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seo-speedwagon

1,015 karma · joined February 18, 2022

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seo-speedwagon··on Does Israel's Stock Market Know Something About Gaza That We Don't?
https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1752709126382289183?s=20

Let me summarize how Israel's war is going: it's way behind on schedule in taking control of the Strip; Arab normalization has been stopped in its tracks and is now made conditional on progress on a two-state solution that Israel categorically rejects; it's running out of both manpower and ammunition as the war drags on and reservists have to be recalled; the US, on which it depends for virtually everything from supplies to political cover, is getting attacked everywhere in the region and may be drawn into a war with Iran; it's being accused of genocide and the EU, its largest trading partner, is coming up with a hare-brained plan to restart the peace process that will never go anywhere but will further damage Israel's reputation when it rejects it;

it still looks as though Israel may eventually get into a far larger and more difficult war against Hezbollah in the North, which certainly wouldn't help with its manpower and ammunition problem; and now Egypt, by far the country whose stability is the most important for Israel's security, is on the verge of economic collapse in part because, as a result of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea (which are themselves a consequence of Israel's war), traffic through Suez has dropped precipitously and the country has lost its main source of hard currency.

But if you listen to Israeli right-wingers, they will assure you that victory, whatever that means exactly, is just around the corner! Indeed, one can only admire the strategic genius of the Israeli government for bringing about such a brilliant situation, which reminds me of the aftermath of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, another magnificent victory.

seo-speedwagon··on Citibank refused to reimburse scam victims who lost "life savings"
In two of the cases mentioned in the article, Citi approved multi-tens-of-thousand-dollar wire transfers from consumer accounts without getting positive confirmation from the customer. And in one case, the customer themself contacted Citi after clicking a sketchy link. That’s pretty egregious IMO.
seo-speedwagon··on [dead]
Thank you for the weird, racist screed about something that absolutely 100% really happened, guy who only seems to post archive.org links.
seo-speedwagon··on Robert Maxwell was largely responsible for how scientific journal system evolved
Indeed it is. For example, Robert Maxwell’s longtime lawyer was Samuel Pisar, who happens to be the stepfather of current US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
seo-speedwagon··on [dead]
Damn Bill, no one has the time to read a 20,000 word tweet
seo-speedwagon··on Robert Maxwell was largely responsible for how scientific journal system evolved
The source is in the quoted tweet

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

seo-speedwagon··on A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
Yeah the article is from 2021, not the incident, as you say. Wasn’t clear on the accepted convention for this situation.
seo-speedwagon··on A war over Taiwan is a real possibility, and the U.S. is not prepared
Respectfully, it feels like you’re missing my point. It is very well known that the US military expenditure is larger than the next N largest countries combined. I’m saying that those kind of financial analyses, which have especially taken off in the last 30 years as the US became the world’s “lone superpower” and finance capitalism became ascendant, are not nearly as relevant as good old fashioned materialist analysis.

The ability of the US to continue plowing money into its military is only an effective measure of US preparedness insofar as that money is used to actually, you know, prepare for stuff.

seo-speedwagon··on A war over Taiwan is a real possibility, and the U.S. is not prepared
Taking just shipbuilding as an example, the US is way behind China in industrial capacity

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-chinas-shipbuilding-...

The Navy is struggling to staff the ships it does have

https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2023/12/12/facing-a...

Recent acquisitions like the LCS are expensive boondoggles (the Navy managed to buy a boat that dissolves in water) and are getting retired years before their planned service life.

I’m not sure where this confidence comes from?

seo-speedwagon··on [dead]
Smotrich (current Israeli minister of finance):

"If we act right strategically, there will be migration and we'll live in the Gaza Strip. We won't allow a situation where 2 million people live there. If Gaza will have 100-200 thousand Arabs, the whole discussion about the day after will be different. They want to go, they've been living in misery in a ghetto for 75 years"

https://x.com/GLZRadio/status/1741347524693127398?s=20

seo-speedwagon··on Maersk ship hit by missile in the Red Sea
The Bab-el-Mandeb has tons of ships in it, and as far as I know the only ones Ansar Allah have attacked are the ones who have ignored their very clear criteria.

It’s incredible to watch in near-real-time how hollowed out the US’s ability to project its will has become. They announced Operation Prosperity Guardian, and within days it seemed to collapse. Looks like there aren’t many folks signing up to be vassal states these days.

seo-speedwagon··on Self-Hosting GPU-Accelerated LLM (Mistral 7B) on Kubernetes (EKS)
Hey thanks for this article. It covered a lot of things I had to figure out myself, at great pain and over the course of many weeks, to get a similar-ish workload running on EKS. It also has some ideas that I hadn’t really thought about, especially around using PVs to amortize the cost of model fetching across pod lifecycles. I like that an awful lot.
seo-speedwagon··on NY times is asking that all LLMs trained on Times data be destroyed
It’s like Gretzky says, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
seo-speedwagon··on [dead]
The travel ban is a toothless gesture precisely because you can’t bar a citizen from entering the US. Now if they said they’d prosecute any US citizen settlers that would be much more effective. I looked but could not find any instances of that happening, however.
seo-speedwagon··on Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims
South Africa has the right to defend itself, and if that means killing the ANC and the people protecting them, so be it
seo-speedwagon··on How to make LLMs go fast
I know almost nothing about this space but “lossy compression of millions of past tokens” feels a lot more like how actual human memory works than “perfect access to a small number of recent tokens”.
seo-speedwagon··on Twitter Now Showing Ads for Nonconsensual 'AI Undress' Apps
The article pointed out other platforms have at least attempted to block searching for such things on their platform (and presumably don’t allow ads for such products as well). Not sure why one would need some sort of universal content adjudication solution before taking action against obviously abusive content?

The example ad in the article literally illustrated using the product to harass someone. This is like the lowest of low hanging fruit.

seo-speedwagon··on Twitter Now Showing Ads for Nonconsensual 'AI Undress' Apps
Did I miss in the article where that was suggested?
seo-speedwagon··on 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture
My personal opinion? Israel’s trying to prosecute its genocide slowly enough that it won’t be noticed / stopped. But if you’re looking for some more expansive reading on the subject you can start here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_lawn

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

seo-speedwagon··on 'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture
I could just as easily turn that around and say Hamas (which is the legitimately elected government of Gaza) is responding to continuous attacks from Israel. Gaza is the world’s largest concentration camp, blockaded from land, sea and air. In 2018 and 2019 they held continual peaceful protests, which Israel responded to by killing 223 Palestinians and maiming many more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_borde...

Hell, one of the co-founders of Hamas watched his uncle get murdered in front of him by the IDF in the Khan Younis massacre; he described it a very formative experience, as you might imagine.

History did not begin on October 7, 2023 with the Al-Aqsa Flood.

seo-speedwagon··on [dead]
Looks like I should have read closer. My bad.
seo-speedwagon··on [dead]
All the way in paragraph 6:

> One of the drones on Sunday “was headed toward Carney, although its specific target is not clear,” Central Command said in the statement, adding, “we cannot assess at this time whether the Carney was a target” of the drones.

The New York Times is a rag.

seo-speedwagon··on The future of air defense must be smarter, more affordable, and reusable
I wouldn’t recommend Israel’s current system. The iron dome’s always had the obvious weakness that it is much more expensive than the rockets it intercepts, and, welp...
seo-speedwagon··on The Problem of West Bank Settlements
It is admirable to want an accurate picture of what’s going on with Palestine, but I’d caution against using posts like the OP as a good source. Consider starting, at the very least, with thing like UN Human Rights commission reports, Human Rights Watch, etc. Beyond that, Western media and governments generally have an extremely pro-Zionist bias, so if you want balance you need to look for it. Consider some of Norm Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe’s work.
seo-speedwagon··on PG reflects on children killed in Israel and Gaza
Yeah, that’s all true but it seems like the question is more along the lines of “does tech have a Zionism problem?”

To which I think the answer is “yes” in that there are zionists in tech for sure. Whether they’re disproportionately prevalent vs the general population I’m not sure. The West definitely has a Zionism problem in that media and elected officials are overwhelmingly Zionist and have been for generations at this point.

seo-speedwagon··on AI Company Plans to Run Clusters of 10k Nvidia H100 GPUs in International Waters
Aside from the fact that this is an extremely obvious scam, the US, which the people supposedly behind this venture call out specifically, is not a party to UNCLOS.

e: Also from their own website they claim to have 3 offices situated in the US. This is like the logical conclusion of those sovereign citizen guys who rant to the judge about Admiralty Law and having no jurisdiction because the flag has gold fringe.

seo-speedwagon··on U.N. votes to end US embargo on Cuba; US and Israel oppose
Yes
seo-speedwagon··on Linear Algebra Done Right – 4th Edition
The 3rd edition of this book is what my undergraduate linear algebra course used. It was a fantastic book. I feel like more computation- and determinant-heavy approaches can make the subject feel like a slog, but this book made me really enjoy, appreciate, and get a gut-level understanding of the subject
seo-speedwagon··on Companies from Starbucks to McDonald's face controversy amid Israel-Hamas war
After the US assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the cleric Shahab Moradi was doing an interview and said:

"In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest- that we take one of theirs now that they've got one of ours, who should we consider to take out in the context of America?

"Think about it, are we supposed to take out Spiderman and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large land mass, but it doesn't have any heroes, all of their heroes are cartoon characters, they're all fictional."

It’s one of those quotes that stuck with me, and I’m reminded of it when I see news articles with lines like “CEOs have a distinctive role in society as trusted voices”

seo-speedwagon··on US asks Qatar to 'turn down the volume' of Al Jazeera news coverage
> No specific offending examples of the station’s output were given but it is thought Blinken was referring to its Arabic-language rather than its English-language channels.

Just incredibly lazy and arrogant behavior. Qatar has been working hard to position itself as a chief mediator in the region, and largely it's worked. But there is tremendous popular pressure now on regional governments to stand with the Palestinians and Israel has vaporized any ability for these governments to continue rapprochement. Egypt had its first demonstration in a decade. Al Jazeera could shut down tomorrow and nothing would change; the anger across the region, and indeed across the world, are due to the realities of what is happening, not how it's being reported.

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