I don’t disagree, but don’t pretend you haven’t effectively set up the equal and opposite thing here. No mods will ban anyone but other than that every comment section is an implicit competition for best pro-Palestinian talking point, even when decency demands otherwise. We don’t talk about Oct 7, and if we do it was friendly fire, and if it wasn’t it was a natural consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and that is the real issue. Yeah fine we admit the attack was not a hundred percent morally sound if you insist so much, but we don’t assign a moral weight to it or linger on it because hey when you make innocents suffer, you sow the wind and eventually reap the whirlwind, oh sure Hamas’ response was ugly but what can you do, you know, be a bastard and it comes around. Now it is our moral duty to call loud and clear for a ceasefire – the cycle of violence must stop.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s not fair! That’s not my opinion! Yeah, the circlejerk doesn’t care about your private opinion. You know better than to contradict any of the above around here in writing, and that’s enough. I’m sure a lot of people privately think “oh… tbh that last IDF strike was unconscionable” before posting on /r/worldnews the part of their opinion they know the crowd will like better.

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

The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the Earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

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.

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.

no ethical people without explainable people

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”.

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

A lot of games allow you to adjust the difficulty mid game. I’ve played several games on “ultra masochist hard” only to lower the difficulty for the bullshit final boss (looking at you Kena).

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

Yes, definitely. It instigated a lot of turmoil and a gamut of spicy takes regarding the fundamental question of whether password managers as a model “work”. On the one hand some people laughed at the idea of putting your password on the cloud and touted post-it notes for being a more secure alternative. On the other hand people extolled the virtues of the cryptographic model at the base of password managers, claiming that even if tomorrow the entire LastPass executive org went rogue, your password would still be safe.

As far as I understand, the truth is more nuanced. Consider that this breach took place 9 months ago, but you’re only reading about cracked passwords now. It seems like the model did what it was supposed to do, and people behind the breach had to patiently brute-force victim master passwords. This means they got to the least secure passwords first: If you picked “19 deranged geese obliterating a succulent dutch honey jar at high noon” or whatever, you’re probably safe. But it doesn’t strike me as too wise to get complacent on account of this, either. Suppose next time the attackers get enough access to “tweak” the LastPass chrome extension to exfiltrate passwords. Now what?

The thing is we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place with passwords. We already know it’s impractical to ask users to remember 50 different secure passwords. So assuming we solve this using a password vault, there’s no optimal place to keep it. On the cloud you get incidents like this. Outside of the cloud one day you’re going to lose your thumb drive, your machine, your whatever. “So keep a backup” but who out of your normie relatives is honestly going to do this, and do you really trust a backup you haven’t used in 5 years to work in the moment of truth? I don’t know if there is any proper solution in the immediately visible solution space, and if there is, I don’t know if anyone has the financial incentive to implement it, sell it, buy it. People say the future is in passwordless authentication, FIDO2 etc, but try to google actually using one of these for your 5 most-used accounts, you’re not going to come out of the experience very thrilled.

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.

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.

If you’re the company CEO and you’ve spent years shouting a marketing pitch of “scooters! Scooters! Scooters instead of walking! Scooters! They’re the future!” then yes, it’s a bad look if you walk, never mind if you issue a company wide walking mandate.