Me as a Romanian: heh. Yup, no post WW2 puppet government extracted our resources, no sirree bob. Totally benevolent soviet occupational forces who bestowed flowers, kisses and rainbows upon the populace.

It also tends to be people farthest away from what’s going on. The most anti-Russian countries tend to be those geographically closest to Russia. Those on the border with them know what’s at stake and why having military backing against Russian aggression is so important.

i really think it’s just more nuanced.

Absolutely! Despite making a short straightforward comment about my own experiences with the time commitment and cost of veganism, I fully understand that it’s more nuanced in my own life, let alone across the breadth of differing human experiences and cultures worldwide.

One of my absolute favourite food products is Felix vegetarian hash

I am genuinely glad you managed to find a cheap and tasty food which can at least help you reduce slightly your meat purchases.

Being a vegan is expensive in time and money

I don’t think the second half is true. Despite being subsidized like crazy, meat is still relatively expensive.

It’s definitely more time-consuming if you wouldn’t be cooking otherwise. At least in my experience if you want to eat something vegan you gotta make it yourself (at least in my home country).

How does his decision to move the embassy make sense in that context?

Here’s a quote from that article, to illustrate how people saw the Trump government on Israel at that moment:

Every previous US administration has been pro-Israel but made some effort to understand and respond to the Palestinian narrative, says Mr Miller.

This one is so “deeply ensconced” in the Israeli narrative it has crossed a red line, he says.

If so, it will be difficult for it to keep propping up the framework, with unpredictable results.

It is true that key Arab countries seem more willing to sanction a settlement less favourable to the Palestinians than before because they want Israel as an ally against Iran.

But Mr Trump’s decision on Jerusalem, and Israel’s heavy-handed approach in Gaza, reduces their room for manoeuvre.

He’s very pro Israel, and if he was given the current situation in Israel as president he’d probably be waving a pair of pompoms in the Knesset.

pi ends with the digit 9, followed by an infinite sequence of other digits.

That’s a very interesting use of the word “ends”.

Good thing I double-checked to see if someone else made this point yet.

Yeah. Not only that, but the splash screen when you launch the game makes it incredibly clear that it’s one guy called Greg (very humanizing) and he’s working on it, but he’s not some superhero.

They can have a little bit of sea, as a treat(y).

Omfg, this line killed me xD

people in the UK want lower food prices, but don’t want to be part of the EU common market

Yup, it’s pretty dumb. But the way the majority feels is that they’ve had these arguments about Brexit for some many years they’re basically done at this point.

And they want more doctors and dentists, but less immigration.

Interestingly, even Reform, the most pro-brexit anti-immigration send everyone to Rwanda party still wants exceptions for doctors, dentists and nurses to allow them to come into the country at will. They are very much considered the exception for immigration.

He’s right. There just isn’t the political will in the population to reopen the topic of Brexit now. Whether anyone likes it or not, the things British people really care about right now, in no particular order, are:

• Inflation

• House & utility & food prices

• Immigration

• NHS waiting lists & more dentists

• Train infrastructure.

People can make very legitimate arguments linking Brexit to those issues, but it’s not politically viable to open that can of worms again. They just really want their lives to improve for the first time in over a decade.

There’s also the fact that a hypothetical end to US aid wouldn’t end EU aid. It’s definitely not on the same scale as the US due to our much smaller military sector, but that’d likely change in the event of a US shut-down of aid.

In my mind, the most likely results would be:

Short-term: Very dangerous period for Ukraine, they lose some ground, lots of men (similar to the last time they had a crippling artillery shell shortage).

Medium-term: EU military sector slowly ramps up to meet demand, as about 3/4 of central & eastern EU considers this an existential war that cannot be lost at any cost.

Long-term: After the war is over (however many more years that takes), Russia finally negotiates some kind of ceasefire where they can save some face internally and brag about how they “Denazified” Ukraine while going home and accomplishing nothing, EU is much more self-sufficient and therefore buys less from the US, and they aren’t seen as a trust-worthy ally militarily anymore. Even if on paper most EU members are still in NATO, they consider the security guarantees of the EU as much more important and serious.

It’s not a civil war and I don’t think it’ll become one. The modern US isn’t geographically separated enough to have any sort of cohesive movement locally. There’s no north vs south playing out, for example.

Instead, what you have is a slow-rolling coup and social instability.

As far as I understand the decision (IANAL!), the definition of what constitutes an “Official Act” is left intentionally undefined, so in effect you can only claim this ultimate power if the courts like you in order to declare what you’re doing official.

This means, if I understand it correctly, king powers for Trump and nothing for Biden. They’d just rule everything Biden is doing as not an official act.

So basically the Lemmy version of Subreddit Simulator, but allowing users as well?

Yes, absolutely. That is a concern that I too share, fellow meat being. We should be vigilant against superior, more capable, and really friendly artificial intelligences.

Probably most countries think so of themselves.

Funnily enough, Romanians are the exact opposite in this regard. Romanians tend to think that Romania is terrible, backwards, and filled with awful people. That isn’t exactly the case (like any country, it has it’s pros and cons, and there’s a lot we need to work on) but it is how they tend to see it.

to have this relationship between A and B you have to make a third database

Probably just a mistake here, but you make a third table, not a new database.

Apart from that (and the fact that one to many and many to one is the same thing), yeah, looks correct.

Even the question of “who” is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the “who” doing the thinking in the first place :))

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.