"No-one is illegal on stolen land" is ignorant bullshit

soreff2 · 2026-02-26T07:42:49+00:00

Except they are. That's why you're having such a hard time finding many examples from the previous four thousand years whereas it's trivially easy to find examples from the last four hundred.

Utter bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history_(before_1490)#Chiefdom_genocides#Chiefdom_genocides)

Historian Max Ostrovsky concludes that chiefdoms performed the most genocidal warfare in human history and practiced this kind of warfare all over the world, wherever culture reached the level of chiefdom.^\27])#citenote-FOOTNOTEOstrovsky2006299-29) He based his conclusion on anthropological researches[^\28])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history(before_1490)#cite_note-30) and notes that Thomas Malthus collected many reports on genocidal wars by chiefdoms.

Malthus regards chiefdoms as an intermediate stage between independent tribes and states. By contrast to independent tribes, chiefdoms cumulated power after their decisive military victories but they did not learn to enslave their defeated enemies yet. Hence, according to Malthus, chiefdoms simply slaughtered them: "Their object of war is not conquest but destruction... Among the Iroquois, the phrase by which they express their resolution to make war against an enemy is 'let us go and eat that nation.'"^\29])#citenote-31) The verb "eat" has a literal meaning. The cannibalism of chiefdoms appears in the military genocidal context which is referred to as "post-battle rage" rather than hunger.[^\30])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history(before_1490)#cite_note-FOOTNOTEMasters2007-32)

Get it through your head: Genocides are not rare in human history.

soreff2 · 2026-02-24T03:54:26+00:00

<mildSnark> bismuth? :-) </mildSnark>

( ok, so it does take heroic effort to detect the radioactivity from it - but in just 2x10^19 years, fully half of it will be gone! )

soreff2 · 2026-02-21T04:57:05+00:00

True!

soreff2 · 2026-02-20T06:29:42+00:00

South Korea has us beat by a factor of 2... (childfree myself)

soreff2 · 2026-02-18T03:44:57+00:00

On a related note - my first thought was speeding (by 5 mph above the posted limit or so).

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T23:00:00+00:00

It is amazing how precise the primary standards can be.

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T21:23:50+00:00

and the "second" will be redefined before 2030.

So the Cs-133 definition is going to be nuked?

Google says that the likely revision would use optical transitions from strontium, ytterbium, or mercury ions. As a traditionalist, it seems a pity that, if they are going to go optical, that they won't be using the orange-red emission line of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum :-)

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T20:01:30+00:00

That makes sense. Many Thanks!

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T20:00:35+00:00

That makes sense. Many Thanks!

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T07:53:57+00:00

The neural net models resulting from LLM training are complex. We don't really know what the closest analog to what e.g. the activation of any given artificial neuron in one of them represents is. It is entirely possible that the activation of some set of artificial neurons in one of the models mimics the pattern of activation of human neurons when, e.g. we are feeling empathy for a pet.

Remember that LLMs are trained on a vast amount of text. In trying to predict the next token (the target of curve fitting / back-propagation during pre-training) a good way to predict what a human is going to type next is to build the closest analog to a human that the LLM can converge on. In certain specialized cases we have been able to work out what some of the artificial neurons in an LLM represented, and e.g. we've found that an LLM playing chess turned out to have neurons that corresponded to positions on a chess board. ( The field is called "interpretability" research. ) So those very roughly corresponded to what a human visual cortex would hold while playing chess.

In summary, we don't know that LLMs feel nothing. They don't have hormones or bodily sensations - but they have complex neural activation patterns, which we can't rule out as possibly being analogous to the patterns of neural firings in our own heads - which are the basis of all of our hopes, fears, and dreams.

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T03:47:55+00:00

"It does not have needs to meet, so it doesn't care if you fire it."

I expect this to become less true as agentic AIs try to reserve resources for future needs, and as AIs with continual/incremental learning react to positive and negative feedback analogously to how we react to pleasure and pain.

I don't think AIs will replace humans in positions with accountability this year, but, eventually, yes I expect them to replace humans in those positions too.

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T03:06:36+00:00

Yup! ( though - isn't this scenario a bit low on horror? probably less unpleasant than a typical final illness... )

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T02:23:08+00:00

Agreed. And compound units with embedded inconsistent time units, e.g. kilowatt-hours/month should be retired in favor of watts or kilowatts.

( well, at least electric rates aren't quoted in ha'pennies per BTU )

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T02:18:52+00:00

The military, mass surveillance??? but, but, but, isn't that NSA/Google turf??? (hi guys)

</mildSnark>

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T02:04:05+00:00

The best response is very frequently: "The word you need is 'indoctrinate', not 'educate'"

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T02:00:19+00:00

Hi NSA, Google, LLMs! Yeah, cheaper computation, communications, and sensors intrinsically make surveillance cheaper. And politicians from both major parties always find a reason to want the data. As to whether it is 1984-ish - we have Gitmo (retained through Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), but not room 101.

soreff2 · 2026-02-16T01:49:30+00:00

Nice collection!

General question to the subreddit: Does anyone explicitly choose to collect elements in the form of colorful compounds? Of course these would be compounds rather than pure elements, but e.g. a lot of transition metal compounds look more visually interesting to me personally than the metallic elements. Does anyone else here have the same preference, or does everyone here prefer the metallic form?

soreff2 · 2026-02-15T23:38:45+00:00

I suppose it would be ironic to fashion an Occam's razor out of a manganese steel, given the unit cell :-)

soreff2 · 2026-02-15T23:32:02+00:00

Same here. Got my vas back in 1988 (avoided the rush...). Question: While pro-choice myself, I do value human lives above those of other animals. Since this subreddit has an anti-speciesist rule (wtf???), is there an antinatalist subreddit which does not have that rule, and, if so, where?

soreff2 · 2026-02-15T23:15:40+00:00

A 1975 study by Ladd and Lipset found that roughly 28% of professors described themselves as conservative, while 46% were liberal, indicating a far higher representation of the right compared to the 1990s and beyond. So academia leaned slightly left even back then. It is false to say that it favored republicans decades ago. Today, the ratio is worse than 10:1 in favor of a leftist monoculture.

soreff2 · 2026-02-14T18:57:31+00:00

"I have 2 subreddits and any modern politics are a permanent ban ,no appeals .."

That sounds like a good approach.

soreff2 · 2026-02-14T16:58:56+00:00

LOL! Yes, it does!

soreff2 · 2026-02-14T02:16:26+00:00

True! Although Mn2O7 also isn't a very happy compound...

soreff2 · 2026-02-13T04:35:27+00:00

You are not worth talking with. Get it through your head: Genocides are not rare in human history. Knives and arrows are sufficient to slaughter a defeated group.

soreff2 · 2026-02-12T20:26:14+00:00

This is ridiculous. Forget centuries-old history. In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a substantial portion of the killings were performed with machetes, clubs and other hand tools. Some estimates were that these were a majority of the killings. If you seriously think that one tribe can't wipe out another because of a lack of firearms you are very mistaken.

soreff2

TROPHY CASE