Some academic fields a decade or two ago went through a phase where they intentionally used “she” for all pronouns. The idea was because academia was so male dominated, even a neutral pronoun would still make people inagine a male lab worker, statistician, etc when reading. Intentionally using “she” was thought to force people to imagine a woman and normalise that image.

The recruitment websites of right wing militant groups have such poor security that leaks happen all the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2/3 of the Oath Keepers are former military and/or law enforcement officers. The leak obtained by DDOSecrets included membership ID, membership type, name, physical and email address, and join date.

Inside The Pro-Trump Militant Group The Oath Keepers - The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/

The database leak included such granular detail that economists have been able to study their firm-like behaviours, including

• running discount codes for memberships
• promises of pre-order welcome packages that are never fulfilled
• “Tiers” of membership types

Selling Violent Extremism - https://www.ucigcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024_wp10_klinenberg_v2-FINAL.pdf

Unfortunately this is an increasingly unviable strategy, because even “good” creators have started using clickbaity titles and thumbnails, even if their content has remained the same. Some have even retroactively changed the titles/thumbnails of their older videos to this style.

Clickbait is engineered by behavioural scientists to be as addictive as possible, and has been proven to trigger similar neural pathways to other addictions, such as drug or gambling.

Basically every creator with a shred of self awareness has admitted that they hate creating clickbait thumbnails, titles, and phrases like smash that like button and subscribe; they end up doing it anyway because A/B testing with randomised thumbnails and titles clearly show that they work.

The live A/B testing in particular obscures whether a creator employs clickbait or not - you may be under the impression that a certain creator has remained principled, when in reality you were just allocated to the control group by chance.

I feel that it’s one of those situations where the game is rigged, and the only way to “win” is to change the rules yourself.

Look into DeArrow (by same creators of SponsorBlock), which offers crowdsourced “de-clickbaited” video titles and thumbnails.

Mayocide when

I think you misunderstand what the Bank of Japan is. It is a central bank, so it does not take deposits from households, and buys government debt by controlling money supply (i.e. printing money). It holds around 46% of Japanese government debt, far more than domestic insurance companies and domestic banks (~15% each).

The Japanese public are definitely not willing to lend to the government at such low interest rates. The majority holder of Japanese bonds is the Bank of Japan, who needs to purchase large amounts of bonds to conduct its monetary policy. This has lead to some accusations of the two having an incestuous relationship, when central banks are supposed to be independent.

Before the Bank of Japan started hiking interest rates, most Japanese people were stuck in a liquidity trap, where they had to pay to store money in the bank. This was due to a combination of low/negative interest rates, and lots of banking fees due to the oligopolistic banking sector. 7-eleven (the convenience store) bank is unironically the fastest growing bank there, in no small part because they were the only bank with a wide ATM network which didn’t charge fees during business hours.

It is certainly… interesting that the Japanese government, with access to such cheap credit, decides to invest it abroad for higher returns, rather than invest it domestically and pursuing structural reforms to improve its own growth, and in doing so perpetuating the spread between government assets and liabilities.

FYI there are a lot of investors who do this exact trade, i.e. borrow cheap money from Japan, and invest it abroad.

they can’t force you to buy X or Y

Anti BDS laws: say syke

Japanese conservative monarchists are wild.

Look up the Google Maps reviews of the imperial palace. For some context, the majority of the imperial palace is completely off limits to the general public (in stark contrast to most developed countries), and the royal family does a new years greeting.

The reviews are monarchists unironically saying things like that they travelled for days, lined up for hours, caught a glimpse of one of the royal family, were temporarily transported to heaven, and will dedicate their lives hoping for the forever prosperity of the royal family.

Side note, the restaurant analogy is exactly why I hate the seemingly American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through.

I guess that’s a good analogy for how creepy surveillance capitalism is, it’s like a waiter judging and recording your every move and reaction throughout the entire meal.

Except that the Nordic model has been replicated across all the Nordic countries, of which only Norway has vast natural resources.

And even then, Norway, under the policies of the Nordic model, was already quite rich before it discovered oil.

Unfortunately I find even prompts like this insufficient for accuracy, because even when directly you directly ask them for information directly supported by sources, they are still prone to hallucination. The use of super blunt language as a result of the prompt may even further lull you into a false sense of security.

Instead, I always ask the LLM to provide a confidence score appended to all responses. Something like

For all responses, append a confidence score in percentages to denote the accuracy of the information, e.g. (CS: 80%). It is OK to be uncertain, but only if this is due to lack of and/or conflicting sources. It is UNACCEPTABLE to provide responses that are incorrect, or do not convey the uncertainty of the response.

Even then, due to how LLM training works, the LLM is still prone to just hallucinating the CS score. Still, it is a bit better than nothing.

Renaissance Technologies is arguably the world’s best hedge fund, and supposedly only uses AI based strategies.

High Flyer are the founders of DeepSeek, and are also all in on AI, though their performance is more volatile.

R:

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Persecution fetish

Scientists too busy writing grant proposals to realise that the developers of RStudio have made Positron, which is VS Code based and generally better

If you see this when your eyes are open then it may be visual snow.

Visual snow syndrome - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow_syndrome

“If you turn a new leaf, it’s the same leaf” - Kandy Muse

Usual suspects

End up? They were already there since at least almost a decade ago.

Supporters defend Roy Moore: “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter” | Vox - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/9/16630464/supporters-defend-roy-moore-mary-joseph