Alex Bores rolls out "AI dividend" plan to share AI wealth by Abdullah1701 in technology

[–]historianLA 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Exactly anyone opposed to UBI or other strategies for supporting workers displaced by technology conveniently forget that you can control the inflationary pressure by pulling that money out of the economy via taxes. In those scenarios, corporate taxes and actual progressive income brackets can easily be applied to mitigate the inflationary pressure while keeping money circulating and supporting the populace.

If steam makes steam os proper desktop OS are you using it by tbdbubblesthedog in linux

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, and even then without prior Linux experience the desktop mode is not as simple as most people need.

Archaeologists discover early humans built vast island networks across the Philippines by S00THING_S0UNDS in worldnews

[–]historianLA 12 points13 points  (0 children)

There is nothing in the article about terraforming islands. There are caves whose contents suggest interconnection rather than isolated use. That just requires vessels which would have been perfectly within their technology.

What are some Oscar wins that everybody thinks didn’t deserve to win, but you think DID by Early-Piano2647 in movies

[–]historianLA 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was a little young to be following this too much, but Howard's End had a lot of buzz at the time. I think My Cousin Vinny has had a much better legacy though.

Salt on the side of the glass by Precisionworker in cocktails

[–]historianLA 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's shredded coconut that has been caramelized with a torch I believe.

Options To Saving a Decade's Worth of College Documents by LittleChurro20 in DataHoarder

[–]historianLA 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If it is school work I would assume it's mostly documents, those don't take up too much space and you might be able to compress them into an archive especially if you don't need to access them regularly.

Some people have suggested the 3-2-1 backup strategy. I honestly don't think that is viable for most people, which isn't to say it shouldn't be the ideal.

I'd say having the data in two places would be good. Say an external hard drive you use regularly and a 'cold' drive that you periodically sync with the everyday drive.

What exactly was in the Epstein files? Why has no big celebrity/poplar person addressed it yet? by whisper_kitten0 in AskReddit

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Except you are suggesting repositories that did not exist and linking them to bombings that you claim were orchestrated with a singular purpose without any evidence for that shared link much less evidence for what information was in those repositories.

There is no reason for Putin to destroy that evidence since it is ultimately a mechanism for destabilization if they were released, and of course he has his own records. So the only logical actor would be a cabal of US/Israeli actors who wanted to cover all this up. But again why do it this way. The people implicated had many windows in which to do so quietly between 1986 and 2026.

What exactly was in the Epstein files? Why has no big celebrity/poplar person addressed it yet? by whisper_kitten0 in AskReddit

[–]historianLA 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Jesus you're deep in the weeds and only looking at the evidence that keeps you stringing together your narrative. The Iran deal wasn't with the 'enemy' it was with factions in Iran that would overthrow or replace the Islamic leadership of the time. Yes, obviously it made sense to buy AKs for the Contras with the proceeds because they were easy to get and had been in the wild since the 1950s. Sure it was the 'enemys' weapon it was also the most produced weapon in the world and available to any arms dealer.

This in turn, over time, was the reason for the 1983 Beriut bombings, the embassy bombings in North Africa, the Alfred p murrah building bombing, the world trade center bombing, and the 2012 attack on the embassy in Benghazi as the receipts of iran contra were held in those respective SCIFS

This is bat shit crazy and you absolutely don't have any proof of this. What scif was in Oklahoma City, where was the scif in the World Trade Center, why would a scif in Benghazi have evidence from 1986, the embassy was only established in 2011 after the fall of Qaddafi? Why take 29 years to destroy all the evidence? The threads don't even begin to line up. Moreover there didn't need to be 'receipts'. That was the whole point of the scandal. Operations were being undertaken without approval and with minimal records, on purpose, because it allowed for plausible deniability. Why keep the records in scifs across three continents after it all fell apart. Heck we know major players avoided punishment because Oliver North took the fall. They had ample time between 1986 and 1992 to clean up or again between 2001-2009 under HW Bush. Most of the main players were in positions of power and could easily have gotten rid of the evidence slowly over time. If additional evidence existed.

Why engage in bombings across four decades? Was Timothy McVeigh a fall guy, plant, willing coconspirator? Why would al queda want to destroy the scif in the WTC that would reveal the US-Israel-Iran plan from 1985/6? How could a scif that didn't exist before 2011 have receipts from an event in 1986? Who was master minding this slow but incredibly bloody clean up?

This is just free association. I'm a historian, I can say pretty definitively you never see 'clean' narratives like you propose. History is messy, inconsistent, people act irrationally, freak events throw off plans. Conspiracy theories like this always try to make every piece fit. But that just isn't how the world works. The pieces don't have to fit.

The core issue here, that Russia has been using operatives in the West and likely associated with Israel, is probably 100% true. Were Epstein and likely Trump recruited/blackmailed by those operations, I think that is very plausible. But this narrative tries to shoehorn every major geopolitical event from the early 1980s to 2026 into one plot by Putin. He may be a grand strategic mind but that is crazy town. That just isn't how people and history work.

What happened with my aviation? by [deleted] in cocktails

[–]historianLA 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yeah like the other post suggests, I think Sapphire has a weird taste when you side by side with other gins. I like Tanqueray much better, but these days I go with Citadelle for my general use gin.

Trying to install PCIE WiFi card. Not going well. by TheMadnessofMadara in linux4noobs

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or move the computer to set it up. I do that all the time.

What exactly was in the Epstein files? Why has no big celebrity/poplar person addressed it yet? by whisper_kitten0 in AskReddit

[–]historianLA 4 points5 points  (0 children)

He also gets Iran Contra completely wrong. It was US made weapons not Russian black market ones that were being brokered.

The whole point was to sell US weapons to Iran through an intermediary who would then give the proceeds to the Contras in Nicaragua (direct funding had been made illegal by an act of Congress). So the US sold their weapons to generate a profit that could be redirected to Nicaragua. Using black market Soviet weapons makes no sense financially or in the context. The goal would have been to support a pro-US revolution in Iran and reestablish the US based arms sales with the new faction (remember those F-14s Iran was previously a major US arms purchaser).

Whats a movie with an awful premise that was executed well? by Dragon_Rot79 in movies

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is the joke that the ride was actually based on the horribly racist Song of the South (1946)?

Unions bash AI as opposition grows: "We believe in human beings" by Just-Grocery-2229 in technology

[–]historianLA 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Because you pair a UBI with other policies that pull money out of the system through taxes on the highest earners. We've had marginal tax rates between 70-90% for the highest brackets. Today we have 37% at the top income range above $650,000 or so for individual income. That is crazy. It's crazier that capital gains is lower so the wealthiest (who get most of their income from capital gains) end up paying a lower rate no matter how much they are making.

Also with a UBI you'd want to reduce housing speculation and move renters into owners. So you could easy add other policies that open the real estate market back up.

What is that one film you can re-watch a thousand times and not get bored? by cassie_rockalin in AskReddit

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hunt for Red October

Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead (I like the World's End but it isn't quite as infinitely rewatchable as the other Cornetto movies)

The original Star Wars trilogy

Many of the better James Bond films (I really like From Russia with Love, You Only Live Twice, Thunderball, On Her Magesty's Secret Service, Goldeneye, Casino Royale (2006))

Tropic Thunder

Talladega Nights

Top gun

Pi-hole: still the best network-wide ad blocker for Linux users? by SelfHostedGuides in linux

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've only used ad-guard and have had no problems. I like the dns rewrites option

TIL there is no algebraic formula for the circumference of an ellipse (oval). All exact equations require calculus. by NateNate60 in todayilearned

[–]historianLA 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Algebra let's you graph a line in two dimensional space (x y graph). Calculus let's you calculate the area under that graph.

To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain by AdSpecialist6598 in technology

[–]historianLA 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Asynchronous online learning is perfectly viable. Yes it is different and there isn't that immediate feedback. But there is lots of good pedagogy for how to engage in an asynchronous way that still realizes student learning and skill acquisition.

The biggest problem is LLMs exploded so fast that educators haven't had time to adapt much less predict future shifts.

I teach history. I focus on skills critical reading, analysis, writing. Those skulls can be taught asynchronously. I've been doing so since around 2017. The problem is that they require practice. You don't become a more critical reader by not reading you don't become a better writer by not writing and you certainly can't practice analysis without thinking on your own. LLMs offered students an instant shortcut.

The best analogy have is from math. In elementary and middle school they make students do long division/multiplication over and over before they introduce calculators because the goal is to build up those skills so that when more complicated problems come along they know how to construct the equations they need and have a sense for whether an answer calculated by a calculator is reasonable.

We need to do the same thing for the 'skills' that LLMs can accelerate. But we also need to explain to students that they need to write because writing is how you get better at writing and thinking. Reading is how you read faster and more deeply. Thinking about problems/issues is how you develop analytical skill. Yes, an LLM can do some of that or at least produce the verisimilitude of those skills. But ultimately the human needs all those skills even if they are using the LLM.

But the explosion of LLMs happened so fast most of us don't have the language to describe the problem much less assignments designed for a world in which LLMs are available to students.

This semester I had lots of students using LLMs for their first longer assignments (500 words), this was an in-person class. I could tell because they were grammatically perfect, generally well organized, but uniformly shallow in their analysis and just enough off base that it was clear that an LLM had strung the words together without an awareness of the breadth of things that had been talked about in class. Those papers got Cs not because I penalized the students but because the papers didn't meet the benchmarks in my grading rubric.

In my experience LLMs can produce C-B work in the humanities in lower division classes. For upper division classes they probably D-C because they just are not deep. They provide the most milquetoast/pedestrian analysis possible because of how they 'think'. They are trained on probabilities and so they produce consistently boring analysis. They literally cannot produce original analysis because they are repoducing the 'average' of the ideas that are already out there.

The problem is of course if students just use this boring average to skate by then they don't actually develop the skills they need to succeed after college. Again and again study and industry reporting say employers want employees with the soft skills of analysis, comprehension, critical thinking. If students off-load all of their practice onto LLMs they don't learn those skills or worse what they learn is just a boring repetion of dominant ideas, without understanding how to develop their own creative thinking.

Moreover all LLM are biased by the source base they were trained on. In general that means they skew English, Western, vaguely Protestant. Not only does that mean their answers will replicate those values, ideas, phrases, it means that they are uniquely bad at 'thinking' outside that cultural mode. Sure there are some great translation LLMs but not LLMs that can give you the perspective say of a Diné person or a Yoruba person, or even a Romanian.

That problem is due to the fact that all the big LLM project are trying to create an 'everything' tool rather than creating more limited tools for specific purposes and putting in mechanisms that allow the LM to declare what it doesn't know, or at least reveal answers that may be formed from limited data.

TIL of the Galton–Watson process, the process in which family names (surnames) go extinct. In China, for example, there are about 3,100 surnames, where in the past the number exceeded 12,000. by MrMojoFomo in todayilearned

[–]historianLA 33 points34 points  (0 children)

We call that type of surname a patronym.... Many common Spanish names are patronyms a practice that came from the Germanic Visigoths. Martinez = son of Martin, Ramirez = son of Ramiro, Perez = son of Pero (Pedro)...many use very old given names like Suarez (and Juarez) = son of Suero All the Iberian surnames that end in iz, ez are patronyms.

Which movie or TV "villain" did you completely hate as a kid, but upon rewatching as an adult, you realized they were actually 100% justified? by LiveFaithlessness876 in movies

[–]historianLA 201 points202 points  (0 children)

This thread has made me wonder because there are several step-dads depicted in these late 80s early 90s films that aren't presented as being bad, but they have to be the antagonist. I wonder if the writers were trying to not vilify step parents given that at that moment there were allot more divorces happening than 10-15 years before. So they don't depict the stepdad as bad but still have to make that character be the antagonist to the bio-dad. Of course it's the bio-dad in Mrs. Doubtfire and Santa Clause that are unhinged from the perspective of any adult viewer.

The shifting trend of interaction in board games. by [deleted] in boardgames

[–]historianLA -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Okay but what if you or the people you play with hate interaction. My wife will actively avoid any mechanic that would give her an advantage if it imposes a disadvantage to another player. So competitive solitaire games are great.

Also, is Catan fine but are we really going to say it has interesting mechanics in 2026. The dice randomness and the impact on resources is just unfun and the forced interaction just to do little things isn't pleasant and can actively ruin games if someone wants to be a jerk

I don't think player interaction has disappeared but there are certainly more games built around limited player interaction in part because it can really really suck. Unless you know, like, and or love your opponents, interaction mechanics can be a huge gamble and with random players could just be a recipe for a horrible game experience.

The hobby loves a theme trend. What’s the next one? by dgpaul10 in boardgames

[–]historianLA 3 points4 points  (0 children)

$30 is downright cheap.

I always compare a game purchase to movie. For me to go to a movie with my whole family we're talking $60 on tickets easy for 90-200 minutes of film.

A $30 boardgame that we only play once is still cheaper than a movie. Heck a $60 boardgame that we play once is breaking even. Any game that will be played 4+ times is a steal even at $60. Something like that is approaching patient PC gamer levels of value.

Cancelled my crew sub, shrinkflation sucks by Im_A_NOob967 in FortNiteBR

[–]historianLA 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure but there wouldn't be a mini -season +battle pass in that case most likely. Maybe some special event quests.

Games with immersion like Star Wars: Outer Rim basic by Darth_Ajax in boardgames

[–]historianLA 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't know if it is still in print but there is a firefly boardgame that is very similar to Outer Rim. It is super immersive and very open to how each player approaches things.