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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It sounds a lot like you’re letting Perfection be the enemy of Good Enough.

    Should there be no UN because in a small proportion of situations it’s actually shit and is it really realistic to have no talking shop like that at all for as long as it takes for the World to somehow get together and make a perfect entity for that?

    I’ve given some thought to it over the years and I think that the UN still does more good than bad, even whilst being shit at some things and having no real power other than that of influencing nations in general and the World’s public opinion.

    Further, even if in the balance of things tearing down the UN and creating something better turned out to be the best thing to do, I don’t quite see how arbitrarily kicking countries from the UN that were deemed “badly behaving” at the moment would help us create the something better since those countries would need to be there too (it would certainly help tear down the UN, just not help with the actual primary purpose of getting something better to replace it).

    A talking shop for everybody using the penalty of kicking members out only ever succeeds in turning itself into an exclusive club, and at the time when the only thing that existed were such clubs (which were naturally made up of nations allied with each other) was before and at the start of WWI and lead to it and to WWII.



  • Aceticon@lemmy.worldtoNonCredibleDefense@sh.itjust.worksThings you should never ask
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    7 hours ago

    Whilst the first part of your point is correct IMHO, for the rest Israel has been the very opposite of a force for stability in the region and the non-conditionality of the US’ help has emboldened successive Israeli governments to behave worse and worse thus making the region less stable (one of their main concerns seems to be to stop nations around them from having stable democratic governments) rather than more.

    I would say that ACAB and a bunch of very rich Americans with Fascist tendencies who happen to be Jewish and love the ethno-Fascism which is Zionism having bought American Politics (basically doing what Russia wanted to do and, unlike Russia, actually succeeding) is a far better explanation for continued American support of Israel, a theory that much better explains the unconditionality of the American support for Israel than the idea that it’s because of wanting stability in the Middle East.

    Absolutelly, American support makes geostrategical sense up to a point. It’s just that we’re well beyond that point and the American support in its current form (weapon shipments, blocking UN resolutions condemning the genocide) doesn’t make sense for geostrategical reasons (both in terms of stability in the Middle East and because it also damages the perception of America all over the World), so it must be something else driving it.


  • It’s a country founded on 19th century White Colonialist ideology (this bunch of people who see themselves as Whites being Jewish rather than Christian makes no different to their victims) which, unlike the places from were such thinking hailed, has never evolved away from it, quite the contrary: just like Apartheid South Africa, with time they just become more violent and oppressive against those they see as lesser races, only Apartheid South Africa was forced to stop whilst Israel just kept doubling down on it and getting more violent.

    It’s not by chance that most Israelis and their leadership say that they “have Western Values”: they do have Western Values it’s just that they’re 19th century Western Values.



  • I’m not at all denying Racism in Portugal.

    I’m denying Racist Hate, even back in Fascist times: people were prejudiced about those in the “colonies” and even looked down on them but they didn’t at all hate them.

    People did (and still do, though less) go around with all sorts of prejudices about different looking people or people from other places, especially “Colorism” (though, curiously, in present day Portugal it’s more the Brazilians that are discriminated against than people with Black African ancestry).

    My point is that even during Fascism and the peak of the wars of liberation against Portugal in the “colonies” people didn’t went around thinking that “Africans are human animals” or that “we should wipe them out” and ditto for the figures of the Regime, whilst the shit coming out of Israel and especially from the mouths of Ministers and politicians of the governing coalition is relentlessly racist and some form or other of mass murder are common suggested as “solutions” for the “Palestinian problem”.

    That level of extreme hate along racial lines is simply not the kind of thing traditional Fascism tries to indoctrinate into the population, whilst it’s the core of ethno-Fascism and its Propaganda.

    This is far from a “just Portugal” kind of thing: even the most violent traditional Fascist dictatorship - that of Franco in Spain - didn’t engage in widespread violence against different ethnic groups (or, in fact, in any kind of “white supremacy” ideas) and its violence was mainly the period of Civil War at its start, which pitched mainly Spaniards against Spaniards.

    I mean, if you want a present day example of traditional Fascist violence, just look at Russia in Ukraine: they’re mostly trying to take Ukrainian shit and have the Ukrainians become Russians and work for the Russian regime, not to wipe them out in Ukraine. The violence is because the Ukrainians naturally refuse and there are certainly atrocities in war by the Russians and even vengeance against civilians using missiles following Russian defeats, and that’s it. There is no such thing as a campaign to get rid of Ukrainians in by any means necessary no matter how murderous.

    Absolutely, that too is evil shit. It’s however more of a nation state version of Theft and Pillaging whilst what the Zionists and other ethno-Fascists do is Extermination, a whole different level of Evil.


  • I’m Portuguese a country which had a Fascist dictatorship until 74.

    I was very young at the time and don’t remember anything of the dictatorship directly but did heard the stories and saw what came out of it.

    The country was definitely colonialist and the people and natural resources of the “colonies” (which were all in Africa) were definitely being exploited but there was no messaging of racial superiority and no racist hate even when the people over there started rebelling and there was war. In fact so little was the racist indoctrination that immediately after the Revolution all “colonies” were left to gain their independence as nations and all of them became friendly nations with democratic Portugal within a few years.

    From all I’ve seen the focus of the Fascist propaganda was all about the Greatness Of Portugal (all the while it was a shithole) especially old “greatness” like the various achievements of the Portuguese during the time of the Maritime Discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries.

    That shit is nowhere near what Nazis and Zionists do and even during the wars of liberation of Portuguese colonies there was never any mass targeting of civilians over there, much less a systematic massacre and a long list of babies murdered by the Portuguese Military.

    As soon as racial supremacy and racist hate gets into the picture, even in war you go from an atrocity here and there generally done remotely (as you see Russia do in Ukraine) to systematic massacres with snipers seeing children through their scopes and choosing to shoot them in their heads (as you see Israel do in Palestine) - traditional Fascism has Sociopaths leading the military, ethno-Fascism has the entire military all the way down to privates acting as Sociopaths.


  • Just a small correction: this is not just plain Fascism, it’s ethno-Fascism (like the Nazis), a far more violent and derranged variant than traditional Fascism because it’s anchored on Ethnicity, feelings of Ethnic Superiority and the ultra racist casting of entire other ethnicities as sub-human (i.e übermenschen vs untermenschen or, as the Israeli leadership calls them, “human animals”) whilst the traditional kind (such as Mussolini’s) is anchored on Nationalism.

    Traditional Fascism being based “merely” on Nationalism does have the capacity to inspire their people to such massive levels of cold sociopathic violence against entire groups of people as ethno-Fascism does.

    Or, more in general, extreme racists are far more irrationally violent than mere thieves.


  • It’s a pretty standard technique of ethno-Fascists: the Zionists, just like the Nazis did, claim to represent an entire ethnicity and then cast any criticism of them and their ultra-racist Genocide as being criticism of that ethnicity they claim to represent.

    And this is hardly the only propaganda technique Zionists and Nazis have in common: most of the tricks the Zionists use are pretty much Nazi shit with just the names of the ethnicities, places and nations replaced, down to how a lot of what the Zionists claim about Palestinians in Gaza being pretty much what the Nazis claimed about the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.




  • One of the first things they teach you in Experimental Physics is that you can’t derive a curve from just 2 data points.

    You can just as easilly fit an exponential growth curve to 2 points like that one 20% above the other, as you can a a sinusoidal curve, a linear one, an inverse square curve (that actually grows to a peak and then eventually goes down again) and any of the many curves were growth has ever diminishing returns and can’t go beyond a certain point (literally “with a limit”)

    I think the point that many are making is that LLM growth in precision is the latter kind of curve: growing but ever slower and tending to a limit which is much less than 100%. It might even be like more like the inverse square one (in that it might actually go down) if the output of LLM models ends up poluting the training sets of the models, which is a real risk.

    You showing that there was some growth between two versions of GPT (so, 2 data points, a before and an after) doesn’t disprove this hypotesis. I doesn’t prove it either: as I said, 2 data points aren’t enough to derive a curve.

    If you do look at the past growth of precision for LLMs, whilst improvement is still happening, the rate of improvement has been going down, which does support the idea that there is a limit to how good they can get.



  • Same principle as a gyroscope: a turning wheel will tend to stay perpendicular or parallel to the direction of the gravity vector because if it starts tilting away from such orientation there’s a force that pushes it back.

    Also works better with bigger wheels (if I remember it correctly the effect is related to spinning momentum).

    I was pretty surprised when learning Physics and they show us how to derive the formula for that (which I totally forgot since that was over 3 decades ago).

    Edit: Actually the gyroscopic effetc is just a part of it. See this article


  • “Family friendly UI” is “ultra-advanced” stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)

    There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I’m just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.

    That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn’t really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn’t even seem to have the concept of a user.



  • That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).

    Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.

    It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern “media library” interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).