Project sundial was a cold war American project to build a bomb so big it wouldn’t matter where it was detonated It was a true doomsday weapon

There is alot of things the government does for you that most people likely have never thought about. Take invasive species for instance; There are huge efforts to contain and eradicate a variety of invasive species. You’ve probably never heard about these efforts. But they are needed to maintain and protect both farmland and the ecology of the United States. If those efforts are defunded and those species are allowed to run rampant it’ll be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

I’d love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don’t cooperate with trump’s agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you’ve never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.

Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that’s even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.

I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren’t serious about project 2025 (if you haven’t read that you should) it’s real bad.

Space is big. It’s so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it’s size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.

Did you know that the Gazan bomb disposal teams are some of the most skilled in the world? The reason for this is so they can disarm and disassemble unexploded Israeli bombs so that the explosives can be repurposed and fired back. So a surprisingly large portion of the explosives that Hamas used were supplied by Israel via their long-term sporadic bombing of Gaza and anything resembling major infrastructure.

This question right here perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with LLMs right now. They could be good tools but the people pushing them have no idea what they even are. LLMs do not make decisions. All the decisions an LLM appears to make were made in the dataset. All those things that an LLM does that make it seem intelligent were done or said by a human somewhere on the internet. It is a statistical model that determines what output is mostly likely to come next. That is it. It is nothing else. It is not smart. It does not and cannot make decisions. It is an algorithm that searches a dataset and when it can’t find something it’ll provide convincing-looking gibberish instead.

Listen think of it like this; a man decides to take exams to become a doctor in France, but for some reason he doesn’t learn either french or medicine. No, no instead he studies every former exam and all the answers to them. He gets very good at regurgitating those answers so much so that he can even pass the exam. But at no point does he understand what any of it means and when asked new and novel questions he provides utter nonsense answers. No matter how good he gets at memorising those answers he will never get any better at medicine. LLMs are as likely to gain sentience as my excel spreadsheets are.

That all depends on where the data set comes from. The code you’ll get out of an LLM is the average code of the data set. If it’s scraped from the internet (which is very likely) the code you’ll get will be an amalgam of concise examples from one website, incorrect examples from another, bits from blogs with all the typos and all the gunk and garbage that’s out there.

Getting LLM code to work well takes an understanding of what the code it gives you actually does and why it’s bad. It will always be bad because it cannot be better than the dataset and in order for a dataset to be big enough to train an LLM it’ll have to have everything they can get including all the trash. But it can be good for providing you a framework to start with. It is however never going to replace actual programming and understanding of programming. The talk of LLMs completely replacing programers is mostly coming from people who do not understand coding or LLMs at all.

The sexual abuse of young boys has been going on for a very, very long time but for most of that time, the church and all its institutions were unassailable and infallible. So most of it went unreported at the time. The attitude that the church and by extension, the priest could do no wrong was especially prevalent here where I grew up. Which is why some truly horrible things were allowed to happen. The church committed some vile acts and they weren’t all sexual abuse and enjoyed the protection of the government all the while. Here have some fun reading.

Allow me to address a question the pro-Russian guy keeps dodging; Wagner is no longer participating in the Ukraine war. I don’t know the full details but after their mutiny, they were sent back to Africa and other foreign countries far from Russia and have been working to shore up Russian-friendly dictatorships and regimes. But they have been kept well away from Ukraine and Russia ever since. Part of what they’ve been doing is selling and advertising their services as consultants and support to keep people in power. This helps Russia build influence which is something it desperately needs right now. Wagner being in Venezuela would not be strange. It would mean the guy who is yelling about the CIA trying to overthrow him has accepted Russian help. In fact considering how active Wagner has been in involving themselves anywhere where they can get a foothold it’d be weird if Wagner weren’t in Venezuela.

Yes going outside in the first week is a very bad idea. However not because the radiation outside will instantly drop you. Much of the radiation will be coming from radioactive dust, known as fallout that’ll be comprised of all kinds of isotopes. The isotopes that decay quickly release a lot of radiation over a short period and if you go outside you will come back covered in them. This will bring radiation into wherever you are using as your shelter. This would not just harm the person who went outside but everyone else sheltering with them. So do not go outside for any reason. You can make do without power for a while.

On a related note; keep water and food covered. Skin is a surprisingly good defense against radiation but breathing in this dust or letting it get into the food you eat or the water you drink is very dangerous. After a week has passed you should for your own safety keep the time spent outside your shelter as low as possible. Short trips outside will become safer as time goes on but activities that kick up dust will still be dangerous for a long time.

Christianity exists. Religions don’t tend to spring up from nowhere. Every myth has its nugget of truth. Was there a preacher back then whose followers later spread around the world? Almost certainly. Where else could Christianity have come from?

Was he the son of god though? Was he capable of all the miracles the bible claims? Is the god he preached even real? There is no evidence that the answer to these three questions is anything but no I’m afraid.

Actually yes. Or well sort of. I believe some tax forms even have boxes for illegal income. This is because there is an odd interaction between two very important laws; you must report all income truthfully for tax purposes and you cannot be compelled to incriminate yourself. Tax law cannot overwrite the 5th amendment. This means they have a choice; either they can prosecute anyone they see as having an illegal income but make it so people writing nothing but “I plead the 5th” on all their tax paperwork is perfectly valid. Or they can choose not to prosecute reported criminal income and retain the ability to go after people who refuse to do their taxes. The only way the tax system can work is if reporting your own illegal income doesn’t legally incriminate you.

The things you write on your taxes cannot be used against you in a court of law unless you are lying in some way. So it is legally safe. Practically perhaps not. Both the police and many of the security agencies love using something known as ‘parallel construction’. It’s where they get some information they shouldn’t have access to or shouldn’t be using and build an investigation that explains how they got that information legitimately so they can use it in court.

The US and international pressure. So optics basically. Kind of like how they made ‘efforts’ at peace and a two-state solution over the past decades just to show they were trying. Those deals involved things like all the Isreali settlers remaining in Palestine, continuing to live under Isreali laws despite living in Palestine and for the IDF to be the defense and security forces for both countries. Or things like all the arable land going to Isreal and Palestine getting cut up into multiple enclaves.

Isreal has been obstructing aid from crossing the border for the longest time. The US even started airdropping stuff in because the Isreal was disrupting aid convoys from crossing into Palestine. They even had to start building a pier because Isreal wasn’t letting in any aid. After a lot of international pressure Isreal relented and stopped deliberately screwing up the aid convoys. Except the moment that happened settlers suddenly started knowing when and where every aid convoy was crossing into Palestine and started attacking them.

No, no it doesn’t. Suicide is a sin but Christianity absolutely glorifies self-sacrifice for the religion. I mean you’ve heard of martyrs right? It became a core tenant of the religion in the early roman days that dying for the faith gets you straight into heaven. Glorifying dying for the faith is a massive part of Christianity too. In Islam committing suicide is a sin unless you’re self-sacrificing yourself for the faith and dying for the faith also gets you straight into heaven. Just like in Christianity. They’re both Abrahamic faiths and have a lot of the same roots.

So yeah what the fuck are you talking about? They are no more self-sacrificing than anyone else. They’re just fucking people. They’re all just people. Why can’t we just treat them like people?

50% of the population of Gaza was under 18 based on Israeli numbers for Gaza prior to October. This means 50% of the population wasn’t even alive when that vote happened since it happened 18 years ago! Fun fact about that vote; Hamas represented themselves as significantly more moderate in the run-up to the election only to drop that the moment they got elected and murder all their political opposition. They have since continued to murder outspoken political dissidents and quash any efforts for new elections.

A twenty-year-old election that was run on lies tells us nothing about the feelings of the people of Gaza in the current day. It doesn’t tell us how much they support Hamas now and it certainly tells us nothing about how much they value their lives.

Though your twisted rationlisation tells me a lot about how you value their lives.

It’s a shame their definition of Hamas includes all Palestinians.

So if your home was invaded in a war that became an unrelenting meat grinder you’d advocate surrender and submission? You’d happily allow things to degenerate into a decades-long insurgency? You’d happily endure the heavy-handed crackdowns the invading government enforced on anyone and everyone who held even the slightest shred of sympathy for the insurgents? You’d accept that the bloody and brutal insurgency was better than the full-scale war despite the constant uncertainty? No, you wouldn’t, would you? You’d advocate surrender and submission again. You’d tell the insurgents to lay down arms because people were dying, you’d tell them that enduring the invader’s harsh rule was better than the suffering inflicted in the fight. You’d tell them to give up.

I do not understand how you do not see the stance you take as the insult it is. I do not understand why you think people should stand down as their freedom is stripped away from them. Putin has made it clear, in a great many speeches, that they resent and reject the idea of Ukranian identity. Yet you tell the Ukranians to surrender and hold no ire to the Russians who levelled so many Ukrainian cities with artillery.

I should really proofread my comments before I post them but then again you don’t strike me as worth the effort. I am well aware eastern Ukraine speaks Russian and has for a long time, I was talking exclusively about the rebels coming from nowhere.

Oh the Russian speaking population that sprang up in rebellion from nowhere in pretty much a single day with a clear and organised command structure from day one, with matching gear, uniforms and weapons and a bizarrely poor understanding of the local geography despite supposedly being locals. You know they attacked a movie theatre because they thought it was a local government center? Those rebels? The ones the locals didn’t recognise? The ones whose casualty numbers had a weird correlation with Russian servicemen dying from unexplained causes? Those rebels?

Now I normally don’t call ‘Russian bot/troll’ too often but Russian propaganda about this is so poor I have a hard time coming to any other conclusion.