This article conveniently omits Israel-Palestine relations prior to and during periods of minimal US meddling. Let’s take a look at the prelude to the current conflict to get our bearings.

Obama made statements early on in his presidency about lasting peace in the Middle East. His first meeting with Netanyahu was a disaster, and so he dropped the issue for his entire term. 8 years of pretty much ignoring the Palestinians. Trump enters office and likewise makes public statements supporting lasting peace. His meetings with Netanyahu were a great success…for Israel specifically. The US changed policy to state that illegal Israeli settlements were legal, it recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel with Israel as the sole owner of the city, and it began to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. All of this was a big kick in the pants to Palestine, who were never consulted for any of these policy changes.

Biden entered office and continued to push for normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but let’s be honest, he had a similar do-nothing attitude as Obama had when it comes to lasting peace.

Then Hamas attacks Israel. The US hadn’t engaged them for over a decade and Arab nations were starting to normalize relations with Israel with no regard for Palestine. It is hard to imagine what else Hamas could have done to get the attention of the US and Arab nations.

And that brings us to the present, where Israel’s retaliation has once again captured the attention of the US and Arab nations and put the needs of the Palestinians in the minds of their leaders.

In my opinion, if we had meddled more during peace time and engaged with Palestinians in the absence of conflict, then we could have avoided the current war altogether. The current conflict appears to be the result of the absence of US meddling, or at the very least an unwillingness to recognize the needs of Palestinians during times of relative peace.

They sell CBD oil with this little droppers for dosing, but when you read the studies the dosage is like a mouthful of oil. It’s like the exact opposite problem of melatonin dosing.

My shower thoughts are always repeating cycles of “fuuuuuuuck this feels niiiiiiiiice” and “time to turn up the heat a smidge.” Am I doing it wrong?

From someone who grew up with a racist father, it was likely a juxtaposition of the handshake with stereotypes of hypersexuality and uncleanliness among black men mixed with sexist ideals of young women and their purity.

Chinese EVs subsidized with prison labor and CCP funds to undercut the market and stagnate long-term innovation, what a boon to humanity!

We are not in a recession. The problems with wage stagnation are not some temporary hiccup in the economy. It is a systemic problem. Stop conflating the two, complaining that a macroeconomic term with a very specific meaning isn’t defined the way you want it to be. Stop expecting the problem to heal itself if the fed lowers rates or taxes get nudged up or down or whatever. We know how to fix wage stagnation because we have done it before. Regulation. Labor protections. Minimum wage increases. Wage stagnation occurs in the absence of these things, and they can only be done by Congress.

Even though the law can be circumvented, it nonetheless provides resistance. Traveling to another state, filling out paperwork, paying extra money, etc all provide additional obstacles to overcome. If someone was having an acute mental problem and felt compelled to eat a barrel, a simple few hours delay in acquiring a gun can make all the difference. For someone planning on using a gun for criminal activity, at some point they might just consider employment as an easier alternative if acquiring a gun is too much of a pain.

We have already seen this effect in reverse with regard to immigration. Legal immigration is such a painful crapshoot that people are willing to surrender their fate to cartels as an alternative.

No. Human evolution is driven primarily by mate selection.

Where is the safety report for the Wuhan wetmarket? You know the one that unequivocally started one viral pandemic? Then, while closed down, we enjoyed a period with no new coronavirus pandemics? And then, shortly after reopening, there was another coronavirus pandemic originating in Wuhan? That wetmarket, you have a report on that one?

Notice that there are methods, data, and peer reviews that I can freely scrutinize. All things your opinion piece lacks.

It is so strange to say that identity should take a back seat to humanism when every historical example of discrimination and dehumanization is based on identity. Identity in those instances is not imposed on oneself, but is used to define the outgroup that is being dehumanized. Identity politics is simply an honest accounting of groups that being descriminated against. When the discrimination ends, we see the group identity evaporate. We need only look at the early 20th century definitions of Caucasian, and the identity politics of Irish and Italian Americans subsequently evaporating when that definition evolved to include all Americans of European decent, to see that identity politics is a reaction to injustice and not the other way around.

For real, we’ve got the first openly pro-union president, we expanded NATO, student loan forgiveness, actual infrastructure funding, the first administration to openly push back against Israel during war time, all of that in only 4 years. He is the most effective president of my lifetime and I am happy to vote for him again.

Details like this are really just a distraction. Do you really think the average respondent understands these technical details, or have any good reason to memorize the specs of all rifles? The focus on the AR-15 is not because of any risk associated with that particular gun, but because most people understand that this is a semi-auto rifle. There is no other model of gun that will have that kind of widespread recognition.

Drawing up these very silly technical arguments is a willful ignorance of the underlying issue: What is the limit of deadly force we should allow one person to lawfully own? We don’t let people own tactical nukes. We don’t need to argue over thermonuclear or hydrogen nukes. We don’t need to understand quantum mechanics to regulate these devices. The technical details do not matter. The potential body count is what matters. And so it is with guns, which happen to occupy that grey area where reasonable people disagree on an acceptable level of lethality. You do not need to know all the different models of gun to be killed by one, so we should not require such technical knowledge when engaging in discourse around their regulation.

Is no one going to acknowledge that a huge portion of the American electorate actually supports Israel’s genocide? Part of living in a democracy is accepting that official policy reflects some mixture of the views of the electorate. If the US electorate is still mixed in its view of Israel then the official US policy should be mixed as well (which it is).

I will use my vote to push for an end to the genocide, the release of hostages, and a stable 2-state solution. But I will not abandon core democratic values just because I find myself in the minority.

You linked a paper on planning in LLMs. Planning is largely in the domain of reinforcement learning. The paper you linked conflates reasoning with planning, alongside the obviously biased prose, so the author really doesn’t seem credible. I prefer nuanced and careful evaluations such as: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949719123000298

Here I think you are behind on the literature. LLMs can infer and reason, and there are whole series of papers that evaluate LLMs for these properties the exact same way we evaluate humans. So if you can’t trust the metrics, then you cannot even assert that humans can reason and infer and understand.

TikTok enacted a very obvious influence campaign to fight this legislation that resulted in congressional phone lines becoming jammed. So what China can do is directly influence our laws.

It would be if McCarthy’s hearings were full of actual KGB agents.

LLMs do not look stuff up (except when they have an API that allows them to), but I think OP’s point still stands. The statistical next token predictor metaphor is useful , but in many regards that’s what text and language are. If you can understand that certain words are linked to certain other words, then you should be able to appreciate that certain groups of words can be associated in a way that is functionally the same as data.

I have not memorized the pytorch documentation, but I can use what I understand about pytorch and other libraries to infer specific aspects of the library that I am not familiar with. Functionally, this is no different than if I accessed the documentation directly. If I communicate this information to others I have functioned as a data repository. The repository works on a more abstract and error-prone level, but it works nonetheless.

Here is another very concrete example: LLMs know George Washington’s birthday. Not because they look up that information, but because of the learned associations between George Washington, birthday, and his actual date of birth.

Lol these are grants. Guess what, we’ve been funding research into corona viruses ever since the first SARS outbreak…which came from a wet market in Wuhan.

What you need to link is physical evidence showing that COVID-19 was in the lab prior to the outbreak, or that the COVID-19 sequence is comprised of two or more sequences from viruses stockpiled in the lab (it is a surveillance lab).

You do not have that evidence. You do not understand how viral labs work. You do not even understand how science funding works. You are the kind of person that believes a highly controlled lab environment with trained personnel is more likely to spread disease than a dense market place where known viral reservoirs are slaughtered in open air by any moron with a blade.