Posts by Anony Mous

12

Is Wokeness a Religion

by JeffT in

jw
friends

this is long so i'll just post a link, i think many here will agree with a lot of what the author has to say.

it certainly resonated with my thinking of the last few years.

https://instapundit.substack.com/p/it-should-be-safe-to-be-unpopular?sd=pf.

@Riley: that seems to be exactly the definition of woke, it is editing the past to make yourself seem more pure in the present. If you publish an album or t-shirt, you shouldn’t change it just because it’s offensive ‘today’, things have historical meaning, censorship in any form is bad. If you did something truly bad, say so, embrace people are fallible and change, but don’t try to hide it, because that is how you forget history and the mistakes people make.

As far as the confederate flag, that entire debacle is exactly fake history and why this re-interpretation of history shouldn’t be accepted. It was never the official flag of the South, it never represented slavery, the flag was a battle flag for Robert E. Lee, who never purchased a slave and set his (inherited) slaves free at the beginning of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant on the ‘union’ side purchased slaves and held onto his slaves until after the war because ‘good help was expensive and hard to find’. The North actually didn’t completely eradicate slavery either, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the southern states and wasn’t completely ratified in the North until Delaware ratified the Emancipation Proclamation in 1901.

21

Is English a hybrid language?

by LoveUniHateExams in

jw
friends

the short answer is no, it is not.. i have heard one or two proposals that it is, including from langfocus, a usually excellent youtube channel.. but no, english is actually a germanic language which has borrowed many words from other languages.

here are several reasons why english is germanic at its core .... 1. verb forms.

i play - ich spiele.

Anony Mous

I am multi-lingual (both in Roman and Germanic languages), English is in most cases structurally the same as Germanic languages, but it borrows a LOT of words and most grammar exceptions are similar to French. Basically it’s a Germanic language, with a strong influence from French/Romance-like grammar but the early English didn’t want to deal with things like gendered words and implemented the rules without the reason (the gender).

I do think that older English is structurally closer to old Flemish (especially West Flemish) and Frisian which are Dutch ‘dialects’, Flemish also borrows heavily from French, which is where I see similarities.

I’m not sure when borrowed grammar and words make a hybrid language, I’m not a linguist, but the case can be made it is a hybrid, a significant amount of words you use daily are Romance.

Things like human (Latin humanus), manuscript and manual (Latin word man for hand) etc etc.

22

AI Generated Art - Impact on Artists

by Simon in

unless you've been hibernating under a rock for the last couple of years, you're probably aware that ai is the new hotness.. chatgpt gets a lot of attention but equally amazing is how capable ai is at generating art.

if you'd been ask to name anything that would be the last holdout for humans, creative arts such as writing, painting, and music would probably be some of the things at the top of the list.. yet those seem to be the things that ai can do best.. it's fascinating to use the tools, but one thing you realize is that they are just combining patterns and shapes, there isn't yet any real "intelligence", artificial or otherwise.. as an example, you can ask it to create a painting in the style or a particular artist, with a whole raft of things you want to include.

it will do a great job on first glance, but can often give people more arms or fingers than is normal, and lamp-posts can grow to different heights, like trees.

Anony Mous

Here’s the thing, it uses existing inputs, it can only give existing outputs, it won’t generate anything novel in the sense that you won’t get a new style like Cubism in the early 20th century (Picasso).

Here are the things that will be replaced: generic artists, the people in advertising that look to influence the average person with safe, generic boilerplate ‘template’ art. It can generate a website, copy and images with a simple prompt, where current website systems (eg. wordpress) have oodles of templates that no sane person could ever pour over, you’ll basically ‘search’ for your style and it will generate that style. Big companies like Coca Cola will never use it, but instead of having a 1000-person website team, they’ll now have to seek out select true artists and pay them a lot more.

I’ve used it in the field of computer and neurosciences, where I currently work, it’s great IF you know what you’re looking for, it improves your productivity but it can’t do anything new. So your code is now better commented because you have to form better sentences to have it generate semi-decent boilerplate. But it won’t implement your logic, it doesn’t understand starting points and end goals.

So what will happen: people at the low ends of each industry, the ‘gophers’, they’ll have to quickly adapt and either get better or get out. You won’t need to fill offices with useless people like HR, PR. In most fields however, people won’t be allowed to stay ‘junior’ for very long as the junior roles will be completely replaceable. People at the top will get better and more productive as they won’t have to think about and work out small details anymore.

It’s going to have a huge impact, people that haven’t taken up the ‘knowledge economy’ in the last few decades, the accountants that stubbornly stick to Excel and QuickBooks instead of specializing in R and SQL, the 50 year old entry level IT person making $80k+ because he creates his own work, the HR and legal at your average company that just search through hundreds of pages of rules, those are all gone because I can ask a trained model the same questions and get the same answers.

62

England v Ukraine

by BoogerMan in

so nice to see thousands upon thousands of fighting-age ukrainian men managed to escape the war and reach wembley to support their national football team yesterday.

things must be improving, eh?.

Anony Mous

Again, I cited my sources, it’s easy to find yourself the modern history of Ukraine and both Russian and US-backed conflict, not even the US government is denying it https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-02-25/ukraine-cia-insurgents-russia-invasion

If you somehow can debunk the stories from major papers in the early 2000s and admitted to by President Bush himself at the time go ahead.

62

England v Ukraine

by BoogerMan in

so nice to see thousands upon thousands of fighting-age ukrainian men managed to escape the war and reach wembley to support their national football team yesterday.

things must be improving, eh?.

Anony Mous

@Corney: everything I said is easily researched and anyone with a bit of knowledge of the region knows.

Even Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas_(2014–2022)

Between 2004 and 2017, the US sent Chechnya’s separatists a ton of aid, both financially and militarily, a lot of that found its way laundered through Ukraine. Not only that, but Ukrainian military members fought in the Chechen war (https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/russian-officials-consider-una-unso-fighters-in-2-3882.html) And Chechens are currently fighting in Ukraine.

Again, do your own research, whatever you’re being spooned today is bullshit. This is equivalent to the Middle East, Arab and Muslims have been at each other’s throats for centuries, finding a good party is ludicrous.

62

England v Ukraine

by BoogerMan in

so nice to see thousands upon thousands of fighting-age ukrainian men managed to escape the war and reach wembley to support their national football team yesterday.

things must be improving, eh?.

Anony Mous

You say Ukraine has to "stand up against it's aggressor", however, Ukraine has invaded various Russian regions both before and during the current continuation and recently their defense minister said they won't stop "until they get to the Red Square" (the Kremlin). In December they even hit Ryazan and Engels, about 300 miles from the Ukrainian border and there have been terrorist bombings in Moscow by Chechen separatists who have been backed by Ukraine all the way back to the 90s.

If it was just about 'retaining' a region they weren't even properly holding before Russia got involved, why would they keep pushing into Russian cities (which if you look geographically, involves crossing various natural borders)

The conflict is a lot less black and white than what the media tells you. The region has always been a hodgepodge of separatists and both Ukraine and Russia are the big players backed by respectively NATO and China to keep the pot stirring.

62

England v Ukraine

by BoogerMan in

so nice to see thousands upon thousands of fighting-age ukrainian men managed to escape the war and reach wembley to support their national football team yesterday.

things must be improving, eh?.

Anony Mous

This is the long tail of socialist policies and fellow travelers in the West (places like the NYTimes and various academia, suppressed the truth about Lenin and Stalin back in the day).

But yes, the truth is that Stalin completely eradicated the Ukraine people in Crimea and replaced them with Russians. The NYT and others in the left wing media knew about this and refused to report on it at the time. Moreover the people of the Donbas have ever since the October Revolution dreamed to be independent from either Ukraine or Russia.

Moreover Crimea is the only place the Russians have access to a waterway that connects to the oceans that isn’t controlled by NATO or frozen every winter.

The question is thus, given the past 10 years Ukraine has been fighting a civil war against independence in Donbas and given Ukraine can’t hold a majority Russian Crimea, what is the end goal. The best option could be to get out with a negotiated deal (by China, because Biden is too weak) where they give up claim to Crimea and Donbas and let the Donbas be an independent “new” buffer country.

Giving them F16s means they can fly into Russia, which Russia would see as an escalation. Then again, trying to re-take Crimea will be very bloody. At this point Ukraine hasn’t lost anything yet land. The Donbas was already opposed, Crimea was already lost.

To Russia, invading Ukraine cost them relatively very little Ukraine lost over 25% of its forces, they lost most of their gear that wasn’t donated by the US and another 20-30% of military aged reserves were lost to emigration and with that a generation of potential military recruits - the Russians lost less than 5% of their active military and gear, not even counting reserves. Russia thus eliminated the threat of having them invade through the Donbas or Crimea for the foreseeable future. Russia completed its goals, Ukraine and the Biden admin is refusing to end it.

18

Why the name change from Watchtower Bible College of Gilead to Watchtower Bible School of Gilead?

by was a new boy in

did too many jehovah's witness kids get curious about wanting to go to a real college?.

they really don't give an explanation, it's like old light and new light, one reads the new light, and .

in the spirit of loyalty, the subject gets dropped, and there's no more talk about the old name again.. .

Anony Mous

Because saying you run a college may construe that it is somehow accredited. NYS instituted a ton of legislation and regulation to any institution calling themselves a college, amongst other things, colleges, even non-accredited ones must send their curriculum to NYS Dept. of Education and comply with various inspections and guidelines so it probably became expensive to comply.

2

Sparlock 3d Printer

by enigma1863 in

so i have access to a 3d printer for a short time and i want to print out a 3d sparlock i don't have time to design my own.

does anyone know if there is a stl or any 3d files available to print out a sparlock?

Anony Mous

That’s a very obscure figure, so I can’t find any public files, but you should be able to simply convert the 2D image to 3D STL and then you only have to round it off a bit.

23

Cost of living crisis

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

during the height of the pandemic all elders had to report to the co anyone who was struggling with bills or who couldn’t pay the rent.

the co reported it to the branch.. i don’t know what happens next.

do the branch help at all?

Anony Mous

They do something with the information: they approached people like me, who were more affluent to see if we could assist somehow with particular members, then they would pretend the borg is the one providing.