bh11235

I do exactly this kind of thing for my day job. In short: reading a syntactic description of an algorithm written in assembly language is not the equivalent of understanding what you've just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of having a concise and comprehensible logical representation of what you've just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of understanding the principles according to which the logical system thus described will behave when given various kinds of input.

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will -- if they're being honest -- tell you: "Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick", etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and 'learn its lesson' which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say "now that we've bombed you, let us uplift you" but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don't care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

This is an issue that has plagued the machine learning field since long before this latest generative AI craze. Decision trees you can understand, SVMs and Naive Bayes too, but the moment you get into automatic feature extraction and RBF kernels and stuff like that, it becomes difficult to understand how the verdicts issued by the model relate to the real world. Having said that, I'm pretty sure GPTs are even more inscrutable and made the problem worse.

white supremacist

Lol. Lmao, even.

None of the 54 people who upvoted this have the first idea about how Israeli internal politics relates to white supremacy. None of them know how Likud got elected in '77, on top what of ethnic tensions. None of them know the names "Dudi Amsalem", "Miri Regev", "Galit Distel", who are high ranking ministers in the current Israeli govt (Distel quit recently), and how they built their political capital and support base on top of repeated scorn and derision for "the white tribe" which in Israel is traditionally identified with the secular liberal elites, who vote for left wing parties and try to promote left wing policies. Listen to some of the stuff that this wing of Likud says, ironically they don't sound far off from the BLM movement who of course they will tell you that they oppose in their capacity as staunch conservatives. Don't underestimate how much of Likud's power comes from exactly that fault line in Israeli society.

Go ahead and call Israel bigoted, a settler state, a colonialist project, all of these start off an argument that often Israel is going to look not so great coming out of -- but "white supremacist"? People make the surprised Pikachu face because this take is detached from physical reality. Out of what I want to believe is good intentions, you ended up shoving the square peg that is this conflict into the convenient round hole that is this narrative about colors vs. whites which has not applied since decades before the turn of the century.

FWIW I don't personally have the taste for any of this. I wish I could stop hearing about the imaginary applications of colors to Israeli internal and foreign policy, and instead start hearing more about practical plans of how to ensure security in the region and how to aim for a future where millions of Gazans don't starve. But clearly no one is asking me.

The advertisement is specifically about returning to the Gaza settlements that were abandoned during the disengagement of 2005; no one in Israel right now knows what's going to happen to Gaza once the war winds down, there's no consensus even for what the Israeli public would want to happen in theory. So, while this ad is jingoistic, tasteless and not a good look, it is not some deep chess move by the Israeli govt sending the real estate industry to Jewify Gaza; it's one actor among a cacophony of competing voices, shouting "LET US UNDO THE 2005 DISENGAGEMENT THIS IS THE REAL SOLUTION". If you want to correctly argue that historically these kinds of crazies do end up having govt backing then by all means argue that, but it's better to understand the situation as it currently is.

I have a lot of complaints about the HFW plot but the biggest one is the juvenile way they handled Tilda and Sylens in their capacity as prime movers. Aloy herself is a mature character but the story around her takes place in a moral scape of the world as seen by a fifteen year old.

Sylens goes through the motions of his scheme and keeps the same smug "I'm above it all and don't owe anyone any explanations" attitude, through setback after setback and reality check after reality check. It seemed like the authors were poised to deliver a harsh discussion about ends vs means, how the world isn't a magical fairy tale and sometimes something important needs to be done that requires dirty politics and won't be magically solved by the one pure hero pulling the sword out of the rock; but then they squandered it completely and went back to 'yeah all glory to the chosen one'. Most frustratingly they had their angle right there, already baked in: Aloy fails the first 7 times she tries to do anything, so if Sylens mocked her "this is the real world, you don't just go ahead and solve things, Hero", she could legitimately retort "idk, have you tried". Instead they just don't have this discussion and go back and forth "screw you I hate you" "behave, girl" again and again in a flat loop.

Tilda was made in the mold of this cringey moral that's all the rage now about how everyone's an abuser and when people say "I love you" they really mean "I own you" (as also seen in Dragon Age: Absolution). It reads like someone's pent up frustration about their controlling parents, like in his nightmares the person who created this plotline sees his mother taking to the air in that floating exoskeleton and shouting amid a rain of guided missiles "you're going to college and that's final, submit or perish".

In fantasy settings the traditional explanation for this is "magic" (i.e. the reason an axe+2 can do more damage than an identical plain axe), and people have learned to just accept this. Maybe it's best to imagine the answer is "nanobots".

In the latest patch for Baldur's Gate 3 they added a "six months later" party reunion. One of the party members says "we should do this more often", and you can respond "well, getting a group of friends to regularly agree to a time and place is notoriously difficult"

Add a "refuse" button that pops up a short text box detailing the consequences. The End, credits roll. Problem solved, now they can all go explain to everyone on the forums why this is the best ending

Now of course one could make some damning argument about the state of the tech industry in practice, resulting in one of those bell curve memes with "using SQLalchemy is a sin" on both far sides and "noooo it's just a name it's fine there's no fraud involved" in the middle

Jules Verne wasn't a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don't underestimate a keen and observant imagination.

that is so fetch