I understand your resentment but the restaurant manager is a different user

fuck it, go full mathematician. Serve an empty bowl on the grounds that it’s a vacuous fruit salad, every ingredient in it is a fruit

Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.

the peak of your civilization

I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life

The only outcome I can imagine is the brigade closing this write-up as a duplicate and dragging off the author kicking and screaming, never to be seen again, like what happens to the vtuber protagonist in The Waldo Moment. The idea has grown too powerful for even him to contain it anymore.

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

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War of the nine speakers

“God that asshole douche Kazuya is so hot… ugh what is wrong with me”

Let X equal the number of cans of spinach in the known universe. Let Y equal the number of times the Hulk can possibly get “angrier” without succumbing to an aneurysm. Since the Hulk gets stronger when he gets angrier (designated [Zi r = Zf]) and Popeye’s spinach ability allows him to attain a level above his opponents strength ([Zi+1 = Zf],) the only way one of these combatants is going to lose is if the source of their power gives out. Thus if X is greater than Y, Popeye wins. If Y is greater than X, the Hulk wins. This is relatively untenable until one realizes that Olive Oyle is present in the room. Since that is the case, and theorists have speculated that Olive is in fact Female, there will be twice as many X chromosomes in the Room as Y chromosomes. Since X > Y, Popeye wins.

(World Wide Web Fights Grudge Match, ‘Popeye vs Hulk’)

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Here’s a pro-Palestinian argument I find compelling. Israelis like to talk up and down how much they love peace. They say fine, there’s settlements eating up the west bank, and a siege on the Gaza strip, and all of that, but how is that justification for violence? Peace is better than war! We love peace! Let us have peace. Palestinians find this laughable: first you kill and conquer, then with the boot comfortably on the neck you talk about peace? There can be no peace without justice.

I don’t know if I agree with the conclusion all the way, but it certainly is a compelling argument. And I find that it is compelling as it applies across the board geopolitically. Too many times “peace, peace” is used as a rallying cry in support of whatever bully already used their power to tread, create facts on the ground and declare fait accompli. You hear the same about Ukraine: how immoral it is of Zelensky and Biden to insist on war where it would be so much more peaceful of them to accept what Russia has taken by force and seek a diplomatic solution. Anyone who supports the push to undo the partial conquest of Ukraine is therefore, by definition, argued to be a bloodthirsty warmonger.

That’s not how the world works, or should work. Conquest and bloodshed is not a game of tag, for agents to escalate at their leisure and then shout “time out” when they are done extracting value from it. In accepting such a “humanitarian” point of view we maybe choose peace now for the people embroiled in the current conflict, but choose bloody war for countless innocent souls in the future who will come under the baleful eye of some geopolitical bully or robber baron who will inevitably reason, “we live in a world where I can go in, slaughter, conquer and philander, then when I’ve had enough and it seems things are turning against me, I shall weep that peace is preferable to war, and the world will listen”. This is not an endorsement of an endless cycle of revenge, but it is an endorsement of the idea that nations should be allowed to retaliate against acts of war in ways that make the original act, in retrospect, not worthwhile. In civil society we have courts for exactly this purpose.

The beautiful modern internet! Where one can in one breath complain about the post-truth era, then proceed to get 30 upvotes for making the absurd, maximalist claim that no one excused the Oct 7 terrorist acts – when Iran called those attacks Palestinian self-defence and Students for Justice in Palestine called it “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (those are Reuters links, hopefully we can agree they don’t invent news wholecloth). So what now, are we going to move the goal posts and say that calling something “a win” and “self-defense” is not excusing it?

There are enough valid pro-Palestinian arguments: denying water to a civilian population of nearly two million is a war crime, that’s certainly a valid argument. These attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, and need to be seen in the context of the impossible conditions in the Gaza strip: also certainly a valid argumnent. But this stuff, this blatant misrepresentation of reality, is what makes it to the top of the comment section instead.

Propaganda is not there to make you agree with it, it is there to tell you that you are powerless against it

That is a perfectly coherent take for 1994 and even for 2015, but these last years Israel has been aligning itself more and more with the anti-US axis in its spirit and rhetoric. The US says “we approve of this, we disapprove of that” and the Israeli elected government responds “who are you to criticize us after what you did in Iraq and Afghanistan?”, like if Putin were there in the flesh he could not have been more on-brand. Geopolitically right now Israel wants to be Hungary, and the only thing preventing that is the historical accident of spending all those years as a US proxy state, and all the strings that came attached to that. And some people waving flags and whining “we liked it as a US proxy state” but clearly no one cares about them.

I am not saying you can’t make an argument for that succinct manifesto above, just that it used to be self-explanatory how one part is exactly aligned with the other, and nowadays it’s much less self-explanatory than it used to be, and that’s a point of interest.

Red Ed Redemption 2

After Liz Truss’ 50-day tenure I truly believe anything is possible

These concerns sound exaggerated. There is no way that simply being infected with microplastics can force a change in behavior like that. In fact, it is my personal opinion that we should manufacture as many microplastics as possible, and disseminate them to the environment where they can reach more biological systems and provide their many medical benefits to as many people as possible. helphelphelphelphelp This title is simply fear mongering.

Reading this comment section is so strange. Skepticism about generative AI seems to have become some kind of professional sport on the internet.

Consensus in our group is that generative AI is a great tool. Maybe not perfect, but the comparison to the metaverse is absurd: no one asked for the metaverse or needed it for anything, as opposed to several cases where GPT has literally bailed us out of a difficult situation. e.g. some proof of concept needed to be written in a programming language that no one in the group had enough experience with. With no GPT, this could have easily cost someone a week. With GPT assistance – proof of concept ready in less than a day.

Generative AI does suffer from a host of problems. Hallucinations, jailbreaks, injections, reality 101 failures, believe me I’ve encountered all these intimately as I’ve had to utilize GPT for some of my day job tasks, often against its own better judgment and despite its own woefully lacking capacity to deal with the task. What I think is interesting is a candid discussion: why do these issues persist? What have we tried? What techniques can we try next? Are these issues intractable in some profound sense, and constitute a hard ceiling for where generative AI can go? Is there an “impossibility theorem for putting AI on autopilot”? Or are these limitations just artifacts we can engineer away and route around?

It seems like instead of having this discussion, it’s become in vogue to wave around the issues triumphantly and implicitly declare the field successfully dunked on, and the discussion over. That’s, to be blunt, reductive. Smartphones had issues, the early internet had issues. Sure, “they also laughed at Bozo the clown” and all that, but without a serious discussion of the landscape right now, of how far away we are from mitigating these issues and why, a lot of this “ha ha suck it AI” discourse strikes me as deeply performative. Like, suppose a year from now OpenAI solves hallucinations. The issue is just gone. Do all the cool kids who sneered at the invented legal precedents, crafted their image as knowing better than the OpenAI dweebs, elegantly implied how hallucinations are a cornerstone in how the entire field is a stupid useless dead end – do they lose any face? I think they don’t. I think this is why this sneering has become such a lucrative online professional sport.

Just because I’m calling it “hype” doesn’t mean I’m bashing the game,

Motte and bailey