grumple

This seems to be in a similar vein to constructor theory / assembly theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

If your currency is high value (which USD is due to demand in part due to oil and part due to others having reserves of it), foreign goods are cheap to you. This makes importing attractive, but it makes it very expensive for other countries to buy your exports.

If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.

The only point I’d argue with this professor: give students your slides by default. In my graduate program, this is done for every class. As a working professional, slides are regularly shared so information can be reviewed later.

The administration could decide to detain, deport, or kill everyone who has certain traits - say, Jewish, or Arab, or Mexican, or maybe just has undesirable traits. The db of millions of users makes this very easy.

The US admin is already at the stage of mass deportations. Detention camps (beyond those we already have at the border) are probably not far behind.

I think the correct way to do this is to allow a rollback to the immediately previous working version. Before updating, write current firmware to failsafe data storage, then do the update. Then a firmware reset sends you back to the last good version. I'm pretty sure this is already done by many hardware and software manufacturers, such as me.

I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.

Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.

Seems too big. Market cap is 1/3 of IBM's.

Why do you think ag needs disruption? Ag has had the latest tech applied to it since the dawn of civilization. Any tech you can think of is already being used there.

There’s also a ton of money being spent on ag tech. My parent company spends billions per year on ag tech. We have drones tracking cows in fields, sensors tracking animals, mixing food, feeding them, monitoring them… tons of other stuff (I’m not on that side of things). This is one of the subsidiaries: https://www.microtechnologies.com/

Probably this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shootin...

Experience - which comes with age - is absolutely critical in all intellectual pursuits, including programming, government, and just about everything else. Experts and lifetime learners learn more each day. A 20 year old simply has not had the time to be exposed to the same breadth or depth of ideas, or to critique them seriously. Younger people are also far more vulnerable to hormonal impulses, manipulation, and more likely to have been exposed to a much more limited world view.

I can’t imagine anyone but insufferably arrogant - and really fucking wrong - young people making an argument to the contrary. Not that there aren’t benefits to youth - being unburdened by complexity, ignorant enough to be especially bold - but these aren’t actually that useful. And we have good evidence to support that; older founders do better, for example: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-old...

Reading about the Roko’s Basalisk saga, it seems clear that these people are quite far from rational and of extremely limited emotional development. It reads like observing a group of children who are afraid of the monster in the closet, which they definitely brought into existence by chanting a phrase in front of the bathroom mirror…

Members of these or other similar communities would do well to read anything on them dispassionately and critique anything they read. I’d also say that if they use Yudkowsy’s writings as a basis for understanding the world, that understanding is going to have to the same inadequacies of Yudkowsky and his writings. How many people without PhDs or even relevant formal education are putting out high quality writing on both philosophy and quantum mechanics (and whatever other subjects)?

Thanks, that is useful. Are there any other efforts to archive all the data on government websites? I suppose we could crawl archive.org.

> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?

Musk, Thiel, and their friends clearly intend to consolidate power, and the people they associate with openly advocate for the creation of independent corporate fiefdoms with authoritarian control over society. There is no doubt at this point. These are not good people. They are oligarchs. They are the bitter nerds that just want power for themselves so they can be the bullies.

This Ziz person is really unhinged. I read some of their writing, it reminds me of every eloquent, manipulative narcissist I've met. They are never as smart as they think they are - or as smart as they want you to think they are - though they may be smart, charming, and engaging. They've created an alternate universe in their mind and haphazardly abuse whatever ideas they've encountered to justify it.

I can’t get ahold of google support while paying them hundreds of thousands per year. I’m not convinced they do support.

Romanticizing anti-war movements is reasonable, in my opinion.

But TikTok was used heavily for the past year and half to glorify terrorist violence and spread misinformation. Well... it's been used to spread misinformation for longer. But all my TikTok addicted friends are happily justifying murder of Jews, applauding the assassination of an insurance CEO, and spreading other crazy bullshit. It really is disruptive to these people - they aren't smart enough to distill truth from the barrage of bullshit, and they are easily manipulated.

US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it.

Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...

Amazing that such overt antisemitism is allowed to remain up. Substituting "Zionist" for "Jew" doesn't make it not antisemitism (yes, 90% of Jews are self-identifying zionists, and these are classic antisemitic tropes).

How this war started: https://www.hamas-massacre.net/

"unlimited justifications". The justification is a massive assault by the Palestinians against Israeli civilians and the daily rocket attacks. They aren't justifying a Holocaust, because again, this is not only nowhere near it in scale, but they also aren't targeting civilians. You are welcome to review hundreds of videos of militants being targeted on the IDF's website or via other sources.

The rest of your post is unhinged racism and insanity and really has no place here.

Sir, 2017 is recent. And it is clear from their actions and speech that their intent has not changed, even if they have whitewashed their written calls for the extermination of Israel.

> they lived peacefully alongside Christians in Gaza

Christians are .13% of Gaza. Come on. If the Christians had any real power, they'd crush them just like they want to crush the Jews. They'd make it totally unworkable just like in Lebanon.

> No, they really don't? Meanwhile, Israeli politicians talk daily of committing war crimes and genocide, but somehow that's fine because it's against Arabs?

The far-right who does so, no that's not ok. But the IDF does not act in such a way.

Hamas is a designated terrorist organization by the US, EU, and others. Their stated purpose is to destroy Israel, and their founding charter including language about killing all Jews. They started this war by massacring over a thousand civilians, injuring thousands more, and kidnapping hundreds. They killed people brutally - beheadings with dull tools, rapes, burning people alive. They also continued launching tens of thousands rockets at Israeli civilians for the duration of the war, though it was basically not reported. If Israel did not have the world's best rocket defense, there would be tens of thousands more dead Israeli civilians.

IDF is the military branch of an actual state. Likud is a political party. Neither advocate for indiscriminate killing of civilians (though some Likud politicians might, just like the US or any other nation has crazy politicians).

"Right to exist" is granted either through law or force. Hamas doesn't have law, doesn't exist within a functioning state, and is illegal by the laws of most nations. IDF isn't.

If you actually think there's a moral equivalence between the IDF and Hamas, or that Hamas is somehow the moral group here, you really need to learn more. Stop consuming social media, stop reading things on the internet, go buy some books from a diverse array of sources, both pro-Israel and anti-Israel, and maybe you can gleam the truth out of there. It's not a guarantee, but it's your best shot.

I really think the TikTok age has amplified insanity where we actually have people asking, "Why does a military get to exist but not terrorists?".

For anyone who needs a reminder of how this war started (warning, extremely graphic / not suitable for life): https://www.hamas-massacre.net/

Islamist is used widely to mean Islamic supremacist. And Hamas absolutely is that. There are non-violent Islamists. Hamas is also jihadist, so they are violent Islamists.

Hamas' charter was changed recently when it was rewritten by a UColumbia grad. They still openly talk about destroying Israel and killing Jews. Learn Arabic, they don't use cover words there.

~20k civilians dead in this war (started by the Palestinians, all civilians were collateral damage thanks to Palestinian militants using civilians as shields) vs 12 million killed in Nazi camps. Maybe you shouldn't diminish far greater horrors in order to attack Israel.

Just in case you are unaware, there are two million Arab Muslims citizens in Israel. Some of them consider themselves Palestinians (which is really a nationalist movement), some do not - but they are the same people / ethnic group that was there during the 48 war. These are full citizens, full members of Israeli society, not the Palestinian non-citizens in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

> officially be labelled as genocidal

By whom, legions of anti-American people on the internet?

> Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing

You do know this war started with a massive assault by Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, and other Palestinian groups, right? They attacked Israel, targeting civilians in a brutal assault, starting this war. If you start a war, you are the aggressor, even if you lose.

> because they are Palestinian

No, this is not why. They are attacking because Gaza invaded Israel on 10/7, killing over 1200, injuring 5000, and kidnapping over 200. Notice how Arab / Palestinian citizens of Israel are not being killed.

> We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.

I think this is a fundamental flaw of the genocide conventions. With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?). Obviously, this is absurd, and nobody is on TikTok raging about Hamas’ attempted genocide of Israel.

> You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?

Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.

"No you" is not really a good argument here. Israel does not have an organized campaign to modify wikipedia, like what the pro-Palestine crowd does. And scale matters: there are 15 million Jews globally, 2 billion Muslims, 1.4 billion Chinese, 90 million Iranians. This is not a level playing field; manpower matters in swaying public opinion. And factually - Israel is an American-aligned democracy and has substantially more freedoms than China, Iran, Russia, and the Muslim world, and is not working to destroy all of those places the way that those places are working to destroy the west and all US influence. It's just "Jews control the media" using the cover word of Israel instead. Obviously untrue - if it were, then social media and wikipedia would be dominated by pro-Israel narratives, rather than the other way around, which is what is actually reality.

Banning a propaganda tool used by China, Russia, and Iran, which is also used to collect our data, is not hasbara. It's just wise behavior to stop your enemies from disrupting your population. Anyway, hasbara means "explanation". Use of this as condemnation is basically somewhere between "foreign word bad" and "Jews bad".