avoutos

Or the roads the Inca built as well.

It's remarkable to me how many seem to forget there is "morality" apart from "legality". Even if this does violate some treaty somewhere, we need not wring hands over the death of an objective dictator.

Defend your thesis

Well, there are other things you can look at. For one, Khamenei was dictator of a regime that abducts women and recently murdered 10s of thousands of protesters in the streets. I'd reckon most, including Iranians, would not judge the killing of such an individual immoral, unjust or uncivilized.

Not a skeptic, but I've seen these studies for a while. Do we have any idea what the mechanism could be?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12713542/

(without paywall)

Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.

Do you have an injury? Knees over toes exercises can do wonders for rehab. From a form perspective, it also helps to avoid heel-striking.

I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.

And even minus the BS, researchers seem more comfortable with making minor incremental improvements in established science rather than taking risks.

Yeah, it's there in every industry, though it seems more prevalent in those that are heavily reliant on taxpayer money.

If the Chixulub asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit us today, humans would probably survive.

Even if over 99.99% are wiped out, that still leaves a decent number to figure it out.

It is estimated that human and human ancestor population has dropped as low as a few thousand in the past.

Life would be glum, but causing complete human extinction is not as easy as it sometimes appears.

And the war would have to carry on centuries to maintain the current rate. If there is a subtle insidious plot to erode the population of Gaza over time, it is a huge flop.

The first mistake would be Israel's unilateral withdraw from Gaza in 2005, ethnically cleansing its own citizens from the region to make way for the Palestinians.

The population of Gaza has increased by roughly a million since then, which I must say isn't great for the Zionist plot.

Perhaps what most different about this conflict is the dearth of nations willing to accept refugees. Many if not most Gazans do in fact want to leave [1] (wouldn't you?).

The unsettling conclusion is that these nations are willing to let Palestinians live in dire conditions--conditions the world has no reservation against decrying passionately on cable news and social media--so long as Israel does not get a perceived "win." The West has adopted the Hamas mindset.

1. https://www.bbc.com/arabic/articles/c9de3x3g41yo

Exactly. From 1950-67 Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip from 1959-67. At no point during this time was there any desire on part of the Palestinians to establish a Palestinian state.

The Palesinians don't want a state, they want no Israel.

I could on and on with historical examples, but it doesn't seem many here are interested in that sort of thing.

How is it self-defeating? Hamas is able to continue fighting with the more aid they steal. By stealing aid they also increase the suffering in Gaza thus winning the propaganda war.

The net savings are probably positive. DOGE's stated savings are 199B, so that would leave 177.3B in savings.

If DOGE is overstating savings, I doubt they are doing so by 900% which is what it would take for savings to dip into negative territory. Either that or losses are severely understated, but again if so probably not by enough.

What is more 1930s Germany were the checkpoints and human-chains set up around UCLA to limit the movement of Jews around campus.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-09/are-you-...

All UCLA has to do is strike up a deal with the gov't that presumably entails eliminating affirmative action and preventing pro-Hamas factions from taking hold of the university.

Columbia made a deal and they have their funding back now.

This is only a problem until UCLA makes a deal with the gov't, like Columbia, and gets its grant money restored.

Oct 7th was certainly not the start of the conflict, but it was at a level of barbarity that one can not consider it to be provoked.

Without a sense of proportionate response, if Hitler did some false flag attacks, do you expect the whole world to be okay with the Holocaust?

Can you explain this point? I don't think I quite understand.

The article you link from NPR seems to mostly cite the Haaretz article. The only possible corroboration are the claims from Adil Husain, but I am hesitant to take his words as corroboration.

The Haaretz article states it is unclear how many died from IDF fire vs the Abu Shabab group. Husain was not at the aid site and so can't state how they were wounded.

It is also the case that doctors without borders is far from a non-partisan group and has harbored terrorists in the past (e.g. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-slain-gazan-named-as-docto...)

If the soldiers truly fired on those who were only running away, not advancing, this should be investigated and charged as a war crime. However, at this point the evidence is not clear aside from a handful of anonymous sources from a single press release.

At the end of the day, the outputs simply reflect the inputs. Initially I was of the "if it looks, walks like duck" view when it comes to LLMs and thinking. But as time progressed and I did more research it became increasingly obvious that the current LLMs, even with chain-of-thought, do not think or at least think remotely close to how a human does.

Advancement of LLM ability seems to be logarithmic rather than the exponential trend AI doomers fear. Advancement won't continue without a paradigm shift and even then I am not sure we will ever reach ASI.

Even if the technology improves and the economics of scale reduces the cost, I still don't buy the narrative that swarms of tiny kamikaze drones will radically change warfare.

Aside from radio jamming, I have not seen an actual defense against a strong EMP.

To defend against an EMP wiping out your drone swarm, you would have to invest in shielding etc which would remove them from the class of small cheap drones.

Idk if anyone can speak about this, but to me this doesn't seem like a problem that these types of drones can overcome.

As someone who grew up during the heyday of common core, I can attest to this. Standardization is not a bad thing, but the pace and complexity were dumbed down. We were taught arithmatic with block visualisations and "bundles" far too long as if it took great effort to understand the abstraction of arabic numerals. I constantly felt like my desire and aptitude to learn outpaced the learning materials supplied and I have never considered myself "gifted" with math.

I think many will be surprised by the amount children can learn if you actually test the limit of their capabilities.

I feel the limiting factor when it comes to learning increasingly difficult concepts is not intelligence but effort. Often teachers and parents may mistake the attention-span deficits of kids for a sign that the material is too hard, when the ability is there and only needs to be distilled with discipline.

To me the correlation doesn't actually seem that high when I look at the two maps.

Anyone know how this compares to Cloudflare Turnstile?

The PlasticList tests seem to have accounted for matrix effects / contamination.

They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.

It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.

While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.

Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.

To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.

The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.

The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.

Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.

As for the "plastic spoon" claim, it originated from this study -- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12003191 -- in Nature.

The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.

There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.

Ah you're right, my bad. That could be lead to confusion then.

The last event states Ireland "returns to rugby glory" suggesting it had won the grand slam before, but also there was a decent amount of time since the last win (return suggests a hiatus). This would exclude the original 1948 win.

As someone who does not buy into the ai doom, I'd like to understand your position better.

Do you believe doom will come about from a malevolant asi or an asi that cannot understand human thinking and thus unintentionally causes disaster from operating on a different plane of intelligence?