And don't forget the inevitable graffiti. The uncreative will simply spray random words and letters, but the deep thinkers among us may have the wit to draw a penis on it.
I also think more accurate. The opening sentence of Neuromancer is one of the most beautifully perfect metaphors I've ever read - one that's also chock full of symbolism. It may be the single best line of writing I've ever read.
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
Russia is neither forcibly conscripting nor are they preventing anyone from leaving the country should they wish.
Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.
The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.
You're conflating two things. There is indeed conscription in Russia, Scandinavia, and many countries in the world where people are expected to do some period of time of military training within a country. These people are generally not used in active conflicts, though it does entail enrollment in the equivalent of Selective Service in the US meaning they can be called up later (2 years in Russia) for "real" service in the case of a draft/mobilization. Russia carried out a limited mobilization once early on in the war in 2022, and it was horrifically unpopular, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country. People don't want to risk being called up to possibly die for a war they may not even agree with. Since then they have relied exclusively on volunteer forces.
Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.
People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.
You forgot to mention the widespread coercion of Russian conscripts into "voluntarily" enlisting for the war in Ukraine. Stories like this are extremely common:
Semyon* (name changed) was conscripted in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, having served in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia for the first five months, where he was asked to sign a contract several times but refused. On 20 April, he was transferred to the Chebarkul garrison and signed up for professional service after just two and a half hours.
His mother says that on the way to the unit he complained of being actively pressured into signing a contract, after which Semyon was taken to a separate office, where a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign. Semyon broke under the pressure, his family says. On the same day, he applied to have the contract annulled, saying he had signed under duress, asking for it to be declared invalid as the commander had not yet signed it, but to no avail.
Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:
Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported.
In one raid, a military officer reportedly accompanied police to hand out conscription notices directly. Activists say authorities are also targeting naturalized citizens who have obtained Russian passports but avoided military service, pressuring them to sign military contracts under threat of deportation or loss of citizenship.
There's a difference that Ukraine had not much choice after being invaded but a larger enemy, aside from maybe surrendering and letting Putin take over. Russia's invasion however was almost entirely their choice and could be stopped tomorrow if Putin just told them to stop.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy as the early terms were relatively modest but, in general terms, I would agree with the point you're making. However the issue you run into is that the exact same arguments were made in favor of slavery. For instance even Aristotle some 2400 years ago predicted the end of slavery, if slaves only were not necessary:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
Of course society could have gotten by without slavery, but it wouldn't have been as convenient, particularly for the wealthy and political classes who were the exact sort that could afford to own slaves. And the exact same is true of conscription. If people are not willing to die for the political class of a country, who are the political class to insist they die for them? And the greatest irony is that the most 'brave' of the political class are often made up of cowards and draft dodgers themselves. But it's an entirely different game when it's not their life on the line anymore.
People, who live in a time when humans in warfare are obsoleted, will look back upon this as even more vile and barbaric than slavery. And they'll damn us all for it. Yet it's an issue that "we", the people without power, mostly do not even really think about one way or the other - because it's just how it is. We might speak out against it, those in affected regions might even start their own 'Underground Railroads' to escape tyranny, but everybody knows it won't end.
For things like this I don't think you can view it as a destination, but rather a journey.
Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.
And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.
Further claims from Ukraine: they've had 30,000 total deaths, are inflicting casualties at a 10:1 rate, have a 'Ghost of Kyiv' single handedly flying around taking on Russia, Russia is out of missiles, and so on endlessly.
you stand in a room with two doors .one always lies. you use the right door because its a old thing now. Everyone knows its a lie. Why the door and its noise is still around is a mystery .
At this point we can, more or less, objectively assess who has been being honest throughout the war. And as is usually the case in war, the truth is on the side that's winning. The way to do this is simply to look at what each side is saying and contrast it against what happened, which you can easily do with web archives.
The only question is when to start. And I think May 2023 was probably the critical point in the war. That was shortly before Bakhmut would fall, and also shortly before the Ukraine counter offensive would be launched and also ultimately fail. The war was arguably effectively decided by July 2023. So here are state media from May 1st 2023. You can skim forward using the widget in the top right corner.
Probably driven in large part by the expansion of the voting pool. Great political thinkers have no more appeal to the masses at large than Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or Linux.
So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.
Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.
Trump's twice election certainly makes a case for universal voting, but maybe different individual vote weights?
Basic stuff, like if you don't know what 5 - 1/4 equals or what cells are. If not, maybe you shouldn't have as loud a say in choosing political leadership?
Universal voting is the opposite of the direction to go. See: Australia. Of course going in the opposite direction is probably impossible, because it's not about knowledge but about susceptibility to typical forms of manipulation, emotional highest among them.
This is the reason that politics has largely shifted from a game of knowledge and vision, to one of mud slinging, ad hominem, and appeals to emotion, fearmongering, and so forth. It's not because the electorate doesn't know enough, but because they have poor emotional control, making them easy to manipulate. It's exactly how conmen, operate with Wiki offering the typical pattern as exploiting "the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed." [1]
This is complete nonsense. There's no shortage of low still, low wage jobs - most of which would pay better in the longrun, have opportunities for advancement, and so on.
But they don't come with the freedom that gig jobs do which is their primary appeal.
Command prompts don't get asked questions like "What do you think about [topic]?" and have to generate a response based on their study of human-written texts.
There is again no need for first person pronouns there.
E.g. 'File not found' vs 'Sorry I could not find the file you were looking for.' Same stuff, but one just adds an artificial and unnecessary anthropomorphization.
A procedure is agnostic past the procedural rules (a calculator only follows a determined flow the way anyone could do without relevant differences); a stochastic process is inherently personal (non deterministic processes have internal biases).
In your example:
-- "iteration over filenames table reaches end → file not found";
-- "non-deterministic choice over lookup strategy does not return a positive → sorry I could not find the item"
Even if in the forward pass there would be no "temperature" tilting, the NN training would still be performed through different processes on different implementations, making the outputs "personal".
And so if you went to Saudi Arabia you'd pretend to be down with executing people for apostasy?
Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of people in this world.
What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values.
And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.
> What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values... you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.
Then, how do you explain, for example some people who migrates to France from a majority Muslim country and decides all French people are infidels and deserve death? Similarly, I know a lot of people who would curse America, yet still chooses to live in America. They were never mostly OK with the values on their current countries...
The thing is that both ideas come from the same place. People try to create a save and livable place, but they have different opinions on how to get to that place. Some more right than others, but the fact is that both have their root in the same desires.
At the end of the day, most people just want to be able to live a life, work, have children, some friends, family and health. Most difference come from the way people think they best achieve those goals.
If you grew up in Saudi Arabia raised by a typical family then yeah sure, you probably would be fine with it. Culture of course shapes people and I think it's silly to pretend you could freely swap adults but that doesn't mean that people are fundamentally different.
The question that was asked was not to confirm what GP said, it was combative to try to position GP as a bad person. Basically the equivalent of saying “so you’re saying you would be okay killing Jews if you lived in Nazi Germany.”
GP answered to clarify their position and answered the only question that should have been asked, the equivalent of, “if during my childhood I was indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth program, yes I probably would have done this horrible thing and so would you.”
I think you may have misread his post. He was not speaking of being born and raised in an area but his thought experiment was swapping out people explicitly from different cultures, and seeing at what percent the 'host' cultures would change.
He believes people would simply change their values, but I think this is an incorrect assumption, as the example should make obvious.
This is commonly stated but seems more driven by ideology than science. People's racial identity is near to perfectly correlated with their genetic identity as can be ascertained with a very limited number of genetic markers.
And essentially all of species related biology would be a 'social construct' by such logic. The difference between entire species is often poorly defined. Different species can even interbreed and produce fertile offspring such as a liger. Or take the Australian Dingo which is literally just a wild dog, but it's not classified as one for quite arbitrary reasons.
