telmo

Yes it's always the evil Russians and the stupid people are influenced by TikTok so we need to tell them what they should vote!

I didn't call anyone stupid. I have been deceived many times in my life. It happens to all of us and it is happening to you now.

At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls

Yes, that is the issue with misinformation, isn't it? It works. Otherwise nobody would care, would they? Misinformation is incredibly destructive, for example it caused Brexit, which was based on mostly lies, some of them famously written on a bus, along with algorithmic manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, that were never properly challenged leading to the referendum. This is all well-known by now and easily verifiable.

How convenient he got fired

He didn't get fired, you are making things up. This is precisely the sort of misinformation that destroys democracy. He had resigned months before this appearance on French TV because of frictions with von der Leyen, who tried to block him from being reappointed. By the time he gave the interview, he was already a private citizen and his resignation had nothing to do with this incident.

Also, and importantily, he never claimed that the problem was that any party of candidate was "bad" or "not acceptable". Breton framed his remarks around enforcing EU law against foreign interference, specifically in the context of Elon Musk's (a foreign actor, by the way) support for the AfD ahead of Germany's snap elections. He said: "Let's stay calm and enforce the laws in Europe. They did it in Romania and, obviously, it will have to be done, if necessary, in Germany as well".

The misrepresentation that you are repeating was initially posted on X by the account Visegrád 24, a well-known propaganda account that constantly posts lies and disinformation with an anti-EU bias.

But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place.

Unfortunately there is indeed one European member state that is suffering democratic backsliding and that is Hungary, but this is not the EU's fault. Otherwise, everything you wrote is demonstrably false.

If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.

AfD has not been banned, and the issue is not them being on my side or not. There are plenty of political parties that I dislike in Europe and I don't want them to be banned. I only wish to ban parties and candidates that break the law, namely by receiving illegal funding from out geopolitical enemies because, unlike the "nationalist" post-truth movements, I am actually a patriot and I love Europe, open societies and liberal democracy.

Yes, it sure did. Read my comment on your original post.

What actually happened was that former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly stated on French TV in January 2025 that if the AfD won in Germany, elections there could also be annulled by the EU "as was done in Romania". That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen, he did not represent the EU in any capacity, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the EU pressured Romania. Of course, post-truth political movements run with a distorted version of this story to play the victim.

Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.

Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.

Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.

I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...

IANAL, etc. but this risk is usually exaggerated by people with a political agenda. EU legislation takes into account the size and purpose of websites. I have never heard of any small website being targeted by such legislation. Do your own due diligence, of course, and take care not to buy into internet hysteria and over-simplification.

If the actions and beliefs of a group are fundamentally morally repugnant to me, I think that it is reasonable to not expect me to be able to find "something positive" in it. We are not amoral automata with grocery-list style utility functions.

I have people in my personal sphere that make this sort of argument and it honestly feels like gaslighting. The undercurrent is: "Look, you don't like this guy, I get it. But if you can't see that he does some good, then you are the one who is irrational and not really in a sound state of mind." Meanwhile completely preventable, life-threatening, life-destroying diseases such as measles are back because of the obscurantist beliefs that come with this "new refreshing outlook". This is a bit like saying: "look, you can say what you want about the Spanish inquisition but they kept rates of extra-marital affairs down."

Corporations love this sort of feel-good campaign (the same way they love performative LGBTQ / feminism / diversity when the culture wars swing the other way) for two main reasons: (1) they distract from fundamental issues that threaten their real interests; (2) they shift the blame on big societal issues completely to the public. They do this with climate change, they do it with increase of wealth inequality and they most certainly do it with public health.

All developed nations have a problem with processed food. Granted, it is particularly severe in the USA, but the ONE THING that separates the USA from almost every other developed nation in our planet is the absence of socialized healthcare. This is the obvious salient thing to look at before all others, so also obviously, a lot of money will be spent to misdirect and distract from this very topic.

Maybe not psychologically healthy for the individual, but likely provides some social benefits.

I never understood this line of reasoning. What good are "social benefits" if the happiness and well being of the human beings that make up that society are sacrificed? Isn't this the basis of totalitarianism? "Everything for the State, nothing against the State".

I was raised catholic and I now consider it a form of abuse. Someone close to me was raised evangelic and thinking about this makes her want to puke.

The psychological damage from this sort of thing is probably so prevalent that it looks like water to a fish. Not to speak of the sleepless nights at 7 years old worrying about eternal damnation.

This is all abuse and it should be treated as such by any decent and civilised society.

Did you even read the declaration? It is precisely about commitments to spend more and buying a string defense.

Also, despite what some sources in the US claim, Europe has been contributing quite a lot to the Ukraine war effort, in fact slightly more than the US.

Singapore has not managed it by being a "much smaller state", it managed it by being a highly repressive and authoritarian state. Myself, I prefer the junkies on the streets.

I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.

By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...

Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard", and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.

Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined.

I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics:

"Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."

It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.

Bathrooms need icons because they have to assume users who can't read, or don't know the local language. None of these two problems apply to language selection 99.9999% of the time: if you can't read, you can't use a system based on reading no matter the language, and if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it.

Come on now. Can you point to one single case of something close to this scenario having happened in real life to a small self-hosted WordPress blog? Or even a big one? Governments are not that stupid, they are not that malicious and they do not have infinite resources to pursue such frivolous and nonsensical activities. This reads like some weird sort of paranoid legal fanfic.

I wonder if advertisers feel the same way. If I was buying ads on YouTube, my least favorite audience would be the people who go out of their way to not see them.

To be clear, I didn't tell OP that he has a bad personality. I don't know OP, how could I know that? What I told him, and do know, is that in my set of experiences this is usually the problem. And I include myself in that set of experiences, to be clear.

I completely agree with you that "women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality". Women are not immune to having terrible personalities. Women, like men, are highly flawed beings. We are all human. We all have to work on ourselves. What I will say is that if you have a good personality, you are more likely to attract a partner that you can be happy with for the long term. This is precisely how you avoid dark triad people, by being self-confident, by knowing who you are, by not needing constant external validation, by not being so influenced by what other people thing of you, by being empathic but not a people pleaser.

You talk about "game". Game is transactional. Thinking in those terms attracts people with transactional mindsets. That is precisely the problem with the red pill, it guides you towards that world. It is self-reinforcing. It leads to depression and despair, because it guarantees to make you more and more aligned with the sort of people that you should avoid. It thrives on the funhouse mirror that is social media, where if you don't make a million a year and are more than 6 feet tall you might as well shoot yourself in the head, unless you use "game" (i.e. deceive people). It's a path to hell.

I did not "straight up recommend woo". What I talked about is "things that sound like woo". Which is another way to say, have an open mind to things that might seem mushy to your male brain, that are not necessarily supported by peer-reviewed studies. Be less mentally rigid, is what I am saying. Men tend to fall very easily in this trap, again me included.

I love subversive stuff. I was a teenager in the 90s, we were all edge lords back then. I miss the time when conspiracy theories were fun. We are not in that time anymore. Tate is vile. He is an abuser of men and women, and he is the one selling impressionable men on lies that will destroy their lives.

You are probably quite young or inexperienced yourself if you think that having and harem will make you happy. The idea makes me shudder. Is it possible to have an "harem"? Sure. You will be surrounded by dark triad women, or by victims who need your money. None of them will love you. Why would you want that?

Try to find out why, and please avoid Internet "red pill" stuff. I'm not telling you this as any sort of political statement nor am I trying to fight any culture wars here. This is just the advice of a middle-age guy with perfectly mediocre / average looks, and some life experience.

From what I observe, 9 times out of 10 the problem lies in personality. I know plenty of guys with no money and no looks that have no trouble attracting the interest of the opposite sex. Why? Because they have a great personality, as in, it feels good to be around them. Furthermore, people who rely only on look and status to attract a partner and do not work on themselves are unlikely to have a happy relationship in the long term.

I am not blaming people for having unappealing personalities. This is usually the product of things that are outside of their control, usually some sort of trauma. Life is not fair. A lot of people are traumatized and do not realize it. This can be overcome, but you must want to overcame it and you must be able to face harsh truths. Maybe therapy can help, maybe meditation, maybe even things that are considered "woo" but that allow you to face your demons. Whatever works and clicks with you is a valid answer. All roads lead to Rome if you are courageous enough.

Check out this guy, I have the impression he is particularly suited for the HN demographics: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG

Good luck man, you can do it!

My somewhat snarky point was that there is no magic distinction such as:

These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses.

I believe I already made my point with the ReLU example, if you don't want to concede it that is also ok.

It's almost like a chose the example on purpose ;)

You mean functions such as:

   if x > 0:
       return x
   else:
       return 0

?

These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses.

What is fashionable to call AI these days are ultimately rule-based systems with if elses. It just so happens that it's a bazillion of those, and they are created by gradient descent.

This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the contrary.

If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.

The only thing stopping me is common sense.

If releases weren't frequent people would have to build their own from the master branch.

But why??? What in the world of Calibre demands such urgent updates? I use a variety of software (some quite complex) that do a great job with much less frequent updates. Why not Calibre?

I love Calibre, and I am very thankful to the people who work on it. It's a shiny example of an open source project that creates a common good.

I just wish it didn't have updates so often. Since you have to do it manually, I feel that every time I start it, this little chore is imposed on me, without any reward. If you really must release updates at this rate for some reason, then I would say that an auto-updater that runs in the background would be a huge huge improvement to the overall experience.

Lack of religiosity is the default state

On the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...

and with it you get the default discontent with death

That is a huge assumption. There is a huge variety of ways in which societies, cultures and individuals relate and have related with death.

they are too far away

The USA and the EU have comparable size. Is Washington DC too far away for the USA to work?

too diverse

The USA is widely regarded as a cultural melting point, and it's ability to attract immigrants from all corners of the world part of the reason for its economic success. I would argue that the EU is less diverse than the USA.

too big to be trusted

Brussels bureaucracy is in fact relatively small when compared to the national bureaucracies of western countries. This claim was repeatedly made during the Brexit referendum campaign. Interestingly enough, the UK's civil service is aprox 10x the size of Brussels (350k vs. 40k, resp.)

These are claims that are repeated ad nauseam by people who have antipathy towards the EU, but they have very little substance indeed.

They can indeed, but that doesn't change the fact that YouTube is obliged to follow the laws of the jurisdictions where it operates, and citizens have the right to demand that these laws are upheld.

I use Firefox as my main browser and it is fine. People complain because it is not Chrome, that is all. It is a shame, because the last remnants of the open web will soon be gone, and with them any sort of user control over their computing environments, namely the ability to block intrusive ads and the various other mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. But I guess it will all be worth it because something was off by 1px on Firefox or it lacked "polish" or whatever...

"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted" (attributed to Albert Einstein)

Consciousness is the thing and the only thing that you have direct experience of. Everything else could be an illusion. You could be a brain in a jar and all of the reality you perceive be a simulation, but you would still be conscious.

I know that I am conscious and I cannot doubt it, but at the same time I cannot prove it to you. Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow).

This means that consciousness is a phenomenon that cannot be doubted (in the first person) but possibly eludes the scientific method. This really grates people who have a strong emotional attachment to the dogma that science must be able to account for all of reality.

People confuse the metaphysical commitment of materialism with scientific fact, and thus conclude that consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of neural complexity, and that it is silly to believe that anything else could be conscious. This feels like an hyper-rational, scientific stance, but really it is not. Science works perfectly fine within other metaphysical commitments such as idealism, panpsychism, etc.

This is not to say that materialism is not correct, I do not know if it is or not. My point is that many contemporary "scientific types" tend to believe that their certainty about materialism being the correct framework is grounded on science, when it is not. It is often an unexamined and quasi-religious belief.