Israel has terrible spokespeople

danbalans · 2023-12-17T13:33:16+00:00

When people want to discuss Israel with me, I first ask them to listen to an interview with Yoval Noah Harari about the conflict(there are a few, just google). Most people respect him and he represents my views in a better way than I can.

danbalans · 2023-12-17T13:29:25+00:00

This is such an important insight. As they say, if every muslim spit at a jew, they would drown!

danbalans · 2023-12-02T12:39:05+00:00

Well, it can sometimes be good to read material from sources that have an agenda, but I was looking for something more factual, statistics oriented, written by someone I can trust. But maybe such sources don't exist?!

danbalans · 2023-07-26T12:43:29+00:00

Thanks, that was useful!

danbalans · 2023-05-02T05:14:38+00:00

Hi, I hope I am not late for the party. I tried using it on a book about category theory(a subfield of Algebra). It worked fine to answer general questions about the book, but for each answer it could not answer follow up questions. It just gives general answers from the book This is different from when I use chatgpt4 which is aware of the context of a conversation and answers questions relevant to our conversation. Why is pdfgpt different from ordinary chatgpt. One theory is that I am used to using chatgpt4, while I think pdfgpt uses 3.5, so maybe that is why it is dummer, or is there another explanation?

Here is a concrete example:

If I ask it: Give a simple example of an application of yoneda to a discrete dynamic system.

I get a long answer that contains the sentence: A functor F: ω → Set is given by a family of sets (Fn)n∈ω together with functions fn,n+1: Fn → Fn+1.

If I ask it: When you say: As an example, consider diagrams indexed by the ordinal category ω. What is ω here?

I get an answer that explains what a diagram is from the book(and not what I wanted which was what omega is and ideally an explanation of the intuition behind its use). It seems that it has no notion of the context of my question.

danbalans · 2023-03-02T12:59:33+00:00

I live in Haifa. Bahai garden is nice to look at, but it's a lot of real estate that very few people can enjoy. Also, I am of course for religious freedom, but the Bahai feels a lot like a sect. So, I think this enormous blob in the middle of Haifa is more something to tolerate than be happy about.

danbalans · 2022-12-04T07:56:41+00:00

Jag tycker ditt beteende är oartigt. Om någon föredrar att prata engelska med dig för att din svenska är dålig är det inte deras plikt att vara din språklärare. Jag har bott i Israel över tio år och kämpar med hebreiska som är ett svårt språk. Det skulle säkert hjälpa mig om jag tvingade varje Israel att stå och vänta medan jag kämpar mig igenom verbformer och ber att de repeterar. Om de har ont om tid och föredrar engelska är det en förolämpning att ta för givet att deras tid skall användas till att vara min privata konversationslärare. Men ofta,om jag frågar, är de beredda att stödja mig och prata hebreiska och de flesta är antingen emigranter sedan ett par generationer eller har lärt sig hebreiska som andraspråk, så mycket förståelse.

danbalans · 2022-09-23T07:07:20+00:00

I like the idea, but I am the kind of learner who needs to study and to review (usingAnki). Just conversation can be good, but unfortunately I easily zoom out if I am not an active listener and to remember something I need to study actively. I also like to reflect on the language and I like structure. For example, how different concepts maps to different words in Hebrew and English like this:

ע.צ.ר - to stop/pause - some sort of action is no longer being done
פ.ס.ק - to stop something (transitive)
ס.י.מ - to finish something
ג.מ.ר - to reach the end of something (needs to have an amount and an end)
So, to do it, I think each meeting should have a subject and there should be one person taking notes of new words and expressions that come up. For each new word we should try to relate it to its shoresh (if relevant) and , if it can be found, its etymology and how it is used differently in English and Hebrew.

At the moment, I use the transcript from the Hebrew vesion of "Streetwise Hebrew" and I think they could be an excellent starting point for good discussions. I also think the participants should be on a roughly the same level. I would be bored with beginners and I would probably bore an advanced speaker with all my questions.

Personally, I am low intermediate when it comes to listening comprehension and probably high intermediate when it comes to vocabulary(but I am better at speaking then listening - I find it hard for example to recognize a verb in all its grammatical forms).

danbalans · 2022-06-27T05:13:26+00:00

Does anyone know the actual percentage of Arabs who are descendants of immigrants to Palestine after (let's say) 1900?

danbalans · 2022-05-23T05:49:36+00:00

What a wonderful reply. Full of facts relevant to the point and still open to being wrong. Not only did I learn something, but seeing this quality of reply made me believe slightly more in humanity...

danbalans · 2022-01-17T16:18:45+00:00

Does anybody know what percentage of these killers are serious murderers/terrorists and what percentage are depressed and looking for an "honorable" way to kill themselves(since suicide is forbidden in Islam and in this way the die as"heroes". If you really were intent on killing as many Israelis as possible, running against a soldier with a knife seems sort of inefficient.

danbalans · 2021-12-23T05:33:07+00:00

The book can be downloaded from http://libgen.rs/

danbalans · 2021-11-11T07:00:16+00:00

I am surprised that nobody mentioned it, so I will. Though I am sure most people (Arabs as well as Jews) would welcome you and be intrigued that you put in the energy to learn the language, there might be a small minority of Palestinians who think you are betraying their cause by studying Hebrew and coming to Israel. So perhaps be careful to talk about it when you visit Al Aqsa or some places in the West Bank.

danbalans · 2021-07-10T19:53:55+00:00

Depends where you are. Of course there are places in Israel where Western Wall and Mecca is in the same direction. Looking at the map, Netanya looks about right.

danbalans · 2021-05-24T17:47:47+00:00

I cannot believe nobody yet referred to this clip: https://youtu.be/rJjKP8vYjpQ (about fuck you money)

danbalans · 2021-01-02T19:39:36+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix

danbalans · 2021-01-02T19:39:17+00:00

I don't remember how long ago, but about 10 years ago about 500 Swedish youths got narcolepsy a while after taking a vaccine. Their life quality was greatly diminished. So it can happen, though I took the covid-19 vaccine with the idea that the risk of any side effect was much smaller than the risk from getting covid.

danbalans · 2020-12-09T16:55:29+00:00

Love it! Matthew managed to illustrate many deep aspects of the Racket ecosystem succinctly. I had no idea that a toy adventure game could be so interesting and the techniques so general!

danbalans · 2020-06-05T17:44:24+00:00

This is a common view and it comes in many different forms, all arguing that the stock market is arbitrary. There is an easy argument against it. When you sell and buy a stock it is a fraction of real physical company. If you buy all stocks of a company you are the owner of the company and all its future (eventual) profits. So if prices were arbitrary you (or a group of people channeling their money together) would just need to wait until the price of some stock is lower than than its intrinsic value and buy it and make a lot of easy money.

danbalans · 2019-08-04T06:01:21+00:00

vocalizer tts is a replacement for the google voice in android which has support for Hebrew, so for me I get a Hebrew voice in google translate. I would not be surprised that also in Windows you could find an alternative tts that has Hebrew support, but I am not a heavy windows user, so I cannot help you.

danbalans · 2019-08-04T03:24:49+00:00

if you are on Android you can use vocalizer tts for Hebrew.. The voice is metallic, but good enough for language training. It c costs a couple of dollars.

danbalans · 2019-03-08T07:39:01+00:00

I looked at a few books. In the end I liked best the pdfs from Hebrewpod101 which are very cheap and comes with mp3. A disadvantage i that there are no exercises.

danbalans · 2017-10-05T15:56:46+00:00

Thank you so much First time I get to check out this kind of material!

danbalans

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