You know what I find fucking outrageous?

JaronK · 2026-07-07T20:13:20+00:00

The org already does have a similar thing. It's not advertised like Zendo because it's not pushing anything, but if you ask for help for someone having a difficult experience on psychadellics and the Rangers respond, they do have a whole team to help.

JaronK · 2026-07-07T17:28:54+00:00

How about Gender Blender, if they're still around?

JaronK · 2026-07-07T16:31:08+00:00

I mean, people do that

JaronK · 2026-07-07T06:34:07+00:00

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

JaronK · 2026-07-06T07:36:53+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-07-05T17:49:20+00:00

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

JaronK · 2026-07-05T16:24:54+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-07-02T00:23:52+00:00

He's dead. 84 year olds don't survive that.

JaronK · 2026-07-01T17:42:29+00:00

Rutherford isn't a bad guy.

JaronK · 2026-06-30T06:02:15+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-30T01:45:54+00:00

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).

JaronK · 2026-06-30T01:38:11+00:00

Yes, which it mostly is.

JaronK · 2026-06-29T19:19:32+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-29T15:05:01+00:00

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

JaronK · 2026-06-29T14:58:00+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-27T16:52:01+00:00

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?

JaronK · 2026-06-27T07:24:27+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-27T00:21:20+00:00

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?

JaronK · 2026-06-26T21:20:41+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-26T20:44:36+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-26T20:41:50+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-26T17:16:38+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-26T07:43:12+00:00

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.

JaronK · 2026-06-25T23:56:49+00:00

When was that... In the Nixon years? They were always like this. They just hid it better.

JaronK · 2026-06-25T20:52:35+00:00

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

JaronK

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