1,018 karma · joined September 4, 2019
Given Spain’s history it is incredible that the gold collected over centuries was spent in a few years.
The wiki article is very carefully tip toeing that there is no evidence that the Soviets defrauded or abused the Spanish, but it is hard to believe that 72% of the world’s gold reserves were visibly spent in a few years.
I did not investigate further but I understood the documents are not completely public, and my conspiracy hat tells me that is because it is a national humiliation.
The same way programmers gave power to AI as a tool, so they could be more powerful in effecting automation, politicians that do not give up power to AI will be at a disadvantage to those who use AI to achieve more complex and effective power. The only problem might be the despot no longer shares power with those pesky humans but with a god in a machine, which in theory is in a box and does not have conflicting interests with the despot.
As today is Sunday, God help us.
So if I am exhausted of a run and cannot rest or sleep, it is almost sure I get sick soon after. Just my experience.
I got sick so often it limited a lot my general life: I stopped practicing sports regularly and started being very careful with sleep(sleep deprivation likely increased the chance of infection), because I knew if I did not lead a perfectly balanced lifestyle I would get sick. I am quite upset I stopped running 15km per week, even with snow. I never fully went back to it, due to fear of getting sick, and having to take care of toddlers while being feverish or nauseated.
In those years I think I was not disease free more than 3 months at a time. In a year where many people decide to not have children, it does not help the cause of having children seeing other parents suffer so much, in those early years. I have non parent friends that get sick after meeting us, resenting meeting us and asking if we are sick, because they spent all the night in the bathroom or with fever. Fortunately it feels we are already immune because we are not sick very often anymore.
I would say that word is so offensive that it forced me to think whether I am a fascist for wanting it to be toned down, just like the CCP. Articles like this are a good check on personal beliefs. From that point of view the article is really well written.
For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.
With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.
Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.
As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.
There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.
It would be a bad show to have SP500 (cheating rules) underperfoming SP500(proven rules). It would also be a bad show with many financiers and even influencers calling out the corruption.
I for one would be advising newer investments in the proven rules ETF trackers. I also think there might be lawsuits from people who had contracts tied to the old rules. After all if you need to sell to transfer to another vehicle there might be tax consequences.
PS: It is a shame that multiple classes of, non floating, controlling stock do not cause penalties in terms of market cap weight. I will research the issue. I know an ETF is not an index, but the relationship is tight enough for practical reasons.
Yes, I share the sentiment of dread don’t get me wrong. But this also has happened before, and it gave us communism. There are people that said it was ok to live in those times. I guess if the state actually delivered the necessities for people to survive as opposed to how it happened historically, I think many people would be fine with that status quo. Not all but perhaps the majority. I think it is worth seeing a shitty way out than a despairing wall…lol this came out more desperate than i thought.
> it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".
The idea is that anyone will be able to use these new means of production to answer more demanding tasks that would not be possible to fulfil without the llms. If we are all hopelessly automated though, yeah, we will either be living in a slum or in a utopia.
Given history and my trusty Hobbes social contract I believe society will come up with a way to not predate on each other.
Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with.
The Industrial Revolution had the same pains, and it took a few centuries to get societies where we are today.
Power generation is also instrumental to almost all labor produced today, and thus utilities were born.
I think the pope is right and the AI bros are wrong. I am currently rooting for the open weights to give the power back to the people. For teachers and artists to work for their neighbourhoods and communities.
I have a performance problem and went down the path of optimising part of a pipeline that when benchmarked was not the bottleneck, even if it looked plausible for me and the llm. When I asked it to make a final benchmark for documentation I found most of the work I did improved 30% while another path would have improved a magnitude more.
Thankfully iteration is now faster than ever and given how fast it creates tests, previous tests created for the aborted optimisation were helpful.
It really releases the stress slightly to call bugs, buggas and generally role play a humorous setting than a purely tech me. I think I will make it speak out loud just to have a laugh at cavemen speak about default arguments in a method.
> I didn’t find bugga but others from tribe will scratch head. Leave comment.
> You clever. Fix it.
I predict caveman speak will be a fad, and people will jokingly speak like that. It also compresses human language.
Also you omitted the part where I said I disagreed with what Israel did. But as a human I believe we are evil like that, and I am really sorry about it.
I can’t imagine having my little children suffering seeing the corpse of a dead human being and I would curse and never set foot on a land where that is normalised.
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
Problem solved. Next!
Made me laugh. Indeed opinions seem to carry more weight if they are a vibe :D
Human creations have surpassed billions of years of evolution at several functions. There are no rockets in nature, nor animals flying at the speed of a common airliner. Even cars, or computers or everything in the modern world.
I think this is a bit like the shift from anthropocentric view of intelligence towards a new paradigm. The last time such shift happened heads rolled.
Spain joined the Portuguese and Spanish armada and went on to fight the English (and Dutch to some extent), with catastrophic results for both Spain and Portugal fleets. When Portugal regained independence 1640 it needed to get back sovereignty of overseas territories, including from the Dutch.
The Dutch controlled a big part of north Brazil when Portugal and Spain were the Iberian Union, but the Dutch and were driven back afterwards at great cost. The damage was done, and 1755 earthquake was the final nail.
There were also terrible mistake in terms of state management up to the XX century where the natives, were not seen as full citizens, and naturally rebelled.
As a post colonial portuguese citizen, it seems like an incredible fantasy that our society descends from such a grandiose history. Even in this thread i see the name Henry the Navigator and am incredulous people know who he was.
A less known both inside and outside Portugal bad ass dude was Afonso de Albuquerque. This is from his English wikipedia page about Hormuz in the middle east:
> At the same time, Albuquerque decided to conclude the effective conquest of Hormuz. He had learned that after the Portuguese retreat in 1507, a young king was reigning under the influence of a powerful Persian vizier, Reis Hamed, whom the king greatly feared. At Ormuz in March 1515, Afonso met the king and asked the vizier to be present. He then had him immediately stabbed and killed by his entourage, thus "freeing" the terrified king, so the island in the Persian Gulf yielded to him without resistance and remained a vassal state of the Portuguese Empire.
Here came a dude that does both diplomacy and war in person, and moved on. Vasco da Gama was a bit similar. Portuguese were quite out of their minds and for me shows shows the pedigree of bloodlust[1] that Europeans must have gained after endless continental strife. That is why I am really afraid of the rearming of Europe, I believe Europeans have a genetic disposition for destruction, and history shows that.
[1] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-storia-do-mogor-by-nicco...
The accountant requirement I confirm, but also true in Poland for example.
The really big offense is that one must pay taxes for the next year based on the previous tax payments. They give a small grace period but then it’s on. It was supposed to be an emergency measure but of course it was never removed. It is a free loan to the state.
You can open a single person business though and skip the accountant.