For space/astronomy news, I recommend Doctor Becky https://youtube.com/@drbecky and Fraser Cain. https://youtube.com/@frasercain

Becky handles mostly astronomy news, Fraser handles mostly space flight news. Both are pretty decent at staying more objective.

Depends if I can get my phone unlocked and call an ambulance or not. Unassisted I’m probably bleeding out, but if I can get to a hospital then I can probably make it. I do wonder how much skin I’ll even have left at this point, considering the sheer number of cuts, scrapes and burns I’ve had, but blood loss should be the only potentially fatal problem needing to be dealt with immediately.

Big if, though, my hands would be a busted up mess. Operating a touchscreen would be a pretty big ask, and I probably don’t have a lot of time fully conscious. I’d also have several broken bones preventing me from going anywhere to find help.

I find it useful to remember that entertainment products are designed to be both understandable and fun, where real life was not designed to be understandable and fun.

With that in mind, no, I would not.

Many modern Christians have turned into the Pharisees from their own stories. As I recall, Jesus rather famously took his belt to them.

Even when I see Elrond in LotR, that’s actually just Agent Smith in a funny costume.

There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

This thread is really making me realize how many people just don’t know what critical thinking is… :\

Problem solving is not the same as critical thinking. No puzzle or strategy game, that I can think of, has any significant critical thinking component to it.

Wait, just thought of one exception. Social deduction games, like Among Us, when played with live chat, will train critical thinking. Critical thinking is about figuring out if this information is lying to you (edit: or otherwise flawed in some way) or not, and if so, how.

That’s a region. It’s also not what you said, you said rust bowl. You know bowls and belts are different things, right? Belts hold your pants up, bowls are dishes you eat food out of.

You read too much bullshit. The US is the second-largest manufacturer on the planet, after China. We have quite a lot of industry still. Nor was “rust bowl” ever a term, which you’d know if you were an American.

If Russian production is so plentiful, where are all the T-90s? Seems to me a major producer of materiel wouldn’t be needing to field its T-64’s in a modern conflict.

… remember the Rust Bowl? lol You should do your homework a little better.

Now I will agree that it takes years, absolutely. Not decades though, which is what you said earlier. Also, fortunately, the process of scaling up armaments production was already started, about two years ago.

Scratch? No, not even close. A reduction and an elimination are not the same thing.

Decade? Probably not, unless you’re trying to spin up domestic production from nothing.

Few years maybe. Depends who you buy them from and how developed their industry is. S Korea does a lot of artillery production. US has its fair share if you want jets. Everyone’s got small arms, trucks, stuff like that.

You see, weapons do not grow on trees. Instead, you need to allocate resources, to either construct them yourself, or purchase them from other people who do. This is usually done with money.

… how many quail eggs are needed to make a decent sized omelet anyway? A dozen?

Finer point, but it’s not measuring independent reasoning, afaik they’re still fully incapable of that. This test is measuring esoteric knowledge, like hummingbird anatomy and the ability to translate ancient Palmyran writing.

Current LLMs should eventually be able to ace this sort of test, as their databases grow. They could still be incapable of independent reasoning, though.

A test for independent reasoning could be something like giving it all the evidence for a never-before-discussed criminal case and asking if the accused is innocent or guilty based off the evidence. This would require a large amount of context and understanding of human societies, and the ability to infer from that what the evidence represents. Would it understand that a sound alibi means the accused is likely innocent, would it actually understand the simple concept that a physical person cannot be in two different places simultaneously, unlike how a quantum particle can seem to be? A person understands this very intuitively, but an LLM does not yet comprehend what “location” even is, even if it can provide a perfect definition of the term from a dictionary and talk about it by repeating others’ conversations.

Anyways, still an interesting project.

Pretty much summed it up.

I think it’s often personal, as opposed to objective. A lot of people simply like it and do not want to lose access to something they like.

Certainly. But anti-elitist sentiment is broader than just this country, as is anti-capitalist sentiment. There’s a broad coalition of people that would celebrate something like this for a variety of reasons. I try to avoid taking people online purely at face value, since its so easy and commonplace to simply spin one’s opinions slightly into something that seems similar to solidarity with one specific position, but in reality is operating from a subtly different motive in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of way.

That said, I do agree that a lot of it is from Americans. But it would be in the interest of a variety of different chaos-interested positions to amplify that in any way possible. To a communist, its class warfare. To a geopolitical rival, it’s a blow against stability. To the far right, it’s a blow against the liberal order. To social media companies its an enticing engagement. Etc etc etc.

edit for a typo and an extra example

It’s useful to remember that Americans are a minority on the English-speaking internet. There’s only 330 million of us, while the world has an estimated 1.5 billion English speakers. Probably much more if we include people that just know some of the language.

English is the global trade language, it’s frequently taken in school as a second language all over the world. If you learn some English, the amount of activities available to you dramatically increases.

Photos of the protest show they’re pretty large, especially for a country with such a low total population. Maybe people just want to be free?

edit: Photos actually remind me of the cease fire protests in Israel now that I think about it. Also a lower population country with a large contingent of upset people in it.