• 6 Posts
  • 179 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgtomemes@lemmy.worldFuck Tankies
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    3 days ago

    There are two issues with human rights.

    One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it’s too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.

    The other is that it’s a “luxury product”. Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It’s hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can’t even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you’ve gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You’ve got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn’t going to get them to make that choice any faster.






  • I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

    Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.



  • Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

    Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.




  • But what data would it be?

    Part of the “gobble all the data” perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.

    OTOH maybe there’s probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the “expert system” with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can’t generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that’s a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE










  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    1 month ago

    The keyboard has 4 keys to the right of the space bar, so it’s probably a PC-style keyboard with “Windows keys”. But the Mac is old enough it would be ADB only. There’s no way that’s working without a spendy adaptor.

    Unacceptable. Beat the props guy with a Model F.