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marsa

77 karma · joined January 16, 2022

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marsa··on Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard
https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read
marsa··on Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI
doing some reason.. uhh intuitioning i imagine brazil and portugal might have some sort of a visa-free deal going on in which case llama 4 might actually be right here?
marsa··on The Real-World Locations of 14 Sci-Fi Dystopias (2014)
see the problem here is you somehow associate socialism -- i.e. socialist urbanism and architecture -- with dystopia
marsa··on Poland's Most Famous Dish: Pierogi
i still remember the first time i tried pierogi at a music festival in Poland after a few beers -- they were amazing

but years later that experience was overshadowed when i tried their traditional zurek soup -- now that was divine

marsa··on Germany's terrible trains are no joke for a nation built on efficiency
anecdotal, but my experience a year ago when i travelled international was: 2/2 delays by OEBB that made me miss connections (and absolutely rude and inconsiderate customer service reps in Vienna HBF on top of that), 1/1 on time trains by DB ICE
marsa··on Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
sadly no, it is an unsolved problem of scholarly publishing imo. on the one hand you have the reputable journals following the traditional publishing process that take pride in their high rejection rates -- these require a large percentage of desk rejections to avoid flooding their reviewers with sub-par papers. thus they'll inevitably have some quality papers fall through the cracks + some flashy sub-par papers making the cut.

on the other hand you have the pay-to-publish journals that have a financial incentive to push as many papers through peer review -- these thrive on sub-par papers that are technically just barely 'good enough', but the upside is that the real good ones will also make it through. however, they inevitably face reviewer fatigue, and the most valuable ones will quit reviewing if they often send them low-quality papers. so basically once in a while they'll publish top notch research without being aware of it.

i'm not aware of any middle-ground solutions out there and it certainly feels like a tough problem to solve.

marsa··on Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
a desk rejection is when the editor in chief (or managing editor, or whoever is the one first receiving the submitted paper) decides to reject the submission without sending it out for peer review

basically a judgment call by the person in charge of a journal that the paper is not interesting or impactful enough to warrant going through with the rest of the review/publishing process

marsa··on White House warns of ‘unprecedented’ Serbian troop buildup on Kosovo border
GP is getting downvoted because it's a shit take. ethnic tensions in Kosovo date back to before the break up of Yugoslavia -- like early 1980s at the latest. Serbia may feel that now is an opportune moment to stir shit up again, and Russia may be supportive, but to suggest that Kremlin is pulling all the strings here is plain wrong.

other commenters in this thread display much more nuanced and informed perspectives.

marsa··on The DJ and the War Crimes
This piece of investigative journalism has been posted on HN some 9 months ago. I'm reposting it now because a) it's a really thoroughly researched article, and b) it's presented in an interesting and engaging way (edit: on desktop at least; I haven't checked how it looks on mobile).

So, dear HN: trust me when I say it's worth spending some of your time on this one even if you're not interested in the subject matter itself

marsa··on 'Atomic Energy' Book Signed by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Enola Gay Crew
shown themselves to you maybe, but have in mind that post 1945 plenty of couped/invaded countries around the world could come up with a convincing case painting US as a bad actor too

this is where you should search for nuance and complexity, whereas dropping a-bombs on civilians is a clear cut case of an immoral act no matter how many lives it supposedly saves

marsa··on 'Atomic Energy' Book Signed by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Enola Gay Crew
it's 2/2 real world cases so 'all cases' seems like a legit conclusion to me, but if you can come with an ethical hypothetical a-bomb dropping scenario i'm all ears
marsa··on 'Atomic Energy' Book Signed by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Enola Gay Crew
imagine Russia using the same justification for dropping one on a Ukrainian city and suddenly all complexity and nuance is gone

it's morally indefensible in all cases

marsa··on Ukraine: Europe clearly overtakes US, with total commitments now twice as large
i haven't heard / read his speeches but isn't that just regular political speech? 'we'll make x great again' where they invoke some mythical glorious past x and make grand promises to appease the masses?

i'll check the book out, but if there's less speculative stuff like leaked cables, war plans, fact based reporting etc out there i'd be more receptive to the idea that the Russians were genuinely about to blitzkrieg Europe if all went well in Ukraine

it just sounds too ridiculous and farfetched

marsa··on Ukraine: Europe clearly overtakes US, with total commitments now twice as large
where does this notion of 'protecting the whole Europe from fascist hordes' come from? has there been any indication that Russia genuinely intended to steamroll Europe if they had taken Ukraine as planned?
marsa··on ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k
according to Derna's deputy mayor quoted in [1] "the dams have not been maintained since 2002", so it seems unlikely that NATO intervention is to blame (though that was my kneejerk assumption too). the situation in Libya post NATO intervention certainly contributed to the negligence, but it has been going on for years at that point.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/12/infrastructure-in-l...

marsa··on Mediterranean tropical like Storm Daniel
localized... Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Libya, Egypt

and that's just this storm. a lot of other countries in Europe got hit by severe floods earlier. it's definitely been a weird summer and not business as usual

marsa··on A look inside a Sharia Courtroom
yes and if i'm reading it correctly, the article says banning women from schools is a remnant of tribal law, which is why they favour sharia law -- the lesser evil apparently given the circumstances -- as crazy as it may sound to out secular ears
marsa··on China Bans iPhone Use for Government Officials at Work
well that's a relief
marsa··on I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
effective accelerationism apparently
marsa··on China Bans iPhone Use for Government Officials at Work
why do you think that?

like sure, i suppose every nation dreams of being the top dog ruling the world, and China even has a realistic shot at it

but i never got any 'we want to destroy the west' vibes from China

marsa··on History of Cartography: Volumes One, Two, Three, Four, and Six (1987)
oh great that's another 7 interesting books i'll download and never get to actually read

jk thanks for posting this!

marsa··on Tidal energy is not renewable
eh are they really making more money with 9,99 tickets or are they just losing less money (on that particular flight i mean)
marsa··on Google preemptively banned hundreds of millions of 'pirate' URLs last year
> Personal guess, I think that Russia is also strongly responsible for the current bullshit going on in Bosnia

the 'current' bullshit has been going on for decades though; there's no need for Russian involvement to make it flare up occasionally (e.g. in the run-up to general elections usually). my impression is it's just Serbia feeling empowered and opportunistically using (the global focus on) Russian invasion of Ukraine to further their goals in Bosnia.

marsa··on Three Antiquities Traffickers and Their Fall from Grace
say Latchford now goes to occupied parts of Ukraine and buys up all their atifacts from the Russian regime and sells them around in order to preserve them

not only would he symbolically support the Russian regime by uprooting Ukrainian cultural heritage from the area, but he'd also support it financially by buying the stuff in the first place

marsa··on USENET rises again?
page 131 of the pdf, but page 93 of the book itself in case anyone else ends up at the wrong place
marsa··on What's the most reliable news source in your country?
yes to some extent, i'm not gonna dispute that!

but when you take 10 pieces of propaganda aboit some event from differently slanted sources and put them all together they'll all agree on some set of points -- let's call them facts -- and then it's easier to clearly see the line between what (f)actually went down and how it's being framed by various sources.

marsa··on What's the most reliable news source in your country?
yeah sadly.. though i don't mind bias; it's only natural to lean towards narratives that are more in line with one's worldview. and i'm quite happy to read well-researched and -sourced stories from various points of the political spectrum.

the idea was more to have a handy list of sources to consult when e.g. my local news covers some story of political intrigue in some far away part of the world. then i'd rather skip the middleman (AP / AFP / Reuters generally) and find out what their local media is saying.

either way, thank you for the allsides.com suggestion, i'll check it out!

marsa··on What's the most reliable news source in your country?
thank you for your reply -- i suppose a lot of the stuff is worth missing anyway so it's not necessarily a bad thing
marsa··on Men charged by U.S. with laundering more than $1B in cryptocurrency
the 'knowingly allowed' wording suggests LG literally asked them for permission to launder money on behalf of NK and these guys were like of course sure here you go, we've enabled money laundering for your account. pretty hard to believe by my standards.

it's more likely LG simply used Tornado Cash just like any other user.

marsa··on Bethesda’s Redfall needs to be online for single-player mode
shit man i bought RDR2 a year ago, and now i can't play it because it needs to be online for entitlement verification. thing is, even when i do connect via phone hotspot that's apparently not online enough for the rockstar games launcher.

admittedly i do only get one bar of 4G reception and ~1-2 MB/s download speed max, but that setup worked fine a year ago -- sadly it doesn't any more.

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