Look, I left something unsaid, certainly. I can’t say that this particular incident would have happened or not if Israel were not currently engaged in genocidal acts on a daily basis. What I can say is that Israel clearly uses antisemitism as a shield and a pretense for those genocidal acts, and in less dire times, for the decades of lower level but equally unjust and horrific oppression that has characterized the occupation of Palestine from the beginning.

The ONLY time I experienced targeted antisemitism (graffiti & threats at my synagogue) as an American Jew growing up in a liberal area, was in the lead up to the second intifada as the Camp David Accords fell apart. So yes, antisemites are responsible for their own antisemitism, and antisemitism like any kind of prejudice is fundamentally unjustifiable - of course. And no, by that token, of course nothing Israel could do would justify antisemitism. What a moralistic statement like that misses, however, is the reality that antisemitism ebbs and flows with the state of the conflict in the holy land, and that Israel uses it as a self-reinforcing narrative to justify their ongoing crimes against humanity, paradoxically reinforcing the very thing they claim to be fighting against, and making the world less safe for the people they claim to fight for.

And to make it all very clear. I am blaming antisemites for antisemitism. Conflating Jewish identity with the state of Israel is antisemitic. Zionists are antisemitic.

Israel is not only less safe for Jews than anywhere else in the world they live, but it also makes Jews in those other places less safe as a result of its belligerence. As a born, raised, bar mitzvah’d and confirmed Jew, fuck Israel.

Hey, it’s my god given right to take it up the ass from corporations. I’m voting for Trump so he can reverse this radical marxist fascist rule on day one.

Code mods are great, maps and assets are in there but not officially, so compatibility going forward probably isn’t great for those. Full modding support is being worked on and is one of their highest priorities, so I’m not surprised there wasn’t much discussion about it. Asset mod support is “before summer” so they’ve got another month according to their last statement on it. PDX Mods has some bugs but overall it’s actually pretty slick and functional, and they’ve made a few highly requested improvements to it already.

He was more than a hero. He was a union man.

Well, yes, I suppose, and that’s why I said all the stuff I imagine you must have read before you got to that part, and the thing I said right after that, too.

I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment.

I feel like a dick talking about it with what’s going on, but it’s still important. And to be clear, we Jews who are inculcated with Zionism and the generational trauma of the Holocaust from a young age have to zealously interrogate our unconscious fears and biases. The protests provide the perfect opportunity to confront it head on if you can swallow your pride and just listen. My Arab & Muslim friends are some of the most thoughtful people I know, with strong opinions and moral convictions that come right from the deepest parts of their being. I feel as at home with them as I did in the Synagogue growing up, and I have no doubt if I were to attend a peace protest that I would find many more like them. They’re an absolute gift; I was never a supporter of Israel, but their friendship has thrown the whole thing into even sharper focus since October 7th. I hope one day the Zionists can be defeated, and from the river to the sea, all good people will finally be free.

Full disclosure, I am Jewish myself, and sorry for the book… try not to knee-jerk react to it.

I hate to partake in this genetic essentialism garbage, but Ashkenazis by and large share their paternal heritage with Sephardic Jews and other Semites, although that Semitic heritage has become somewhat diluted over time by converts in the maternal line and their descendants. My point in saying that is not to say that Zionists have any legitimate claim to Palestine - they absolutely don’t. It’s just “Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Semites” is a highly debatable and fraught claim that has the potential to lead one down a rabbit hole into actual racism, and incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes of Zionism. When I hear that implication, my mind is drawn to the adoption by antisemites (most recently Black Hebrew Israelites) of the now disproven myth that the original Semitic Jews died out and were replaced by Khazars.

I’m stopping short of calling what you said, specifically, antisemitism, but in another context a similar statement might be called a dog whistle. People can say these things unintentionally when they just don’t understand the implications. This kind of reckless use of language and ideas is at least part of why we have Jewish students on college campuses claiming they don’t feel safe. We Jews have grown up being implicitly taught to keep our ear to the ground when it comes to rising intolerance, and yes in a lot of cases that has resulted in a massive blind spot for our own intolerance, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore warning signs. Of course, as a Jew, and like you, I often scoff when I hear claims of antisemitism, and in fact I get angry about them when they conflate Jewishness with Israel & Zionism, which ironically IS antisemitism.

Now I mentioned the Khazar myth and Jewish students who don’t feel safe. The issue here is that they lack the self awareness to say, “maybe my hangups about certain things people say are a product of my own upbringing and sensitivities, rather than any intentional antisemitism on their part.” On the other hand, when people talk about Jews or Jew-adjacent issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they should also have the self awareness to ask themselves “am I contributing to a climate that lets actual antisemitism fly under the radar and should I be more careful about the things I say?”

In any case, flinging accusations back and forth is unproductive. If my fellow Jews feel threatened by protestors and their words, I would recommend they approach those protestors with humility, and listen to their grievances before making assumptions about their intentions. Which is funny, because here I am Jew-splaining in response to a flippant remark in an internet comment section, but the reason is I just desperately want people to understand each other (and themselves) better.

But have you considered the heat death of the universe?

Without even reading it.

A Windows update broke my wife’s install earlier this week. Her laptop has Manjaro on it now.

Yes you can get dial-up, DSL, cell network data, or even satellite! These services are clearly equivalent to cable or fiber in the ISP marketplace.

Let’s just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It’s not 1954. I’m not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I’m reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?

As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.

Looks like the headset she’s wearing in that video (EPOC X - 14 channel EEG headset) is available from Emotiv for $1k, and the software she’s using to map controls (EmotivBCI) is something they provide for free. They have 2 and 5 channel headsets for cheaper and 32 channel caps that are more expensive. Seems pretty consumer-ready to me, but I’m sure your EEG activity data gets shared with Emotiv, which isn’t ideal.

Commenting to remind myself later because I’d love to check into this. My hands are achy from years of overuse, so an alternative to physical controls would be amazing.

The base game is quite playable as is. I’m happier with the cities I’m building in CS2 than anything I ever built in CS1, even with a dozen mods and 35 gigs worth of custom assets. It looks way better and the cim behavior is as good or better than CS1 + traffic manager. There are issues with land value, but it really doesn’t impact gameplay that much.

I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I’m honestly baffled by just how negative the reaction to this game has been.

While I agree for the sake of clarity, a bigger problem is that it only goes back less than 2 months. Has the number of installs been steady at 7k for a long time? Or does it fluctuate wildly like this occasionally for reasons totally unrelated to laws?

I just started my switch to Linux and the only things that don’t work out of the box on my brand new Lenovo laptop are things that have no bearing on the actual use of the device. And frankly, spending hours fiddling to make things work is much more satisfying than spending hours trying to figure out how to stop Microsoft spying on me.

VTOL VR is awesome too. The problem with a lot of games that support VR is they don’t support the controllers to the same extent. Playing VR with an Xbox controller instead of the motion tracking Index controllers just ain’t the same.

I guess I’m wondering if there’s some way to bake the contextual understanding into the model instead of keeping it all in vram. Like if you’re talking to a person and you refer to something that happened a year ago, you might have to provide a little context and it might take them a minute, but eventually, they’ll usually remember. Same with AI, you could say, “hey remember when we talked about [x]?” and then it would recontextualize by bringing that conversation back into vram.

Seems like more or less what people do with Stable Diffusion by training custom models, or LORAs, or embeddings. It would just be interesting if it was a more automatic process as part of interacting with the AI - the model is always being updated with information about your preferences instead of having to be told explicitly.

But mostly it was just a joke.