There was one weird agreement. During WW1, the Pope declared that a Christmas ceasefire should happen. Obviously, the Pope has no such power in these matters and the diplomats around the world failed to turn the Popes wish into any real ceasefire.

But then, a bit of Christmas magic happened. It turns out that WW1 soldier conditions were so shit, that many soldiers wanted to go against orders and proceed with the Christmas ceasefire anyway (as an act of rebellion against their commanders).

Legend has it that soldiers picked Still Nacht (aka: Silent Night), it being one of the few bilingual Christmas Carols. If both sides in the trenches started to sing the song, you knew it was safe to partake in the ceasefire, allegedly with another confirmation of Oh Come All Ye Faithful (another Christmas carol).

This all proves one thing. It’s not the leaders or diplomats that really matter per se with ceasefires. It’s the soldiers at the bottom. If they refuse to shoot, then the ceasefire will happen. With orders, or (in the Christmas miracle…) sometimes AGAINST orders.

It’s not a complete miracle, as some reports of fight / killing still happened during the Christmas Ceasefire. But there are reports of hundreds of thousands of French, British, and German soldiers exchanging Christmas gifts (coffee and other trinkets), playing soccer and more. So it largely was a success.

Heterogenous scheduler support for big.LITTLE CPUs seems like a big deal to me, especially with the Advent of P+E core Intels.

Well that’s the funny part now isn’t it?

Increasingly, the investors are other AI companies. NVidia, Microsoft, Facebook. Be it directly (ie: Microsoft buying half of OpenAI), or indirectly (Special Purpose Vehicle creates a new Data center and Facebook pays to be an owner of that and then the Datacenter pays Facebook for AI or some shit).

From people? No.

From AI. AI companies have seemingly infinite money (not really but investor sentiment is huge and investors are happy giving more and more money to AI). And banks are willing to lend money to AI. And there’s new financial instruments (special purpose vehicle) allowing even more money to come out of investors.

This ends after AI runs out of money. But they are funded by the biggest tech bros with $Trillions in valuation.

Be careful with the plastic spatula used to flip your eggs I guess.

Except you know, plastic isn’t a real chemical. There’s polyethylene, polypropylene, polyurethane, and silicone… of which there are food grade versions and non food grade versions of said plastics (and many thousands of formulations).

Anyone bullshitting with scare words like ‘Plastic’ are immediately discounted by me. Real scientists are at least specific with their terminology and not using weasel words that have effectively no meaning in a serious discussion

Meanwhile my buddy gets fucking arsenic poisoning and there’s not even a ruckus about it at all. Do you know what a REAL poisoning is like?

Ultraprocessed bullshit word by Make America Healthy Again bullshitters.

They think a can of corn is ultraprocessed. When in actuality it is just boiled corn in a can. The sooner the health food bullshitters are exposed for the crap they are, the sooner we get rid of RFK Jr. And his team of bullshit health advice.

We need to stop it with the fake science… And start to favor real science again.

Any methodology that labels canned corn and canned spinach as evil/unhealthy but labels fucking Five Guys as healthy is fully bullshit. Period.

We are on the 25th month?

Anki is far more grueling than beginners realize. And it’s very difficult to predict future work.

Adding new word isn’t just work today (maybe 5+ viewings to get Anki to make you think you’ve learned the word…), it’s also multiple showings over tomorrow, later this week and more.

You must change your words/day to something that is doable. Keep an eye on your Anki usage, if it’s longer than you want then cut down on your new words/day until you master your current review set.

And always be careful with the new words button. It’s more work to learn 20 words than you might realize, so don’t double or triple it to 40 or 60!!!

20 words/day is about 30 minutes of Anki for me, because 80 reviews + 20 new words == 100 cards. But I need around 300 flips to finish Anki.

That’s 30 minutes of Anki in practice (a card flip averaging 6 seconds, 10 cards per minute and yes 30 minutes/day).

If I drop down to 0 new words/day, I still have the 80 reviews per day (at least until those old words are mastered). Eventually I get quicker and Anki believes I’ve learned the words but it can take literally days before your workload decreases.

You must also remember that Anki / Flashcards is rote memorization. Its your “brute force cudgel”. You can never truly reach mastery with Anki alone. Anki is great for spelling practice, pronunciation practice (if you have included real-world audio .mp3 with your flashcards)… and if necessary is a forced German -> English vocabulary memorization tool.

Useful skills yes, but language mastery can only happen with reading, writing, listening and speaking. Aka: “Immersion”. Anki is great because it helps minimize the time spent on flashcards. If you aren’t saving time but instead feel like you’re wasting time, then you need to change Anki settings to something more useful.

Anki has been used to master Jeopardy, and is also becoming a popular tool in the medical community.

Anki may have been invented for language, but its useful for almost any studying.

Another small note on FSRS settings - adjusting the desired retention a little bit can be helpful. Defaults at 90%, turning it down makes review intervals longer, up makes them shorter. For large decks (vocab lists), I prefer it down at mid-high 80s. You want familiarity, not perfection, so less overwhelming reviews can be better.

Depends really. If you are drilling der/das/die genders and spelling, you might want perfection.

But yes, drop the FSRS setting to 80 or even lower for familiarity. If you are focusing on reading/consuming, it’s better to focus on familiarity instead.

But if you are studying writing/speaking, you need to set that retention back up to 90 and also aim for perfection on each card.

In general, 90% is closer to perfection and the highest you typically should go. However, medical students have been known to aim for 95% or higher (!!!) because they want to pass an exam and then forget about it later, lol.

So even going above 90% makes sense for some communities out there.

Medical students are willing to drill 4-hours per day on their subjects and want near 100% memorization in time for their exam. It’s a different kind of learning, but Anki does support that.

I wish Anki existed during my SAT days.

Do you know hard it was to learn 1000+ SAT words without Anki back then? I had to use like, a book. And index cards written by hand. My hand cramped up just writing all those words down.

You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.

Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).

Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.

Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.

That’s about it.

The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.

VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.

BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.

So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.

Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.

Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.

Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.

Thanks for the clarification.

It could be 10+ years of me misremembering the explanation. The person who told me this was Korean, so it seems more likely that I misremembered than them explaining it wrong.

Someone told me that Oppa means ‘Uncle’, but in the particular district of Gangnam the word Oppa/Uncle also means Pimp.

So it’s basically a song based on a pretty bad pun. I’ll protect you like an uncle, and by Uncle I mean Pimp.

EDIT: English speakers likely would do better with the translation as 'Ill be like a Father to you, a real Las Vegas Pimp Daddy (where Daddy is a word that means Father but has more Pimp connotations, and Las Vegas being famous for legalized prostitution).

It’s definitely debauchery. But we likely have memorials to Austin Powers and other such pop culture icons, so it’s understandable.

Someone needs to tag this with git blame and it’d be the perfect programmer joke.

For the non programmers: git blame is a tool to figure out who on your team wrote a specific line of code. Inevitably, the answer tends to be ‘me’. Waaayyyyyyy too often.

Manual curation is the criteria. If you think something is best it’s enough for a topic.

If it’s problematic or low quality, we can discuss options. But manual curation and the feel of just talking about what interests a person immediately is the point of this place.

That being said, it seems like the original topic was deleted or something. I can’t read it… That’s certainly a problem but not the one I expected.

Itch.io is currently saying the problem is Stripe, and maybe Visa.

Historically (ex: https://otakuusamagazine.com/visa-and-mastercard-refuse-to-work-with-another-doujinshi-retailer/), I’d say Mastercard and Visa are both to blame. But the jury is still out on wtf is going on here.

I’m not sure who pressured Steam. But Itch.io (https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypal) is claiming Stripe and Visa are pressuring them.

(Speaking with Aftermath, Itch’s founder, Leaf Corcoran, specifically cited a notice from Visa as an incident that led to the sudden deindexing of so many games).

While Hercules is impressively wrong, I knew Aladdin was a fun original read when it began with ‘In the Far East Kingdom of China…’

Hercules, for all of its faults, actually takes place in Greece. Which is kinda sorta close to Rome (Hercules is his Roman name lol. Heracles is his Greek name).

On the other hand, Aladdin might be a fake story all together. As in, some French Guy may have made up Aladdin as part of his translation of 1001 Arabian Nights. IIRC, Arabs don’t know wtf that story is doing in the (French) book.

So Aladdin might be an entirely fake addition to the 1001 Arabian Nights novel. Canonically fake. So it’s in the true spirit of Aladdin (and 1001 Arabian Nights) to screw with the story anyway.

Btw: the original Aladdin story had no three wishes rule.

Aladdin just spammed the heck out of wishes. Got everything he ever wanted.

The only part of the Disney movie that’s accurate is when the sorcerer returns, teleports the Sultan (of China) palace to Africa, and Aladdin needs to use the weaker Genie of the Ring to steal the Genie of the Lamp back through trickery.

The princess of China (yeahhhhhh) helps Aladdin out a bit IIRC.

But yes, palace teleportation, sorcerer wishing to be Sultan, that’s the legitimate part lol