wrzuteczka

The term "fake news" has been overused, but... we initially heard about hundreds of thousands of visas sold for bribes, now we know about maybe a couple hundred of visas issued with some - let's say - irregularities. No bribes found yet, even though it was the most high profile case in the country. So yeah.

Part of Orlen was sold to the Saudis to merge Orlen and Lotos (the exchange of gas stations with MOL was done for similar reasons) and to get better access to Saudi oil.

"Covid bribes" etc are probably mostly fake stories from Onet as well.

It’s still nothing compared to the other things I mentioned.

I think you got it backwards.

Over the last 20 years, the SLD govt used to literally sell new legislation for bribes, PO (currently in charge of Poland) literally has right now a guy in their ranks who has likely stolen 100s of millions PLN from a public company, but is the prime minister’s BFF so the prosecutor canceled the investigation. The stuff PiS has done is nothing compared to those.

I actually think that the Anti- Corruption Bureau that PiS founded is one of the core reasons Poland was able to mostly weed out the post-Russian corruption (corruption is unfortunately the main export of Russian culture, every country they invaded ended up extremely corrupt).

Didn't expect that stuff to reach HN... anyway:

> packing the Polish Constitutional Court

This didn’t start with PiS. PO, just before losing power, tried to elect five Tribunal judges at once, including two seats that weren’t theirs yet. The Tribunal later said: three OK, two not OK.

PiS then did the PiS thing: ignored the three valid ones too, and installed its own people. So yes, PiS behaved badly. But "PiS packed the court" skips the opening move.

American-ish version: lame-duck Senate tries to pre-fill future SCOTUS seats. Incoming side responds by throwing the furniture around.

> filling the government with party loyalists

For normal political jobs, what’s the issue? That’s politics. Republicans appoint Republicans. Democrats appoint Democrats.

> placing restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly

What are you referring to exactly?

Russia has been literally selling Venezuela all kinds of military equipment for decades.

If they hadn’t helped Venezuela militarily this time, it’s probably because they are a little busy losing thousands of troops per week in Ukraine.

These 8 laboratories shared the same sample collected from a corner of the shroud. The priests handling the shroud would always hold it by its corners. So the explanation is not as weak as it may sound.

Weird twist: Slavic languages use words very similar to "domus" for "house", for example, "dom" in Polish or "дом" in Ukrainian.

How are we supposed to know, being outside of Google?

My Bose QC 35 headphones are like that. I just replace the ear pads every few years and they are like new.

With the AI "revolution," I began to appreciate the simplicity of models we create when doing programming (and physics, biology, and so on as well).

I used to think about these things differently: I felt that because our models of reality are just models, they aren't really something humanity should be proud of that much. Nature is more messy than the models, but we develop them due to our limitations.

AI is a model, too, but of far greater complexity, able to describe reality/nature more closely than what we were able to achieve previously. But now I've begun to value these simple models not because they describe nature that well but because they impose themselves on nature. For example, law, being such a model, is imposed on reality by the state institutions. It doesn't describe the complexity of reality very well, but it makes people take roles in its model and act in a certain way. People now consider whether something is legal or not (instead of moral vs immoral), which can be more productive. In software, if I implement the exchange of information based on an algorithm like Paxos/Raft, I get provable guarantees compared to if I allowed LLMs to exchange information over the network directly.

Discovering how a large system works can be fun. Even if a codebase is old, but the design is good, it can be gratifying.

We don't have that here either, but I'm satisfied with the Apple premium reseller network.

Still better than Apple! I pay the full price for Apple One but Apple thinks I shouldn't have access to Fitness+. Or Siri, which still doesn't support my language (Polish, 40M speakers) and has problems recognizing my English accent (whereas Google speech recognition works fine).

Ukrainians were given full employment rights in Poland after the Russian invasion, so they can just move to Poland (at least the female ones, as males aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine for now).

OK, so it sounds like it’s possible in France too, you just need to employ yourself (and then pay employment-related contributions). In Poland, this is a little simplified, as there’s a company structure called “single-person company” (I’m sorry, this is my own translation of the term, it’s probably not the best) which combines these two things (i.e. after creating this type of company you pay social security for yourself, without any extra employment contract).

The "employee" creates a single-person company in Poland (or any other EU country, I guess) and sends invoices monthly. Honestly, it's trivial to set up. I'd say it's even easier than the standard employment process in the EU.

The smaller one turned out to be hardly useful, the larger one isn’t available. Warmates seem to be more effective in Ukraine, and Ukraine bought/received more of those.

It seems to me that calling facts you don't like a "salad" or "yoghurt" is a mental equivalent of covering your ears.

Exactly, that’s one of the most overlooked parts of the Earth, but if you consider the GDP growth rate over the last 30 years, Poland is second only to China.

It's not word salad, this is the logical conclusion of the Church-Turing thesis. If you think it's false, you should present some arguments against it.

This seems irreverent to me. If you created an evolutionary algorithm, where these very complex statistical models competed for survival, I don’t see how that would help one of them become conscious.

Do you mean that because of its complexity, we are not able to define it due to practical reasons (i.e. no powerful enough computer exists)? If so, that’s something completely different. Consciousness cannot be defined with math or logic even in principle. Certain aspects of consciousness can’t be defined either, like qualia (for example, the sensation of a color). Many materialists would even say that consciousness doesn’t exist because of that, and it’s all just a delusion (to which I ask: who/what is this delusion experienced by?).

What properties of fire do you mean?

So how being embodied helps consciousness emerge? If it’s just the statistical model that underpins the consciousness, then it doesn’t matter if it’s embodied or not. It doesn’t matter to the algorithm what hardware it runs on.

I wouldn’t call it science-based, it’s just materialism. There’s no science in believing that something that can be completely described by a set of logical rules, or mathematical formulae, or something similar, suddenly gains new features that cannot even be defined with math or logic. It’s pure belief, without too many arguments for it.

You mean “talk” as in be receiving answers in real time? Because I think all Christians believe that you can “talk” to God in some way.

Is there any proof that the AI is anything else than a complex statistical model and actually has consciousness?

All pickup trucks in Poland have been sent to Ukraine and are now used by the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces

The better your military equipment is, the lesser the chance that you will need to use it.

Whose understanding of Christianity? Modern day American tech workers? Because that is the traditional understanding. It sure was how Christianity was understood by st. Augustine, st. Thomas Aquinas and st. Anzelm. And how Christian philosophers still understand it today.

There’s a Soviet version of that joke that is way harsher.