From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.

The issue isn’t just local. “This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive - a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008,” the report stressed.

I know this isn’t the main point of this threadpost, but I think this is another way in which allowing housing to be a store of value and an investment instead of a basic right (i.e. decommodifying it) sets us up for failure as a society. Not only does it incentivize hoarding and gentrification while the number of homeless continues to grow, it completely tanks our ability to relocate - which is a crucial component to our ability to adapt to the changing physical world around us.

Think of all the expensive L.A. houses that just burned. All that value wasted, “up in smoke”. How much of those homes’ value is because of demand/supply, and how much is from their owners deciding to invest in their resale value? How much money, how much human time and effort could have been invested elsewhere over the years? Notably into the parts of a community that can more reliably survive displacement, like tools and skills. I don’t want to argue that “surviving displacement” should become an everyday focus, rather the opposite: decommodifying housing could relax the existing investment incentives towards house market value. When your ability to live in a home goes from “mostly only guaranteed by how much you can sell your current home” to “basically guaranteed (according to society’s current capabilities)”, people will more often decide to invest their money, time, and effort into literally anything else than increasing their houses’ resale value. In my opinion, this would mechanically lead to a society that loses less to forest fires and many other climate “disasters”.

I have heard that Japan almost has a culture of disposable-yet-non-fungible homes: a house is built to last its’ builders’/owners’ lifetime at most, and when the plot of land is sold the new owner will tear down the existing house to build their own. I don’t know enough to say how - or if - this ties into the archipelago’s relative overabundance of tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, but from the outside it seems like many parts of the USA could benefit from moving closer to this Japanese relationship with homes.

I wanted to counter with a “what if I am there to kill the other nine Nazis?” but after reading the Wikipedia page for Assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler it seems there’s still a >90% chance I would happen to, in fact, be a Nazi.

That page is pretty wild; 2 that stood out to me were the following:

In a last-ditch attempt, Fabian von Schlabrendorff gave a time bomb camouflaged as a package of two liqueur bottles to an officer in Hitler’s entourage, as a supposed gift to a friend in Germany. The bomb was supposed to explode on the return flight over Poland. The package was placed in the hold of the aircraft, where it iced up, causing the detonator to fail. Realizing the failure, Schlabrendorff immediately flew to Germany and recovered the package before it was discovered.

As an expert, Gersdorff was to guide Hitler on a tour of the exhibition. Moments after Hitler entered the museum, Gersdorff set off two ten-minute delayed fuses on explosive devices hidden in his coat pockets. His plan was to throw himself around Hitler in a death embrace. A detailed plan for a coup d’état had been worked out and was ready to go but, contrary to expectations, Hitler raced through the museum in less than ten minutes. After Hitler had left the building, Gersdorff was able to defuse the devices in a public bathroom “at the last second”. After the attempt, he was transferred back to the Eastern Front, where he managed to evade suspicion.

Imagine the sheer levels of stress these two people went through, starting at the precise moment of realizing their attempt wouldn’t work.

Slight question/nitpick over the prequels’ CGI; is the opening space battle [over Coruscant] of Revenge of the Sith somehow not up to par with its contemporaries? That sequence still holds up in terms of visual spectacle that takes advantage of its medium (3d rendering in this case vs practical effects) to do specific shots and set pieces.

Or am I just ignorant of how much the original trilogy pushed things?

Funnily enough, Angela Collier also made some pretty good videos for “actually” studying physics. Spoiler: no need to go to Hawaii, or anywhere further than your own couch/desk!

how to teach yourself physics

how to solve a physics problem

Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

I watched a few playthroughs earlier this year, and was struck by the games’ vibes. Maybe I’ve become jaded, maybe 2013 was just a different time, but the over-the-top-bombastic, gratuitous-yet-totally-sincere meditation on power, violence, and humanity feels incredibly relevant, not to mention a breath of fresh air compared to the games I see coming out today.

It’s also very similar to the type of video game I’d like to make someday, so it counts as homework as well!

Not to mention it feels like half of the media/art that I love from the past 10 years has been heavily influenced by this game, so playing it could give me a fuller appreciation for them.

Le terme anglais est shifting baseline (syndrome), que Wikipedia traduit apparemment par amnésie écologique.

Je soupçonne aussi que cette brigade était autant un coup de comm’ française qu’un réel effort d’aide et de collaboration, vu tous ces commentaires de militaires ukrainiens qui déplorent le manque d’équipements etc dans des unités/brigades existantes.

Encore un coup de l’opportunisme (et de l’irresponsabilité) de Macron pour moi…

Bon, si la France n’est pas capable de fournir davantage de matériel français/spécialisé, ça me paraît assez censé de vouloir regrouper ceux qu’on forme dessus en une unité de combat. Pour autant, ça n’a pas l’air d’être le mouv’ à faire vis-à-vis de l’état actuel des forces armées de l’Ukraine ???

Let’s not wait until trump starts his term, though. I don’t trust trump not to invoke the USA’s ICC contingency plan on the whole of the EU if his master of “efficiency” gets arrested here.

I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.

Les tissus synthétiques sont très inflammables. C’est une des raisons qu’on oblige les blouses de labo à été en pur coton ou autre fil naturel. L’autre étant qu’ils fondent et se collent à la peau quand ils brûlent :/

Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.

Je trouve dommage que l’article qualifie de “tâche sur son mandat” la prise d’otages et sa gestion, sans toutefois mentionner les soupçons envers Reagan et son équipe de campagne. Selon un article du New York Times paru en 1991 et que wikipédia référence de la manière suivante :

Abolhassan Banisadr, the former President of Iran, has also stated “that the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Tehran to delay the release of the hostages in 1980”, asserting that “by the month before the American Presidential election in November 1980, many in Iran’s ruling circles were openly discussing the fact that a deal had been made between the Reagan campaign team and some Iranian religious leaders in which the hostages’ release would be delayed until after the election so as to prevent President Carter’s re-election.”

D’un côté ça ne qualifie pas directement Carter ni sa «gestion» de la prise d’otages. D’un autre côté si on veut examiner son héritage, sa contribution au monde d’aujourd’hui, il faut aussi parler de ce qui se passait “autour” de lui.

Thanks

🎶 Just a pair of Hitler fanboys, preparing to enter the white house 🎶

I can’t believe it just clicked for me that we shouldn’t be watching out for the “next Hitler” (which I was getting ready to assign to trump based on the past 9 years) but a group of fetishizing copycats.

Reminds me a bit of how Robert E. Lee and much of the confederacy saw themselves as real-life Misérables (https://boundarystones.weta.org/2019/05/13/how-les-miserables-became-lees-miserables).

The common point between Lee, Hitler, and the Misérables is they were all lost causes in the end (thankfully). Hopefully today’s regressive shit-stains-of-a-human-being will go the same way.

Labeling the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong when you consider that Alice Weidel, the party’s chairwoman, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? I beg to differ!

Fuck you. There were gay Nazis. There are gay neo Nazis today. Fascism cares about power more than any internal consistency. The moment those gay Nazis are no longer useful to their higher-ups, they’ll be disposed of.

When will someone with more reach than I, a random internet commenter, start saying this shit to his face!!! The people who are swayed by his bullshit rhetoric are not coming here to read our takedowns, and I can’t tell if I can expect them to read the counter- and response op-eds…

Ooooh, that’s a good first test / “sanity check” !

May I ask what you are using as a summarizer? I’ve played around with locally running models from huggingface, but never did any tuning nor straight-up training “from scratch”. My (paltry) experience with the HF models is that they’re incapable of staying confined to the given context.

How feasible is it to configure my server to essentially perform a reverse-slow-lorris attack on these LLM bots?

If they won’t play nice, then we need to reflect their behavior back onto themselves.

Or perhaps serve a 404, 304 or some other legitimate-looking static response that minimizes load on my server whilst giving then least amount of data to train on.

I’m not sure if this is how @hersh@literature.cafe is using it, but I could totally see myself using an LLM to check my own understanding like the following:

1. Read a chapter
2. Read the LLM’s summary of the chapter
3. Make sure I can understand and agree or disagree with each part of the LLM’s summary.

Ironically, this exercise works better if the LLM “hallucinates”; noticing a hallucination in its summary is a decent metric for my own understanding of the chapter.

Reminds me of Zdzisław Beksiński’s oil paintings.