nemesis

https://fedi.layer02.net/users/nemesis

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nemesis_at_fedi.layer02.net@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2025-07-19 00:55:47 UTC

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honestly I wonder if the world not getting blown up during the cold war just made people born after it more complacent. "nothing ever happens"

2025-07-19 00:14:04 UTC

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those are fine if you want a chat, I would not rely on them if you actually want to offload a nontrivial part of your cognitive workflow. they are significantly worse at ICL, zero-shotting novel tasks and doing complex reasoning, and they do not (yet) have the kind of tooling for research workflows that chatgpt and claude do. there's nothing open comparable to deep research for example

2025-07-18 23:57:51 UTC

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I havent used any Claude models for chat yet mostly because it's more rate-limited than chatgpt and I feel like it's hard to justify *two* subscription LLMs, but I believe it's the best model available for coding and it's what Cursor uses. I am meaning to try it at some point for general chat though as @npub1hjv…drdr says it is less hallucination-prone than any openai model, and because claude models have a larger context window than openai ones do (which is a noticeable issue for long chats)

2025-07-18 23:53:55 UTC

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for chatgpt I use gpt-4o as my general baseline as it's very fast and pretty good if you give it a reasonable prompt. deep research is extremely good if you want a literature review of something (though btw gpt-4o can do web searches too). o3 is very good (by LLM standards) at reasoning-heavy tasks in my experience but it's overkill as a goto option. gpt-4.5 is afaik a bit more hallucination-resistant and feels less artificial on a vibe level but I personally havent noticed it being actually much better than gpt-4o in practice

2025-07-18 23:46:26 UTC

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afaik nothing is comparable to paid chatgpt and claude

2025-07-17 12:53:41 UTC

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its true and it's not in serious doubt among behavioral geneticists, you can literally identify the specific genes in question at this point. you've just swallowed a lot of propaganda

2025-07-17 12:51:41 UTC

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> those countries will improve and they can then trade with you and everyone benefits.
not really, if you actually look at the data the limiting factor on reducing global poverty is just low productivity due to bad genetics among the third world. also while I'm not against global UBI as said I think actually-existing foreign aid and remittances functions as a resource curse because it makes them less inclined to invest in domestic production

2025-07-17 12:48:06 UTC

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then why do you want nation-level welfare plus open borders? why not just give people the same amount of money but let them stay in honduras or india or whatever?

2025-07-17 12:46:12 UTC

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I agree with you on that but I do not think paying people to move should be part of this. as said I would be supportive of global UBI and I'm not even necessarily against open borders *if* you have world government to back it up

2025-07-17 12:22:42 UTC

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theres a real point that the US has a stupidly complex and difficult legal immigration process and no one has seriously proposed making it much easier to move legally to the US, but that's again deliberate, as said in the US (unlike in Europe) they actually want it to be illegal

2025-07-17 12:10:12 UTC

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and in general if you want to accuse boomer evangelicals of destroying america immigration seems like one of the least useful things to point to, MAGA has been more anti-immigration at least rhetorically than any mass movement we've had for decades in the US and yet it's completely derailed the country. I am not a single-issue voter on immigration

2025-07-17 12:04:56 UTC

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well mainline protestants are just very liberal in general

2025-07-17 12:03:13 UTC

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yes I'm aware of that stuff (iirc it was one of Reagan's rationales for wanting more immigration too) I'm just doubting that they're more in favor of it en masse than the average american is

2025-07-17 11:59:22 UTC

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also is it even true that evangelicals are super pro-immigration? I'd bet they're less in favor of it on average than the median american is

2025-07-17 11:53:18 UTC

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yes I'm just disagreeing that old people vote for stability. you could just as well argue they have a bigger willingness to blow everything up because if it goes wrong they'll have fewer years of having to live with the consequences. I dont actually believe that either, I think its basically tempermental and a product of life history, but nonetheless it seems clearly false to me to say boomers always vote for the pro-stability candidate. trump was the anti-stability candidate in all three of the elections he ran in and (while that's starting to change as gen z shifts rightwards) historically he got the most support from old people

2025-07-17 11:50:39 UTC

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RFK is but yeah this admin is mostly gen xers. boomer evangelicals have historically been trump's strongest support base

2025-07-17 11:47:30 UTC

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you are right about how democracy works but saying boomers just vote for bad things to get other good things is silly. "it's a shame we had to bomb iran and crash the economy and get rid of science funding and destroy medicare/medicaid and fire all the air traffic controllers, but at least we got to cover up the epstein files!"

2025-07-16 15:10:52 UTC

its really sad how the world's only island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island on a lake is owned by some mining megacorp and cant be visited by the public

2025-07-14 12:39:51 UTC

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I do think llmware is at a point of diminishing marginal returns, afaik thats what all the quantitative charts show
they moved the goalposts to inference scaling but without model improvements theres limits to what that can achieve

2025-07-13 22:52:24 UTC

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and people thought I was being paranoid when saying trump would use denaturalization as a way to intimidate his political opponents

2025-07-10 23:22:56 UTC

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being charitable to them they're probably just overindexing on the specific muslims they know, some of whom (especially at elite levels) are pretty nice
less charitably theyre just people who have a grudge against their own group and its an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of thing

2025-07-09 02:07:23 UTC

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if you squint a bit LLMs are basically ye olde expert systems but learned from massive amounts of data rather than hard coded. like cyc except it actually works and the millions of hours of labor can be outsourced to redditors rather than philosophers and programmers

2025-07-07 18:00:16 UTC

you may not like it but this is what peak male performance looks like
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/9c41ceffa60a9fa43258b176ef1d965ad82f9509ced07c222e3bea68c45702ce.png
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/197b733159a407f50e516a1575d38ca4490ff08c2abaa259d9672f04aacc248e.png
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/20380d553277e43c25ebd1b6c98bbd8f617bc3461496c863cc02bc51a8d9ea65.png
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/87d9b6995785476352130fb313010fbf6639b530faee26c04abbe695883302ec.png

2025-07-07 17:11:51 UTC

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paralysis by analysis isnt the only agency problem---I struggle with focus quite a bit and thankfully I dont have that particular obstacle. but for a lot of people that kind of anxiety is a big chunk of the issue

2025-07-07 16:50:43 UTC

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basically the midwit meme but for "you can just do things"

2025-07-07 16:43:14 UTC

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jokes aside its remarkable how millions of third worlders are willing to cross continents and hitch illegal boat rides with no budget on basically a whim, meanwhile people here often act like doing literally anything to change their life circumstances is impossible

2025-07-07 16:39:31 UTC

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:sticker_akko_aaa: me when somalian immigrants
:akko_mmh: me when somalian immigrants whose motivation is a lifelong dream of playing sports for liverpool

2025-07-07 14:36:23 UTC

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this guy is a source of bangers
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/53ad421efc5a703824d85e0da24f805f082f67d7a282899a5bae87fe657bbf6b.png
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/c97c76b940b92079b4e2f88fa4fb740da48dd3ba44e51ece9da7c2c6085c2dbb.png
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/e8103a30f443198413e28d5b2f817d30a4f69835bfe437d12ffb66bcbaaf540f.png
https://fedi.layer02.net/media/e13850c0dc48db2df5e1e6486a92dbe1b79cd7863a211a4e528b75722448e66d.png

2025-07-05 23:56:19 UTC

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you are right that america has a massive exception for anything related to israel, but this is not an example of zionist control of everything, it's an example of europe simply not having the baseline of civil rights absolutism that america claims to have. the move to proscribe palestine action was part of a move to crack down on a bunch of groups, most of them neo-nazi groups. I am not trying to defend the UK government here I am just annoyed at americans who constantly talk about how europe is better than "amerikkka" without understanding how anything actually works in europe

2025-07-05 23:44:39 UTC

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I am not pro israel at all, I am a free speech absolutist and I am not in favor of arresting peaceful protestors either. you are aware of that unless you just want to unpleasantly strawman me. I am just explaining that most european countries dont actually consider free expression an absolute value and people get arrested for statements the government does not like of all kinds. the UK arrests right wingers for calling for violence online too, and most continental european governments are more aggressive than the UK is in censoring people. I am just saying that if you actually want to move to europe you should appreciate it is not just america minus the specific things you have a grudge against america for, first amendment is flatly not a thing here

2025-07-05 23:37:00 UTC

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your attitude on this is very american tbh. most countries dont believe in absolute free speech.

2025-07-02 00:54:06 UTC

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see this is the problem with teslas: they're designed for places like San Fransisco, California and not for Kabul, Afghanistan

2025-07-02 00:34:57 UTC

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me and arcana arent even anti-EV, I explicitly said earlier in the thread I'd love for them to be used for the vast majority of everyday use cases
its just that teslas are designed as city cars, they arent really good for the kind of stuff we do in our pickup truck. and while teslas arent the worst cars for reliability, they do pale in comparison to our truck which can survive stuff like wrecking balls and being driven off buildings
and come on, you shouldnt need to be navigating a touchscreen to do basic shit like turn the wipers on, and you shouldnt need cell signal to access the map

2025-07-02 00:14:10 UTC

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yeah if you want reliability get a toyota. dunno about other EVs but teslas are honestly pretty unreliable

2025-07-01 23:04:18 UTC

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so long as they control the evangelical base and the elite donors they control actual policy. not being a zionist is basically illegal if you're a US politician

2025-06-29 14:06:29 UTC

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from my vantage point as far as I can tell you are completely right about the 2000s and to a significant extent 2010s---the older far right people in europe (e.g. the nouvelle droite people) very much were burn-the-whole-thing-down and did cross pollinate across the atlantic pretty heavily
its specifically the younger people I'm referring to here, whats driving the growth in groups like the AfD isnt so far as I can tell mostly people like that, it's not people reading right wing substackers (to say nothing of actual books), its relative normies who dont give a shit about the economy or elites or pretty much anything except for having had negative experiences with diversity and wanting to undo it

2025-06-29 13:55:31 UTC

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like my model of the median young european hard-right person is that if they could have an otherwise-liberal social democratic country with a population that's 95%+ their own ethnic group, they'd basically be happy. I dont think that's true at all of young american hard-right people, who I get the impression generally actually do want to radically rework the entire system from the ground up (though they cant agree on how exactly this is supposed to work), or failing that, burn all the existing institutions to the ground
you talking about elites and neoliberalism is an example, most european right wingers as far as I can tell think mainstream institutions would be basically fine if they were ethnically homogeneous, whereas americans dont believe that at all I dont think

2025-06-29 13:48:47 UTC

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I do get an impression theres a bit of a difference across the atlantic, right wingers in europe seem like theyre usually single issue people mad about immigration which is less true in the US I think (not that americans arent also mad about immigration but I get they impression they often perceive it as one of many things wrong with the modern world, whereas in europe they basically dont care about anything else)

2025-06-29 13:17:37 UTC

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she can see which way the wind is blowing. most left wing people cant ime

2025-06-29 13:13:18 UTC

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it is somewhat tied to the economy in that a worse economy makes people more inclined to have a zero-sum fight over who gets access to scarce resources
you could make a case that the great recession helped cause the 2010s wokeness wave in the first place

2025-06-29 13:10:02 UTC

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I think absent a clear cause to return it wokeness is definitely in retreat
main plausible thing that might bring it back in the US is if the economy completely collapses under trump. but young right-wingers often dislike trump anyways, so I dont think this would actually cause a shift of many peoples views

2025-06-24 22:10:33 UTC

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> i’m the editor for the german subtitles of that show
omg wow uhh hello :nkoWave: first time I've actually met someone involved in the anime industry
I watched s1 and s2 a while ago and enjoyed it but I dont remember it very well

2025-06-24 22:00:29 UTC

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thanks for reminding me I still need to watch s3 of that
hope you're not too tired :akko_weary:

2025-06-23 23:51:30 UTC

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economists dont actually believe that btw

2025-06-23 21:07:05 UTC

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yes, something I didnt grasp until I left america was that it's one of the only places in the world where most of the population generally believes in a non-ethnic view of national identity

2025-06-22 00:10:12 UTC

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something I've noticed is americans seem much more willing to impose draconian restrictions on animals than brits are. I feel like stuff like sheep on farms just wandering across roads and blocking traffic wouldnt be tolerated at all in america

2025-06-21 21:32:08 UTC

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in britain *not* letting your cat go outside is considered animal abuse, and they're right
not locking a cat your cat in a box is not "banishing it", it's just not imprisoning it. animals really benefit from being able to have freedom
and people have been doing this for ages and it hasnt led to some ecological disaster so the idea that you have to kill or imprison cats to avoid depopulating other species cant be true

2025-06-18 22:38:55 UTC

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why not just address the push factors then rather than relying on borders? the median indian doesnt actually want to live in a tiny flat working as a delivery driver in london, thats entirely a result of perverse incentives

2025-06-14 23:56:15 UTC

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that looks cool yeah
I remember seeing the kings guard (well, queens guard back then) when I visited london

2025-06-10 15:12:30 UTC

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curious if you'd extend that to not wanting to let me in? (no offense if so)

2025-06-10 15:02:36 UTC

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dont you want to import tomato to britain lol

2025-06-10 14:18:00 UTC

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my wife is british

2025-06-10 14:02:19 UTC

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I have some attachment to the part of the US I was born in--less so the country as a whole. but once I have permanent residency in britain I dont think I'll go back to the US for a very long time tbh

2025-06-09 20:24:10 UTC

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why? how is LLM middleware more vulnerability-prone than other software?

2025-06-09 20:20:39 UTC

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why would this cause more vulnerabilities?

2025-06-07 19:26:57 UTC

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werent you saying the 1920s was the peak of history?

2025-06-05 22:45:33 UTC

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I agree with this
I definitely think theres a deep state faction that had it in for trump, but seeing it as a monolith is a big mistake. and its copium to deny that trump has largely helped the deep state (palantir, israel, ramping up the police state, etc.)
DOGE did defund a lot of deep state adjacent stuff. but that was Musk, not Trump!

2025-06-05 22:34:15 UTC

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so do you think musk is just lying about this then?

2025-06-05 22:30:15 UTC

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bingo, I dont think he's blackmailed particularly, but he is on the list (I am almost certain). it's just that while the deep state didnt want him particularly, they also didnt consider it worth exposing everyone else on the list to use it during the election
I dont think he is the deep state candidate, but he also doesnt seem to have hurt them that much (and the Palantir stuff is actually strengthening them), so I think they view it as a whatever

2025-06-05 22:21:54 UTC

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they kind of have a point in that america doesnt really have a distinctive identity the way european and asian countries do. its just an insane melange of various immigrant groups most of whom arrived just a few generations ago
in europe you can drive fifteen minutes and be at a thousand year old church and read about how it was used to store weapons to defend against the vikings or whatever. in contrast most of the US basically didnt exist 200 years ago, and much of the west didnt exist even 100 years ago
probably part of why we feel like a joke rn tbh

2025-06-02 00:05:28 UTC

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yeah a big part of it was that institutions were glad to have a movement to attack trump with. as a point of comparison they've been a lot harsher towards the recent palestine protests

2025-06-02 00:02:03 UTC

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what gave momentum the 2020 protests was that practically everyone in burgerstan under 60 has a negative attitude towards police, it was a silly focal point for it but the general anger at cops was in large part justified imo

2025-06-01 23:58:28 UTC

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yeah there were some but surprisingly few compared to the scale of it

2025-06-01 23:56:59 UTC

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almost no one actually died in that afaik

2025-06-01 23:38:40 UTC

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honestly if theres one country that is surprisingly averse to violent protesting I feel like it's america

2025-06-01 23:37:29 UTC

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...not really accurate, tbh

2025-05-30 23:46:03 UTC

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oh yes, ww2 accelerated it a lot
you should watch Adam Curtis' documentary The Century of the Self, it explains a lot of this

2025-05-30 23:41:38 UTC

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it actually started earlier, after ww1 and the russian revolution governments basically lost faith in their publics. ww2 accelerated it massively though

2025-05-30 23:21:55 UTC

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the technocracy movement of the 1930s has been completely memoryholed

2025-05-30 23:20:46 UTC

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the effect of that is that its controlled by the hedge fund managers instead. blackrock owns the world

2025-05-30 12:54:41 UTC

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the 3d stuff is almost all in the client. the actual game logic isnt that different afaik

2025-05-30 12:12:44 UTC

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yeah that true but multiplayer is much more profitable and much more able to utilize user generated content

2025-05-30 12:09:50 UTC

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how come? cc @arcana

2025-05-29 22:24:08 UTC

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yep that's a far better approach.
of course you have to have some way of funding yourself, but the amount of busywork for subsistence wages you get as a grad student is probably more than just having a side gig, if you need one
really the only reason to rely on academia imo is if you need access to the Large Hadron Collider or some other piece of nonreplacable infrastructure

2025-05-29 20:25:25 UTC

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doing undergrad you can kind of ignore what an utter soulcrushing abyss academia is
once you become a grad student it's impossible to ignore. total academia death tbh

2025-05-29 18:56:44 UTC

remember, electricity is woke and linear algebra is fascist

2025-05-28 22:35:39 UTC

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america's financial system is stuck in 1970 basically. same as most american government institutions really (the banks are functionally a government institution)

2025-05-28 22:27:20 UTC

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yeah worry about payment processors is absolutely a legit concern imo. it's no different than worrying about hosting providers

2025-05-28 22:24:37 UTC

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a great option... in britain

2025-05-28 21:50:18 UTC

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in light of people thinking we were sisters this is very :cirno_laughing:

2025-05-28 21:43:39 UTC

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hold on, dont you claim that the wirral is cheshire occupied territory? :awoothink:

2025-05-28 01:45:14 UTC

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dunno about before you click on, but gptzero works pretty well for detecting after you click

2025-05-17 00:23:32 UTC

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main example of petty crime I can actually think of from personal experience is people stealing my mail

2025-05-17 00:21:58 UTC

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I mean I cant actually remember seeing a car that was visibly broken into either and I've also lived in high crime areas :cirno_shrug:

2025-05-17 00:19:22 UTC

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thats kind of a problem anywhere really

2025-05-03 15:12:07 UTC

going to take another indefinite break from fedi I think
was nice talking to you all again 👋

2025-05-03 14:35:33 UTC

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that is really pretty

2025-04-28 15:13:46 UTC

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with friends like suiseiseki, linux doesnt need enemies

2025-04-28 14:23:46 UTC

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and making it an evangelization thing makes free software itself worse
if your selling point of your software is just "it's free!", there isn't much else good to say about it, most likely

2025-04-25 17:20:52 UTC

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they are common in functional languages but I think that's more a historical coincidence than anything else. linked lists (especially if you represent them with lisp-style cons cells) arent really any more abstract than arrays, and low level linked list details have been a persistent factor in making FP more annoying than it could be. c.f. http://xahlee.info/comp/lisp_cons_problem.html

2025-04-25 17:13:06 UTC

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whats a good functional abstraction you can use with linked lists but not arrays? you can use map-reduce-filter with arrays, you can even do recursive algorithms by implementing them using array-views, which under the hood are just pointer arithmetic, without the huge cache non-locality cost that linked list traversal has
in lazy FP languages (i.e. Haskell), linked lists are great because you can use them to structure control flow and deforestation means the linked lists will rarely actually be produced in practice. but that doesn't make them a good way to store and query lots of data

2025-04-25 17:05:06 UTC

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ok but the implementation matters, you need to know how fast collection types are, it affects what algorithms you write. there's a reason the big-O cost is part of the documentation for java collections for instance ( https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Collections.html)

2025-04-25 16:57:45 UTC

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what kind of lists? linked lists are really inefficient whereas arrays are basically the fastest data structure :blobcatderpy: c.f. https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

2025-04-25 01:32:47 UTC

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I'm not a leftist and I'm not interested in defending leftism, but I do feel like you're kind of exaggerating this point. historically most leftists who weren't anarchists didn't actually reject hierarchy in general, and there are plenty of leftists who were exactly the kind of personal-loyalty-inspiring leader you aspire to be. you yourself have praised a few marxist-leninist leader in the past. obviously not saying you *should*, but I don't see how hoping to be the Khruschev of the 21st century would be a betrayal of who you are as a person

2025-04-24 23:59:35 UTC

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see this is what I would reject emphatically
that is an extremely destructive mindset imo

2025-04-24 23:55:13 UTC

I'm a centrist about space colonization, I dont care to actively oppose it but it also seems basically impractical for the foreseeable future, and I think the main reason people are motivated to try it is out of a growth-era mindset that ought to die

2025-04-24 23:50:15 UTC

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huh I'm curious why you think so?
it seems true to me that people usually care more about picking a team in a fight than abstract consistency, and also that the team leftists pick is usually the side that is perceived as being the losing one (at least historically)

2025-04-24 23:42:51 UTC

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well its mostly a matter of people picking politics as a team sport more than anything else
leftism is basically underdog-ism, in that you can predict who leftists will side with by seeing who is (or at least seems to be) the underdog in any given conflict
underdogs are sometimes right but they're sometimes wrong too so I dont really care about the underdog-ist perspective

2025-04-24 23:38:30 UTC

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ehhh
I cant see space colonization happening fast enough to have a significant effect on politics for the next century or two at all tbh. at least unless we have other tech shifts (*cough* AGI *cough*) that would disrupt things far far more

2025-04-21 01:31:10 UTC

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I see the world as increasingly differentiating into "elves" and "orcs", basically---where that's not a distinction of race or even of raw IQ, but rather of something more subtle about mindset and personality. I am pessimistic about the US mostly because I see it as being increasingly taken over by orcs, but I am also pessimistic about China because the CCP just seems like a really orcish government to me, which relies purely on crude physical coercion and surveillance and economic bribery with cheap mass-produced consumer goods. I don't think it's capable of attracting many elves because elves prefer to engage on the level of ideas rather than pure carrot-and-stick tactics. China doesn't even have the degree of cultural appeal that the USSR did, it's basically just a hard power threat and I don't think orcs can defeat elves in the long term