Zompist Bboard Again

OK, but again, whatever mining it's doing of abstracts, I have to replicate it to get the actual paper. It's basically performing a search, then giving me hints about what I should be typing into the search bar in my other browser tab. No link, no title, not even a DOI! Why did they design it like ...

See "Southern Strategy" above. I'm not happy about it either, but has any Democrat been elected president by catering to the 25% of the electorate that calls itself liberal or leftist? It's hard to tell what would have happened in a 2 party system. Which was in July 1933. There were alrea...

If I have to go to academia.edu and type "African pleistocene migration" to get the paper, how is this saving me any steps? That's what I was doing before. Consensus GPT will give you names of the papers by a semantic analysis of the abstracts in case keywords aren't cutting it. It has be...

Note, I wasn't justifying Biden, but explaining. The general rule in US federal politics is that you have to appeal to the "independents", the tiny minority that actually does switch votes between parties, frequently and whimsically. The Independents are not overwhelmingly pro-Israeli lik...

A new book that attempts to explain the geometric intuitions behind deep learning: https://udlbook.github.io/udlbook/ Quote: "The book is neither terribly theoretical (there are no proofs) nor extremely practical (there is almost no code). The goal is to explain the underlying ideas; after cons...

Fever.

It's depressingly simple: not supporting Israel is political suicide. A recent poll shows 58% very or mostly favorable views of Israel. And it was over 60% for the entire period 2005-2023... often over 70%. You don't get ahead in US politics by bucking that kind of trend. Er, it looks like 35% Demo...

China does seem to be less interested in imperialism than the states: it does not have a military base in every corner of the planet, nor does it seem interested in it, but even if China was exactly as interested in a globespanning empire as the US, it simply cannot have one: it's not that storng. ...

ChatGPT is a bad research tool because it doesn't know anything and will fabricate citations if you ask it for citations. If you want to search for papers, you have to use the Consensus GPT: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-bo0FiWLY7-consensus I haven't looked at the results, but this is what you get when y...

Why do people see structure as meaning? Why do we see neatness as justification? For example, take people who think the Quran has some kind of code in it. Here's a literal flat earther trying to explain his theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTxlqYyd7m4 Regarding this specific attempt, you can ...

malloc wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2024 7:52 pm So last week I tripped while running and scraped my shoulder on pavement. Now an enormous scar is forming on my shoulder, the size of a playing card and stiff enough to make moving my left arm uncomfortable.

I hope you get better soon.

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I'm so sleepy.

Flavor conlang idea for my novel: Standard Intramural (Let me know if this conlang idea already exists. I know it's terrible, but I think it's cool for an exotic SF setting. I have many pages of notes on this "language" that I didn't consult for this post. Last year, I had hopes of workin...

Wait, isn't this veering towards anti-Arab bigotry? 1. "Antisemitism" is not a word that magically adds justice to your position. It is insane to "believe" a woman who says you are invading her personal space if she is currently in the process of throttling you. In fact, the left...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 8:59 pm They are also known as the Kerguelen Islands.

Thank you. People might oppose colonizing it because it might endanger seal habitats or something. There might also be better options. What do you think?

If I may ask, where are the Desolation Islands? I can't say I've ever heard of them before; sorry. They are a barely inhabited French territory on a microcontinent in the southern Indian Ocean. 49 degrees south latitude IIRC. 49 degrees north latitude is the south of France. The area is approximate...

I mean a bit, yeah. it's one thing for some of your jews to migrate out to israel or wherever... but four in five is a lot. I admit it's weak, i'm only just now going on the 'what's the deal with jews in iran' googling session but the ADL says Iran is currently the least antisemitic country in the ...

Well the part about the death penalty was Iraq, not Iran. But yeah, being coerced into protesting against your will is horrible. Sorry, I thought you brought it up because Iran has something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if Jews with connections to Israel are targeted by the Iranian Revolutionar...

I heard that Christian missionaries to the Middle East actually largely imported anti-Semitism there in the not-so-distant past, even though they largely failed to import Christianity itself (disregarding those Arabs and like who were already Christian to begin with). Personally, I think people's t...

Apparently Jews are treated better in Iran than in much of the Middle East -- but that is not saying much (considering just how atrociously they are treated in much of the Middle East; IIRC not too long ago Iraq put in place a law mandating the death penalty for ties to the "Zionist Entity&quo...

The fact that Jews were treated like utter crap throughout the Middle East after the 1947-1948 war despite most of them having no part in said war is a big reason why almost all of them moved to Israel (generally with what they could pack in a suitcase at most), and I have heard nothing that indica...