Remember, no amount of brown suffering can make up for any amount of white suffering.
I know this isn’t necessarily about race, but it is another example of whites getting their way while browns get in the way. Just gonna add another tally.
The idea that indigenous peoples should be subjugated and forcefully integrated by settlers is an inherently racial problem. This was just as true in Canada and the US as it was true in South America as it is in Palestine today.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the indigenous people of North America should be free.
And that’s part of the reason the Israel-Palestine conflict is so contentious. Both peoples are indigenous to the region, having strong ancestral ties to the Canaanite peoples that inhabited the area over many periods of external rule and migrations.
That the Jewish people were once forced from the area but retained their identity in new lands doesn’t diminish their right to live in their ancestral home. Nor does it give them the right to treat their distant cousins (who also have ancestral claim) the Palestinians the way the state of Israel has.
I don’t know what the solution is, but many Palestinians and Israelis just want peace, contrary to the rhetoric of their governments.
I’m starting to lean towards a one state solution myself. Especially the more I’ve learned about the fact that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all used to get along in the area before the colonization of European and Western Jewish people into the area and displacement of the locals.
Give them democracy with a strong Constitution where everyone is equal, remove all traces of ethno nationalism or theocracy from the government (except for some public holidays). Integrate the security forces, courts, and other agencies of power together, enforce human rights, try to learn from South Africa, the Troubles in England, and I heard what they did in New Zealand to integrate with the indigenous worked, too. Mix up the schools so the next generation learns to grow up without the hate for the “other” their elders have.
During the crusades the region was controlled by the Abbasid Caliphate, and ruled as a Muslim land. The only reason the Christians, Jew, and Muslims “got along” there was due to being under the rule of a single and powerful empire. It wasn’t like the Middle East of the time was separate kingdoms who got along, it was controlled by empires for almost all of its history.
I don’t think any sort of one state solution that would exist between the two countries would classify as an empire, and “enforced stability” is a funny way to try to make people not killing each other sound bad. Also if you want to talk about enforced, that word seems perfectly applicable to Israel’s relationship with Palestine now.
At this point, one state solution is the only possible way forward. A two state solution will not work unless conditions radically change. Maybe it never would have worked, maybe the Israeli government only pretended to be willing to go with a two state solution.
Such a thing is unacceptable to the current Israeli government because it would end their ethnostate but i don’t see an option between that and complete extermination of the Palestinians.
Last time I checked over half of Israel's population is at least partly of Mizrahi descent. Ie. they have Middle-Eastern, Asian, or North African ancestry.
They're not homogenously white which is blindingly obvious if you look at a picture of ordinary Israelis. That's also ignoring the fact that 'European' Ashkenazi Jews were historically never considered white either.
Applying simplistic quasi-binary American notions of race, and simplistic understandings of colonialism, to a complex conflict is ignorant and stupid, and anyone who upvoted your comment is ignorant for doing so.
It's about as dumb as when Americans go on about the US being incredibly ethnically diverse, because they're too ignorant and racist to realise a country like Uganda is super diverse even if 'they all look the same' to an uneducated American eye. Applying simplistic American notions of race to humanity's birthplace, oblivious to the genetic diversity this entails, and to the fact that countries divided by colonial powers without any respect for existing linguistic, ethnic, national, or cultural borders are likely to be super diverse too.
Last time I checked over half of Israel’s population is at least partly of Mizrahi descent. Ie. they have Middle-Eastern, Asian, or North African ancestry.
I assume those are American concepts, part of American racial politics that primarily focuses on skin colour. But those genuinely aren't as relevant to countries half way around the globe.
America is not the world. Foreign countries are genuinely foreign. No, really. Allow me to illustrate:
Example 1: imagine you just heard someone complaining about racism against white people.
In an American context, you'd likely (often correctly) assume they were a right wing lunatic or a racist.
But here in Europe, the Sámi and Irish travellers would likely seem 'whiter than white' from an American racial politics perspective. IRC there are some theories that suggest Irish Travellers are the descendants of people who lived in Ireland before the celts arrived. We're talking millenia. And yet they face plenty of outright and often pretty nasty racism to this day.
Example 2: Israel.
My understanding is that Mizrahi Jews (sometimes known as 'Arab Jews' although that's considered a pejorative by some) historically and still do face plenty of racism in Israel from 'white' Jews....
And yet they also vote for Netenyahu and Likud en masse. The far right Itamar Ben-Gvir is (still?) the current Minister of Security. Iraqi and Kurdish heritage. Not 'white' by American standards. And yet here's an excerpt from his wikipedia article:
Itamar Ben-Gvir ... is an Israeli lawyer and far-right politician who serves as the Minister of National Security. ... His father was born in Jerusalem to Iraqi Jewish immigrants. ... His mother was a Kurdish Jewish immigrant ... Ben-Gvir, a settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has faced charges of hate speech against Arabs and was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. ... He was also previously convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism, an extremist religious Zionist ideology. ... Under his leadership, the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a party which espouses Kahanism and anti-Arabism, won six seats in the 2022 Israeli legislative election ... He has called for the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel who are not loyal to Israel. Ben Gvir is "widely known for his openly racist, anti-Arab views and activities" ... led several visits to the Temple Mount as activist and member of Knesset, contentious marches through Jerusalem's Old City Muslim Quarter, and set up an office in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood which witnessed several evictions of Palestinians. On 3 January 2023, he visited the Temple Mount where the al-Aqsa Mosque is located, spurring an international wave of criticism that labelled his visit purposely provocative. As a lawyer, he is known for defending Jewish radicals and terrorists on trial in Israel. ... Prior to entering politics, he defended Jews spitting at Christians as a "an ancient Jewish custom". ... Ben-Gvir is married to Ayala Nimrodi... The couple has five children, and they live in the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba/Hebron, which is deemed illegal under international law, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
One day we're going to find out that downpunxx is actually a 65 year old Maga living in Wisconsin and posting from his adult child's basement, I just know it.
@be_excellent_to_each_other the irony is that only other people from kbin can see him. He caught bans from the big news communities. Like having an imaginary friend only theyre not very friendly.
My understanding is this claim is basically entirely false. The tests done by these researchers had some glaring errors that when corrected, show gpt-4 is getting slightly better at math, if anything. See this video that describes some of the issues: youtu.be/YSokS2ivf7U
TL;DR The researchers gave new GPT questions from two different pools. It’s no surprise they got worse answers.
You shouldn’t need to be a prompt engineer just to get answers to math questions that are not blatantly wrong. I believe the prompts are included in the paper so that you don’t have to guess if they were badly formatted.
“Prompt Engenieer” is one of the funniest thinks that have happened in the recent history of the world.
“Learn to ask questions to a prediction algorithm and get rich! Is the work of the future! Software engineers and writers will lose their jobs, but asking questions is an evergreen field!”
Dude, if the algorithm only understand correctly formatted input is a parser. We have those.
I actually did that for some code, and it did work.
I asked chatgpt to write me a prompt that would make chatgpt write a recursive function for uploading files and all files in subdirectories to a server as “multipart forms”, because when I asked it to modify my code originally it was just giving me a do-while loop, whereas I wanted a recursive function.
I kept changing my prompts to try to phrase “write a recursive function” differently, and instead the prompt that chatgpt gave me explicitly told it not to use non-recursive logic. Weirdly, forbidding it from using non-recursive logic actually made it finally give me the proper function.
The problem is they aren’t comparing apples to apples. They asked each version of GPT a different pool of questions. (Edited my post to make this clear).
Once you ask them the same questions, it becomes clear that ChatGPT isn’t getting worse at math, because it has been terrible all along.
"And it's important to note that the reason those firms (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) were allowed to grow as large as they have, the reason that state regulators turned such a blind eye, is because states view those firms as potential deputies for their own exercises of power."
They certainly work like deputies whenever an authoritarian pops up.
And this is why we’ve seen article about migrant laborers from India “risking their lives” in Israel…
Israel doesn’t have shit to rebuild on their side of the border, the migrants are to build in Gaza, land that Israel will say they have to seize for some bullshit reason.
as part of an Israeli plan to construct a security zone just inside Gaza—to which Palestinians would be barred entry.
INSIDE Gaza. They already built their apartheid prison-wall inside Gaza, in violation of international law or Palestinian consent. Now they are going to take even more land for their concentration camp.
I don’t like Google (and they deserve an L), but Epic really shouldn’t be given a win either. Pardon my Australian, but Tim Sweeney is cunt with ulterior motives and dreams of buying his way into his own monopoly.
I can’t wait for Google to sue Epic for using their market share to put out their engine for free to add market share and then exert pressure on game developers by having a yearly subscription/seat and royalties.
good luck with that angle, practically “all” creative industry software have a free learning or community edition until you cross certain threshold and they are also all very dominant software, not because there are no competition, but more like existing market share friction. Like asking Maya artist to transition to Blender.
There are also plenty of game engine out there that are free or cheaper, UE4 or UE5 aren’t exactly click 2 buttons and you have a game. (in fact, people spend decent amount of time to trim features/plugins they don’t use/need from the source to cut build time and memory cost for the shipping build.
care to layout how he buy his way into his own monopoly?
buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
give free games out? It’s consumer friendly.
drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold. (EOS voice chat back end does work nicer compare to steam’s one if the game build for it. BUT, many gamers just use discord instead.)
anything I missed?
Epic’s capital is tiny compare to other big publishers.(MS, Sony, Tencent)
buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
In the case of studios or intellectual property owned by a publisher, you can (unfortunately) expect that to be exclusive to the publisher. When games don’t have the funding to make it past development, taking publishing deals are a necessary evil that often come with similar provisions.
Epic has a habit with inserting itself in projects that don’t need its funding, however. They have a track record of finding indie games that were funded by Kickstarter and offer up a loan in exchange for timed exclusivity to their storefront—backers who already paid for GOG or Steam keys be damned. They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.
I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive, but I can absolutely criticize them for being anticompetitive and consumer-unfriendly. Their publishing deals aren’t made in good faith as an investment in the game or future profits, but as a means to remove the consumer’s choice and funnel prospective consumers into their own storefront.
give free games out? It’s consumer friendly.
This is the one thing I will give them credit for, actually. It is an excellent business model for creating growth and getting users invested in their ecosystem, and it doesn’t actually hurt the consumer.
drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
That would be the goal of a monopoly, yes.
make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold.
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?
Is run by a CEO who sees astroturfing as a legitimate form of speech, and not manipulative marketing. [Source]
Attempts to gain market share by subverting competitors rather than offering a better product. [Source p. 151]
I’m not saying Steam should be the only platform; competition benefits us as consumers. But Epic is shady, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they aren’t doing what they are doing for the good of anybody but themselves. Any action they take needs to be looked at critically and analyzed for long-term consequences.
With their win against Google, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that they create an Epic Mobile Games Store to siphon a large chunk of the massive and extremely profitable mobile gaming market. It’s better than Google having 100% of it, but you can be pretty sure that they would try everything in their power to pull the ladder up after they climb it.
They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.
As a PSN/Steam launch Rocket League player and still playing. The only thing I don’t like about this decision is that it’s losing the workshop integration since Epic doesn’t have their own implementation. Otherwise I don’t blame them for doing this and it does not affect any “new” players after the F2P switch. Workshop was eventually rectified with community mod for EGS version but I wish there is workshop maps on consoles as well, some of them are really well made, my son love those a lot.
Note, it does not mean I like or approve how they run Rocket League and recent changes. In fact I decided to stop buying anything on RL with recent removal of player trading until they implement new features or improve RL that’s worth my bucks. I’ve paid enough in RL to let me go another 57 years for my share of server cost. (base on my calculation of hosting a server with similar capacity, my numbers might be off but pretty sure I paid more than enough. average around 7090 CAD each year since launch. )
I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive
If I buy off Skyrim’s right and have my own store and did the calculator for risk and return, you’d be dame sure I will delist it and only host on my store so I don’t have to pay another store front 30% for the new Alan Wake II engine powered version of Skyrim.
Why buying exclusive deals are everywhere because making profitable games are almost like making correct bet on penny stocks. As a developer I would choose safe income to ensure we can keep going if no one else is willing to offer exclusivity deals. Those deals are really good for indie games especially if they are self-publishing instead of having to split with a stronger backing publisher. This is the part most steam worshiper or people that criticize Epic’s moves don’t get their head around and then threaten to “boycott” their once “loved” projects or developers, call them greedy, and abandon the fans, or backers. I believe some dev even promise to give out steam/gog keys after the exclusive deal expires but still getting shamed to death by accepting such deal. Developers aren’t your personal slaves, they got bills to pay and company to run.
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?
No, sorry for my failed sarcasm, EGS as storefront are probably worse than EA’s Origin that was retired or Ubisoft’s crazy Uplay. It’s impossible with the current market share and dominance from Steam even if Epic actually put serious resource into making EGS better, and we all know they aren’t. Because any right minded person would put more resource on product that make them money, for Epic it’s Fortnite, for Valve it’s Steam and not [Insert project name] 3. Just like Gabe have his plenty of pet projects, Tim also have his own pet store front and law suits. Rich people do what rich people do.
And, I want to point out, Tencent the venture capital/investment arm and Tencent the publisher is very different entity. Like yeah they have the CCP tie and stuff but the people that runs the venture capital is just similar to any other venture capital, they want their investment make them profit. Compare to say, EA/Activision buying your studio, I’ve heard better things from industry friends. Oh, and they would try to avoid publish that Tencent owns their shares etc to avoid this kinda of finger pointing from internet folks. Even the Tencent venture capital people knows this and suggest keeping acquisition/investment under wrap. Epic is public company so they have to disclose. Wouldn’t it make sense? If you are a venture capital project manager would you:
pick and invest company that have good potential and planning to carry out their project and product then make big bucks in return and racking in your bonus. Less effort more result?
invest and dip your fingers into everything you can using your board voting power thus make future investment collaboration more difficult. And then getting fired because the company complaint in postmortem?
EA/Activision did their thing because they were in the game of owing your IP and then cut you off from your creation. They have long history of doing that and then fuck up the sequels/prequels/reboots, they don’t care since they got what they wanted. EA was doing much better now from what I can hear.
My points and arguments are solely on don’t view Epic as a malicious actor and focus on what changes it can bring to the digital game selling store front. Way too many people just “fuck Epic” and does not see the full picture and place their loyalty with a platform, just like fans of console wars. For example, during the past sale, I bought Witchfire on EGS, bought Cyberpunk on GOG even though I don’t have good experience with Galaxy, almost bought the new Jedi on EA Play but decided against it because Disney doesn’t need more of my money and I should not give in to my StarWars fan itch and buy a so-so product from the reviews I read. I made my purchase decision solely on one simple rule, how can I give the developer more revenue cut from the purchase I made.
I would use EGS, but they don’t support Linux. Additionally they are deliberately building a walled-garden version of NFTs where you exchange “Vbucks” for emotes and skins that can work across UE games, thereby encouraging more devs to use their engine, and more customers to play games on their engine. That feels gross, centralized, and anti-consumer.
Steam lets devs use any engine, and enables players to use any OS via proton. Any DRM or anticheat present is up to the devs. Yeah, I have a library that is centralized on steam, and that’s not ideal, but it doesn’t feel like they’re exploiting that…yet. Epic doesn’t even have market share yet and it already feels like they’re exploiting everything they can.
Valve’s push on Linux is THE reason that Microsoft isn’t forcing Steam, EGS, EA Play, etc, to go through the Windows Store, which would allow msft to take 30% of all their sales. Both Valve and Epic are fighting the same battle, just valve is fighting with innovation and pro consumer options, and epic is fighting in court against the same kinds of walled gardens they’re building.
Valve’s steam provides values to consumer but aren’t entirely “consumer friendly”. Some of their “give ins” are entirely because of competition.
Examples:
self refund and refund window, directly copy EA’s origin.
allow big publisher to negotiate store cut, direct response to Epic’s store cut.
linux push is entirely for steam’s own survival, not a pro-consumer move.
their policy changes on steam reviews over the years.
the Steam UI revamp multiple times and makes discovery pretty messy when they tried to gamify the discovery process. All for easier marketing campaign pushes. (I found it pretty annoying, but I also don’t like the Netflix style on EGS or other store front.)
Valve’s market place and their key/lootbox and cross game drops are among the pioneers just shy of the scummy gacha from the mobile space.
Valve’s policy dictates that you can not sell at lower price on different store front. Ie. a game dev selling on EGS can take off 18% and get the same amount of revenue from the store front, but they can’t price lower because of Valve’s policy. That’s not consumer friendly.
The fact that Valve can just charge 30% even if a developer didn’t use “any” steam feature is simply because they can. And we are all eating the cost cause developers have to factor that in as well.
I don’t think “pro consumer” is mutually exclusive with “because of competition”. In fact, I would say the two necessarily overlap. If a company does something pro consumer that isn’t driven by competition, then it’s just charity, not “capitalistic” at all. The point I’m making is that, Epic often seems to be on the other side: taking actions that are driven by competition, but not good for consumers. As I stated above, the linux push by valve is the same fight that Epic is battling in courts vs Apple and Google; the difference is that consumers benefit from the linux push, whereas mostly just Epic benefits from their court battles (and maybe some other companies).
I don’t think steam refund was driven by EA offering refunds on EA-exclusives. It was in direct response to Early Access titles being posted that were just obvious scams, with no recourse once you’ve purchased the game (maybe you read EA as a motivator somewhere and assumed Electronic Arts rather than Early Access?)
I agree valve could afford to take a smaller cut. I do believe Epic is directly to thank for all the Sony exclusive ports to PC.
linux support is 100% motivated by valve’s business interests, but also, it’s good for consumers
I’d need to know specifics about reviews over the years. I don’t read reviews, but I know they have to make a deliberate effort to prevent review bombing. “Curators” are a waste of everyone’s time.
TBH I feel like the Steam UI changes at a glacier’s pace compared to almost any other UI. It’s really not that different from what it was 20 years ago.
Yeah, the key/lootbox stuff is a valid criticism. I don’t like any digital economy that’s clearly fishing for whales.
AFAIK, steam’s price parity policy only requires that free steam keys not be sold off the platform for less than what they’re sold for on the steam store. Which makes sense, as that would open the door to just freeloading your game on the platform. I could post my game on steam for $1,000,000, never sell any copies through steam, then generate free steam keys, and sell them over on my own site for $30, keeping 100% of the profits. If allowed, every dev would just do that, and no one would ever purchase through steam. But it sounds like their policy would allow for a game to be $50 on steam, and $40 on EGS.
Meanwhile, EGS is constantly signing exclusivity deals on their platform, preventing them from selling on any other platform at all, which is very clearly anti-consumer.
The fact that Valve can just charge 30% even if a developer didn’t use “any” steam feature
The fact that the Valve is facilitating streamlined distribution of the game (and any updates) to thousands, or millions of players at the same time alone means they are already taking advantage of steam’s features. That is a huge amount of bandwidth savings and complexity that the developer just doesn’t have to think about.
And there are other articles that checks for if you can sell at lower price(without temp sales) on EGS, only 5 out of 41 did so. I take it with some handful of salt cause ars didn’t actually list out the games and who is the publisher behind those 5. That’s why I post the first link from a developer’s stand point. We will only know details once the case developed more.
Regarding reviews, it’s like manage or moderate a forum, but it has huge impact if your changes aren’t communicated, I just list this one but if you are more interested you can dig up older/newer changes. Simply put, if it wasn’t through backlash and developers pulling teeth to push some odd changes like this back to a more neutral place. (ie. Early Access Reviews, Product received for free, product refunded tags are all much later than this article.) Steam’s reviews would be something like youtube shorts that I simply skip. Is it better in the end? I don’t know, cause you can still influence how popular a review is by the upvote/found useful from marketing campaign. Extra costs from developer to marketing(and still subject them to exploits), harder to navigate for consumer(like Amazon reviews), it’s really messy and not really consumer/producer friendly.
I put my points in simply because there is a overwhelming “worshiping” of Valve/Steam that make the 30% cut seems justifiable, and distribution for digital good seriously can’t be more expensive than physicals right? you can go check how much average Amazon charges seller even given it’s dominant position as digital market place. Or simply put it this way, youtube/netflix/social bandwidth consumption is bigger than game distributions for average user. It might be a case for triple-As that come at 45G per game but vast majority of games are about 12 hours worth of streaming(<20GB), I’d like Valve simply provide a usage based charge like cloud providers and developers can pick and choose what features they wanted to pay accordingly. 30% cut is not normal just as lootbox is not normal, they did it simply because they can. (as in traditional brick-and-mortar shop like BestBuy charging extras for cables etc, even with Amazon as competitor.)
Sorry if I miss some parts to provide follow ups, simply too tired to focus on stuff. Mark my words, once Gabe passed gamers are gonna have the reckoning coming for them. All my purchases are based on how much money the developers can get at the end. I buy games on store/launcher even if I don’t like them, but if more bucks goes to developer, that’s where I choose to buy. That’s the important part, we buy stuff to support the developer we like/love, not to support the “platform” selling them.
Yeah, I was aware of the case, but I’m confused because it does sound like Valve’s policy only explicitly restricts the sale of free keys for less. Obviously, I’m all for Valve being held accountable if they’re actually requiring the game be the same price on a completely different platform.
I don’t think there’s any difference between “justifiable” and “simply because they can”. If they can, then they can. Yeah, I do support developers, but I’d be lying if I said steam doesn’t add any value to my experience. If it wasn’t 30% worth of value, devs wouldn’t choose it. And I’m all for EGS undercutting them to attract developers, I think that’s the right way to combat it.
If there is any regulation that needs to happen to combat monopolies, then I think it’s the same regulation that needs to happen on all content distribution and streaming platforms, which is: there should be a standard API for accessing content in a cross-platform way so that open source front-ends can be trivially developed. If steam (or netflix, or spotify, or google, or whatever) has established too much power, it’s because they’ve locked their users into their user experience, and it’s inherently inconvenient to have to switch between different platforms and UIs. But if regulation forced a common API, and open source front-ends were developed, people wouldn’t be locked into a specific user experience. You could switch between EGS or Steam or GOG or whoever, and the only thing that would change are the games that show up in your front-end of choice. IMO that’s the real way to solve it.
While epic aren’t the white knight we want, anti competitive practices should be stamped out. It’s come out that Spotify get special terms. How can anyone new compete with them? The cut taken by app stores for what is effectively payment process in most cases is crazy.
They command the power as they have users. However most users don’t choose to be there. They have no choice but to use the app stores. It is technically possible to download from elsewhere, at least on Android, but it gets harder and harder to do so.
Personally, a few years ago I never would have co sidered an android phone without gapps. Now it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s a necessity. More and more tracking. More and more rorting. More fees. More micro transactions. More and more locked down.
Absolutely, this is still much better than Google winning. Here’s to hoping it gives third-party app stores the power to be more than glorified APK downloaders.
The people talk about the “elected” government was their choice. Nah, they lied and preached democracy. Also, most of these children weren’t even born or could vote yet… 🙄
No one gives a shit what Putin has to say about anything. He’s forever relegated to the little kids table with Kim Jong Un and the rest of the wannabe dictators around the world. He can’t even project strength in Ukraine, much less undermine American hegemony on the world stage. Iran is largely in the same boat. China may be able to take advantage of the situation to a limited degree but the rest of the article is fanciful thinking.
Anyone who thinks China will be pleased for a more chaotic global situation doesn’t really understand the Chinese strategic situation.
China borders 14 countries. Four of those states are nuclear-armed: India, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia. Of those four, only Russia and North Korea are its allies (but it remains to be seen how loyal they are, considering their subordinate status.) Three of the four, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea are one crisis away from total collapse, a nuclear nightmare scenario for China.
China shares a border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, both hotbeds for extremist activity and both teetering on the edge of chaos themselves. Further chaos in the Middle East makes this situation less predictable for China.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has turned Kazakhstan and many other Central Asian powers towards the West just as China was making big inroads into those countries.
China needs the West to be stable because China does not have the consumer base to sustain its own economy, and finding new markets has been borderline impossible.
If you want to know who is responsible for the chaos, look to who it benefits: Vladimir Putin, who is losing his disastrous war in Ukraine and desperately needs the West to reduce its support; Iran who are facing unprecedented social unrest with no sign of abatement; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been stoking the flames of this conflagration with the desperation of a man whose only path away from prison and disgrace is a “justified” war that might get his next election over the line.
Frankly might not be a bad idea for China to solidify a partnership with the West short term, to maintain that stability. A strong bulwark alliance like that would anchor the world.
I don’t think they can afford the lose face like that, by doing a complete 180 and making nice with the west. It would completely undermine everything Xi Jinping has been building for over a decade. His grasp on that power is somewhat tenuous already, and doing a complete about face would make him seem weak and indecisive and that’s when the vultures would strike.
Agreed on most points. I’m not sure how a war in Israel helps Putin in Ukraine though. If you assume support for Israel means less support for Ukraine then sure, but I don’t think it’s that black and white. If there’s one thing Americans love to spend money on it’s war and there is plenty of cash to go around.
Personally I’d rather give all the aid Ukraine needs and let Israel sort out their own business. The two situations aren’t really comparable both in terms of the actors involved or the reasons the two conflicts began. Putin and Hamas do both represent evil organizations but if I had to pick which one to deal with I’d pick Putin every time. That’s partly for personal reasons but I also think it would do more good for the world as a whole.
Very true. The US could sustain full operations in both theaters without breaking a sweat. Both of those theaters are tiny compared to the US military industrial complex and it’s force projection.
Agreed on most points. I’m not sure how a war in Israel helps Putin in Ukraine though. If you assume support for Israel means less support for Ukraine then sure,
Israel has been a fairly large supporter of Ukraine in terms of equipment and ammunition and such. before this happened, I remembered reading something about them helping build their own Iron Dome system, for example. (though, I’m not sure how effective such a system would by. Israel has about 8 thousand square miles to it… Ukraine a couple hundred thousand.)
Also, if you assume war materials are finite resources… Israel is going to be less likely to share if they have an active war on their own home turf.
A Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll of likely Republican caucus voters released Monday found that Trump’s lead over DeSantis has grown by 5 points since his indictment in Georgia last week on 13 criminal charges related to trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.
His approval went UP after the indictment. This is absolutely insane and only shows how hopeless US politics has become. How do you roll that division back? Can you even roll it back if everybody wanted to? This cat is out of the bag and I don’t see it going back in there any time soon.
The only hope I’ve left is the division of the GOP itself. Let the extremists go somewhere else politically and it’ll hopefully lead to a more, what is the word again, fact based approach of politics when the extremists can be ignored because you don’t have to appease them.
The rebulicans have plenty of politicians in power besides the president. As long as the voters favour trump they’ll need to appease them to get into the other houses.
In an ideal world it will split there vote allowing massive dem gains. But that hasn’t happened yet.
If there’s anything the GOP is good at, it’s mobilizing and motivating their voters. When they are all so alike, it’s easy to get them to agree on the stupid shit.
The democrats have the issue of diversity, which makes it hard to motivate large groups of people on a single issue. Love the diversity for the strength it brings, but it makes it hard to feel you’re getting adequate representation in a two-party, first-past-the-post system no matter who you are.
I wouldn’t trade the diversity for the mess the GOP is though.
Honestly it’s just as easy as the media deciding they want us all to be friends again.
That’s legit all it takes.
If left and right wing media outlets would just start an initiative to bring the country together, everyone would fall in line. People only think what they are told to think.
The issue is that these corporations want money, and happiness doesn’t make money.
Mainstream "normal" republicans won't actually not vote republican. They know that their only hope of maintaining some power is to continue to work with the batshit crazy regressives.
They got in bed with these people via the Southern Strategy, and they've only recently started making noises like they're uncomfortable. Once they're in the booth, though, they will still vote straight ticket.
Hitler became dictator only after he was sent and got out of jail. Lula in Brazil more recently was sent to jail and then got out and won a presidential election.
The Justice system coming after you feeds the Trumper’s belief that the system is against him. Therefore he is anti-establishment therefore they must vote for him because there is a very strong anti-establishment movement right now.
It’s why I think it was a very dangerous and potentially foolish decision to bring charges against him. We may be starting a chain of events that will get out of control.
Well that’s the issue with imprisoning popular political figures. All it takes is a tide to shift, a different party to come to power, and they may remove the popular figure from prison.
What if we imprison him and say DeSantis makes freeing Trump his main campaign promise? This type of thing can have unforeseen consequences. It’s an unprecedented time.
I think there is a bit of cherry picking in this. I don't think you're wrong that the charges will rile up his supporters, but plenty of dictators have taken power without going to jail.
The problem was already there, charges or not we were going to have to deal with a very violent mob, at least with charges filed we stand up for the moral value that all people (should be) are equal under the law.
I agree you don’t need it but I think there’s a certain zeitgeist going on right now and for example the last Brazilian president before Lula, Bolsonaro is also being prosecuted and they’re trying to put him in jail.
These types of things are not normal in a stable and healthy democracy. We are teetering on the edge. I just hope Democrats can win this next election. I hate them with a passion but I think they can at least maintain the system functional for another 4 years.
Maybe it’s better that he had either lost the election first and then we charged or we had brought charges 2 years ago instead of right before election season.
I’m not sure, to be honest. I just think this is a dangerous decision that shouldn’t be made likely. The world doesn’t work like it ought to. We should keep that in mind. Obviously me and you don’t actually make decisions so we can just speculate.
The issue is that his DoJ refused to investigate him because they have a standing policy that a president cannot be charged with breaking the law. So despite multiple public violations of both law breaking and high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump was allowed to get away with it under the Nixonian mandate of anything the president does is by definition legal. It means that Biden could begin actually just arresting all republican politicians on the charge of treason and, as long as the senate doesn’t vote to remove him from office with a 2/3 majority, it’s legal even though it would violate the word and intent of the constitution.
Now they can’t prosecute him because, despite being a private citizen, he might become president? This is the same party - and literally the same person - who joyfully chanted “lock her up” over their political opponent throughout the previous campaign. The same people who boasted about defeating Hillary Clinton via a comic investigation into Benghazi, which was designed to do exactly what it did.
Absolutely nothing republicans complain about is said in good faith. It’s time to move past that idea and not even address the complaint. If Trump wasn’t investigated and prosecuted, he’d still be ahead in the polls. Trump is the republican party, and the republican party is Trump.
Being a crime lord does not make anyone “anti-establishment”. Bernie Sanders says Treason Trump is the most corrupt president in history. What matters is not a meaningless abstract word but whether the billionaire elites support your policies, and they love Treason Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.
Of course but you try explaining that to the Trumpers. They won’t believe you. They hear Trump say “witch hunt” and “hoax” so they’re primed to believe it and then he tells them the government is against him… they see the justice system going after them… it almost becomes evidence for it. You see what I mean?
My point was that a coffee machine is designed to make coffee, not to keep track of time. Maybe it always takes roughly the same amount of time to make a coffee, and so someone uses it as a proxy stopwatch. But it can very well suddenly take more or less time, without anything being wrong about it – maybe different coffee brands, cleaned pipes, or whatnot.
ChatGPT is an algorithm designed to parrot language, not to perform mathematical reasoning based on logic rules.
ChatGPT is an algorithm designed to parrot language, not to perform mathematical reasoning based on logic rules.
Mathematical language is a language, ChatGPT has been shown to come up with relationship between very distant elements of language that were not present in the training data… so there is nothing stopping it from, given enough mathematical training data, coming up with whatever relationships we call “logical rules”.
Mathematical language is a language, but mathematics is not just a language. It is a structure with internal rules that are not determined by pure convention (as natural languages are). We could internationally agree from tomorrow to call “blue” whatever it’s now called “red” and vice versa, but we couldn’t agree to say that “2 + 2 = 5”, because that would lead to internal inconsistencies (we could agree to use the symbol “5” for 4, but that’s a different matter).
This is also related to a staple of science: that scientific and mathematical truth is not determined by a majority vote, but by internal consistency. Indeed modern science started with this very paradigm shift. Quoting Galilei:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
If we want to train an algorithm to infer rules from language, we need to give samples of language where the rules are obeyed strictly (and yet this may not be enough). Otherwise the algorithm will wrongly generalize that the rules aren’t strict (in fact it’ll just see a bunch of mutually inconsistent examples). Which is what happens with ChatGPT.
Edit: On top of this, Gödel’s theorem and other related theorems have shown that mathematical reasoning cannot be reduced to pure symbol manipulation, Hilbert’s unfulfilled dream. So one can’t infer mathematical reasoning from language patterns. Children learn reasoning not only through language training, but also through behaviour training (this was pointed out by Turing). This is why large language models have intrinsic limitations in what they can achieve and be used for.
3 years ago I visited Hebron and talked to some of the Palestinians, asked them questions, etc. It became a very interesting episode of my podcast jeena.net/pods/21
I also went out to a families home which has been bulldozed away by the Israeli military a couple of times and they built it back up.
Here is a picture of some children I met in Hebron, they were learning English on the rooftop I stayed.
We need deliberate efforts to archive everything efficiently.
We also need a way to decouple everyone's personal info from publicly available information about them, keeping in mind that not all publicly available information is intended to be that way.
Storage ain't cheap and it definitely ain't infinite.
This is a way harder problem than "the internet" being a bit more mindful can solve easily.
Not to absolve any companies from responsibility or anything.
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