Here’s a lighter bit of news about something that didn’t change for a good while
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Michigan State [University] lost to [University of] Michigan by a score of 49-0.
A YouTube commenter remarked that Michigan State put more Hitlers on the scoreboard than points.
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Interview with Israeli writer Etgar Keret (no paywall)
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Lovely interview. Thank you.
If you are referring to the woman who sued McDonald’s, I suggest you don’t swallow the “frivolous lawsuit” meme McDonald’s would like you to (as I used to), but look into the details. McDonald’s were serving coffee in the high 80s degrees Celsius, such that it caused 3rd degree burns in a matter of seconds which fused her labia to her thigh (there are graphic photos online) and required hospitalisation and skin grafts.
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What were they expecting? This is the internet… 
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Seems like Youtube’s new ad-block-block policy also contributed to Nick Sibicky’s recent decision to stop* making Youtube content.
* regularly, and for a while, maybe not 0 for ever
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It seems more like Nick felt really bad about the situation with him wanting to have an “ad free channel” and Youtube actually running ads on his videos without notifying him or asking for any consent on that. I run a “free project” and I’d be furious if someone else sold my book which I made to be free of charge, so I dare say that I understand his frustration on that.
On a general note, making content for 12 years usually ends up turning a fun hobby to an anxiety generating mechanism. Nick totally needs and deserves a well-earned rest and as I wrote in that YT comment, we are still going to be sending new players to his channel, even if he never uploads a single thing ever again. Nick’s the best teacher for DDK/SDK. 
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Forecasts typically rely on Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), which begins with carefully defined physics equations, which are then translated into computer algorithms run on supercomputers. While this traditional approach has been a triumph of science and engineering, designing the equations and algorithms is time-consuming and requires deep expertise, as well as costly compute resources to make accurate predictions.
Deep learning offers a different approach: using data instead of physical equations to create a weather forecast system. GraphCast is trained on decades of historical weather data to learn a model of the cause and effect relationships that govern how Earth’s weather evolves, from the present into the future.
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But his campaign ruffled feathers in some circles, with a concerted effort by many in New Zealand to thwart what they perceived to be “American interference” in the bird election.
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Cats and the internet still a thing in 2023
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Shifting crops to a different kind is one thing, but such a change in such a small time means that you cannot plan ahead and plant trees. That’s the big issue now. By the time they are old enough to produce anything meaningful, they might not be in the same climate zone they started out in. 
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(There’s more Hikaru videos and possibly one more longer Kramnik video from earlier)
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Unless we unite now to stop them, populists can win anywhere
This lesson is as old as the 1930s but clearly it takes a long time to learn
In a single week, two far right populists with crazy hairstyles triumphed in elections they weren’t supposed to win. Javier Milei secured the presidency of Argentina, defeating the Perónist establishment candidate Sergio Massa to begin an experiment in ripping up the state. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, Geert Wilders – a man with a criminal record for inciting racism – scored 23.6%, allowing his PVV party to make the first attempt to form a coalition.
Beyond the hairstyles, the extreme rhetoric and flamboyant political gestures, however, the most worrying feature of the two populist victories is how different the countries were in which they happened.
[…]
Are you folks at the ready for the 2024 post and thread?
What will the title be? “2024: Cthulhu vs. Godzilla!”
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In this case the title should be “People are unable to learn”.
I read the article and it actually falls prey to the same thing that it tries to warn against, look at this:
There are no miracle cures, but ending the temptation for free-market conservatives to move on to the anti-woke/overtly racist agenda of the far right is surely one antidote. A firm political alliance between the centre and the left is another.
They are not even trying to ponder “hey, what’s the reason the voters go for that kind of thing?”, “maybe there are some things that we should listen, consider and incorporate as well?”, “isn’t a democracy supposed to represent the people, so maybe we should try to listen to what the people worry/care about and at LEAST pretend to do something?”
I am watching these days a review of that fellow in Argentina and it really is borderline insanity with a fair amount of chainsaws of all things.
And that fellow won??? This is not the kind of thing you just ignore and say “let the other fellows do a coalition and problem solved”.
This is the equivalent of a large group of students trying to decide whether to go for vacations in a beach or a mountain or a dumpster and instead of everyone worrying “hey, why would anyone want to go to a dumpster for vacations?” then go “hey, who cares? The mountain and beach people should lobby to avoid the dumpster and that’s all we need! Yay!”.
And that is called a solution? Come on 
It is a politician’s job to listen to the public and represent them. If they did a better job at that, populists wouldn’t have had a chance at anything.
Another prime example of how tone-deaf are those people that are tasked to “rule the countries and save the world” (some of them do think like that), is what happened in the Greek left party SYRIZA and their internal elections.
Behold the scene:
The lifelong party president resigns and the people that had been sawing his chair are finally up to take up his seat. They come out of the courtains and set as candidates for president. The same people that the citizens had rejected and their politics had failed went out and made speeches about “doubling down” on more of all that had failed.
In an insidious move by another branch of the party (and the now ex-president) a new candidate, practically outside of the party, arrives. NOONE from the citizens knows how he is, he is not really a populist since he is running as a presidential candidate for a Left-wing party while admitting to be rich, dabbling with ships and being an ex-employee of Goldman Sachs.
Hardly a populist candidate for a left-wing party where “ideological purity” is valued and noone would have voted for that guy? Right? Wrong.
Because the public voted for that unknown fellow with one and ONLY ONE criteria:
“We will vote for ANYONE else, other than those people that were already in the party”
It sounds odd, eh? That the people that vote for the party, didn’t want to vote for the people that are in the party, but it is TRUE! Because those people were now out of touch with reality and the voters. They got a bit of power and suddenly they thought that they were the “avatars of the Left”, the “embodiment of progress” and stuff like that (I am not making them up - I wish I was, but those are almost verbatim), so what do they do?
Do they take the message of the people, accept the loss, LEARN from it and improve while respecting the democratic result. Of course they didn’t :
They blamed the public for “selling out”, outcried that the candidate that won was “a drone of the alt-right brought in from America” (actual quote said on TV by one of them), took no responsibility for the result, made no comment of any mistake or improvement that they might have to make, got on their high-horse of pretending to be the avatars of the Left, broke the party in half, left the party and took the parliament seats with them (which according to the party rules does not belong to them, but the party), by claiming that “the public voted for a left party, SYRIZA is no longer left (because we are not in it and we say so), thus we represent the left, ergo we keep the seats”.
But the public didn’t sell out. They were very clear with what they wanted (they wanted improvement and actual progress) and those people went “nah, that’s not how democracy works” 
Next elections those fellows are not getting even a 2% and they will write fiery articles about populism and BS like that. They will say that, people that might not know better might read those articles and believe them, but they will be dead wrong.
Some people need to get out of their offices and actually do the work of representing the public. Not THAT hard of a concept and not that hard of a solution.
But it requires some actual work and, worst of all, some humility, in returning in their minds from being “rulers, avatars and saviours” to just being “public servants” (words are important)
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At 4:27 a.m. Sunday, a 40-centimeter tsunami was observed in the Pacific island of Hachijojima, part of Tokyo, the agency said