• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Yes. There are millenia of conflicts. There are millenia of conflicts around the globe. You get two groups of humans next to each other and they are going to start stabbing each other.

    But it was normal (apologies for the negative connotations) tribal warfare. Different regions would fight other regions as both skirmishes and conquest. But it was largely when Westerners decided to draw up a bunch of maps with no willingness to understand the residents that we began the current cycles of horror. Because lets say you hate the Reds and the Reds hate you. But now? Now you live in a city with one Red and the rest of the Reds live in a city with one You. Eventually someone decides to do some ethnic cleansing which leads to retaliatory ethnic cleansing and more wars and so forth.

    And, inevitably, warlords see an opportunity to gain power. Which leads to refugees which leads to ethnic cleansing which leads to…



  • Well. The current conflict with Israel only really goes back about 80-ish years. And there are strong arguments that the current iranian proxy wars are a different conflict with different root causes but… yeah.

    The region itself? Most of that goes back to when The West decided to redraw borders with no real logic other than guaranteeing cyclic wars of ethnic cleansing between warlord. I want to say that is more 150-ish years, but I genuinely forget. So it very well could be centuries in that regard.

    But the way to think of it? The former is why EVERYONE hates Israel. The latter is why nobody is actually interested in helping the Palestinians and just view them as a way to bleed IDF resources and give the government rope to hang themselves with.











  • Part of it is the same “human speech” aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because… that should be obvious.

    This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to “This youtuber sounds smug” or “They are presenting their opinion as fact” then you see why people prefer “natural human speech” over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

    And… while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.

    But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.



  • People tried that.

    reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

    Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.