kergonath

Strong Kaleidoscope vibes. I love it!

The nice thing is that once it’s been published, you can re-read it at any time, and then compare it with whatever book you want. I don’t see how the publication year is really relevant, books don’t just expire after 6 months.

Yes, coincidence. It was submitted for publication but rejected in 1863 (and then lost in a pile of papers and re-found in 1989). Anybody familiar with e.g. how most of Tolkien’s works were published posthumously won’t be surprised. Jules Verne wrote a lot, and he did not have a Christopher to comb through the boxes of papers he left. There are 200k pages of drafts, letters and manuscripts in a museum in Nantes, and not everything ended up there.

And I don’t see why the Internet is relevant: not everything that happened since the mid-1980s are internet-related conspiracies.

He’s a rational actor, acting in his own interest. This, along with the other arseholes in similar situations acting similarly, ought to result in optimal allocation of ressources. That is the philosophical foundation of capitalism.

Greed is good, remember?

Exactly what I was thinking reading through this. This is amazing and also frightening and hilarious. It’s like a deformed version of how normal groups of humans would operate. Very rules and process-oriented humans. I found the no-blame inquiry into chicken tossing that resulted in what is effectively written law particularly striking, and adorable, and depressing. And cute.

> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand.

This does not mean that they would necessarily subsidise consumer demand. They may be very happy to sell palette-loads of GPUs to datacenter and large corporations.

Polymarket is very unreliable. People believe it because of survivor bias: they heard about all times when it turned out to be right, often associated with insider trading. You never hear about the thousands times it was wrong.

Yes, perpetual wars can be used as a tool of domestic control. The benign use is the rally around the flag effect. More harmful is using them as justifications to do anything without oversight. It’s one of the patterns shown by the vast majority of dictatorships and totalitarian governments. One of the aspects of fascism in Umberto Eco’s definition.

Someone posted and other people upvoted. But don’t worry, it will get flagged and drop out of the front page soon enough.

Le Pen is more or less dead politically. The RN is currently twisting itself into knots because they want to use the anti-government protests but are still supposed to be about law and order.

> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?

Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.

Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.

Indeed. I know it’s a lazy way out because I don’t have to assume anything about the actual correctness of either, given that they are famously incompatible in the details.

But as a physicist I have no illusion that any of our theories are actually true. They are all models that help us making sense of an unimaginably complex universe.

I cannot stop fidgeting with the crown. This thing is addictive.

My iPhone did the same (as your Android). I am not sure I like it either, because I tend to listen to very different styles of music in my headphones and in my car. Anyway, it’s actually the car that tells the phone to start playing when it is connected. I just disabled it. It’s not an iOS versus Android thing.

Both cannot be “exactly correct” at the same time. And most likely, neither are.