Between iNaturalist and Wikipedia, for me iNaturalist is the more significant of the two. I use iNat every day, have many tens of thousands of observations, and using it I've learned to identify thousands of birds, plants, bugs, fungi, and other things out there. Now I can name trees, plants, birds, et al, but more than that I understand better how they fit together into ecosystems. Also I've learned a lot of taxonomy which actually helps inform my view of the world a lot. In the process I've connected a lot more to nature, and thanks to iNat (and eBird) I now spent a lot more time doing meaningful things exploring wild spaces and spend less time scrolling on web pages. Wikipedia's invaluable as well, and completely indispensable, but between the two it's been less significant for me actually directly learning about the natural world I live in.

While the quantification isn't inherently reliable, the reality of many dead at the hands at Elon Mush is a simple fact that's not up for dispute. The only question is how many he's killed so far. He cut off life saving meds to sick kids and food aid to the areas with food shortages, the deaths are known and reliably reported.

Then it should be easy to prove, instead of saying "it isn't up for dispute" or citing a person's model.

It is easy to prove, it is shown in the linked model. The model is simple. If I spend X amount of dollars feeding people, I can save Y lives. Since this model is obviously bunk, I'm sure you can easily articulate why this model is inaccurate, untrustworthy, or otherwise unhelpful.

True, feel free to Google "deaths attributed to end of usaid", lots to read and learn about there. Have at it.

You’re implying that you have evidence to support your argument without actually providing any of it.

We're not. Blame and guilt are not limited resources; more than one bad guy exists.

> a simple fact that's not up for dispute

We used to say the same about the male/female binary.

> He cut off life saving meds

Sophistry. Forcing charity is literal enslavement. Withholding charity is not homicide.

So the kids died as a result of the action taken (withdrawing meds from impoverished children), but the person who took the meds away from the sick kids who then died as a result is innocent? I feel like you might want to look at that word "sophistry" long and hard, and do a bit of soul searching.

He co-founded a payments company - he certainly wasn't an engineer. He was fired and given a golden parachute from Paypal for his incompetent insistence that they stop all software development at PayPal for a year so that they could move off Linux and move to fully hosting on Windows NT servers (!). He was a manager and money guy from the start, he never was a software engineer or any kind of engineer.

Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?

Those words you listed are an example of exactly what I’m talking about. Words like Nazi, bigot, etc have lost most of their power now because they have been used so much. 5-10 years ago those labels could ruin your life and people in the US would trip over themselves to prove how those labels didn’t apply to them. Now a great number of young people don’t care at all about being labeled as those things, and being labeled as one of those things is much less likely to ruin one’s life/career.

That is some impressively convoluted doublethink. Good luck straightening your head out someday.

I’m just saying that words have the power they are given by people. If you don’t want to be offended by a special word you then just don’t give it the power to hurt you.

“Queer” is another example. It used to be a slur, gay people decided collectively that they were going to take the word back, and it worked. Go ahead and call someone queer as a slur in San Francisco, it doesn’t really work the same as if you had called someone queer in the Midwest in 1990.

It’s not doublethink, it’s a provable phenomenon.

>it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek

I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.

It's not all-or-nothing, though, and free sources like Attikos provide word definitions at a tap. Since I'm old, I also have a shelf of Loebs, and have no shame about skimming the dull bits by reading the trots.

I did some tests with heavily math oriented programming using ChatGPT and Gemini to rubber-duck (not agentic), going over C performance tuning, checking C code for possible optimizations, going over math oriented code and number theory, and working on optimizing threading, memory throughput, etc. to make the thing go faster, then benchmarking runs of the updated code. Gemini was by far better than ChatGPT in this domain. I was able to test changes by benchmarking. For my use case it was night and day, Gemini's advice generally quite strong and was useful to significantly improve benchmarked performance, ChatGPT was far less useful for this use case. What will work for you will depend on your use case, how well your prompting is tuned to the system you're using, and who knows what other factors, but I have a lot of benchmarks that are clear evidence of the opposite of your experience.

Which models? It's completely uninformative to say you compared "ChatGPT" and "Gemini." Those are both just brand names under which several different models are offered, ranging from slow-witted to scary-smart.

Worst people I've ever met have all been in ornate offices

Be careful what you wish for.

Also a 31% approval rating, unpopular with a large majority of people in the US, fwiw

31% on the economy specifically. Unbelievably (to me), a full 41% of the country still believes he’s doing a good job in general.

The claims about extreme complexity of the Late Roman/Byzantine state came into the popular imagination by Enlightenment and other Western thinkers who were deeply biased against the late Romans due to a long history of cultural conflict. The OP is completely correct here, the reddit comment is an extremely incomplete story. It notes that the Roman state was more complex than other Medieval states (correct), but to say that it was "too" complex is a culturally based judgment, not a fact. The origin of the negative cultural judgment about that complexity waen't coming from the Romans, they were coming from the Franks, Venetians, and later Western Europeans who in large part were repeating the old prejudices going back to the schism, but also justifying their own conquest and abuses of of the Roman people.