Hah, thanks, but I am absurdly unqualified to be a keynote speaker, thats the job of actual ancient linguists with PhDs and what not… I’m just a nerd that watches actual ancient linguistic scholars like Josh Bowman and Kipp Davis, and maybe at best understands some of the basics of an undergrad in that field.
They both have youtube channels and do interviews and discsussions with other ancient history/religion themed youtubers, if you’re interested.
Ah, you’re right!
24 hrs w/o sleep, haha.
Now… on the one hand, I feel bad for the eagle.
The windshield is shattered, this guy is in shock, probably has a broken wing and other bones, having just careened through a windshield, or been hit by a moving semi truck while trying to fly across a highway…
But on the other hand, funny face!
It’s no big deal, I am just unable to keep up with zoomer slang at this point, and I thought it might be that, haha.
Thank you for clarifying =D
Sorry, genuine question:
He’s nut.
Does that mean He’s nutty, He’s crazy, He’s bonkers, He’s lost his mind?
Or was that a typo?
I’m 35 and I’ve never heard anyone say ‘He’s nut’ before.
I’d say never get old as a joke but uh… yeah, looks like all our probalistic life expectancies are dropping rapidly.
… and then a few years that, all that beachfront property will melt into the rising seas.
Yeah…
Kinda… like… How in Iraq War 2?
The one where we were looking for WMDs?
… The only possible things that could qualify as such that existed in Iraq, were buried, aging and leaking chemical artillery shells…
That we either directly manufactured and gave to Iraq (and Iran), or paid to purchase for Saddam, in the Iran Iraq war in the 80s.
… That he used to genocide the Kurds with.
… And the Kurds are now on track to be totally abandoned by US, yet again, which will lead to even more genocide of them, this time mostly Turkiye… oh right, and the descendants of ISIS, who are themselves the deacendents of literally Al-Qaida, who wasn’t even in Iraq, untill we invaded it… to… get … them?
There basically are no proper Hieroglyph to English translators online.
There are only trans literators.
So, they only really work for representing a name in hieroglyphic, or visa versa, they just attempt to match everything to the closest audible syllable… sorta like how in Japanese, katakana is used to just take an english word and replicate it syllable by syllable.
A stupid example that pops to mind is the pokemon Haunter.
In Japanese:
ゴースト
Literally: Go , (long vowel), Tsu, To.
Go–TsuTo
(The t in tsu is softly aspirated, a kind of very minor hissing sound, like a snake hisses as tssss or you get a cats attention with pspsps)
Basicslly, ghost, in engrish, as in, a thing that haunts people, one who haunts, a haunter.
Whereas… actually correctly trans lating ‘ghost’ to Japanese… that’s not so straight forward, because there are many kinds of specific, spiritual entities in Japanese, but they all have a bunch of other unique attributes … but there isn’t really a catch all term for just ‘any kind of disembodied spiritual entity’.
The closest I can come up with is 魂 which means soul… but that isn’t quite the same as a ghost.
People are not typically said to all have eternal ghosts in them, its more often the case that the idea is you have a soul, but a soul becomes a ghost when the body dies, and it stays on earth.
Unless you’re Motoko Kusanagi.
???
…
Anyway, back to the hieroglyphs: in this instance, the 3 characters are not to be interpreted as letters or syllables, but as concepts that each character embodies.
As shneancy has explained its literally :
Ankh (Life) Wedja (Strength) Seneb (Health)
These characters are often found together after pharoah’s personal and family/house names in inscriptions and stelle.
With what little, extremely little I know of actual hieroglyphic grammar, it seems that a ‘phrase’ like this at the end of a sentence or name basically modifies the subject of the sentence, in a permanent, essential sense.
Hierogylphic grammar is still not perfectly understood though… its not exactly clear how the exact phrasing would work.
So it could mean something like:
'May (subject) have everlasting life, unyielding strength, and forever be in good health."
Or it may also be declaritive:
‘The immortal, omnipotent and robust (subject).’
… basically I’m trying to say ‘have a doubleplus good one’ or ‘live long and prosper’ in hieroglyphic, but i fucked up the grammar by not putting your name in hieroglyphs inside a royal cartouche for maximum praise and respect, haha.
Sadly I don’t think unicode supports drawing a cartouche around a set of glyphs, haha.
Functionally: Live long, and prosper.
Or I guess: 🖖
lol
We were in Afganistan for 20 years.
The second time in Iraq? Basically 15 ish years.
And we are currently in a situation where Trump is just outright cracking down on the media, way, way more brutally than Bush ever did…
War can’t be as unpopular if no one ever sees those videos.
Also … have you talked to a MAGAtard recently?
They’re way, way fucking more insanely doublethink delusion dedicated to dear leader than any Republican, I wouldn’t be surprises that if something like massive anti war protests happened, or anti war activists organized, Trump would just deputize the proud boys and 3%ers and that kinda shit to just do SA/SS style crackdowns domestically.
I hope to fucking hell you’re right and I’m wrong.
I agree with you that it isn’t certain this will actually happen.
But it is what he is saying, and other countries are going to take this seriously.
It is 100% absolutely a possible thing the US military could do, if ordered to, and this didn’t cause … well, basically a post soviet union collapse style military loyalty breakdown/coup/treason/de facto secession clusterfuck.
If the fascists society of isisrael couldn’t do it what makes you think america could when everything has to be shipped half way round the world?
Have you heard of the Gulf War?
Or the 2nd Iraq War?
Or the US Navy?
… How do you think all our shit got over there?
We sailed it and flew it over to Saudi Arabia, mainly, and staged it all there, I believe within something like 3 months.
Remember when Biden ordered the seabees to build a port for humanitarian aid, and that was done in like a month or less, and then he just kinda forgot about it?
The US is absolutely logistically capable of this.
Pete Hegseth runs the DoD.
Rules of Engagement? Eh, fuck em, warcrimes are legal, adopt the Israeli RoE, kill whoever you want.
Do you think an america abrams tank is going to fare any better than a merkava which was designed specifically for the conditions?
For starters, it doesn’t need to ‘fare better’, it just needs to exist and be reasonably able to withstand IEDs and RPGs and drones.
Also, we’ve got the SEPv3 and TUSK variants, they’re arguably more capable as tanks, only ‘edge’ the merkava has over an one of those Abrams is that they also hold some infantry…
But they went with that design and doctrine because they need every one of their tanks to also be a psuedo IFV, because they have far less vehicles overall:
The US has 5000 Abrams in active duty, 3600 in storage, reserves.
6.7k Bradleys
4.5k Strykers.
By comparison, Israel has about 400 to 500 Merkavas.
1360 of varying kinds of APC/IFVs.
The US could deploy roughly 1/15 of its existing heavy land combat vehicles and it would be the same quantity as the entire IDF.
We have more twice the number of tanks, in storage than the IDF has IFV/APCs.
… There’s a reason we are ‘The Great Satan.’
Do you think america can ship as many tanks as isisrael had a year and a half ago?
Yes, easily.
We very recently shipped a whole lot of HIMARS and other heavy vehicles to Ukraine.
Do you think american soldiers are any better trained than the idf? They will eat shit every bit as hard as the zionist entity did.
Yes. American soldiers are volunteers, many of whom make careers out of it. The IDF has mandatory military service for 2 years and thus has proportionally far more inexperienced conscripts.
Sure, there will be American casualties, but there are a lot more American soldiers and Marines than IDF infantry.
We also tend to have signidicantly more body armor on our average infantry than the IDF.
Oh right! I think the Army is also actually starting to get issued the new, higher caliber, longer ranged, Sig Spear / M7s, which pretty much outclass the IDF’s 5.56 Tavors in every way.
american soldiers aren’t raised to dehumanize and hate Gazans. They will have way bigger issues starving and murdering women and children than the idf. Most of them aren’t chomping at the bit for genocide and if they are they want to do it closer to home. The reason for the war wasn’t enough to keep the israelis fighting why would american troops be willing to fight and die for a pile of rublle the zionists weren’t willing to fight for?
I very, very much hope you are right.
Unfortunately, most of the military people I’ve known, are pretty gung ho MAGAtards…
And its entirely possible that refusing to follow an order you don’t agree with would court martial, military prison.
What do I think about this?
Well, going off of what I’m going to call ‘internal heuristics reinforced by 35 years of raw data’:
The author is very likely female and Chinese.
They use more harsh, accusatory, and direct language when describing men, and they use more soft, explanatory, and indirect language when describing women.
The various grammatical oddities sound extremely similar to ESL, native Mandarin and Cantonese speakers I’ve known personally.
Ok, from my ‘career as a data analyst’ perspective?
AB Testing
…
This is the only actually useful part from a ‘how do you actually make a good dating app’ perspective. It is difficult to AB test the algorithms of the feed because the change usually has an impact on the user that gets a specific variant but also users that he likes that are on any variant. Other than that, you can gain 10 points of retention just with AB testing and finding the best things that work.
It is actually pretty easy to create a dating app that works in terms of retention if you use extensive AB testing.
Yes, yep, AB testing works.
Too bad the vast majority of the analysis is devoted to explaining how things don’t work or aren’t that impactful or at best, prevent retention from falling.
The word ‘retention’ appears 72 times in this post, and that blurb I quoted there is literally the only time it is mentioned within a context of doing something to change the algorithm, the underlying nature of the app, that improves retention, by a specific amount, across the board.
That means AB testing is the actual secret sauce, and well, there aren’t any details because then the sauce wouldn’t be secret any more.
I have some background in economics.
In econ, specifically hedonics, attempting to determine a consumers actual preference for one basket of goods vs another, you’ve got the core concept of cardinal preferences and ordinal preferences.
I’ve also got a background in poli sci.
The same basic concept underlies ranked choice vs first past the post voting.
Long and short of it is: To get a result that does a far better job of actually understanding preferences, and matching them with outcomes… you have to de-abstractify decisions and make people actually think about them, pains-takingly match up and rank all their preferences against each other.
You can either do that brute force, all at once, as with a ranked choice voting slate, or you can build the same result, doing AB testing, one at a time, until you actually construct a consistent preference structure.
An example in a dating app would be: If you match on someone who has something you’ve indicated as a red flag, but pass on someone who doesn’t… you have the app tell the user what they did, and ask the user why they did that.
The ‘good’ way to proceed with this would be to inform the user when they are being inconsistent, to actually help them figure out what they actually want, explain their inconsistencies to them, have a way of suggesting underlying preferences that they may have, because they similar to other users who had the same problem and later had success, present the user with analytics on all their preference evolution, etc.
The ‘bad’ way to proceed with this would be just track this kind of ‘hypocrisy’ score in the background, and not help the user become less of a hypocrite. Then, you sprinkle (or firehose!) peoples feeds with hypocrites who have a decent enough chance of matching, but you know have a high likelihood of having a it not working out after some weeks or months, thus creating a perpetual soul grinding machine that keeps you coming back.
I’ll leave it to anyone who reads this to guess which of those two choices best resembles what most dating apps are doing, actually helping people learn what they want in a partner, or consistently and intentionally matching you with dates that seemed promising, but fall apart after a bit.
Your own little AB test!
PS: You may also note that OkCupids old model of having the user just be able to answer hundreds or thousands of questions, and rank their importance, without needing to pay for anything, and also having an unlimited number of likes/dislikes/dms is the closest to the ‘good’ way of doing AB testing, and that basically everything every modern dating app does, is some flavor of the ‘bad’ way of doing this, with varying levels of monetization, limiting, and obfusucation.
In game theory, it is almost always the case that a player with incomplete information will lose to a player that has complete information.
The app has complete information.
Do you?
Some pigs are more equal than other pigs.
He just pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Commission.
He may actually be nuts enough to just pull us out of the UN and tell them to build a new HQ somewhere outside of New York, and turn the UN building into a fucking Trump tower.
Would the ICC investigate Trump as well if he take action and tries to take over Gaza?
Maybe?
If they do, he’ll just laugh like Andrew Jackson and say ‘lets see you enforce it’.
If somebody tries to, he’ll follow along with existing US Law / Policy eatablished in 2002 under Bush, and threaten to or perhaps actually invade Belgium and the Hague, and go to war with the rest of NATO.
Do you not understand what he means by ‘we will own it?’
He means a fucking US military occupation of Gaza.
Go watch the full videos of the presser he did with Bibi.
He ‘isn’t ruling out a long-term’ occupation, he ‘isn’t ruling out sending US troops’, we will be in charge of ‘dismantling weapons’, we will ‘take over the Gaza Strip’, it ‘will be long term ownership position’, ‘we will develop it.’
He means a US Military occupation of Gaza, overseeing turning it into a fucking territory, turning it into beach resort with Trump towers, while all the Gazans are…??? forced into Egypt and Jordan? Starved and bombed by US boots on the ground and an aircraft carrier group or two?
The only for sure thing is all the Gazans have to leave.
He is saying he plans to do an actual, 1800’s style manifest destiny, military backed colonization.
Turns out a sedated and anaesthetized and gaslit population is less likely to meaningfully revolt against the structure that oppresses it, who would have guessed!
Even better, the sedatives and anaesthetics cause dependency, so they’ll keep paying for more, and they often cause numerous other deletorious health conditions, which they’ll need to pay even more to deal with those side effects!
And they’ll now also be too physically unhealthy, as well as physically and mentally dependent, and too mentally precarious to do anything other than shrivel up, whimper and die, or maybe go berserk, when industrial civilization collapses and no one can get their meds any more!
The truth is researchers and doctors don’t actually know how effective antidepressants are or why certain types work only for certain people. But recent advances in genomics and personalized medicine are bringing us closer to a better understanding.
We don’t even know how these things work!
Or why they seem to for some but not others!
New research, reviewing huge bodies of scientific evidence, found no direct link between serotonin and depression.
The authors find “no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression or that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”
Fuckin’ whoops, turns out SSRIs don’t actually treat depression at all, meaning we’ve been giving tens, hundreds? of millions of people uneccessary medical complications in the form of side effects, and any reported mental health improvements were actually from the placebo effect!
In fact, we’re still somehow legally allowed to say:
Antidepressants, including SSRIs, remain an effective treatment. We just need to better understand why and how they work.
Even tbough the fundamental ‘chemical imbalance’ hypothesis that SSRIs are built on has been shown to be bunk!
But its ok, see, here’s our ‘current best evidence’, that SSRIs are indeed an effective treatment, from our article written in 2022.
Yep, that’s right, its a study from 2009!
Which outright statea in the abstract:
Most of the studies were supported by funds from pharmaceutical companies and were of short duration.
See! All fine.
Keep taking your pills.
Withdrawal can be very dangerous.
meta-ad-ception
Ads within an ad, about about ads.
My favorite homological word:
Sesquipedalian.
An unnecessarily long word, or a person who uses unnecessarily long words.
Sesquipedalian is a sesquipedalian word.
You got it!
A pictoglyph being used to represent something associated with the actual thing being represented, falls under ideogram.
But when your grandma sends a shopping list to you in emoji form, she probably means it as a pictogram.
… Hopefully.
Unironically, I’d love to see a sourced meta study from ideally the last 3 years that concludes that, which is based on long-term studies, which were properly peer reviewed, and not funded by the drug manufacturers themselves.