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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Both. It’s satire.

    The “benefit” of world hunger is that it keeps people locked in their place and entrenches the status quo. This is actually true, and the author believes it, but he doesn’t like it.

    Many people benefit from world hunger though, and every time you hear that poverty is a hard problem to solve you should ask yourself, how much of that is actual problems and how much is the status quo resisting change?









  • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.mltochapotraphouse@hexbear.netSame
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    1 month ago

    Having drunkenly talked to German philosophers about this, some of them actually prefer reading him in English.

    Heidegger does all kinds of fuckery with the German language, and imposes new technical meanings on words. If you’re reading it in English and you come across a loan word from German in italics at least you know there’s some fuckery going on, and you don’t make the mistake of assuming he’s using the word in the same way everyone else does.





  • As someone working and publishing in the field this is more a cyber jerk about American exceptionalism than actually true.

    Chinese universities and companies publish a shit tonne at pure machine learning conferences. They absolutely do a large amount of research into the fundamentals of machine learning as well as the applied stuff. They’re probably the closest to the US in terms of having large firms that are prepared to bank roll the training of the very large language models.

    Alibaba in particular has been constantly doing cutting edge stuff in terms of multimodal language models that are worth paying attention to.

    The actual truth is that China does both kinds of work. Broad foundational and applied work lead by independent research groups in companies and universities, and focused application driven stuff for direct application by the state.

    Google still stands out in terms of the amount of research it does, but this is because Google is different to everyone -other US research institutes don’t compare to it either.



  • One of the important things in many kinds of meditation is it’s not about stopping the bees, but noticing them.

    I remember hearing about some Buddhist monk who was famed for his meditation. Someone asked him how long he could sit before his mind wandered “oh about seven seconds normally”. He just got very good at noticing when his mind wandered and trying again.





  • This is going to massively depend on which country you live in, but frequently neither.

    Parties can pick who they like, but they often allow politicians and party members to vote as part of internal selection process.

    In the UK only weirdos and political extremists are party members, and the Tory party tends to spend a lot of effort trying to stop their members from having a vote.

    So of the last four prime ministers.

    Sunak didn’t have a vote (lost to truss before that).

    Truss won an internal vote.

    Johnson won an internal vote.

    May was uncontested.

    And this is only the internal vote. All of them became prime minister without an election. Generally you vote for a party (some pedant will claim you vote for MPs, but they do what the party says) and then the leader can change while they’re in power.