Define “good”. I would say that any professional with dozens of hours of training, that could comfortably overcome any average person is “good”. Those are the people I trained with, and my impression is that Keanu is better than most of them.

IIRC, Keanu did some extensive firearms training in connection with John Wick. I’ve seen some footage of him on a training set with mobile targets, and would estimate that he’s better at handling a wide variety of firearms than a fair portion of military personnel are before the first time they see combat. This estimate is based on my own military training on similar courses.

I know the movies are choreographed, but I definitely wouldn’t give someone without extensive training good odds against him, based on footage I’ve seen from his training.

If you make any edits that contradict the physical evidence, you’ve outed yourself.

We’re talking about people that contradict both themselves and physical reality on a daily basis without their supporters batting an eye.

Export to jpeg. Compress.

Can decent edits still be reliably detected?

Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I’m not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole “nation building” attempt went about. I’m very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.

I’m not saying we don’t care.

That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I’ve disagreed with you on so far (“the world simply doesn’t care”). If you didn’t mean that, then I don’t see anything I disagree with you on.

Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.

This is literally the point I’ve been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I’m not saying that.

It differs per community.

Good point, I’ll moderate myself and just state that I’ve never experienced it being a hard requirement in my field.

No it’s not. I have both published in a variety of scientific journals, reviewed for a couple journals, and turned down reviews for a couple journals.

No journal checks your “review history” before allowing you to publish. However, if you consistently turn down reviews from a journal, the editor is likely going to get annoyed and you will probably have a harder time publishing in that journal in the future.

Yep. At that point, why even bother taking the review? You’re not forced to do reviews. Never taking any is likely to negatively impact your career, but still… just decline the review if you’re going to use a LLM for it anyway. Have some dignity.

I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here?

My point is that, while flimsy and flawed, there was in fact an education system and a humanitarian system in place that was propped up by coalition forces. This system did fall apart, leaving no system at all when the forces left. And yes, a bunch of Afghanis have every right to feel betrayed. I never said otherwise.

It’s not like Afghanistan is the only place where schools, hospitals and infrastructure has been financed by western countries. By and large, we spend a lot of money on these things because a significant portion of the population sees it as the right thing to do. Because we care, and want to help people.

What became very clear in Afghanistan was that you can’t force a population to be a liberal democracy. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves. The Afghan army (on paper) had several hundred thousand men, loads of heavy equipment, and several years to train and prepare for coalition forces leaving. There was a government structure in place. These things instantly folded when the coalition left because, clearly, enough people preferred Taliban to what the outsiders had forced upon them.

I guess I’m saying it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. If you stay, you’re an oppressive occupier. If you leave, you’re a traitor that permits a humanitarian crisis to occur.

The OP here asked “why doesn’t anybody do anything about NK”, and my answer is that we (seem to) have learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights on a country. Chalking it up to “we don’t care” is reductionist.

I’ve never heard of this “mass gap” in black holes before, does anyone here know anything about why it exists? I also didn’t really get why they think it’s unlikely that these two black holes were simply formed from a series of previous mergers?

It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.

It seems like you didn’t observe the thousands of people swarming the airport in Kabul trying to get out with the last planes. It also seems like you haven’t picked up on the people crying about how people are being brutally punished for getting an education or listening to music now.

I’m not denying that shit was really bad while coalition forces were there, but acting like it didn’t get worse for a lot of people when the left is just closing your eyes.

Regardless, it’s ludicrous to claim that western countries “aren’t doing anything because they don’t care”. It’s not like we’ve spent truckloads of money and thousands of lives over 20 years of trying to get a functioning system in place while preventing a humanitarian crisis because we “didn’t care”. People saw it as immoral to just turn our backs on Afghanistan and let them solve their own problems. The result was largely that we learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights onto someone else, as proven by the almost complete absence of people willing to fight for just that once the coalition left.

“The west” isn’t really a cohesive unit regarding Israel/Iran. You have some western countries supporting a genocide and committing blatant violations of international law, while others condemn them for it and try to pressure them to stop.

Sadly, one rogue state can cause a lot of damage, and countries typically have a very high bar for using military force against their closest allies in defence of a third party.

I’ll definitely agree that we have a problem with boatloads of crap science being published every day. Also, I’m under no illusion that the articles I’ve rejected were never published. They were likely just published in some predatory journal with no peer review instead. I’ve actually hear of people coming across articles they’ve rejected published verbatim in some obscure journal they’d never heard of before.

Luckily, most people working in a field know what journals are trustworthy, and are themselves capable of recognising bullshit when they come across it. Unluckily, very few journalists and laypeople have the same insight.

I’ve fantasised about a model where governments go together to finance a series of open-access journals. This could finally end the chokehold that modern reputable journals have on academia, and serve to provide broader access to quality science to journalists and the population at large.

Every journal I’ve submitted to has passed my paper through at least one round of review with three or four reviewers. It’s more common than not to need several rounds of review before getting published. I’ve rejected papers for publishing myself.

Not to say bad stuff can’t get through, but a lot of crap science is filtered out of the serious journals by the review process.

I know there are some vetted lists you can search to check if a journal is trustworthy or not, but don’t remember what the site was.

Journals I’ve published in (for reference):

• Fluid phase equilibria
• Journal of chemical physics
• International journal of heat and mass transfer
• Entropy
• Journal of physical and chemical reference data

It’s not that people “don’t care”. We’ve tried intervening with force in e.g. Afghanistan, where the oppressive regime was forcibly removed, and military power was used to ensure that elections were held and the results were respected.

We have observed, several times, that everything goes to shit when we leave. Not only that, but people generally don’t seem like it when outsiders take over and tell them how to run their country, who should be allowed an education, and that <insert group> cannot be oppressed. So a side effect of the armed intervention is that a lot more people hate you now.

Western countries “aren’t doing anything” because we’ve both learned from experience that military intervention doesn’t really work, and been repeatedly told by the rest of the world to mind our own business.

In my country we have a flat 25 % tax on anything sold to an end consumer (there are some exceptions). It’s often mentioned as the most important tax we have to equalise the economy and finance the welfare state.

The point is that, because it’s a flat rate, you end up paying more the more money you have. If you only buy cheap groceries, that 25 % isn’t a huge amount of cash, while if you buy an expensive boat or car, it becomes quite a bit. This turns out to be a great way of ensuring that anyone who wants to “live rich” pays a decent amount for it.

There are no “accidents” with firearms, there can only be negligence.

Look, I’ve been in the army, I know firearm safety, and I strongly disagree. People can slip and fall, or inexplicably fumble and drop stuff. People with no history of it can suddenly have seizures or heart failure that causes them to seize up or collapse. None of these are common, but all can occur. If you happen to be carrying a loaded firearm when it happens, that firearm can go off. Even if you have the safety in place. Shit can malfunction.

Regardless, if I get shot, the question of whether it was intentional, an accident, or due to negligence is really a secondary matter. The primary issue is that I just got shot, and that can have irreversible consequences.

My point is that if I happen to get shot, I really don’t care how statistically unlikely it was to happen in the way it did. The most effective way to prevent firearm injuries/deaths is to keep firearms away from people that don’t strictly need them.

I’m just waiting for the point where essentially enough people have caught on to this tactic that the effect flips.

Now, when trump announces some policy that will harm a certain business, their stock tanks, a bunch of people buy the dip, the policy is called off, and the stock rebounds. There are probably already people that begin buying already once the policy is announced, in order to catch the dip.

If this continues, there could eventually be enough people trying to “buy the dip” that trump announcing a harmful policy causes a stock to jump, rather than dip. Which would be hilarious.

The issue I see with the logic that “Everyone should have the right to carry a gun everywhere, until their negligence causes harm” is the massive consequence of someone messing up with a gun.

Guns are so extremely lethal that when accidents happen (they will eventually happen), it is likely to result in death or disability. It seems pretty clear to me that society overall is safer for everyone the fewer guns there are around. It doesn’t really matter if the person that shot me due to negligence loses their license, I’ve already been shot, and they shouldn’t have had a gun in the first place.

The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.

Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.