Neat! Genuinely cool to see more models of governance than the default BDFL/cool kids’ club online.

Will community moderation policy be determined by sortition?

Snorting launch. Snorting hack. Snorting go. The possibilities are endless.

It depends, would you consider Sam Altman part of the LGBTQ+ community?

Israel’s entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.

In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they’re not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it’s all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.

It’s not even secret, there have been highly publicized tests of ground- and air-launched interceptor missiles, and a fair few tests observed by amateur astronomers where military satellites rendezvoused and closed to observation/weapons range with dummy targets. It’s very hard to hide anything that happens in orbit.

From what I understand, biological systems regulated by sex hormones require one or the other to work at all. For example, you get one pattern of post-puberty bone growth with estrogen, a different pattern with testosterone, and no bone growth at all if you have neither. These systems also have some counterbalancing factor, like your bones constantly being slowly dissolved to keep calcium in your bloodstream, so if you have no gonads and no supplementary hormones, you essentially speedrun osteoporosis over the course of a few years.

I’m not too clear on other effects, but a lot of things are downstream of “your bones slowly melt,” and lots of other parts of your body rely on sex hormones to regulate them and will have long-term issues without them.

I just think we have different definitions of what accountability looks like. Have a good day.

I’m glad you can get excited at the prospect of a handful of cabinet members getting fined a fraction of the millions they enriched themselves by and getting handed 12-month sentences to be commuted while the people they imprisoned for political gain spend years in concentration camps. Where are the presidents on this list, by the way?

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It’s hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

How obsessed can people get with one inconsequential guy for being cringe on the internet?

There’s actually plenty of material to compare to, with a swath of Pal designs that are clearly original, in a similar style with similar inspirations. Then there are models with almost precisely the same silhouette and proportions as iconic Pokemon, which are frankly just worse designs for it, since the altered colors and markings clash with the original concept and result in a generally forgettable whole. They clearly had the skill and motivation to innovate more within their niche, but instead the game is half-full of what feel like hastily painted over placeholders.

• Segways
• 3D TVs
• steam-powered automobiles
• Lisp machines
• hovercraft
• supersonic airliners

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don’t count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn’t, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries “for free” (even though they already chip in).

Chabad are mostly notable for being less insular than most Orthodox sects, doing a lot of outreach to secular/Reform/Conservative Jews, and thus ending up as one of the big names in overseas funding for Zionism in the modern day. They’re really the mainstream face of Orthodox Judaism, and the fucked up abuse scandals in Israel have tended to come from fringe, Messianic sects that the state’s Rabbinate and larger organizations like Chabad can at least pretend to distance themselves from.

As for the Talmud, it’s weird how much it tends to get played up in antisemitic narratives, because in my (very limited) experience it is really, incredibly dry and mostly boring. It’s like reading Reddit comments on every page of the scriptures, where 5 incredibly pedantic nerds are arguing over what exactly counts as a fork, or what a story about a wage dispute is supposed to say about contract law and social hierarchy. There’s a predictably authoritarian “just listen to your boss and your rabbi” bent to the morals it extracts, but at the end of the day it’s a couple thousand pages of mundane, day-to-day legal doctrine. Anyone can learn Talmud, it’s just a lot of effort, and like a lot of difficult religious texts, it mostly ends up being a source local authority figures can pull out to settle arguments in their favor.

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

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There’s a lot of government and religious NGO money funneled around Israel for religious schools and student stipends, so any unscrupulous rabbis looking to start an abusive cult have plenty of opportunities handed to them. It’s really not unlike the various Christian cults that sprouted up on compounds in the American West, taking advantage of cheap resources and isolation tactics to build organizations that beat the shit out of children or do whatever else they want.

Edit: I think the settlements in particular create a similar physical dynamic, where living on stolen land ringed with fences and security checkpoints allows leaders to create an insular community that keeps victims in and accountability out. Even twenty minutes’ drive from Jerusalem, no one gets into a settlement without arranged permission, and a housewife with no car may as well be stranded out on the prairie.

A lot of those reports are nonsense. There’s solid evidence that several dozen, maybe a hundred at most, people were killed by friendly fire, which tends to get exaggerated to “every single victim at the Nova festival was killed by helicopter strafing under the Hannibal Directive.” Neither side anticipated how easy the siege would be to break, and the resulting undisciplined bloodbath isn’t out of line with similar anticolonial revolts throughout history. I don’t think there’s any reason to jump to conspiracy theories to explain the results of the Israeli government getting lost in its militaristic hubris and dehumanization of Palestinians.