ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝

or, if I’m mistaken, replace NATO with any other military alliance Ukraine would want to join

This is essentially what the Ukraine EU accession talks are about. The EU is the military alliance they want to join, and it is actually even more protective than the NATO.

So the question isn’t stupid, Ukraine actually wants this, the EU is of two minds about it so far.

even then calling it an organization is not really that accurate

It is an organization, you can go work for the NATO directly. They are headquartered in Brussels.

That said, military intervention on behalf of NATO works as you described, but there would be an obligation to help Canada in your example if the war would spread to its home soil. That said, the help obligation is literally worded “as they deem necessary”, so they could pretend that no large-scale intervention is necessary.

I’ve perceived that things have never been better for American international order than under Trump/Biden.

The last few cycles have been a weird time for NATO, as the escalating Russian aggression revitalised the alliance, but the unreliability of Trump vastly diminished the status of the US. Europe is now actively trying to get out of the military subordinate role.

There’s like 5 governments doing full dragnet surveillance in the world, wonder if one can send an interesting enough dickpic to warrant a UNSC joint session

Is the Michael Bay Skibidi Toilet adaptation still coming though?

Adventures of the little religious child soldiers

That is I guess Windows:

• Installed by the manufacturer
• “Maintained” by M$

Just joking tho, I run Fedora, even lazy people have standards.

Help me choose a distro!

My coffee preparation method is:

I drink this one kind of instant coffee that does not even need me to heat the water, I can just mix it in cold water and be good with it. It’s still coffee and I don’t have to make the slightest effort.

taps head

Why did you think Sith lightsabers are red? Think!

In my part of the world, the receipt proves that the sale was entered into the tax record, so the seller is not cheating on taxes by understating revenue.

You don’t exist on the news if you don’t have a stock market ticker.

Thanks!

Can you elaborate on these topics for someone not in the know?

No.

Watch as it does jack shit to inflation as the wage price spiral was always just a bogeyman to make sure a recession always only hits workers.

Yeah, lol no it isn’t, the whole submarine plot has been forced into it because Clancy can’t not write about submarines.

No, the loved one was actually the author, it’s a children’s book actually, light fiction, think early Harry Potter for example.

It’s a self-published hobby project, with a few dozen copies sold in the original language since there are relatively few speakers and light novels for kids are unfortunately a very small niche everywhere, and we didn’t really market it either since earning money wasn’t really the goal. The reason I’m mentioning that it was not professional work is that I’m not misrepresenting the amount of work done to someone paying me, and I’m actually interested in preserving the qualities of the original, I really don’t want to make more LLM slop, and I especially don’t want to make LLM slop out of something that has meaning to me personally. I’ve put at least a few hundred hours of manual work into it to make sure it isn’t.

But the idea is indeed to self-publish it and sell a few copies to people who are interested. It’s not about the income (the author actually has a regular job and is freelancing in 2 others, this is literally just a hobby), it’s more about the feeling of having made something that made other people interested enough to pay five bucks for it.

Responding to the other topic, one interesting thing about the translation that I’ve found out (and mistranslations from the LLM actually helped spark this idea), is if you can somehow convey the context to the reader, it can make it fresh and interesting and something they haven’t read before, and that’s true not just about idioms, but other cultural patterns as well.

Think how the world and themes of Witcher was something refreshing and new for most international audiences, while in its home country it was very recognizable where the author got his material from.

That’s a very good question.

• Yes, I have.
• It was not professional work but a private request from a loved one.
• It was actually their idea.
• And I was very, very sceptical about it at the idea at first and the output all throughout the process.

I have made extensive edits to the original LLM translation, as it got a lot of things wrong. To be honest, it got a lot of the stuff that is unique to the book and that made the book special wrong, both in words, or intent, and I had to correct it. My workflow was literally putting it in the prompt, taking the output, then putting the two texts next to each other and deciding, sentence by sentence, word by word:

• Is the translation any good? (around 95% was generally good, sometimes it trailed off, and I needed to find the point at which it started bullshitting)
• Does it use terms that are unique in the book consistently the right way (it almost never did, I literally had a dictionary of the most frequent mistakes)
• Could I have done it better? Do I know a way to better convey the intent? (this happened quite rarely, as it has done a near word-for-word translation, the biggest problems were idioms that made sense in one language but didn’t in another, or misgendered characters)

All in all, I think the LLM did the heavy lifting in remembering all the odd words and grammar, and it gave me a very flawed first draft. It was 80% of the time, but like 5% of the actual creative work that goes into a translation.

I spent 90% of my time outside the LLM, in my text editor.

And I was just making a lame joke about your spelling being exactly one typo away from two differently valid spellings.

IMO, the whole topic is nothing but a political tool, and most people wouldn’t care either way.

So there is this one playbook that the Russian-aligned right likes to play, which is: take an issue nobody but a very small minority of people care about, but it has to be something they can’t just let go. For example, the rights of trans people in the US, but in Hungary it has been the existence of one particular university at one point.

Then start bombarding your base with misinformation about how this thing is bad for society and has to be opposed, and introduce legislation. Finally, watch the small minority protest continuously and very fiercely for the issue that is existential for them, and lay back while this issue occupies public discourse for months and years, precluding other serious issues being discussed as you can comfortably be in a majority position while doing whatever you want without public attention.

The insidiousness is that the issue is really existential for the people affected, so you can’t tell them to let it go, and a lot of very loud people would demonize you for letting it go as well since it is existential for them.

So you have three options:

• Take up the fight in the issue and let it be the deciding issue for elections, driving turnout for your opponent - see gay and trans rights
• Try to take the opposite side and leave the minority group to fend for themselves, and lose them as voters - see funding the Gaza genocide
• Be a stereotypical politician and change the topic each time it comes up, which will blunt the first effect, but you will still get some of the second - this is unfortunately usually the good choice

But to actually win, what you have to do is:

• Use the tactic to your advantage and make your own attacks, keeping the topics on your talking points

Just off the top off my head, here are a few ideas the Dems could have done the same to the Reps, and I’m not a genius:

• Declare the KKK to be a terrorist organization
• Make it illegal to fly the Confederate flag on public buildings
• Institute a federal ban on child marriages

I know each of these would rile up some small segment of the Republican base, but that’s the point! You want to make them fiercely defend points that not all of them care about, as not all of them will turn out for all of these issues. You want the Mormons out in arms on the streets protesting the child marriage ban so you can be “tough on crime” and “crack down on the rioting Mormon paedophiles”.