European Jews make up the Israeli elite. There were Jews already living in the land that is now Israel, who were very much not part of any colonization movement, but we’re well integrated into the local economy. When the Europeans cames, there was a lot of aminus between them and the native Jews as well as the native Muslims.

As the conflict developed and identities hardened, the native Jews became increasingly accepted within the Zionist camp, and less so within the Arab camps. Relatedly, this led to a bunch of Arab countries doing their own ethnic cleansing of Jews, who would then go to Israel. Again, these Jews were overwhelming native to where they were expelled from, not European.

A massive amount of the original conflict started not as a racial dispute, but as a property dispute. Britain brought over its own notion of land ownership that did much match the local notion. The immigrant Jews bought land under the British system, which led to a bunch of dueling claims, both sides of which were legally valid.

The amazing thing about reading the history on this, is that everyone knew this was going to happen. There were contemporary Zionists who warned about it. Contemporary Arabs warned about it. Even the fucking Nazis warned about it (which is why they were much more interested in forming a Jewish colony in Madagascar).

At this point, I’m not convinced any of this history actually matters. We have Israellis and Palestinians now. Both of which are modern identities that were created as part of this conflict. And those are the identity groups that need to reconcile in order to solve it. The original land disputes are so far in the past that there is no way to unwind them. The new land disputes can still be unwound, but those are illegal under every system, including Israeli law (although, I’m not so sure about now, as they recently passed laws authorizing it, so the very new ones might be legal under Israeli law).

KSA seems to be modder friendly; to the point that there early releases were for the expressed purpose of getting modder input.

They also seem to still be in the core tech development stage. I suspect the details of what actual gameplay looks like will be flushed out through iterative development with player feedback.

What’s the difference between millionaire and a billionaire? About a billion dollars.

It still amazes me that laptops are still the cutting edge tech for schools.

General purpose computers have always had major problems with students getting distracted and going off topic, and are a never ending source of tech issues; particular when locked down in a way that still fails to address the previous issues, but makes them fail more often.

Admin is concerned about paper costs? Get every student an Eink reader. Schools are a big enough market to justify specoalized Eink readers that support classroom management style features (e.g. pushing a reading to student in the room).

Don’t want to deal with hand written essays. I was using a digital typewriter as a middle school student 20 years ago.

It’s like requing laptops for every math class because we don’t want to force students to do all their calculations by hand. But that’s not the choice: we have calculators! Even when we let them use calculators, we have a choice of what calculator to give them. We have 4 function calculators, scientific calculators, graphing calculators, symbolic calculators. And we can pick what tool we give students based on the needs of the particular lesson.

The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it. Israel’s blanket denial of food, water, and other necessities to Gaza is a serious violation of international law and will do nothing but harm innocent civilians. The United States has rightly offered solidarity and support to Israel in responding to Hamas’ attack. But we must also insist on restraint from Israeli forces attacking Gaza and work to secure UN humanitarian access. Let us not forget that half of the two million people in Gaza are children. Children and innocent people do not deserve to be punished for the acts of Hamas.

• Bernie Sanders, October 11, 2023

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-statement-on-continuing-violence-in-israel-and-gaza/

You and I, in a little toy shop

I’m not sure how common it is, but my employer (in the US) runs on a twice monthly payroll system.

Large projects also involve casting tests as well. When you do a pour, you also cast a few cylindrical molds of concrete. Then, you test those cylinders after a few weeks.

If your goal is to safely sabatoge a project, something that causes an issue here seems like a good option. It will get caught before it becomes a safety issue; but after it has already cost a significant amount of time and resources

It’s nice that heating milk kills bacteria and viruses; but doing it too much can damage taste and nutrition. That’s why I’ve been experimenting with ways to minimize the temperature and time needed to sanitize milk without otherwise damaging it. The deep state will never get me to drink pasturized milk!

I have 3 cats, and one of them plays fetch. Although he typically gets bored after a dozen throws or so.

So does the bad code

So does the bad code

Talk to your doctor. BMI is a crude metric that doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle. For understanding population level statistics, this is good enough. But for individuals it can be highly misleading; particularly those that do strength training.

If you wanted to lower your BMI, there is a good chance that stopping all weight lifting would do that for you. But that would probably make you less healthy, despite “improving” your BMI.

No. The time has come for Plan 9!

Part of the reason we are seeing such an active protest movement now is that ICE is doing its thing in Minneapolis, which was able to mobilize the existing activist network that was created as a result of the police murder of notable white black person George Floyd. This murder was national news and led to police reform in a bunch of states.

When notable white Salvadorian person Kilmar Abrego Garcia was illegal deported to a foreign torture prison, there was nation wide protest, with Senate Chris Van Hollen traveling to El Salvador. This nationwide protest movement eventually secured his release.

But they won’t have the authority, protection, and power of the state to carry out violence.

Advanced calculus? In this house, we use numerical methods!

Datasets are not the only mechanism to train AI. You can also use reinforcement learning. This requires you to have a good fitness function. In some domains, that is not a problem. For LLMs, however, we do not have such a function. However, we can use a hybrid approach, where we train a model based on a data set and optimizing for fitness functions that address part of what we want (e.g. avoiding em dashes). In practice, this tends to be tricky, as ML tends to be a bit too good at optimizing for fitness functions, and will often do it in ways you don’t want. This is why if you want to develop a real AI product, you actually need AI engineers who know what they are doing; not prompt engineers who will try and find the magic incantation that makes someone else’s AI do what they want

He’s likely going to have mental health issues now, as a result of the shooting.

As for pre-existing mental health issues; to me the most likely condition seems to be “was 11”, which most people grow out of. As a thought experiment, how many 11 year olds are there that you would be comfortable having a gun unsupervised.

Probably a stupid question, but has anyplace tried just making business restrooms public. Cities already impose a lot of zoning requirements. It seems like adding this rule to high pedestrian zones should be entirely doable.