Just a little technical note;

White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon because it operates primarily by heat and flame rather than toxicity, making it an incendiary weapon. Its use is governed by Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW)

Not saying that it can’t be used in bad ways but it has legitimate uses in combat areas (mostly as a flair) so the issue of supply, etc is not as simple as were it an actual chemical weapon

Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you

And those people are all people like Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson who are totally shameless liars and manipulators, all his 911 truth stuff led to stuff like the sandy hook denials and maga nonsence.

They do have a lot of rules in supplying aid to Hamas if you actually look into it, most the criticism of them proping up Hamas come from ultra right wing criticism of providing aid and medical support to Palestine.

If you believe all Palestine is Hamas it makes sense and you’d have to say allowing aid in is bad but I don’t think you want that.

That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.

It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.

An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)

You’re using odd ways of describing things to try and win a pointless argument, even if everything you say is correct then it changes literally nothing about anything so whatever yeah use words like a weirdo if you like

Yes that’s a model, I’m not saying the model magically controls reality but that the underpinning reality is math - the reason you always have two apples in a bag when you start with one and add another is because of math, the human model of that isn’t controlling it but if we want two apples in a bag and we currently only have one then we can use our model to determine how many apples we need to add into the bag.

The same is true of more complex systems, if we can accurately model the cellar interactions then we can derive solutions in the same way

Everything is math, it’s what controls gravity and cell division and protein folding - there is no god it’s all just math

Of course the model is only a model but the point is you can use the model to predict real world responses, therefore you can test millions of things and do the one which is most likely to work

But it doesn’t do that instantly and it does it for good reason, eyes and the sections of the brain using them require energy and are vulnerable to infection so in situations where they don’t provide an advantage they increase the likelihood of death before breeding thus giving any offspring born with less energy devoted to eyes has a small advantage which over s very long time results in them being selected away.

So unless the creatures reach a perfect form for their environment then they’ll always be in the process of changing and have some of the old junk in there. Also if the formerly useful part doesn’t make any real difference to survivability there’s no force driving it to be selected away from, it might eventually be removed by lots of pure chance events but that’s going to take a huge amount of generations meaning the middle time where there’s junk not yet removed us going to be very long

It’s still a rusty machine even if the maths that control it are a bit more complex

I still feel like he’s nitpicking tbh, wiring diagrams can have devices with variable or probabilistic states and though the maths is very complex it’s theoretically possible to similate and map.

But he’s British and we have a good NHS so that’s kinda a weird argument

I hate the royal family but for reasons that many sense

Of course your going to ignore it, it’s the inconvenient reality ignored by everyone that wants to feel like a hero because they wished for an easy solution to difficult problems

It’s just the obvious trajectory of social media attention seeking within the disaffected aesthetic. Someone that loves to feel special and the center of attention picks a cause almost at random then throws themselves into the fray as loudly as possible.

It’s always happened, you can see them in every community and aesthetic - conspiracy theories, political types, sports fans… Protest communities are especially attractive to attention seekers, it’s great for social media clout to pretend that you’re doing these crazy things for a bigger cause

Why would I care it’s probably stupid, all these groups have childishly stupid goals like ‘why don’t we just not use oil, I’m sure no one ever though of that, right?’ and ‘force everyone to live the lifestyle I personally happen to prefer’

Their plan always overlooks the fact that total chaos would ensue if anyone ever tried what they’re demanding, if they had anything worthwhile to say they’d be saying it in the relevant places and people would be listening.

They did studies that demonstrated this kind of thing can make political progress more difficult because politicians don’t want to look like they’re weak to it and voters don’t want to be associated with it.

But they, and I guess you, don’t really care, it’s not about actually making positive change it’s about feeling like a hero and getting followers on social media.

This is kinda racist, as much as you might not want to admit it the people in this world with darker skin are actually real whole people - they have emotions and feel pain and yes sometimes they have a bloodthirsty hunger for power no matter the human expense. They’re people and sometimes people are like that.

Your knowledge of history might only involve things from the European perspective so yes nothing happened before we got there and everything that does happen there we’re at the center of - that’s not actual reality though, read history from their perspective and often we’re just not that important.

The middle East conflicts are painfully complicated, different factions of Islam with different factions in those factions all with their own power struggles and conspiracies and political needs… Just like everywhere else,

Pretty sure that’s what they want, destabilise the region with big wars and their brand of hate can have the victory it’s currently having in Afghanistan and Iran where girls can’t go to school and where they get beaten to death for showing their hair.

You see that, these damn immigrants coming into our void and stealing our jobs! Messing it all up separating the water and the land, making light and all the creatures… they should send em back to the metadivine where they came from if they’re not going to integrate!

It’s interesting because no one could believe Alex Jones or any of these greedy mega/maga church leaders if they came at it neutrally, they believe because they want to, because acting like they believe it benefits them.

But then such a cult gets built up you start getting true believes who are so caught up in the cult that they can’t think anything else. People feel the need to prove how much they belive so they join these crazy groups and movements, they love putting on a big show of being a warrior for the cause but of course they don’t want to actually mess up their life because then they wouldn’t need the excuse to be selfish… So they do meaningless things like go to protect the boarder knowing full well what everyone knows - it’s just some roads with gates there’s nothing interesting or even slightly dangerous there.