Interesting. Are hard, clear fruit spirits (usually double-distilled straight off the fruit mash and not treated or mixed after) also called Snaps in Sweden?
Anyway, I can warmly recommend drinking those after dinner, neat, as well. I like plum best, but Williams Christ (a type of pear) is a well-deserved classic, too.
pbmonster
3d ago
I am vociferous in my endorsement
That's enough for me to give it a try! After 15 minutes of research and several false starts, I've now settled on the Zelsky translation. I found an ePub with 2334 chapters. Does that sound about right, or do you recommend something different?
pbmonster
3d ago
I've only learned about xianxia through this thread, and I'm intrigued. Have you read "Cradle" by Will Wight? Is that "western xianxia"? How does it compare to Reverend Insanity?
I'd call Cradle "power fantasy slop", but reading stuff like that is my guilty pleasure. Maybe I should give the "eastern OGs" a try...
pbmonster
3d ago
Yeah, I would. Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines is easier to defend. You can argue it was more about preventing your common adversary from selling than your good ally from buying. You can argue you're just making sure your good ally is following the agreed-upon embargo (with the stern implication that you both knew that this ally was always in danger of smashing the defect button if the economy got rough enough).
Then, of course, you can also always pretend that it was the work of an Ukrainian crack squad, that they (tragically, really) slipped their leash, and that there's really not much you could have done to stop them in the first place. Your intelligence counter-parties and the political elements they advise will see through that, but they'll understand. Support it even, maybe. The public won't see through the lies, and if they do, they'll have forgotten all about it a week later.
Germany imported less from Russia in 2022 than they do from the US now, and it caused a minor energy crisis and cost spikes when they stopped importing Russian gas. They had to build terminals to receive US LNG. Or am I wrong about that?
No, absolutely! But all those new floating gas terminals are agnostic to who's LNG carrier docks and delivers gas. Any country with gas liquidation tech can now sell to Germany - and that's most of the counties with gas wells.
Specifically, the US doesn't operate a single large LNG carrier. Those are built/owned/flagged/operated by third parties, and they can just pick up gas for Germany from somewhere else.
Gas delivery by LNG carrier is a mature global market. Japan, South Korea and India have historically imported a lot of their energy needs this way. Now the EU does, too.
pbmonster
4d ago
the United States can probably credibly threaten to throttle German and thus European domestic arms production if they so choose
Not by LNG exports, at least not without significant direct embargoes. Qatar, Norway, Algeria, Canada, ect. all ship a lot of gas, and would supply gladly. The US could increase global gas prices by not selling to anyone, but the Germans would spend too keep their at least their MIC running. And at the end of the day the US really likes selling gas...
No, if the US really wanted to put the hurt on the EU, they could stop selling them chips and sensors.
But I don't think those steps are very realistic, measures like that would be unimaginably antagonistic.
pulling out of Europe means that the Europeans will have to arm themselves further, which might actually prove fairly lucrative to the United States.
If that's your goal, you need to pull out very, very carefully.
The only reasons the Germans are begrudgingly buying any F-35s and FA-18s in the first place is that the US isn't certifying new EU aircraft for B-61 delivery, and the non-French EU really wants to be part of NATOs Nuclear Sharing program. If the US pulls its nukes from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, I don't see those guys buying American aircraft ever again.
And what else do you want to sell them? Outside of an actual defense emergency (where they would absolutely buy everything on offer - as Poland is doing right now, because they correctly perceive the situation to be an emergency already), they are more than capable of arming themselves with domestic systems, and would do so for now pertinent strategic reasons - and a whole lot of spite, of course.
pbmonster
4d ago
There are no dense, cheap cities in the First World.
Ah, come on! First and most famous example is Berlin - it's still relatively cheap today, when compared internationally, but it was fantastically cheap for 25 years.
Germany is actually full of examples like that. Dresden is following the Berlin playbook, and Leipzig is the new cheap/dense/hip city for now. There's also Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Essen, but those are cheap for a reason (they're ugly dumps, but they are dense - and there are jobs there, so they aren't cheap just because the region is totally economically destitute).
There's also Vienna, which is an interesting case, because Vienna has cheap housing mostly because the city owns tens of thousands of apartment units and is actively using its market position to push down prices. Austria also has a couple of other cities that are cheap and dense, and so does Italy, but going in detail isn't that useful if nobody has ever heard of them.
My conclusion is that you can have cheap and dense Tier 1 cities if you expend some effort, and there's great value in boosting your Tier 2 cities.
pbmonster
9d ago
There's probably also
- There's a decent chance that any medical event they would be on the hook for happens at a foreign hospital, which, on average, is going to be a whole lot cheaper than a US hospital.
For reference, $500/mo for health insurance is very expensive even in HCOL and high-GDP-p.c. countries like Switzerland, Liechtenstein or Norway.
my intuition is that one could train a model with lots of sheet music-audio file pairs and then feed it the latter to generate the former
Yeah, that's the way. Once you run out of training data, you can probably also do self learning by transcribing music without available sheet music, transforming the generated notation into sound through a synthesizer, compare the results (this needs another model) and then try again. Once you run out of music, you can continue with synthetic data (since current models can already make fresh sound files of high enough quality).
The devil is in the details, of course, e.g. current software transcription aids work much better for solo piano than for any other instruments (there not many different ways to modify the sound of a note on a piano). Guitars, on the other hand, are notoriously hard to transcribe. They kind of make up for it by having tabs available for a million songs, so at least there's a lot of training data. But the relationship between tabs and final sound is much less straight forward than for piano.
Can it output sheet music? Can it output notation? Part of the problem is the synthesizer isn't that great. Ideally it would output notation is something like Frescobaldi.
No, and it fundamentally can't right now. Those models are trained on raw music, not on notation. During creation, the model isn't "composing" like a human would, in the same sense that an image model isn't actually sketching, drawing and painting - the final image is directly condensed from the diffusion process.
But this is clearly the next step in the value chain. Once audio creation models can input and output notation, they will completely change the creative process - in the same way that video models will become valuable once they can input and output an entire 3D scene into/from Blender. But this step is difficult, there is orders of magnitude less training data in all those cases (you need specific sets of music + notation, video + 3D models, ect.
Music is, of course, simpler than 3D in this aspect. You can run AI audio creation through the usual transcription aids or quickly rebuild a beat you like in Abelton by ear/hand.
pbmonster
11d ago
Cut off the moldy parts, eat the rest.
This is true for a large number of types of food, but bread is not one of them. Mold on bread goes deep, fast, and eating the deep mycelia is quite toxic.
pbmonster
17d ago
I'm not saying that BP is harmless, but constructing a bomb for terrorism purposes using it instead of modern explosives probably requires a much different design.
Depends on what the goal and/or target of the terrorist is. Is there an effective difference between dozens and hundreds of causalities? How important is successfully evading law enforcement before and after?
A relatively small number of standard pipe bombs or nail bombs - each containing a couple of pounds of black powder - are devastating in crowds, i.e. the classics in modern terrorism: packed bars, Christmas markets, street events/demonstrations. The chance to escape after is higher than with a truck attack, and the chance to evade detection before is higher than with most more modern explosives.
But yes, if you want the headlines to contain "hundreds" or "thousands", you don't want an empty truck, and you don't want black powder.
pbmonster
18d ago
See, I'm opposed to China dominance- because they're dirty commies.
Can you elaborate? Is your problem their lack of a democratic process, the CCP itself and how they govern their territory by degree, or something else?
Because if you're on the streets in Shenzhen and talk to people, if you deal with the average company there, they're all incredibly capitalist. People work for the best salary they can get, switch companies often, and found startups that buy parts and sell product directly on the open market. The average Chinese city dweller isn't a communist at all.
And if a government allows its people to get to that state - is the government communist in any meaningful way?
pbmonster
22d ago
Key revisions:
Allright, that's impressive.
I assume this uses a scratch pad for train-of-thought style arguing with itself, including the searches it does? Does it give you access to that?
pbmonster
22d ago
Plenty destructive... but that's all besides the point, the original argument was about jailbroken LLMs helping talentless death cults. Danger of knowledge, ect., which I argue isn't an issue for nukes. The knowledge isn't the hard part.
pbmonster
22d ago
When 90% of Europe’s population died during the Black Death, it reset Malthusian traps and created vacant niches for exploration
Did you feed it that number, or did it hallucinate that on its own? If it's the latter, hallucinations are continuing to be a concerning problem, and I still can't trust a single word a LLM produces.
pbmonster
22d ago
No, gun-type uranium bombs are almost trivial to make if nobody stops you from getting uranium and gas centrifuging it. They never even tested them before dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima, because absolutely no-one had any doubts that the thing would go off.
I'm even more pessimistic. There's no decent "human hand" robots, anywhere, at any price point. Drop the weight requirements, because you'd be glad to stationary mount it? No product. Drop the strength requirement, because you'd be glad to 'just' have the dexterity and the tactile sensitivity? No product.
AI design assistance or not, it's a surprisingly difficult hardware problem. And that's a billion jobs, right there.
pbmonster
22d ago
Just make comments for each option and tell people to upvote the one they use? That's how the literature subreddit voted on "book of the year/decade/GOAT" 10 years ago.
I suspect vandalism is low enough (and people follow instructions well enough - on most other sides you'd get people voting which they like best) here that this might still work.
pbmonster
24d ago
replace every year at least. there is no such thing as a long-term coated non-stick pan.
I disagree. I'm very happy with my PTFE non-stick pans, I use them daily and they last longer than 5 years.
I take special care with them (no metal utensils ever, not hotter than 150°C ever (meat goes into the cast iron), never in the dishwasher, no pan scrubber ever, not stacked in the pan rack), and as a result the coating is completely intact. My theory is that the coating starts to degrade in patches starting from a scratch/nick - so if you never have a scratch, the coating stays intact.
I'm not sure brands make a huge difference, but my pans are all from WMF and in the low 3 digit price range.
pbmonster
24d ago
A quick hack you can use is to instruct it to use "radio etiquette", and not to respond with a full answer until you finish a transmission by saying 'over'.
The way it is coded, it will be compelled to respond every time you "send" it a prompt (which happens automatically when you pause), but you can instruct it to only respond with e.g. a single '.' (which it will read, but that's only one syllable) until you say 'over'.
Funnily enough, it's role playing conditioning will automatically also result in it saying 'over' after every answer.
pbmonster
24d ago
it would cut against the idea of any kind of 'Christian exceptionalism', where male-female monogamy is a unique Christian innovation, rather than a Christian re-statement of a universal principle
This idea is a bit foreign to me, are there people actually arguing that?
Monogamous marriages are much older than Christianity. Ancient Greek and Roman societies universally had monogamous marriages (in the sense that marriage was between one husband and one wife, and men were not allowed to have concubines living in their household). The entirety of the old testament describes pretty much only monogamous marriages for commoners (and royals pretty much did what they wanted anywhere, anytime - including in Christian kingdoms much later).
The Euros keep failing them in large numbers in their road-worthiness inspections at around 4 years. Depending on the exact country, it seems 20%-30% have "substantial deficits" which require major repair work. Worst EV in class, every single time.
The biggest problem is certainly brake rust from under-use (which you can mediate yourself, and Tesla could probably fix that by software update), but the reports I've seen also all mention suspension problems and faults with the headlight systems.
I wanted a used Model 3, but major repairs at 4 years is kinda scary. I've driven my Toyotas all well past 15 years of age, and I'm not confident the early generations of the Model 3 will get anywhere close to that.
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