@paninid
> “AI” now represents whatever hype merchants are selling to make up for unused compute power left over from the crypto bubble
This was my guess too. But a good friend who works in a small, indigenous-owned company working on machine translation seems pretty convinced that blockchain mining hardware isn't particularly useful for training MOLE.
"... the book's first-person narrative and empathetic tone mask a basic problem in the text: all Israeli soldiers are portrayed as anonymous rapists and killers, while Palestinians are victims of trigger-happy occupiers. Violence against Israeli civilians is not mentioned, perhaps because it is considered a legitimate means in the struggle for liberation against the occupiers."
This is like criticising a novel about the treatment of Uyghurs for not mentioning violence against Han Chinese.
Minor Detail is a novel about the lives of Palestinians under a military occupation that's been escalating for decades. Just like Nathan Thrall's non-fiction book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is about the lives of Palestinians under a military occupation that's been escalating for decades;
This is seriously the last time I'm taking an #InterCity bus. As usual, I'm desperate for a piss, because for an 8 hour bus ride they only schedule 2 stops where passengers can go to the toilet.
We stop at Turangi, right outside the i-Site, and I ask the driver if I can quickly use the toilet. He grumps at me in his "papers please, comrade" accent, "No! Go back to the bus". No basic courtesy. No information about when we'll next be able to use the toilet.
#InterCity is everything we were told competition would protect us from when it was privatized. It's long past time that - as with the trains - the privatisation experiment with long distance buses was declared a failure, and InterCity re-nationalized.
Here's an example of a principled conservatives who defends the democratic rights of those they disagree with;
"[David] French is a conservative warrior, who has fought numerous legal battles to protect the right of Christians to participate in the public square. He’s not a squish by any definition. 'I’m going to fight for the rights of others that I would like to exercise for myself because I also know that my rights are fragile', he said."
"I understand the frustrations of religious conservatives, who have watched the culture head off in disturbing directions. But putting up with some drag-queen storytelling seems like a small price to pay to live in a relatively free society."
The US movement against re-electing President ManBaby can greatly improve its chances of success if it can make common cause with moderate conservatives who think like this.
"A plan to update the system for regulating our media content has been running under the radar for years. Some of the agencies that do it now backed the move to one single body, but this week the government dumped it over fears it could cramp free expression online."
Thoughts on this? My knee-jerk anarchist response is that democratic governance has no place in decisions about citizens' expression, online or otherwise. But...
... I'm aware that in a highly unequal capitalist society, the expressions of different people and organisations have very different scales of "reach". So maybe there is a place for regulation to create and maintain pro-democracy media environments. As always, the devil is in the details.
What happens when you mandate masks at a conference now that most people no longer wear them but medically vulnerable people are still at risk because #CovidIsNotOver? In the case of #PyConUS, the conference sells out.
Why a masking policy? “Many of us and our fellow community members can’t attend without health and safety guidelines in place. We want PyCon US to be an event that everyone feels safe attending,” organizers explained.
"More than 180 New Zealand public agencies have transferred masses of data to Microsoft cloud computing servers in Australia for storage and processing since 2019. Sensitive courts data could be headed that way."
"The NDMS [National Disease Management System] was being hosted within a 'private isolated section' of Amazon's 'cloud' of data warehouse servers in Sydney."
@whn just released this excellent 3 page flyer for #healthcare on the Airborne Paradigm Shift of disease, please share, there is a print-friendly version as well and many translations, at:
@themaskerscomic
> just released this excellent 3 page flyer for healthcare on the Airborne Paradigm Shift of disease
Note the comments about the disposable surgical masks most people still masking up are using;
"Does NOT reliably protect against inhaling the smallest airborne particles and is NOT considered respiratory protection. Leakage occurs around the edge of the mask."
Anything short of a respirator mask, handled with full surgical protocols (eg not re-masking without fully sanitising the mask), is about as helpful as wiping down groceries with hand sanitiser.
Go for it, it's a free country. But don't be surprised if the rest of us roll our eyes when told we should all be joining in with the health theatre.
American journalist and writer Evan Lambert was critical of Liu Cixin’s perceived sexism, which was predicated in the author’s view that “women need the logic of men to balance them and temper their irrationality.” He cited the author’s characterization of Ye Wenjie as a “quasi-villain” due to her curiosity with alien species and her depiction as untrustworthy, incompetent and irrational. Lambert was also critical of the novels for what he regarded as its “thinly-drawn” characters. Lambert praised the Netflix television adaptation for addressing the source material’s perceived sexism by recharacterizing Ye Wenji as an antihero and replacing the main character Wan Miao into two new female characters.[10]
I suspected something like that. I guess I’m gonna have to read the original books to get the non-bowdlerized version. Does anyone know a good translation that’s as close to the original Mandarin as possible?
@Hyolobrika
> Polish science fiction critic Wojciech Orliński argued that the trilogy represents Liu Cixin’s endorsement of concepts of world government, consequentialism as well as tacit approval of “China’s surveillance and control society”
Hmm. Not sure now which translations of the 3 novels I read, but I didn't notice this, nor the alleged sexism Lambert sees. Perhaps it's a literary Rorschach in which anglophone critics see whatever they expect a Chinese author to show them?
Fighting an invisible illness: The curse of Long COVID. By Milanda Rout
"Exhaustion, erratic heartbeat, brain fog, pain: women aged 31 to 45 are contracting Long COVID in greater numbers than any other part of the population. Why?"