spiky_fungus
29d ago
Minor counter counter counterpoint
There is some minor hostility to Ukrainians in Poland. But it is far from widespread and that is after massive shock migration due to war.
Though if 4% of country would be imported from Syria/Libya/Turkey/Nigeria/Russia/China/etc within months then reaction would be much poorer then welcoming then minor hostility months/years later.
But I'm interested in hearing other European perspectives on this
From Europe, Poland to be more specific.
For me "American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be" is absolutely laughable position.
No, just because you can trace some Polish ancestry does not make you Pole. You have no genetic memory etc. You are welcome in my country but if you start talking in English (not knowing any Polish and having meme-level understanding of Polish culture) how you are Polish then I am surely not going to agree with you.
Just because your grandfather could say 10 words in Polish, 5 of them being curses does not make you Polish. If all your grandfathers and grandmothers were Polish but you lost language, lost culture that makes you white, not Polish. (though if someone wants to recover that, it is entirely welcome to do so and I would be happy to help if I would encounter such person)
I have quite high bar what I would expect before I would consider someone to be Polish. But at least in theory it seems possible to me for someone green/yellow/black/purple/German to become Polish. And there were cases of this happening.
And yes, specially for our resident SSman: many people with Jewish ancestry were Poles, some of them were Poles practising Jewish religion, for some of them they were distinguishable only by genealogy and surnamed. (some failed to do so or had completely distinctive cultural identify). Though nowadays it is extremely rare as German murdered millions of Poles and Jews after invading. And while under communist occupation many were kicked out. Or preferred to escape from communist paradise.
And we had and have Poles with German, Belarusians, Russian, Ukrainian ancestry. Maybe if you would look really hard you would find some Poles with other skin colours (note: I can easily find some prominent people with Polish citizenship which are yellow/black, this does not make them Poles).
spiky_fungus
29d ago
I haven’t seen any evidence of the former
murdering them in a terrorist attack targeting them seems to be at least a weak evidence
My brother in Christ, the 174th best coder on Earth is literally an LLM.
No, it is ranked as 175th in a specific ranking. That is with access to all analysis, answers of this existing questions. Solving question is distinctively easier if you seen the answer.
Make no mistake, LLM are much better at coding than I would predict 10 years ago. Decade ago I would laugh at anyone predicting such progress, and in fact I mocked any idea of AI generating code that is worth looking at. And trawling internet for such solutions is extremely powerful and useful. And ability to (sometimes) adapt existing code to novel situation still feels like magic.
But it is distinctively worse at handling novel situations and taking any context into account. Much worse than such ranking suggest. Leaving aside all cheating of benchmarks and overfitting and Goodhart's law and all such traps.
If this AI would be really 174th best coder on Earth then they would be already releasing profitable software written by it. Instead, they release PR stuff. I wonder why? Maybe at actual coding it is not so great?
spiky_fungus
29d ago
LLM is great at writing code in area utterly unfamiliar to me and often better than reading documentation.
But nearly always rewrite/tweaking/fixing is needed, for anything beyond the most trivial examples.
Maybe I am bad at giving it context.
spiky_fungus
30d ago
anyone working in software needs to either pivot to developing AIs themselves or else look for an exit strategy.
I will start panicking when I will see AI-generated code working correctly and requiring no changes. For three simple cases in row, that I needed to implement.
Right now AI is powerful tool but in no danger whatsoever to replace me.
Though yes, progress is scary here.
working in software
why this field would be at unusually high risk? Of all things it is field where minor mistakes and inconsistencies may take down entire system. And for now AIs are failing at being consistent at large projects.
spiky_fungus
30d ago
We perversely choose not to.
not sure how perverse it is
massively upgrading my laptop would cost me (after converting time to money) few days of work
rewriting my OS/text editor would take years of work
Enormous quantities of computational power squandered on what could be much lighter and faster programs.
I am not sure whether even total overall costs of badly written OS/apps would cost much more than rewrite costs.
16GB RAM for laptop costs about 5 hours of minimum wage work, and it is in a poor country.
And if it would be overall worth it - we again have standard issue coordination problem. And not even particularly evil one.
OK, I can make some program faster. How I will get people to pay me for this? People consistently (with rare exceptions) prefer buggy laggy programs that are cheaper or have more features.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Oh, with that I fully agree (and depending on dates/inflation/what would delivered trillion may be actually on table...)
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.
in minor war, yes
in major war if he overplays then he gets nationalised under some emergency war powers
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?
As obviously some good cameras exist - I would expect that reason is the same as lacking high quality pictures of Yeti, Bigfoot, Ukrainian biolabs from Russian propaganda fantasies, Loch Ness monster and so on.
These things are not actually existing or have a boring explanations.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Really? 90%? Only 10% for typical mass hysteria and people confusing stars, planes, street lamps Christmas decorations etc for UFOs?
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
I’m still surprised people are so incredulous about non-conventional explanations
Because when I was younger and had more time I looked into several such cases and it turned out that people advancing non-conventional explanations were some combination of lying, stupid, confused, on hallucinogens, shitposting, unable to distinguish UFO from Milky Way or Sirius and so on.
Give me some serious proof or even hint of proof.
because there are some novel aspects to it
Then clearly list them if you want people to bother.
After spending few times on investigating UFO claims and discovering that it was waste of time induced by liars/incompetent/trolls I am not inclined to waste even more time, I prefer it to waste on something novel. It makes as much sense to investigate this as follow up on "You have received a donation of Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ($500,000) from" emails.
In fact, following on scam emails likely has greater payoff. Some people managed to scam scammers or at least waste their time.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Based on this we can say that New Jersey Congressman lied (or repeated lies/confused babbling) about supposed Iranian droneship of the coast of USA.
Silly, but still below old classics like risk of island tipping over.
Also, he may have seen some drones. Or planes. Or stars. Or street lamps. Or something else.
Why this would be of interest to anyone?
UFO people claims at least have some (usually lame, but still) backstory with all this alien stuff.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience
That is two unnecessary dumb government-mandated inconveniences too much.
then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life
you seem to fail at distinguishing "I dislike it" and "I cannot survive it". You also fail at being aware that planes moving N-S exist and planes travelling on short distances in the same time zone.
Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in.
Yes, I try to avoid it.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
What drones? Can you be more specific in top-level post? At least link some useful summary?
What's the deal with the drones?
Is about war in Ukraine or what?
Are there even any drones?
Probably no then. Unless it is some really big-brain take.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
When you need this level of specificity? Celsius has already too much of it. (except rare cases like measuring fever or scientific research)
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Every contractor in the world is subject to the same problem.
If contractor is redoing my attic and on starting renovations it turns out that my uncle stored there 10kg of U-235, his collection of land mines and 1450kg of asbestos and top secret documents of USA, Ming Empire and Slovenia... Then they can just announce that they stop work, pay penalties stipulated by contract and run away screaming.
The same for say programming contract, if I discover that part of system run on literal punchcards in sealed off bunker then I will likely (depending on contract structure) pay contract penalties and run away or announce that 800h time estimate gets revised to >4800h.
If doctor is doing routine appendix and discovers clot/cancer/other medical emergency equivalent to above they are, I expect, not allowed to run away screaming and pay just modest penalty stipulated by contract and leave patent there.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
I believe superintelligence is not possible.
I see no reason to expect that humans are the most intelligent being possible.
I hope that AIs are nowhere close to that. LLM managing to succeed here would be just sad, being outcompeted by glorified Markov chains would be too much.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?
I dislike non-SI systems for distance/weight/volume in general precisely because it affects me, especially when doing human-scale works with own hands.
(though I am from area which is dominated by SI with minor encroachment of weird units)
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
I feel that there's subjective plausibility to the idea that heretics are more hated than heathens, or that traitors are more hated than enemies. If I ask myself how I feel about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, and then how I feel about Muslims or Hindus, I realise that on a visceral, intuitive level, I dislike the former much more than I dislike the latter
sounds like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays
no, just no, no, apage, no
This is a dealbreaker to me.
One of effects of being a programmer for me is developing allergy to electronics and "smart" things were they are not critically needed. If your idea requires them - you will have an uphill battle to convince me (though I will gladly repair you IOT system at market rates, and these are definitely higher than printing/carpenter costs).
Also, I want to be able to remember when shop is open without consulting external memory.
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
The switch never affects me
switch is annoying as it throws sleep schedule a bit over data change (if you have externally defined work hours)
and this adds some extra confusion for no benefit
few times I wasted few extra hours on fixing DST-related software bugs
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
this part of your post
Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu, who was in the 90s still well-regarded among anti-Communist sympathizers. Antonescu's image was dinged some as Elie Wiesel Commission did its relentless Holocaust guilt-tripping campaign
is definitely a Holocaust Revisionism. Specifically "Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" part.
See
Not only that, but it's pretty odd to say "Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" when it's followed by a quote indicating that Georgescu also praised Corneliu Codreanu, whose antisemitism was absolutely under zero doubt by any standards.
AFAIK noone in this thread claimed that "praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" is automatically "Holocaust Revisionism"
spiky_fungus
1mo ago
We don't know if something is covered by insurance because 5% of the time they decide not to cover what they said they said they would.
You are replying to short post that included "force health insurance companies to make legally binding answers".
Intentionally killing random Germans to punish Germans in German government counts to me as hating Germans.
Even if you do not agree with (1) then posting in public how you plan to murder Germans, finding justifications and then murdering bunch of Germans is at least a weak evidence that they in fact hated Germans. Even if they have not tweeted about it outright.
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