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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

    Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

    The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.






  • enough men exhibit predatory behaviour to the extent that a decently large percentage of women fear the average man more than the average bear.

    Women should fear the average man far more than the average bear because they will almost certainly never encounter the average bear, but will encounter thousands of men.

    That said, the entire argument belies a deep misunderstanding of statistics. Many women, perhaps most women, have experienced trauma at the hands of men. Many men, perhaps most men, have not been perpetrators of that trauma. There is not a 1-1 relationship between victimized women and guilty men - there is a minority of men who negatively affect many women.

    The entire thing has become flamebait and it is impossible to have an actual discussion about it. The point is to start a conversation about how women feel unsafe in society - not to talk about bear attacks and incels.






  • While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn’t as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

    Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.








  • TheChurn@kbin.socialtoMemes@sopuli.xyzWATER
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    7 months ago

    There are plenty of things that can cause fires that are not oxygen, and don’t contain oxygen.

    The halogens, Fluorine and Chlorine in particular, are powerful oxidizing agents on their own and can produce flames in the same manner as common flames.

    Here’s a report on the spectra of flames produced by combustion in a Fluorine atmosphere (PDF warning).


  • Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.

    That isn’t the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.

    The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.

    When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: “First I will draw a diagram and put in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem”, and so on.

    Neural nets don’t appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such ‘black boxes’ and researchers ‘don’t understand’ how they work.


    1. Hans has admitted to cheating in the past
    2. Hans played a near-perfect game as black against the best player in the world who hadn’t lost as white in years
    3. Hans made some suspiciously good moves quickly, without much time passing
    4. Magnus played a very rare opening that Hans was somehow able to perfectly respond to without skipping a beat

    From these, many people think he cheated. The vibrating butt plug is unlikely, but what is more likely is that Magnus’ prep got leaked and Hans was able to hyper-prepare for a specific line of play.