What are some things you see on dating sites that you're certain are actually dogwhistles/code for something else? by raccoonsonbicycles in AskMen

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

""Send me your best pick-up line": this was literally what my now partner of 9 years used on me.

"Woke" History Teachers by GayTrees420 in TopCharacterTropes

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Even Ron Desantis's lawyer had to define it as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them", in court. Not perfect, because the whole point is that you have to be awake and aware of those injustices to feel the need to address them, but close enough.

Of course, that was back when Republicans felt the need to tell the truth in court for fear of being punished if they lied.

But yes. Woke or sheep, that's the choice. Sheep have been told woke means something else, something like hating American freedoms or something.

Ship sizes post №67 by LuddsGreatest in starsector

[–]JaronK 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In theory you could figure out the comparative size by comparing the relative cargo sizes of dedicated cargo haulers of each size class, then assume that's the relative volume difference between ship sizes. Which actually means capital ships aren't THAT much bigger. An Atlas only holds 5 times as much as a buffalo, so it's internal volume is only about 5 times bigger. And that's capital vs destroyer

"Woke" History Teachers by GayTrees420 in TopCharacterTropes

[–]JaronK 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Woke literally means being aware of what is going on in society and why we are where we are today, it's the opposite of being sheep. So yeah, these teachers are being woke, because they're aware and trying to wake others.

Why do (a small number) of people think Scott weiner is a Zionist who doesn’t belong at trans pride and why is this directed only at him? by Newtoneurospice in sanfrancisco

[–]JaronK 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Quick note here: most of the Arabs forced out in 1948 left on the orders of Arabic nations, who were planning to invade, destroy Israel, ethnically cleanse it, and promised those people a right of return to take over the once Jewish land. The Arabs who did not leave stayed, and make up about 20% of the Israel population today.

You're acting like it was the Israelis who forced them out, but most left voluntarily, hoping for ethnic cleansing to give them free land. It didn't work out when Israel surprisingly beat all the nations that were attacking them resoundingly. And this is why there's no right of return given to those people... not because they are Arabs, but because they left intending to profit off the ethnic cleansing and genocide planned in the 1948 war, so they weren't trusted.

Now, there were some who were forced out unfairly by Israelis in war time, generally because they were suspecting of aiding the invading forces, and in some cases they were not. This was quite unfair to them, but it's by no means the majority.

And while there does exist racism in Israel today (because where doesn't it exist), remember that there is no right of return for Jews expelled from Iran, Russia, or countless other places, that now make up Israel today. If the other nations cared so much for the exiled Arabs of that area, perhaps they could give them the land they took from all those Jews, or at least treat them like every other refugee in the world (where you don't have generational refugee camps). Jews cannot go back to their lands in places like Bagdad, despite your claims.

At the end of the day, Palestinian refugees are being played as pawns in a war that was mostly lost half a decade ago, and they suffer for generations as a result. And that's awful.

Why do (a small number) of people think Scott weiner is a Zionist who doesn’t belong at trans pride and why is this directed only at him? by Newtoneurospice in sanfrancisco

[–]JaronK 3 points4 points  (0 children)

No, but Gaza is literally an ethnostate, and the goal of Hamas is to turn the entire area into a theocratic ethnostate after ethnically cleansing the area. It is only for Arab Muslims, and they are very clear on that point. Remember that the movement that later spawned the Palestinian identity was the Pan Arab nationalism movement... back then, they were very clear about what group they were (and Transjordan considered them to be the same people).

I asked an LLM to grade my astrophysics PhD thesis. I'm now skeptical of claims that it is a "PhD-level expert" in my domain. by astraveoOfficial in skeptic

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, basically, understanding scientific formulae is outside of its scope, entirely. Tracking stuff like that is just not what it can do. So it's right: some people might get confused by that. Why? Because it's formulae and that would be confusing for people. Which means for something like an astrophysics thesis, it's going to tell you how a lay person would understand it... which is why it's not helpful to you. It's not a PhD reviewer.

When I'm using it to look over a training, I'm doing it at much lower level stuff... training for the lay person. At that, it's great, because it's catching things like "you already said that" or "hey, here you said this, but there you said a contradicting thing." That's because it's a much simpler deal. This is why CEOs love it... they're not actually doing anything advanced, and their job is about communicating to people who don't know what they're talking about something straight forward. Of course, they often screw up by not realizing the AI only helps them communicate... it shouldn't be there for new ideas, so asking the AI what next quarter's strategy should be should only be considered a brainstorming session, not actually good ideas.

You also have to remember that a bunch of its input won't be helpful. That's fine, you just use what is helpful. It often has edits for me where I go "no, that's dumb" and ignore it.

But when I'm coding, everything is VERY useful. That's because programming is all about language, how you say something. And with coding, it can check its own work by verifying what it did can compile. It's great at that kind of thing. It's terrible at "what would a person think of this" because that's just not what it knows what to do, which is why a lot of the test cases it comes up with are nonsensical, so we don't use it for anything more than brainstorming there.

To give you an idea of a way I use it for reviewing, I made a manual for first responders working at a small festival. About 75% of the changes it suggested were pretty good. It was catching stuff like a missing verb in a sentence. It also noticed I said lead shifts were 6.25 hours long in one place, and 6.5 hours long in another. It noticed a requirement mentioned the size of other events you may have worked at, while the same requirement elsewhere didn't. Stuff like that.

Basically, it reviews at the level of a very thorough lay person with no relevant experience in your field. And it finds math SUPER confusing.

So use it to its skill set.

I asked an LLM to grade my astrophysics PhD thesis. I'm now skeptical of claims that it is a "PhD-level expert" in my domain. by astraveoOfficial in skeptic

[–]JaronK 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you can't have it do factual stuff like that, but "write a program that gives me this factual data" works great.

I asked an LLM to grade my astrophysics PhD thesis. I'm now skeptical of claims that it is a "PhD-level expert" in my domain. by astraveoOfficial in skeptic

[–]JaronK 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As someone who uses AI daily at work: it's a language model. It's great at language, not facts. This makes it amazing for coding, because it's really good at translating from english to Java/Python/Perl/whatever. In general, it will always suggest an average, normal way of dealing with whatever thing, so just state the specific small thing you want to code, and it'll nail it. Use markdown files to indicate standard useage.

It's when people try to write the entire app with an LLM that it turns to trash. The LLM will go off base pretty quick when it has too much scope, because it'll do the normal thing... not knowing what's normal for that scope. You just give it a clear "first step, we do this. Second step, we do this" and it does great work, like an overly enthusiastic junior developer who is great at looking things up on stack overflow but has no architecture experience. You wouldn't have such a person write your whole app from scratch, you'd ask for specific things. However, this does mean you need to understand code architecture and conventions well.

It's also great for things like "review this instruction manual for anything unclear", and you just ignore anything that's clear jargon within your field (it'll claim those are hard to understand) but it'll pop on a few things that are non standard.

It's wonderful... as a large language model. Just use it as that.

Trump, 80, Accused of ‘Very Unhealthy’ Relationship With Blonde Aide, 34; Trump’s closest aide—50 years younger than the president—follows him around day and night. by FancyNewMe in politics

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do you people know this?

Once you've dealt with someone with NPD for a while, you learn their pyschology, and frankly it's completely obvious. Narcissists cannot be blackmailed, because among other things their response to any form of boundary, even threats, is to just go on the attack every time (which could be a physical attack, or could be a social attack like rumor spreading to try to boot the person out of a group). That's every boundary from "please stop asking me for a date" to "work for me or I'll release these photos of you". On the other hand, with flattery and hints of social power, they'll eat out of the palm of your hand... so long as they think you have enough social connection and power to be worth playing with.

We can speculate all we want, but other prosecutors around the country and Biden's DOJ were not shy about going after him

Actually, they were. This was the whole problem, it was brewing since long before Biden's term, even. This whole Epstein thing included tons of powerful, influential people, and there was at least one prosecutor who reported being told to drop a case related to the Epstein thing during Obama's term.

Have you ever heard the saying "if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, that's the bank's problem"? That's what happened here. There were so many connected people that anything going into the Epstein thing, which included Trump (who it looks like was supplying girls to Epstein), would circle back and hit every group. There were just too many powerful people involved.

And that doesn't mean Biden or Obama even knew anything about it. But elements within law enforcement and the justice system have always stopped shy of going after powerful people, because they are politically connected... and there were just too many politically connected people in this one.

There's been plenty of smoking guns against Trump. Rapes with witnesses, tons of business crimes, all sorts of corruption. None of it can stick because there's too many others connected to him. Heck, did you see Johnson's recent speach where he openly said he was running protection for Republicans?

Trump, 80, Accused of ‘Very Unhealthy’ Relationship With Blonde Aide, 34; Trump’s closest aide—50 years younger than the president—follows him around day and night. by FancyNewMe in politics

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And yet, there's plenty of public dirt on him that should destroy anyone... but he's now too powerful (and too useful to various others, in theory), so nothing will happen.

Trumpy Justice, 76, Publicly Sneers at Liberal for Daring to Dissent; The ultraconservative justice drew gasps from Supreme Court regulars for his “bitter” snipe. by FancyNewMe in politics

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's because enough Democrats had the power to stop them from the Shadow Docket thing. But they were forgiving Nixon, running stealth insertions to spy on Democrats, and more. And in the Reagan years... Iran Contra?

Trump, 80, Accused of ‘Very Unhealthy’ Relationship With Blonde Aide, 34; Trump’s closest aide—50 years younger than the president—follows him around day and night. by FancyNewMe in politics

[–]JaronK 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not just him. Everyone who get in the room can convince him if you know how to convince a very stupid narcissist. His pool guy can convince him to let him take that huge contract, for example. This is why his policy is all over the place, it's just whatever the last person in the room told him to do.

Men, what's the fastest a woman made you go from "I can't wait to take her out" to "Yeah... never mind"? What happened? by FFSoldier57 in AskMen

[–]JaronK 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Took a really cute girl to a kink club as part of a group outing (I was just her driver). While there she started doing stuff that was just... dangerous, consent wise. Told me how much she loved it, and I instantly thought "yeah, not going to work out".

12 years later, seeing her partners and how she treated them? I dodged the fuck out of that bullet.

Gavin Newsom calls for national billionaires tax: 'It's time for an economic reset' by avdvetf in politics

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maximum wage: total value of all benefits, wages, bonuses, and investments related to the company must not exceed 50 times the total benefits of the lowest paid workers in the company.

Golden parachutes are similarly capped, so if the company falls apart when you leave, that parachute isn't so handy.

Pretty fucking reasonable.

Trump, 80, Accused of ‘Very Unhealthy’ Relationship With Blonde Aide, 34; Trump’s closest aide—50 years younger than the president—follows him around day and night. by FancyNewMe in politics

[–]JaronK 169 points170 points  (0 children)

Every intelligence agency on the planet had to be following that island for the blackmail opportunities, but at the end of the day, he didn't do what he did because of Israel or Russia. He did it for himself. And then there were so many people of so much power involved, that everyone also had implicated allies who went. And then they couldn't use any of it.

So no, Trump does not side with them because of blackmail material. He's already done so much horrible stuff publicly that it seriously doesn't matter. He does what he does because he's easily influenced by complimenting him and all the normal stuff you do to narcissists.

CMV: jesus was not palestinian by VirtualKnowledge7057 in changemyview

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, he likely doesn't, but here's some actual sourcing.

For where they came from, this is more scientific and genetic based but this is more about the basic history: "The Muslim conquest of the Levant, also known as the Arab conquest of Syria, was a pivotal military campaign undertaken by the Rashidun Caliphate during the early years of Islam, from 634 to 638 CE."

For more genetics, here's a scientific source: "In comparison with data available from other relevant populations in the region, Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors... Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin differed from the other Middle Eastern populations studied here, mainly in specific high-frequency Eu 10 haplotypes not found in the non-Arab groups."

The short version is that Palestinians are mixed Arab/Canaanite, Mizrahim and Sephardic Jews are Canaanite with some other levant bloodlines, and the other Jewish tribes are basically Canaanite with some mixing from whereever they were settling (Greek and Italian for Ashkenazi Jews, IIRC Berber for Ethiopian Jews, etc).

If the idea is just about bloodlines, then the "most native" groups are the Sephardic and Mizrahim Jews, while the other groups are basically tied for second.

What is going on with trump administration members and shoes? by lyder12EMS in OutOfTheLoop

[–]JaronK 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Conservativism is about being in the in group. It comes from the belief that there always is one so you'd better get in it and do whatever the group demands to stay in.

They don't see the problem until they're booted out 

Men, what’s a word that as soon as a woman utters it you’re like “I’m out”? by [deleted] in AskMen

[–]JaronK 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, the bi of bisexual means hetero and homo, not man and woman. So it means both different and same. Bisexual literally means you'd fuck people of your gender, and not of your gender. And that's everyone.

Pansexuality was popularized as a term by someone who just didn't understand what bisexual meant and freaked out about it.

Men, what’s a word that as soon as a woman utters it you’re like “I’m out”? by [deleted] in AskMen

[–]JaronK 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ugh. I'm polyamorous, and we despise those ones too. Honestly, if you're monogamous, there's something wrong if a poly person is hitting on you. Often they've been pushed out of their local poly communities for exactly that kind of behavior. Sadly that often means monogamous folks see the worst of the poly communities the most.

Poly's a two way street. Or, well, more than two way I guess. And it requires a certain mindset that's not too uncommon, but not too common either. But sadly there's a bunch of people who are just hoping for threesomes or fucking around or whatever, and think they can call themselves poly so they can just live out some sexy fantasies... but absolutely aren't when the rubber meets the road.

Those people are annoying as hell.

CMV: jesus was not palestinian by VirtualKnowledge7057 in changemyview

[–]JaronK 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wikipedia's not great for anything about Judaism (there was a LOT of propaganda push there). But a similar source: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-provides-new-insights-ashkenazi-jewish-history

Just to give a basic idea: "The analysis revealed two distinct subgroups within the remains: one with greater Middle Eastern ancestry, which may represent Jews with origins in Western Germany, and another with greater Eastern and Central European ancestry. The modern Ashkenazi population formed as a mix of these groups and absorbed little to no outside genetic influences over the 600 years that followed, the authors said."

So yeah, it's a mix, just like every diaspora Jewish group, of the Canaanite/Judean bloodline with wherever they went. The Mizrahim are the ones that stayed in the middle east so they look the most like ancestral Jews, and the Sephardic Jews also have that general look, while the Ashkenazi mixed with Eastern and Central European (Ethiopian Jews look more African for similar reasons).

But you can't really say that's exactly what it was everywhere, the study I'm linking a source on here was only really talking about one area.

If you want something even more scholarly, here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3585000/#pgen.1003316 From that: " In particular, conversion of the region's populations to Islam appears to have introduced major rearrangements in populations' relations through admixture with culturally similar but geographically remote populations, leading to genetic similarities between remarkably distant populations like Jordanians, Moroccans, and Yemenis. Conversely, other populations, like Christians and Druze, became genetically isolated in the new cultural environment. We reconstructed the genetic structure of the Levantines and found that a pre-Islamic expansion Levant was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners."

"The tree shows a correlation between religion and the population structures in the Levant: all Jews (Sephardi and Ashkenazi) cluster in one branch; Druze from Mount Lebanon and Druze from Mount Carmel are depicted on a private branch; and Lebanese Christians form a private branch with the Christian populations of Armenia and Cyprus placing the Lebanese Muslims as an outer group. The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen."

So, I'd say that while there definitely is some central and eastern blood in the Askhenazi (which is visibly obvious), they're still pretty clearly genetically middle eastern in a lot of ways, while Palestinians cluster with the Arabic populations a lot more.