Of course it is, that’s how “Democracy” has always worked. In what meaningful way has the US ever promoted Democracy? Yet every single military action abroad is justified by saying we’re defending Democracy. It’s not an actual thing, just a signifier (and practically speaking, democratic countries = countries that bend the knee to US hegemony).

Those Bush quotes genuinely fill me with rage.

Most reliable Reuters article

I’m on a seaweed diet, I see weed etc etc

knowing history makes you a Putin bot

That’s true. I’ve never asked around or even googled to see how much it’s changed in the last centuries where I live.

One of the things I remember from when I was much younger was when I thought that Thanksgiving was a holy day of obligation where I lived because I saw some reminders from some American centric people saying to go to Mass. I think my dad called a priest and the priest was like wtf do you mean why would we celebrate that.

There’s two separate practices: Abstinence, and fasting, with some different rules. Abstaining means no sex as you said, and you don’t eat meat, with the exception of fish and mollusks (can’t remember if other types of seafood are allowed because I don’t eat seafood in general), and abstinence. From 14-17 you’re only required to do abstinence, even on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Abstinence is required on those days and every Friday of Lent. Fasting is only required on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. I guess it’s kinda funny to imagine a couple marrying on a Friday and not being able to consummate.

And I think the confusion you’re talking about might be because the rules are very different in different countries (though I’m not sure about it varying by diocese as you suggest, it’s fairly consistent throughout countries). For example, where I live, there’s never been that rule to abstain on every Friday of the year, and I think it’s also like that in most places in Latin America. I’m pretty sure that Catholics in the US used to all abstain on Fridays even after 1983. I know that a lot of Tradcaths still do it, but they’re such a small minority (but very prevalent online ofc).

I’m sure you already knew a lot of that but the point is that afaik in Latin America we haven’t had as many inconsistencies with that because we keep abstinence and fasting to Lent only. Also, I hadn’t heard of fasting in Holy Saturday, that sounds like something regional as well.

: She’s a firebrand socialist, Harry!

Not sure if she’s completely innocent of everything or anything but I didn’t find out anything bad about her in my playthrough and she did nothing but defend the Union. The way Evrart described her, she was even more radical than him, and he’s already a communist who’s willing to do anything to win the class war.

Agreed, don’t expect it to break absolutely everything but I expect that software development is going to get very hairy when you have to use whatever bloated mess AI is creating.

do we have pain threshold?
yeah we do

Well in my game the tribunal just went terribly haha. I did a sober run and all the checks had like 15% chance to succeed, failed all of them miserably except saving Kim. I felt the worst over Elizabeth dying honestly, I respected the Hardie boys but they had signed up to defend Martinaise and their sacrifice was something they had agreed to. But Elizabeth was innocent.

The dream sequence at the end was something else. Something about how Dolores had been presented as a recipient for all humanity’s love, a perfect human, yet there was immense pain associated with her thru her genocide and the baggage HDB projects onto her just made it feel bizarre. Felt a lot like the third act of Mulholland Drive, where the rug gets pulled from under you and the characters you loved have betrayed each other so all the warmth is gone, it’s just despair.

Sadly uni starts soon and Path of Exile 3.22 comes out in a week so I don’t have time! But I will definitely play OMORI and BG3 once I find the time.

It won’t be long (maybe 3 years max) before industry adopts some technique for automatically prompting a LLM to generate code to fulfill a certain requirement, then iteratively improve it using test data to get it to pass all test cases. And I’m pretty sure there already are ways to get LLM’s to generate test cases. So this could go nightmarishly wrong very very fast if industry adopts that technology and starts integrating hundreds of unnecessary libraries or pieces of code that the AI just learned to “spam” everywhere so to speak. These things are way dumber than we give them credit for.

You have a pretty interesting idea that I hadn’t heard elsewhere. Do you know if there’s been any research to make an AI model learn that way?

In my own time while I’ve messed around with some ML stuff, I’ve heard of approaches where you try to get the model to accomplish progressively more complex tasks but in the same domain. For example, if you wanted to train a model to control an agent in a physics simulation to walk like a humanoid you’d have it learn to crawl first, like a real human. I guess for an AGI it makes sense that you would have it try to learn a model of the world across different domains like vision, or sound. Heck, since you can plug any kind of input to it you could have it process radio, infrared, whatever else. That way it could have a very complete model of the world.

yeah the saws are just for decoration, the serrated edges are incapable of inflicting tissue damage unless they’re powered

Yeah that’s definitely true. She is anticapitalist to some extent though, if you watch her video on AI she basically says the same thing ML’s have been saying for forever, that AI is only an instrument that reduces the amount of specialized labor that goes into each commodity, but firms will still need workers to make their products (but with lower wages and less bargaining power now).