ithkuil

I'm not a typst user but from a quick look at the language you should be able to type C\#

You can also write a macro

#let csharp = [C\#]

And then use it as #csharp

"the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide"

-- Michael Russel

Are there precedents where an authoritarian state outperformed the free market in technological innovation?

Or would china be different because it's a mix of market and centralized rule?

OTOH once you document something you need to do more work when you change the behaviour

The lights should be designed so that if you don't have enough space to stop with a mild deceleration you should just go through. If a mild deceleration get you rear ended then of course that's an unsolvable problem

Both things can be true:

1. People are trying to sell a product that is not ready and thus are overhyping it

2. The tech is in its early days and may evolve into something useful via refinement and not necessarily by some radical paradigm shift

In order for (2) to happen it helps if the field is well motivated and funded (1)

nice one.

we're AI's fitness function

I want a Robert Duck AI

I understand; but as an excercise to better understand this problem I'll keep doing devil's advocate and I'll raise with:

What if my executive assistant reading the news website and giving me a digest?

Would the website owners rather prefer me doing my reading directly?

I was very annoyed about this feature when I first read about it. I don't have it in my car.

But then I rented a Kia which had it. The nudge was very gentle and balanced and it felt pretty much like if the road had a groove or incline. Now, I'm used to driving in places with very bad roads so the feeling was very natural and my instinct was to overcome the steering wheel resistance with a gentle pressure just as you'd do when driving on roads that present those features.

But my eyes were telling me something different: the road was well paved and flat, so I realized it must be this smart feature. I was pleased at the Kia engineers for calibrating the physical response to be not surprising.

My main concern is that you can get used to this feature. The feature is not perfect and doesn't recognize the ends of the lane in many cases so you quickly learn that you can't trust it. But as technology gets better and better the risk of ending up relying on something that can fail occasionally is a serious one

Foo news wants you to visit the site, look at the main page, watch the ads, click on them and buy the products advertised by third parties which will give money to Foo news in exchange for this service.

And yet people install ad blockers and defend their freedom to not participate in this because they don't want to be annoyed by ads.

They claim that since they are free to not buy an advertised product, why would they be forced to see ads for it. But Foo news claims that they are also free to not waste bandwidth to serve their free website to people who declare (by using an ad blocker or the modern alternative: AI aummarizera) they won't participate in the funding of the service

any research needs funding

I agree. That doesn't make the bombing of Tokyo and Dresden moral acts. War is atrocious by definition.

What is different this time is that most of the west has forgotten what it actually means to be at war and they pontificate from their armchair.

Combine that with the fact that it is generally easier to have empathy for the side that you perceive to be the victim or on the side of justice, and most people truly cannot comprehend how so many Israelis would support their right wing war policies.

I don't think one has to justify the killing of innocent civilians in order to at least try to put themselves in the shoes of people who have been born in Israel and have lived their lives punctuated by the fear of their family or friend being blown up in a bus bombing.

Most people in the west will just not entertain the thought exercise. They'll just dismiss it as "well they invaded Palestine and stole their land", as if this is a justification for suicide bomb attacks or raining rockets over Israeli cities.

I think our collective inability to accept the situation on the ground and push for a compromise is fueling the violence.

Hamas has a strategy where they can leverage their population acceptance of martyrdom in order to gain more and more victim points in their master PR strategy.

Israel feels more and more isolated internationally and they react by giving everybody a big F U and doubling down on their own extremism.

I often hear "Jews should just go back to Europe" as if that is an actual solution.

I believe that if this was any other conflict that didn't involve Jews (e.g. Turks and Kurds) most people would be cheering for peace or they'd be indifferent.

But this conflict has the right mix of inflaming ingredients. There is white colonial guilt and guilt of racism, there is the association of Jews with global capitalism, and associating Jews as "being white".

To be clear, my take is not that since there are other wars like in Sudan, Israel can do whatever they want. All wars should end and every day they continue is a tragedy.

My point is that if one wants to help bring this conflict to an end, one should not put Israel in an impossible position and demand that they simply cease to exist because they "are not native to the land" or similar arguments that people make nowadays.

It's much more effective to pressure Israel to avoid war atrocities if one understands their point of view, their condition and what it means to be under existential threat.

In order to do that you don't have to deny the same to Palestinians.

For some reason most people seem to only reason by taking one side

I've listened to Avi Loeb on Mindscald and he was quite clear that he's taking the possibility seriously as any scientist should take any possibility seriously. He did strike me as a crackpot, but just as somebody who thought that this field has been stigmatized and ridiculed for a long time and somebody has to have the courage to remove the stigma and take this field back in the hands of real science.

I only listened to that one podcast and it was at the time of oumuanua I don't know if in the meantime he veered completely on the crackpot side.

Space is big and quadratic function grows fast

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to diminish the suffering of people who have to live through this degrading and stressful experience. I just think the word terrorism used to describe the action of (usually militarily weaker) insurgent actors trying to destabilize a society is not the same as using the word terrorism used to describe the intentional oppression by a state (using military and police) towards a minority.

We have "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation".

Why do we need to use the word "terrorism" there? I suspect it has to do with the fact the word "terrorism" has been abused by american right wing after 9/11 to just describe "any muslim" and "any evil" and there has been appetite ever since to have some retribution and use this term back to label the west (and israel as its proxy).

Again, I'm not trying to defend the actions of israel against the palestinian population of the west bank in particular, but I find that "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation" are already strong words enough and we don't need to strip the word "terrorism" from its specific meaning.

If any form of coercion and prevarication is labeled terrorism we then lack a word to describe the act of plowing through a crowd with a truck or planting a bomb in an everyday place with the intention of instilling terror in the population.

Those acts are different from military occupation or apartheid or genocide. It's not a judgement of value. It's a description of a method.

My point is that the word "terrorism" transcended the description of a technique for reaching certain goals, to a general blanket term used to describe "pure evil" and so people started to use it to describe very bad things even if they are not technically terrorism

I guess it's hard to define words. Surely terrorism has this vague meaning of doing very evil and violent things.

But a picked up a random dictionary and it says: "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".

I struggle to understand what political aim Israel is pursuing when using unlawful violence and intimidation.

If you believe that Israel is performing a genocide what is the point of explicitly instilling more fear in the victims? Just sadism? I genuinely don't understand what advantage would Israel have in employing terror tactics against Palestinians. Is the idea that they do so in order to make them even more angry so they can justify their genocide? Is that the argument? Or am I not giving the same meaning to the word "terrorism" as you do?

I don't want to argue about which side is on the right side or whatnot; I found that this kind of conversation is is highly unproductive online. But I am interested in understanding how words have changed their meaning over time. Is terrorist now just a synonym for "murdering civilians"?

I grew up in southern Switzerland and the dialect situation is the same as you describe.

Not necessarily every town retained their distinctive dialect in practice because people move, not all parents pass the dialect down to their kids etc.

But I remember a friend of mine lived in this village of 40 inhabitants where they said "e peu que?" instead of italian "e poi cosa?"

He also claimed to eat only fat of dead animals, so yes nothing too peculiar I must say

There are a lot of interpretations of Satie's work and a random playlist on YouTube may not necessarily get you the best performers, also because not everybody has the same tastes in music.

My favourite interpretation of Satie's is played by Reinbert de Leeuw. He plays very slow, playing just a bit behind the beat, with astonishing precision and expressiveness.

I think this fits squarely with the idea that LLM today is a great learning tool; learning through practice has always been a proven way to learn but a difficult method to learn from fixed material like books.

LLM is a teacher that can help you learn by doing the work you want to be doing and not some fake exercise.

The more you learn though, the more you review the code produced by the LLM and the more you'll notice that you are still able to reason better than an LLM and after your familiarity with an area exceeds the capabilities of the LLM the interaction with the LLM will bring diminishing returns and possibly the cost of babysitting that eager junior developer assistant may become larger than the benefits.

But that's not a problem, for all areas you master there will be hundreds of other areas you haven't mastered yet or ever will and for those things the LLM we have already today are of immediate help.

All this without even having to enter the topic of how coding assistants will improve in the future.

TL;DR

Use a tool when it helps. Don't use it when it doesn't. It pays to learn to use a tool so you know when it helps and when it doesn't. Just like every other tool

> But if you're rich enough [..] nobody's gonna hold you to "adult behavior" standards

but that's a problem, isn't it?

That's on us. Why on earth did we stop expecting adult behaviour from ultra-rich people?

I personally don't care about ukraine nor ukrainians; I have no stake in the game.

But I think all humans are fundamentally the same and when I see a bunch of humans fighting for their freedom I can understand them. I understand their motivations.

I also understand the imperialistic motivations. I understand russian need for status and pride and their relationship with their grandiose past. I understand all these emotions. All these emotions are exploited by various interests, sure, but nevertheless without those emotions of the masses war couldn't happen.

What irks me is when people do not want to put themselves in the clothes of somebody else at all, an d just conclude that one group of people is not entitled to have a given emotion. So Ukraine is not entitled to defend themselves because <insert_some_rational_reason> but russia is entitled to defend their separatists because <insert_some_rational_reason>.

It's the double standard that irks me.

I think we can agree that war is shit and everybody would be better off without it.

But, no, that's not the proposed alternative. The proposed alternative is that a group of people, in this case the Ukrainians, effectively surrender and become diminished. Future generations of russians will look at them and say "we're justified in treating you ask shit because after all we won and you lost". This happened over and over in history. Hell, this is why most white supremacists think they are the chosen ones, because whites conquered.

So how should I judge the people who want to defend themselves? I honestly cannot blame them from trying their best.

I'm not talking about whether you guys should give him money.

But it's totally normal for a country to try to defend itself.

I honestly don't understand why people seem to ignore this angle and just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.

Ok, you don't want to give Ukraine money for their defence, FINE, do not give them money!

But why do you have to frame it as zelenski is corrupt, traitor, murderer, boogyman or whatever.

No normal leader of a country being invaded would be expected to surrender their country. They would have been hanged by their own people.

What I find infuriating about this discourse is the double standard. At the same time the american right is absolutely going bezerk over "immigrant invasion" and when some other people suffer an invasion "nah, I don't see the problem, they will just get along fine if they surrender".

You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.

That can totally explain the lack of desire to get involved.

That doesn't explain the victim blaming though.

Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal because he refused to capitulate to a stronger enemy.

War is crazy and brutal and engaging in one is going to get people killed. But I don't understand how we can expect some other country to just give up and yet we don't expect ourselves to do the same when somebody attacks us.

Hence my only explanation is that no living person in America truly knows how it feels to be invaded.

Perhaps that's why the UK has so much more sympathy for Ukraine than the US.

Yes the US fought in WWII with a lot of human investment, the amount of direct threats to American soil was much smaller than the UK and the memories of the war are those of the fights in the jungles and not of American children fleeing bombs in major cities

I phrased it poorly:

Being an adult child has moral and ethical consequences.

Behaviours and emotions that are totally legit and tolerated in a child are no longer so in an adult.

An adult that has all the privileges and freedoms of adulthood over childhood, like the ability to vote, drink, drive and hold an office, also has to abide by the moral obligations of being an adult.

KaaS (king as a service)

The property of "being a child" in an adult is effectively a matter of ethics and morality