worked. Let it stay there as an example of how far you've come. You'll also have a minimum output even if your latest build breaks for some reason.
- Avoid saving complicated blueprints, and absolutely avoid using other people's blueprints. Copy and paste is fine in the moment.
- Embrace the restrictions, treat them as harder limits than they actually are. For example avoid logistics drones on aquilo. Keep belts moving and other things moving on space platforms.
- Build in the moment. Let the needs of the factory dictate your build. Let spaghetti happen. Only you will understand your spaghetti. Embrace the simple challenge of weaving belts in and out of the existing factory.
- Build to last. Paradoxical with the last point, I know. Don't allow a breakdown in one part of your factory to clogg up the rest of it. This is important on Gleba. As long as inputs are available and output are needed each part of the factory should work. Make it a habit and you won't need to delete stuff.
- Switch it up. Go kill some enemies sometimes. Go build mining outposts. Go build factories planetside. Go build space platforms. This will help avoid the relentless optimization that will otherwise take hold. You don't need an insane ammo output factory, just a small one that will cover you and fill up a chest that you can occasionally empty out for cathartic bug killing.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8mo ago
This week I learned that LLMs are terrible at coming up with quiz questions.
We're having an end-of-the-year party with my team of data engineers, and I want to prepare a quiz for them. I don't want Jeopardy-style "either you know it or you don't, your only hint is the category name" questions, my gold standard is the What? Where? When? show that has questions that:
- look impossible to answer at first glance
- have a hint in the question itself
- don't require knowledge of random trivia
- can be answered by six smart people in 60 seconds and they can use this fact as a hint
For example, "droste.zip is a small Zip archive that contains two files. One of them is droste.jpg, a very small picture of a Droste hot chocolate poster. Its only purpose is to make the presence of the other file even more impressive. What is the other file in this archive?"
Or, "Charles O'Rear has spent more than 20 years working for National Geographic in exotic locations. But his most expensive and most viewed work is a very simple landscape. Name this photograph."
ChatGPT is hopeless at this. It suggests questions like "What does su in sudo stand for?" even when you explain what you want from it, why its questions are wrong and even give it my handcrafted questions as examples. I thought Russian-language LLMs would be better at it, having a better corpus of competitive W?W?W? questions to learn from, but they were even worse.
Since I sincerely hope none of you work for me, here's some friday fun for you:
- Can you answer my questions?
- Can you come up with more computer-related questions like these?
Update on my economic and personal malaise. I wound up sticking with the beer line cleaning gig and got promoted to service tech faster than I found the motivation to job hunt (My self-imposed deadline there was Jan 1.). It wasn't great, but about another month in I improved at it enough that it became dead-easy and never difficult unless I slacked badly and backed myself into a deadline crunch to hit the bonus.
Apparently I interview better than I thought, as I was the "emotional choice" by the service manager who hired me (backed up by my immediate supervisor whose coattails are a good place to ride behind). This is good because I'm going to have to be the emotional choice a few more times until I earn myself a better resume. I'm not exactly brimming with excitement about the new position, but it's a rational step forward. If it goes well, I'll make enough money to make my life a bit more tolerable. At worst, I'll at least break even compared to the line cleaning gig (and I get a company truck, so I won't have to worry about commercial insurance and running my 15 year old car into the ground) and should make more money if by virtue of getting more hours if nothing else. Overtime is a useful antidote to crappy hourly pay. I care less about beer the older I get, but IMO learning how to fix anything to do with a draft system and demonstrating competence at it would be useful for the purposes of either moving into a gig with a distributor or making a career change into some other variety of repair work (I’m told that the usual career trajectory with this company is that people put in a year or so and then bail for a distributor with better pay/benefits.). I'm currently training for the new position at the company HQ for a month and my trainer is good. I like him, and he strikes me as doing a commendable job of being demanding enough that I actually learn quickly while not being an abrasive dick about it.
The not-so great news is that my suspicions about it not being a great pay boost appear likely to be correct. I was pulled aside by an assistant manager in my market and told not to take the job because the sales quota to actually earn commission is impossible to hit in my state's relatively poor, low-density market, and I likely wouldn’t be able to beat a retreat back into line cleaning without relocating unless the guy replacing me doesn’t pan out.). I don't know how it's all going to work because the company is presently restructuring the service department's role and pay structure. My first service meeting was...something, almost unnerving, dominated by 45 minutes of heated back and forth between a disgruntled tech and the new big boss/designated scapegoat about recent changes in pricing, low service call volume, and being diverted into non-billable (aka. line cleaning) work are going to fuck himself and several other technicians out of hitting commission right before Christmas (The consensus seems to be that said tech was badly lacking in tact, but wasn’t wrong.). I didn’t know that one could speak to a superior like that and remain employed outside of the restaurant industry or construction site (Then again, this is still food and beverage.).
I spoke with my trainer about this and got the following: The restructure is probably going to lead to his exiting the company, as it appears that it will badly limit his upward mobility within it (The management role he was being groomed for will no longer exist, and he’ll be stuck competing for other management roles that have far longer tenures with the company and thus deeper personal relationships with upper management.). The technicians’ complaints about changes in pricing and so on are valid. My predecessor (who was with the company for almost a decade) often missed the quota to make commission and he wishes he could’ve swapped markets with my predecessor to find out how much of that was him being too lazy/hungover to get out of bed on time versus the market itself being challenging.
Whatever happens, I figure that this is worth doing because even if it isn’t what I want to be it’s unlikely that I’ll wind up making less, and I need to push myself and become vastly more familiar with stepping outside of my comfort zone because being spending far too much time being overly comfortable, complacent, and okay with a mediocre but overpaid and easy job is how I got myself into the predicament of having mostly wasted the last ten years of my life in the first place.
How’s that for a segue into my personal life? It’s somewhere between “not great, but manageable” and “a falling apart disaster” depending on how neurotic I’m feeling on a given day (In therapy speak this means “I am struggling with emotional regulation and poor coping mechanisms that aggravate it.” or “I am presently realizing that I am not sufficiently functional to make the sort of life that I would like for myself. It only worked with the cushy delivery gig and easy financial situation.”). There was another roommate (I wasn’t looking, but it fell into my lap and I was sufficiently stupid/intoxicated at the time to agree without any vetting. 11PM on Friday night at the bar isn’t the best place to go roommate shopping, who would’ve guessed?). The good news is that I realized that she was insane (The worst alcoholic I’ve ever lived with and the most blindingly obvious case of Borderline Personality Disorder or something along those lines I’ve seen in almost a decade, one of three that I’ve met in my adult life that gave me the vibe of “RUN, NOW!”.), told her that she had to go, and after a few weeks of temper-tantrums and pleading left in peace.
The bad news is that between that, the job transition, and a rough Thanksgiving visit with my father I am a shaken-up mess in dire need of a hug/some serious reassurance. This is far from the first bad visit with my father but it just gets worse every time. He’s in his mid/late 50s and it’s now plainly apparent that if he makes it to retirement he’s going to drink himself to death within a few years or doing so, and that’s the optimistic timeline in which my stepmother’s codependence exceeds her self-respect (This is likely to remain the case.) such that she doesn’t leave him (If that happens, my sister will regret being his favorite child. I was our mother’s and she was/is awful, but is mostly the VA’s problem now.). There’s nothing I can do to stop it. The cool and adventurous if neglectful and a stereotypical bad divorcee (exceeded by my mother’s “monstrous divorcee” conduct such that I feared getting the Medea treatment long before I’d ever heard of the play) father that I grew up with is mostly gone, replaced with a rapidly deteriorating drunk whose only desires are to enrich Miller-Coors’ shareholders while chain-smoking and blasting Fox News in his garage or to go to the one bar in the godawful desert town he lives in where he is only tolerated because he throws tons of money at the bartenders. At least I didn’t have to defend him in a bar fight this time (Like fishing stories, that one grows more exaggerated with time; the latest version I’ve been told is that I brandished a barstool in his defense. I did nothing of the sort, just very loudly made it clear that we’re leaving and the fight was over, and if it had come to that I’d have gone for something less unwieldy as a weapon than a barstool.). Oh, and he’s hooked on crypto speculation now (and has made more on Dogecoin since the election than my entire debt burden. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a touch jealous.). Yay.
I’m going to have a bunch of free time sitting in a hotel room during the workweeks for the rest of this month, feel desperately compelled to vent (That’s the polite term for emotionally vomiting on people/exploiting anyone willing to lend an ear as an unpaid therapist.), and need to stay away from the bars around here so it’s likely that /r/raisedbyborderlines is going to get the story about my mother burning down our house for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and that the fine people are going to get my take on Hillbilly Elegy and Borderer honor culture as someone whose background was “Hillbilly Elegy, but in rural north Alabama and with more domestic violence and dead pets”.
Last thing: I feel a lot better having finished typing this out than I did as I was starting and doing it, like the storm has passed. I just feel tired now and am phoning this paragraph in. I am frustrated by the fact that I am not “over it”. This stuff comes and goes and sometimes I go long periods of being okay before getting smacked in the face with it all over again. I think it happens less as time passes or when my life is more in order. I’m going to make it.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
8mo ago
My last post was on fishtank, fishtank is simply him housing people with issues and fucking with them instead of dating. It is not a dating show lol but I get what you mean. His schtick is meta irony, amazing in short doses.
Lauren apparently left a 1488 bracelet with Paul Joseph Watson after spending a night at his place according to milo. Why do you think it becomes incestuous though? Some suspect that dudes who are higher status would seem more attractive to the girl which would make them attractive but destiny is a literal poly guy whose wife left him.
2rafa
8mo ago
Yeah I said something similar on Friday. There doesn’t appear to be any line in terms of keeping stuff you wouldn’t want to be seen watching in public, especially porn, away from the normal side of the site. Even Reddit has seemingly managed to do this, so it’s unclear why Musk hasn’t.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
What's with Wikipedia's new (2022) appearance, and its refusal to remember my preferences?
I've told it half a dozen times that I like wide column size and small text...and it keeps on reverting to the "modern" crap that doesn't even show half as much information on the screen.
I'm tempted to do the same thing I did to Fandom.com in order to make it a persistently readable website, but I'm hoping there's an easier way.
(No, I won't reward their arbitrary restrictions and poor UI by making an account. That way lies madness.)
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
Steelmanning Rogan’s Dragons
Epistemic status: boredom induced schizoposting. It’s in the Friday fun thread for a reason.
So apparently some recent drama is Joe Rogan feuding with the ladies of the view about the existence of dragons. So the theory on JRE goes, we know dragons existed because so many ancient cultures with no connection to each other depicted themselves fighting them, and they’re not fossilized because they have bird like bones that aren’t very robust the fossil record is incomplete etc. It wouldn’t be the first time that an animal was known to the ancients, dismissed by historians, and then later discovered to have been there after all- although the Benu Heron and hippos in Mesopotamia are quite a bit less juicy.
We know from paleontology that flying creatures of that size can exist and have batlike dragon-style wings- for example, Quetzalcoatlus northropi. We also know that flying is energy intensive, pushing animals that do it towards energy-rich foods(eg meat, fruit, seeds), and the only source of sufficient quantity of energy rich food available to a flying creature of that size would be megafauna living in open areas- a flying creature of that size cannot hunt over a forest canopy effectively. Furthermore, ancient sources are unanimous that dragons are similar to snakes- depictions of dragons as being flying lizards are more recent, contemporaries agreed that they may or may not have hindlimbs but definitely did not have forelimbs- pointing to vestigial back legs, and all snakes are carnivores. Ancient sources agree that they ate large animals, preferred hot weather, and were highly venomous, indicating similarities to existing squamates.
So dragons needed open areas with sufficient temperatures to hunt, but being flying creatures could range long distances. It’s reasonable to suppose that they needed rocky, inaccessible broken terrain to nest in, being too big for trees and all. Given the preference for hot weather but also ancient sources placing them in places that have winter, we can probably assume they migrated.
Now if their bones were bird like we can assume that a dragon’s hunting strategy would have avoided directly overpowering prey animals due to risk of injury; today’s eagles go for a quick strike but without talons, and with taking elephants, that’s likely impossible.
Instead, let’s call attention to the weapon the ancient sources describe- their breath. Ancient sources are often confused about this- some describe spitting fire, others say their breath by itself could kill, others say that they spat venom. Python is described in legend as very nearly killing Apollo with his venom. And spitting venom isn’t unknown- cobras do this. Probably the ancient sources are a bit confused as to what exactly dragons were spitting, I think it’s fair to say that they’re describing a spitting cobra-like mechanism for getting venom into their prey’s face, which weakens them sufficiently to be safely attacked, and that it tended to disperse into a cloud rather than a defined stream leading to confusion as to what exactly it was. Ancient legends don’t seem to refer to dragons setting fires, so the fire part is probably an inexact description- maybe spat venom was highly caustic and tended to burn or sting on contact.
Now this raises the question of what happened to them, and the answer is ‘we killed them all’. Specifically, the indo-European expansion spread a dragon-killing technology package of better bows and better mobility for the individual warrior. If my theory about how dragons tended to attack was correct, then a chariot borne warrior with a compound bow would have a nearly ideal attack angle on a dragon that fought, if he had the balls to use it- spat venom is mostly effective against the face, leading dragons to have an instinct for diving at their prey from the front and breaking suddenly to spit. It’s not like wild horses or elephants have missile weapons.
Now that story is especially unfortunate for our poor dragons because, geographically, the indo-European urheimat is likely the primest summertime territory sustaining the largest breeding population(most existing migratory bird species breed in their summertime territories). And isn’t Russian mythology supposedly all about rendering the territory fit for human settlement by killing a dragon? For pastoralists, a large creature that comes out of nowhere and kills their livestock is a huge threat and an indo-European tendency to be especially aggressive at persecuting dragons can perhaps be perceived, although the semites are possibly just as bad. We can also assume that people with the option would destroy their nests and kill more vulnerable young/eggs. Long story short, sharing territory with people is just not going to work out well for them(as for many other animals).
By Roman times, naturalists record them as occurring solely in India, perhaps because the Himalayas are the hardest to get to location. A small population like that is extra vulnerable to extinction and it’s not a mystery how they wound up dying out entirely.
cjet79
8mo ago
Friday Factorio thread.
I haven't played as much in the past two days cuz of travel. But I'm on my way back to my computer and can't wait.
I feel like I found good ways to deal with gleba. And it just needs to be scaled up and improved upon. With a major injection of bioflux to the system. There should be enough bioflux to keep a constant export going to Nauvis where our science is being moved to take advantage of the more efficient biolabs.
I've also been trying to scale up Vulcanus quality item generation. I have maybe a few thousand active recyclers at any given time. Working on iron, steel, and copper.
Fulgora still oddly seems like the best place for getting legendary equipment. Even with my massive Vulcanus recycling operations. I finally saved up enough for a legendary mech suit. Now I just need to keep filling it with legendary equipment.
I'm coming to realize my space platform designs for the outer system are not working. They are too big, and not quality enough. It's hard and a little annoying to build rare or legendary quality ships, since I need to see which components are in stock on the nearby planet before building.
In addition to quality changes I might need to switch the general design philosophy. Most of the current designs pass necessary resources on belts that circle the entire space platform. I think this works alright on average but is bad during extended periods of active flight. It gets too clogged with asteroids from my grabbers, and ammo/rockets run low too fast if all of them are pulling from the same belt. I instead want to feed resources in and out of the central hub for the front of the ship, and then do a circular belt for the other sides. The central hub will store up extra ammo, and if it starts running low use interrupts to stop the ship and let it build a reserve back up.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8mo ago
Apologies for the delayed response - I don't post on the motte on weekends.
Out of curiosity, have you actually read any books about the history of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Do you think you could accurately summarize both the Israeli and the Palestinian positions in words that they themselves would agree with?
Yes, I have, and I've read a lot about the history of the region due to the prominence of the issue. As for accurately summarizing both positions... the Palestinian side would be easy but as for the Israeli side I honestly don't think so - there are real divisions in Israeli society on these topics, and coming up with an answer that could satisfy all of them is hard. There are hardline settlers who believe that all the land God gave them in their scriptures belongs to them with no negotiation, and there are Israelis who want a two or one-state solution to the Palestinian issue. At the same time I have actually discussed the issue with people who were born Israeli citizens and they've agreed with my understanding... but given that I met them at a protest against the genocide, I am not actually sure that they'd qualify for your purposes here. I could definitely come up with an accurate summary of the Israeli position that the current government would agree with, but I would prefer not to lie.
Who is them? The footballers in Amsterdam?
"Israeli partisans". The Amsterdam crew count, but they're a subset of the larger category.
It's undeniable that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. There is no war, especially one happening in an urban environment, where lots of casualties weren't women and children. This doesn't make their war just, but it does make it unexceptional.
Disproportionate numbers of women and children are showing up in the casualty lists and this is being reported on by reputable media organisations - these figures are actually exceptional.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Friday nearly 70% of the fatalities it has verified in the Gaza war were women and children, and condemned what it called a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.
The U.N. tally since the start of the war, in which Israel's military is fighting Hamas militants, includes only fatalities it has managed to verify with three sources, and counting continues.
The 8,119 victims verified is a much lower number than the toll of more than 43,000 provided by Palestinian health authorities for the 13-month-old war. But the U.N. breakdown of the victims' age and gender backs the Palestinian assertion that women and children represent a large portion of those killed in the war.
This finding indicates "a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including distinction and proportionality", the U.N. rights office said in a statement accompanying the 32-page report.
Nor are the Israelis exceptional in having some drunken footballers chanting terrible things and soldiers in the field sometimes getting up to stupid and offensive grunt shit to amuse themselves.
I have never in my life heard a football chant that was as offensive and cruel as the ones from Maccabi Tel Aviv. Taking glee and exulting in the mass extermination of children is way beyond the bounds of football banter, at least in my experience. Do you have any examples of ones that were worse or even comparable? As for soldiers in the field, I'm going by reputable third-party numbers as linked above. There's a difference between soldiers in the field getting up to stupid and offensive grunt shit to amuse themselves and "systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including distinction and proportionality." Even if your argument holds, the idea that they're disproportionately murdering women and children to amuse themselves says worse things about the IDF than any of the claims I've made so far.
That would require you to describe them as they would describe themselves. Do you think they would describe themselves as "a blood-drenched, bronze-age state intent on ethnic purity and conquest via force of arms to reclaim the territory their god said was theirs"?
I have had conversations with hardline Israelis who would proudly adopt that label for themselves, but I understand those people are a minority in Israeli society. At the same time, I know several people who would object to entirely accurate and factual descriptions of themselves because they don't want to admit something that they actually did. If I murdered someone in cold blood and was convicted, you'd be entirely justified in calling me a murderer, even if I would disagree and describe myself as a patriot who did what I had to do to save my nation. The standard you're applying here prevents any kind of condemnation of the Nazis as well - they'd view themselves as brave heroes protecting their nation from evil parasites, so they'd disagree with any of the negative descriptions that they deserve to receive.
Again, you aren't using the word "evil" but you're clearly saying, in not so many words, that they're evil monsters and there is no other way to explain them.
I believe they're ethnonationalists who want to reclaim the territory that their god supposedly promised them in their religious scriptures. That's the explanation! It sounds unflattering to modern, non-Bronze age ears, but that's because the actions the Israelis have actually undertaken are unflattering. You don't get to run an apartheid state and then complain that people are saying you run an apartheid state because you'd call it something else that's not as bad for your reputation.
Also, Likud is one political party in Israel whose popularity waxes and wanes. They do not speak for the Israeli state and the entirety of the Israeli citizenry. This would be like taking some of the Republicans' most extreme statements and saying they speak for Americans. (Which of course is exactly what they and their enemies would both like to claim, but it doesn't make it true.) Much has been made of Netanyahu's "Amelek" comment. Netanyahu is a sort of Trump-like figure in Israel - he has a lot of supporters, especially after 10/7, but a substantial portion of the Israeli's population hates him. Think of all the outrageous things Trump has said, which a sizeable portion of the American population would not agree with, and then claiming that Trump was clearly speaking for the American people, and reflecting what Americans think. In an abstract sense, this may be true (they elected him, after all), but at the same time, you'd be completely wrong in claiming he's channelling the American psyche and voicing what the average American thinks about everything.
Likud is currently in power and Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest serving PM the country has had. Unless you want to make the claim that Israel isn't a democracy and their elected leaders do not represent the will of the people, Likud and Netanyahu do speak for the Israeli state. You make the point about extreme republicans, but Zero HP Lovecraft isn't the POTUS right now - and when Trump takes office again, I have no problem saying that he speaks for Americans. Do I think that all Israelis act like this? Absolutely not, I've even mentioned the Israelis I marched and protested alongside. But when I look at the polls, a lot of those more noxious beliefs have incredibly broad support amongst Israeli citizens.
https://truthout.org/articles/polls-show-broad-support-in-israel-for-gazas-destruction-and-starvation/ (yes, the source for this is anti-zionist - I don't believe that means they are just publishing fiction.)
Polls seem to offer confirmation of this statement. A 2013 survey showed that over half of Israeli Jews believe “very strongly” that Jews are the chosen people and that nearly two-thirds believe this statement either “very strongly” or “quite strongly.”
In a January 2023 poll, 93 percent of Israeli Jews said that all of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River belongs to them. The justification for this belief is not discussed in the poll
93 percent of Israeli jews support the claim that their god promised them all the territory between the river and the sea. If you put the claim that the Jews are god's chosen people and that he has given them all that territory (including Palestine) to the Israeli people on a referendum, polling data suggests that's what they'd vote for! I don't think you can really say that these ideas don't represent the will of the people when a majority of them say they do when asked.
Netanyahu, and other militant Likud officials, are pretty open about despising Palestinians, and there's a sizeable portion of Israel that would just like the Palestinians to go away (who can blame them, after all this time?).
Me! I can blame them! Not once have I ever in my life said that I would like another ethnicity to just 'go away' because I don't like the political consequences of their continued existence. If you want to defend that impulse, go ahead - but you're forever giving up the ability to criticize antisemites, racists and white nationalists. After all, they would just like the jews to go away - who can blame them, after all this time?
But most Israelis do not want to exterminate Palestinians because God said to, and you know this and you know it's not an accurate characterization, you're just using that description because it makes Israel sound really super-evil.
I said it because the polling data supports it. That's what it means when over half the population says that they are god's chosen people, and 93% of them of them believe that the territory promised to them in their scriptures belongs to them.
We have a number of white ethnonationalists here, and while sometimes they will admit that they would be okay with a violent solution to create the ethnostate they want, none of them would accept as uncharitable a description of their motives as the one you are claiming is the Israeli one.
I'm not just aware, I've spoken to and argued with them. And you're totally right - very few of them would accept as uncharitable a description of their motives. But at the same time, I'm willing to bet if you assembled all the white nationalists here on the motte and asked them if they were willing to go to the lengths Israel has gone to in order to rid their country of jews and non-whites, many of them would actually say that they would prefer less overtly violent and bloodthirsty methods. I have no problems criticising white nationalists and other ethnic supremacists who would support the disproportionate murder of women and children in support of their ethnostate, and when I see white nationalist troops blowing up hospitals I'll be protesting against them too.
No, you are assuredly and absolutely not. Again, can I ask what books you have read?
Most of them I read over fifteen years ago and can't recall, but the most recent one was Righteous Victims.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
8mo ago
People forget how ridiculously compressed LLMs are compared to their training corpus, even if you spill an amount of personal info, it has little to no chance of explicitly linking it to you, let alone regurgitating it.
That is true of course, but I read @quiet_NaN's comment as less concerned about models having their data "baked into" newer models during training (nowhere on the internet is safe at this point anyway, Websim knows where we live), and more about the conversations themselves physically stored, and theoretically accessible, somewhere inside OpenAI's digital realm.
While I'm sure manually combing chatlogs is largely untenable at OpenAI's scale, there has been precedent, classifier models exist, and in any case I do not expect the Electric Eye's withering gaze to be strictly limited to degenerates for very long.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
8mo ago
Considering OpenAI's extensive, ahem, alignment efforts, I think using GPT in its current state as a therapist will mostly net you all the current-year (or past-year rather, I think the cutoff is still 2023?) progressive updates and not much beyond that. Suppose you can at least vent to it. Claude is generally better at this but it's very sensitive to self-harm-adjacent topics like therapy, and you may or may not find yourself cockblocked without a decent prompt.
what do people think about therapy becoming AI?
I'm quite optimistic actually, in no small part because my shady source of trial Claude has finally ran dry last month and I hate to say I'm feeling its absence at the moment, which probably speaks to either my social retardation or its apparent effectiveness. I didn't explicitly do therapy with it (corpo models collapse into generic assistant speak as soon as you broach Serious Topics, especially if you use medical/official language like that CIA agent prompt downthread) but comfy text adventures are close enough and I didn't realize how much time I spend on those and how salutary they are until I went cold turkey for a month. Maybe the parable of the earring did in fact have some wisdom to it.
Despite my past shilling I'm so far hypocritically valiantly resisting the masculine urge to cave and pay OpenRouter, I don't think there's any kind of bottom in that particular rabbit hole once you fall in, scouring /g/ is at least more of a trivial inconvenience than paying the drug dealer directly.
TitaniumButterfly
8mo ago
Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up
My two cents, but you're fine. It adds to the impression that we have a rolling conversation going around here. Personally I'm unlikely to go digging through prior topics to see what conclusion you came to if any, not least because it wouldn't be clear where to look.
People who aren't interested can minimize the post and its children. I minimize about half the posts here within a few seconds of skimming. It's a great system. Also, this isn't 4chan; no topics died to make room for yours.
Finally, as you say, it's Sunday. So long as things are kept in good taste, there's always been an unspoken understanding that Sunday-poasting doesn't have to adhere as tightly to the straight and narrow. It's like Hawaiian shirt Friday at the office.
The people making this meme don’t think he’s “slightly less hawkish.”
That was an injection of my own thoughts, I can see how it could be confusing. I was simply trying to gesture at Trump's differences of opinion on foreign policy from the mainstream.
Also, I don’t think anyone says he’s “literally in bed with dictators.”
Sigh. Here we go again.
On national security, he’ll sell out Ukraine and get in bed with dictators, most prominently Russian President Vladimir Putin. A liaison with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán isn't out of the question either.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/
The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/opinions/trump-dictators-putin-xi-erdogan-ben-ghiat/index.html
Trump continually praises dictators and who he is trying to reach with this kind of talk. Some of it is no doubt Trump airing his fantasies of the kind of authority he could exert as president. He praises Hitler, Chinese leader Xi, Russian President Putin and others because of their absolute power, not in spite of it. He repeats these leaders’ cult of personality propaganda in presenting them as so strong and feared that it is useless to resist them.
From the Kamala Harris compaign:
https://www.facebook.com/KamalaHarris/videos/harris-vs-trump-harris-walz-2024/1092590845847573/
Donald Trump admires dictators—and he wants to be one on day one if given the chance.
Also, from the first Trump administration, who could forget SNL making a joke about Putin fucking Trump:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/snls-homophobic-trump-putin-jokes-need-to-stop/
"Honey, why you still up?” Bennett’s Putin says, emerging from a hotel room door bare-chested with a randy, horny smirk. He seductively pats the small of Baldwin’s Trump’s back. “Come back to bed, babe!"
Maybe "admires dictators" is different, but at least one of those pieces expliclitly said "in bed with dictators," and the implication was all over the past year of the campaign -- let alone the first Trump presidency.
Perhaps I made some mistakes in my presentation, but I was simply trying to provide my best understanding of the meme in terms that people who disagree with it might be able to understand. I would not have posted, particularly in the friday fun thread, if I thought I were going to create a debate over all this. It's a silly polandball meme.
jericho
8mo ago
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night?
One of the reasons given is that X's new terms of service kick in today. There was already a minor media dust up about this a couple weeks ago.
That's not to say that the exodus is actually primarily due to concerns about AI scraping or that it isn't coordinated, just that's likely why you're hearing a lot about it today.
5434a
8mo ago
A multi media push for Bluesky is happening today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Bluesky&iar=news&ia=news
Currently listening to BBC radio news with guests talking about "is X over?" To their credit the host is offering some criticism of the move and the possible motives.
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
I don't have much to say but I thought this was worth a post given these platforms' centrality to the internet culture war and its synergies with journalism. For my part I've always thought Twitter was shit, is shit, and will remain shit, and the same goes for any copycats adopting the same format. I lament the drop off of RSS, which suffered from terrible branding/awareness. I didn't understand the value of RSS until it was already in decline, dismissing it as just more icon clutter below a standard format blogpost next to Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and send-to-email share links.
Twitter's rise began with journalists hailing it as the beginning of "citizen journalism", plateaued with it becoming a journalism circlejerk of mutual citationogenics they could profitably mine for clickbait from the comfort of their pillows with no need to undertake difficult tasks like research and real world reportage, and is now being abandoned as those same citizen journalists have increasingly turned against the professional journalist class who lauded them. Reap what you sow, Frankenstein's monster, the student has become the master, etc...
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night? Sunday night is the typical slot for setting a news agenda for the week, but something like Bluesky might be more suited to a weekend when people would be settling down to a relaxing night of shitposting.
cjet79
8mo ago
Still playing factorio space age. I think we've had a thread about it every Friday since its release. It deserves it though, solidly awesome game.
We finally made it to Aquilo. Kept feeling like every other planet still had minor things we needed to fix. Aquilo feels like the seablock mod a bit. You need to build your own land.
The high power costs of drones, and the requirement to use heating pipes adds some new challenges. Builds tend to look pretty different.
I'm also trying to build a massive space platform for some forms of production. Its almost 4500 tons so far. I expanded it from a ~1000 ton ship that was producing its own space platform. I think I want to see how ridiculous the space platforms can get.
Quality has also been a fun mechanic. Feels like burning massive amounts of resources for slightly better stuff. But factorio is all about using up massive amounts of resources. And usually the resource sink is science, but sometimes science isn't enough.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
8mo ago
Read Nancy Fridays book my secret garden for more lol
No_one
9mo ago
Some book recommendations for you and anyone else:
Classics: I rate Clarke much higher than either Asimov or.. Bradbury. As a writer. Although honestly even if Clarke paid for child sex in Ceylon, that still makes him a vastly more likeable individual than Asimov, the eternal consequences of evolution denying high-modernist tool..
Midrange: SM Stirling is essentially an SF writer even if he writes fantasy, which he seems to like. He's not the best but he's pretty good and the Draka series is unparalleled as a political Turing test. He is a rare type of guy - a die-hard 1776 liberal, but biologically aware, evolution-pilled in regards to organisms of all scales, whether individual or societal. Most of his stuff is weird alt-history like the Dies the Fire series where electricity stops working. Probably a good read, but I like his SF. He has notably contributed imo the best novellas to both the War World anthology (about the codominium prison moon of Haven) and Niven's Kzinti one.
Alastair Reynolds (active from cca 1990) worked as an astronomer, so he's got the hard-sf part down. It is often space opera, but it's a fresh look at how that'd be in a STL universe where you can, at best, hug the lightspeed because a bunch of actually elite human capital- cybernetic researchers taking advantage of freedom on Mars networked their brains with nanomachines, became something way beyond human and moved the tech frontier in a big way to infinite thrust engines that, rumor has it, just tap the ongoing big bangs in parallel universes thus allowing constantly functioning reaction drive.
Setting (for the obvious reason) doesn't have superhuman AIs with a few exceptions.
New:
I have sympathies to anarchists, one can't really feel glad about the necessity of the entire sausage machine required in our finite world on a flat surface. So Iain M.Banks's Culture series isn't really about the utopia or even that political, it's more of a very high effort space opera.
You seemed to have missed Greg Egan. If he's too weird/spergy for you with his math stuff, it's not omnipresent. The short story collections Axiomatic and Luminous are very good, Distress & Zendegi I'd also recommend.
Like I said in a previous FF thread, I very much appreciate Walter Blaire, a new true SF writer. As in, it's not just lasers pasted in for rifles, it's about internally coherent worlds that are different to ours for material reasons. That's why I came to dislike Star Wars - it's just the stale old WW2 myth but in space.
Although he takes more of the 'human/history' angle, as his books are less about shiny tech but more about the ways organisations and biology trap people. Especially raising the salience of the latter is very praiseworthy and I hope to one day make him profoundly cringe about the implications of that. Guy writes as fun book, steps on the sorest thumb there is inadvertently.
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
Not Just Bikes has a new video out: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it). I have a love/hate relationship with urbanist essayists like this. On the one hand, they often raise issues that most of the time are not explicitly considered by most people. On the other hand, they tend to have a very leftist perspective, and ignore important costs, benefits, and solutions.
The video makes roughly the following arguments:
- If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
- Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
- Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
Externalities
1 and 3 are similar problems. There are externalities that current laws don't address because they weren't huge problems given historical technology. Namely noise, tire pollution, and congestion. But new technology, autonomous cars, changes the costs and benefits of driving and will make these externalities much worse.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages. Bans are the same blunt tool that current laws use to force too much parking and not enough housing and bikes lanes to be built, just in the opposite direction. But he redeems himself by proposing putting a price on driving.
If you've ever heard of Arthur Pigou, a price on driving as the solution to 1 and 3 is pretty obvious. If someone really wants to drive at 4:30pm on a Friday when everyone else in the city wants to drive too, let them pay extra to be one of the people who can actually get places. There's a limit to how many people can actually get anywhere at that time, and we might as well offer the slots to the people who get the most value from it, and get some money back for public use in return. Charging a congestion fee completely solves the problem of autonomous vehicles circling the city hoping to be closest to the next customer. They have to pay the same fee as anyone else, so they'll only be on the road if they're the highest-value use of road space.
Not Just Bikes proposes investing in "functional and viable public transit", especially in forms that are difficult to remove, presumably to be able to resist transient political pressure. Of course, any publicly-run agency is going to have a very hard time running "functional and viable" transit when compared to a selfish private organization. And there's no reason a company that makes autonomous vehicles can't make and run buses as well.
A better solution is to price road space appropriately, and be agnostic to who's using the space. This allows the highest-value uses without artificially restricting to "public" or "autonomous" uses. Offer express lanes that guarantee certain speeds by limiting the number of vehicles that can enter. The entry fee is set high enough that there aren't any queues to enter. Crucial here is that any vehicle, private or public, should be able to use the lane as long as the driver pays the fee. This allows many more solutions to transit problems, without the dysfunction of publicly-run bus agencies. For example, corporate shuttles, church buses, and private rideshares should be allowed to use the same express lanes as public buses. And if Jay Leno wants to drive his personal car in the express lane, as long as he pays the fee, let him! Same goes for autonomous vehicle makers. If they want to reserve some space on freeways for their cars, make them compete on price the same as anyone else.
Putting a market-based fee on express lanes has a side benefit of making the opportunity cost of formerly transit-only lanes more legible. A few such market-based lanes can illustrate how expensive existing transit-only lanes really are.
Public Choice
Point 2, that laws will tend to favor autonomous car makers over the public, is just a specific example of public choice being a hard problem. There are analogous situations with Big Tech and the public commons, John Deere and right-to-repair, and Big Oil and climate regulations. I don't have a lot to say here, except that this has always been a problem, in other times and places has been much worse, and is likely to be manageable. People are smart.
An Aside on Congestion and Induced Demand
This video mentions the old chestnut that (paraphrasing) induced demand means it's pointless to increase road capacity. I'll quote one of our own:
Likewise a new freeway lane immediately filling up tells us there are still more people who want to be using this freeway.
If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.
Conclusion
I'd like to see more discussion of the economics of transit, and economic solutions, especially without a leftist slant. But this is the first time I've seen a popular urbanist talk about the fact that self-driving cars will increase road use and congestion. This is great! This fact should be obvious to anyone who's spent five seconds thinking about the consequences of making driving cheaper, but I haven't seen it mentioned much outside rationalist circles. This point alone makes up for any other failings in this video.
yofuckreddit
9mo ago
I finally finished The Culture series, ending on The Hydrogen Sonata. @roystgnr asked to hear what I thought of it when I was done:
I heard that Banks didn't want this to be the last culture novel, but I do think it fits in a way. The focus on Subliming (definitely the most hand-waved, mystical part of the series) was arguably a great topic to wrap up on. I think he did a good job peeling back the curtain just enough, but any more books about it afterward would have been too much.
There were elements of it that felt a bit disjointed and unrealistic.
In any case, I've moved on to other books. I discussed being recommended "Normal People" from a woman I have a bit of a complicated relationship with. I discussed it in the Friday Fun thread. To be frank, I don't think it will tickle the fancy of many people here. It's a modern romance novel with a little bit of woke dashed in. Great sex scenes, and refreshing in terms of how it treated an intense relationship. I haven't read a romance in many years. Many commit the sin making what's supposed to be a great love just... not very good. I much prefer the type of book that reminds me of what it felt like the few times it's happened.
I've also started on Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. The title is hilariously "standard" for a history book, but I'm very into it so far. At one time as a child, I had an abject fascination with the California gold rush after getting a basic book about it from my San Franciscan cousins. Anyone living in the Bay Area probably considers it played out, but for a guy in the Southeast, it was exciting stuff. Reading about it with the level of fidelity a book like this provides (just in the first 25 superdense pages) is a treat. I'll wait to recommend it, but so far, it's been good.
i went to highschool in the USA in the 90s: there were mutiple parties every weekend at various houses of kids whos parents were out of town, when the weather was good we'd sometimes have huge keg parties just out of town in a sort of nature area. something like the moon tower party in dazed and confused. not infrequently, people would get a hotel room to hang out in. pretty typical to go to multiple stops on a friday or saturday night.
even i, described once by a friend of my girlfriend as being a "cool nerd", knew multiple people who could get me weed, beer or liquor. friends of a friend would rarely show up with cocaine or acid, and i knew of older people using heroin but never saw any.
this type of partying was by far the main highschool social scene, i would guess 40% of kids were part of this including most of the athletes and popular types.
looking back, it seems like a major factor was parents constantly going out of town and leaving the kids in charge of nice single family homes, kind of surprising how much that was happening
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