Removed by mod

In the case of your example we’d do .map(&:unwrap) in Ruby (if unwrap was a method we’d actually want to call)

Notably, these are not the cases _1 and _2 etc are for. They are there for the cases that are not structurally “call this method on the single argument to the block” e.g. .map{ _1 + _2 } or .map { x.foo(_1) }

(_1 is reasonable, because iterating over an enumerable sequence makes it obvious what it is; _1 and _2 combined is often reasonable, because e.g. if we iterate over a key, value enumerable, such as what you get from enumerating a Hash, it’s obvious what you get; if you find yourself using _3 or above, you’re turning to the dark side and should rethink your entire life)

Funny thing is it’s not a proper lake, and not very old. It’s an artificial basin that was originally prepared to allow for control of the height of a canal dug all the way from the Thames a few miles away, for transport. But they finished it not long before the railway came, and it went bankrupt, and the canal path itself was sold off to a railway company and is now the path of one of the main London rail lines. As a result there are roads near me, nowhere near water, named things like Towpath Way and Canal Walk.

It’s wildly unrealistic but also pointless, because nothing stops us from building new services on top of the existing net. See also: Lemmy, Mastodon etc.

Convincing “regular people” to move is the hard part.

Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.

My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.

That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)

As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.

The foxes are still more shy here for the most part. They’ll run if I open the door or if they see me move too much inside, while the cats will sometimes come to me and some of them (that one in particular) will come inside. But the gazebo is too tempting for both cats and foxes when I’m not out there.

That’s true. It’s been an issue near me as well. Thankfully in the most built up parts of London the foxes seems to mostly have enough food to not be particularly interested in cats. But I always keep an eye out when I see the cats here get close to foxes in case it turns nasty (not happened so far).

And yet my comment did not suggest any views in either direction and only addressed the specific point of selective schools.

I’ve not suggested otherwise, so I don’t know why you felt compelled to point that out.

You’re moving goalposts. You claimed ANCs attacks were inconsequential, and now you’ve changed your tone to focus on civilian attacks.

Sure, they carried out fewer and smaller civilian attacks than Hamas.

There are absolutely arguments over what the most effective use of violent resistance is, and to be clear I have never claimed that Hamas’ method is particularly effective, and it might very well be entirely counter-productive. What I argued was specifically against this:

Although the ANC did declare an armed struggle against the White regime, in fact their attacks were inconsequential and contributed nothing to the struggle. The game-changer was a concerted campaign to mobilise world opinion. It was sanctions and isolation that ended apartheid, not bullets.

But specifically to what you claimed in this latest reply, I do remember the bombing campaign that targeted a range of Wimpy burger joints during lunch hour. I do remember the regular use of limpet mines against sports venues, bus stations, shopping centres and other shops, restaurants. They were regular enough that they are one of the regular features of the 1980’s evening news that was seared into my memory as a child despite growing up half a world away.

The ANC liked to pretend they didn’t target civilians, but in the 90’s applications were made to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee by ANC members who admitted to bombing civilians, and ANC themselves submitted a lengthy list of bombings to the TRC which also included a long list of civilian bombings that they claimed to be “uncertain” who carried out but nevertheless submitted in a longer list of their operations alongside the police and military attacks you mention. These lists are readily available.

Mandela “escaped” being tarnished by this in large part because he was in prison from years before MK escalated from sabotage to bombings, and to this day it’s unclear how much he personally knew, especially about the civilian attacks. It’s clear other members of the ANC leadership, like Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo, knew, however.

Apartheid started in 1948, but segregation had existed for 40 years by then, and the fight for equal rights preceded the formal start of Apartheid.

What is clear with respect to Mandela is that he doubled down on the necessity of violence to his death and was clear that things got worse during ANCs nonviolent fight and first improved when they started fighting back. He held onto that view to his death.

ANC was founded in 1912 as segregation was just ramping up. 36 years after they were founded, Apartheid was passed.

They didn’t start killing until 1976, after 64 years of the world mostly quietly ignoring them as oppression got worse and worse.

1 year after they started killing, the UN finally made the voluntary and ineffectual arms embargo binding. 8 years after they started killing, the disinvestment campaign started seriously hurting the South African economy. 13 years after they started killing, Thatcher called the ANC a terrorist organisation at the Commonwealth summit, but beside having gone from being seen as a harmless nuisance to being called terrorists by both the UK and US governments, they won the struggle 14 years after they took up arms. But 78 years after they started fighting.

As such, I’ll take Mandelas words on the importance of their armed struggle over yours any day.

There are over 160 selective secondary state/public schools in England. Being state run does not prevent the existence of selective schools.

Other sources that are public domain or “cheap enough” for OpenAI to simply buy them. Hence my point that OpenAI is already worth enough that they could make a takeover offer for Reuters.

The thing, is realistically it won’t make a difference at all, because there are vast amounts of public domain data that remain untapped, so the main “problematic” need for OpenAI is new content that represents up to data language and up to date facts, and my point with the share price of Thomson Reuters is to illustrate that OpenAI is already getting large enough that they can afford to outright buy some of the largest channels of up-to-the-minute content in the world.

As for authors, it might wipe a few works by a few famous authors from the dataset, but they contribute very little to the quality of an LLM, because the LLM can’t easily judge during training unless you intentionally reinforce specific works. There are several million books published every year. Most of them make <$100 in royalties for their authors (an average book sell ~200 copies). Want to bet how cheap it’d be to buy a fully licensed set of a few million books? You don’t need bestsellers, you need many books that are merely sufficiently good to drag the overall quality of the total dataset up.

The irony is that the largest benefactor of content sources taking a strict view of LLMs will be OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the few others large enough to basically buy datasets or buy companies that own datasets because this creates a moat for those who can’t afford to obtain licensed datasets.

The biggest problem won’t be for OpenAI, but for people trying to build open models on the cheap.

Your blood and soil arguments are entirely irrelevant to the point that Israel itself does not make the extremist claims you’re making. You keep recycling this despite its total lack of relevance to the argument. And in doing so you’re aligning yourself with a tiny minority of the most far-right extremist fascist-adjacent Israeli parties.

beyond the fact they agreed to a 2 state solution in the 90s then reneged and attacked Israel

Again you’re collectively blaming a population, the majority of which were not born when the Oslo accords were signed (look it up; 65% of the Palestinian population is below 25 years old, and the Oslo accords were signed 30 years ago) for actions a far higher proportion had no influence over.

beyond the fact they elect a genocidal government that will only bring themselves ruin

I’m assuming you don’t get the irony in writing this when it can be equally applied to Israel.

Of the two sides, only one has a government actively engaged in what covers a substantial portion o stage 8 of Stantons ten stages of genocide.

When you cut toddlers throats and rape Innocents who have NO SLIGHTS AGAINST YOU, film it for fun plus have genocide as your prime governmental policy I give 0 shits about your plight regardless of what pushed you there. You deserve to get pushed around by the people you have a desire to wipe off the face of this Earth. To quote the bible, “live by the sword, die by the sword.”

This boils down to “it’s ok to murder innocents and oppress people and want to get rid of people because the other side murdered innocents and wants to get rid of you”. Unless you’re an utter hypocrite, you’d apply that to both sides. Yet this “logic” is meaningless if applied to both sides. By your own logic, Israelis deserve to get pushed around because some of them have murdered innocents and because some of them wants Israel to annex all the land (to be clear, despite your argument in favour of collective punishment: they don’t; just like Palestinians don’t deserve to be collectively punished for the actions of a few either). But if that is the case, you have no moral basis for your uproar over Hamas’ actions - by your own logic you shouldn’t give 0 shits about it.

Yet you clearly do. So clearly you’re not applying that logic to both sides.

You’re conveniently only applying it to the Palestinian population, whom you’ve elsewhere also implied collectively are untrustworthy and likely to try to take over any state who might invite them in.

Again, note how quick you are to be ok with collective suffering for Palestine for the actions of some, while you’re up in arms about the suffering of a portion of Israelis for the actions of some.

Can you see how this deeply hypocritical and one-sided demonisation of Palestinians as a people, whom you have elsewhere implied are collectively untrustworthy and a risk of trying to take over, comes across as racist?

Because I certainly do.

I have no interest in continuing to indulge you in your ongoing demonisation of a population of five million people of whom the vast majority has done no wrong other than been born in what is effectively an open air prison where you, to quote you think they “deserve to get pushed around” despite the majority of them never having voted in any violently oppressive government (and that holds for the majority of Israelis too, though sadly not for the majority of the electorate - but just as I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for the actions of some, neither to dI hold all Israelis responsible for the actions of some; have a think about that).

And so I’ll shortly be blocking you, so I don’t have to deal with any more attempts at justifying oppression of innocents because of the crimes of some.

What matters is that they must unequivocally reject Hamas, and work with Israel to eradicate these factions as best they can so that Israel can trust their populace to not harbor terrorists. Only then can the Israeli leadership end the restrictions placed upon the Palestine territories that seek to prevent the inflow of arms and rocket artillery to Hamas.

Asking an oppressed population to collaborate with their oppressors like a bunch of quislings in order to appease the oppressor before they can get peace has never worked.

It is not an illogical act that Israel has done to secure the safety and security of their people.

The have not secured the safety and security of their people, though. What their decades of oppression has bought them is continuous warfare.

With the recent artillery attack by Hezbollah, I don’t think there is much question as to where the Palestinian people stand with regards to the Hamas attack on Israel.

So doubling down on the approach of assigning collective blame to a whole population for the actions of some. Who typically assigns collective blame to a whole people for the actions of some? Can you tell me?

Israel does not owe the Palestinians a good outcome. If they keep testing Israel, there is no limit to what Israel can do short of mass-killing genocide. Displacement is the best outcome in an Israeli victory.

So you keep arguing for massive war crimes of a level too extreme even for the far-right Israeli government, in other words.

False. It takes the will and the courage to out the terrorists amongst them to the Israelis so that the terrorists will be hindered and slowly wiped from prominence.

Ah, so you just want them to be quislings and collaborate with their own oppressors. When has that ever worked again, remind me? This is nothing but an excuse to justify your support for continued oppression.

Or perhaps Hamas will benefit from the reprieve in state suppression, and use the opportunity to import more arms, equipment, and training from Arab countries and bide their time.

That is the risk you run when you oppress a population for decades. But if that were to happen, at least they would actually have a moral leg to stand on. Now they do not.

Which is why I said it would be so much easier if it could be done. It regretfully can’t be done which is why there’s so much conflict up till this day. The keyword is “if”.

So to make this clear: You’re regretful Israel is unable to carry out what would be one of the worst crimes against humanity since World War 2? Something which would reach stage 8 of Stantons 10 stages of Genocide?

Yikes.

And besides, the Israeli goodwill is running out.

Well, yes, gross human rights violations for decades do eventually tend to piss people off.

I wonder if they might just throw caution to the wind and just do it, given how right wing their government is getting. It would be just, and there will be popcorn in the aftermath and subsequent war for sure.

Calling crimes against humanity “just”. So much for caring about the millions of innocents you casually are arguing for harming.

Time for a block - debating people who openly not just argue for crimes against humanity, but describe them as “just” is giving extremism unjustified attention.

If all they did was argue for jettisoning stone age thinking, I’d have been all for that. But instead the person I replied to engaged in just another variant of the same stone age thinking.

I’m simply applying the logic the Palestinians apply.

This might be relevant if it was a Palestinian state imposing apartheid on Israel. If so, they would be equally worthy of condemnation irrespective of who had which historical claim to what land.

But they are not, so bringing it up is yet another attempt at victim-blaming.

Had Israel stopped at a point of doing the bare minimum to secure its legally recognized borders, or indeed the borders they themselves recognize, and attempted to avoid oppressing innocent civilians for decades, there’d likely still be conflicts, but then Israel would have something of a moral leg to stand on. They have not. They do not. As it is, they are occupiers, as recognized by their own government and their own courts.

I’d also feel more empathy for the apartheid conditions if Palestinians would stop electing a political group who’s stated goals are the deaths of every Jewish person.

Hamas didn’t even exist until a couple of decades into the oppression. It was formed as a result of the failure of PLO to get Israel to the table, so this is blaming the victims again for responding to decades of Israeli unwillingness to end their oppression.

Also, notice how in contrast to your repeated talk of the Palestinians as a unified group while assigning blame, not once have I tried to blame the Israeli people as a whole for Israel’s actions, despite the fact that a majority of them have elected governments in every single election for the entire existence of their state that have continued a policy of illegal occupations and apartheid?

I stand by that. Just like the Palestinian people as a whole can not be judged for the actions of Hamas, neither can the Israeli people as a whole be judged for the actions of the Israeli state.

Are you going to do the same, or are you going continue to assign collective blame to people including the millions on either side who have no power whatsoever to influence the actions of any of the belligerent parties and/or who oppose them? Including the millions in the West Bank who are largely cut off from even being able to intervene in what goes on in Gaza due to Israeli apartheid policies beyond the control of Palestinians in the West Bank.

And as I said it’s comical you keep saying I support apartheid policies by simply stating killing innocent people is fucking wrong and deplorable no matter what side does it.

When you criticise only specific and limited outcomes of the oppression rather than the oppression itself, then, yes, it’s natural to presume you’re fine with the oppression. Notice how even here you only express opposition to the killing of innocents, and not against the imposition of apartheid or the illegal occupation that created the conditions for it over multiple generations.

If Ukraine starts liquidating Russian cities and raping, torturing, kidnapping, and using innocent’s as human shields I’d say the same fucking thing to them and pull my support. If this is how Palestine wants to do things I shed no tears as they are destroyed.

If your support for opposition to oppression is contingent on the oppressed doing no wrong, then you’re really just looking for any excuse to side with the oppressors.

My support for the Ukranian people, as for the Palestinian people is unconditional. That does not mean I support every action made on their behalf. I do not. That does not mean there aren’t actions I find deplorable. It does not mean I don’t sympathise with innocent victims.

It does mean that in an asymmetric fight the oppressor is the only side that has the choice of ending the oppression, and until they do they have no moral standing to complain when some of their victims lash out in desperation - the oppressor is ultimately always the culpable party for every consequence of their oppression.

Anything else is to create an incentive for oppressors to be extra brutal in order to provoke an extreme response, knowing that if they do, they’ll have people like you ready to dismiss the plight of the entire oppressed population because some of them were pushed into a level of desperation where they’ve gone too far.

It won’t really matter, because there will continue to be other sources.

Taken to an extreme, there are indications OpenAI’s market cap is already higher than Tomson Reuters ($80bn-$90bn vs <$60bn), and it will go far higher. Getty, also mentioned, has a market cap of “only” $2.4bn. In other words: If enough important sources of content starts blocking OpenAI, they will start buying access, up to and including if necessary buying original content creators.

As it is, while BBC is clearly not, some of these other content providers are just playing hard to get and hoping for a big enough cash offer either for a license or to get bought out.

The cat is out of the bag, whatever people think about it, and sources that block themselves off from AI entirely (to the point of being unwilling to sell licenses or sell themselves) will just lose influence accordingly.

This also presumes OpenAI remains the only contender, which is clearly not the case in the long run given the rise of alternative models that while mostly still not good enough, are good enough that it’s equally clearly just a matter of time before anyone (at least, for the time being, for sufficiently rich instances of “anyone”, with the cost threshold dropping rapidly) can fine-tune their own models using their own scraped data.

In other words, it may make them feel better, but in the long run it’s a meaningless move.

EDIT: What a weird thing to downvote without replying to. I’ve taken no stance on whether BBC’s decision is morally right or not, just addressed that it’s unlikely to have any effect, and you can dislike that it won’t have any effect but thinking it will is naive.