imperialismus's recent activity
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Comment on US President Joe Biden pardons son in ~society
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Comment on World Chess Championship 2024 - Ding Liren vs Gukesh D in ~games.tabletop
imperialismus LinkI haven't been as hyped about a chess game in a long time as after Ding's victory with the black pieces in game 1. I recommend GM Daniel King's recaps. Ding is such a soft-spoken, introverted, shy...I haven't been as hyped about a chess game in a long time as after Ding's victory with the black pieces in game 1. I recommend GM Daniel King's recaps.
Ding is such a soft-spoken, introverted, shy character, he's never involved in any drama, and has seemingly struggled with mental health issues the past few years. Meanwhile I have nothing against Gukesh, amazing player and not at all arrogant or conceited, but Gukesh has many years ahead of him as an elite player. I was afraid this match would be a complete blowout, and I still expect Gukesh to bounce back shortly, but I'm just happy that it seems we have an actual match on our hands, not just a steam train of the younger generation overrunning the old.
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World Chess Championship 2024 - Ding Liren vs Gukesh D
The World Chess Championship started today between reigning champion, China's Ding Liren (2728 Elo, 32 y/o) and India's young prodigy Gukesh D. (2783 Elo, 18 y/o). It's taking place in Singapore...
The World Chess Championship started today between reigning champion, China's Ding Liren (2728 Elo, 32 y/o) and India's young prodigy Gukesh D. (2783 Elo, 18 y/o). It's taking place in Singapore with games starting at 5PM local time (10AM CET, 4AM EST). Commentated coverage can be found at Chess.com or FIDE as well as numerous smaller channels.
Coming into the match, Ding is far more experienced, but has been displaying terrible form since becoming World Champion. Meanwhile Gukesh has looked far stronger and has the chance to become the youngest World Champion ever, beating out the likes of Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov by several years. Former World Champion Magnus Carlsen is still ranked as the #1 player in the world, but has declined to participate, just like last year.
The match is 14 games from November 23 to December 13, with potential rapid chess tiebreaks if the score is even after 14 games. The players will have a rest day after every 3 game days.
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Comment on Marius Borg Høiby, the 27-year-old son of Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit, has been arrested on suspicion of raping a woman in her 20s in ~news
imperialismus Link ParentUnlikely. The monarchy and royal family had a great starting point, sitting at around 80 percent approval rate a few years ago, so even with a recent dip in popularity, they still have the support...- Exemplary
Could it lead to the end of royalty?
Unlikely. The monarchy and royal family had a great starting point, sitting at around 80 percent approval rate a few years ago, so even with a recent dip in popularity, they still have the support of the majority. The monarchy has been so popular that no politician has even raised the question or wanted to start a debate on the topic for many many years, regardless of their private feelings. Arguably there hasn't been an actual serious public debate about it since the establishment of the modern monarchy in 1905, when there was a referendum. That's nearly 120 years ago. Not that there's any political repression of the topic, or that people who are anti monarchy can't get their opinions published in any newspaper... It's just not something that anybody takes very seriously. Anti monarchy editorials are seen less as a threat to the order of society than as kind of... out of touch? Irrelevant? Like, don't we have more pressing issues to debate?
One more scandal, or if this scandal somehow grows to involve the crown prince and princess more directly (like if it turns out they helped their stepson/son destroy evidence or something)... And we might have an actual public debate about the monarchy. Just a debate mind you.
Personally I've always been a small-r republican, as in someone who favors a republic as a form of government. However, it's not a very pressing political matter since the monarchy in practice has no actual political power. It's mainly a question of symbolism, and to me the symbolism of some people being "born to rule" and literally above the law has never sat right. I've had this conversation multiple times with my parents. To them, and the majority of people it seems, they see the apolitical figurehead monarch as a kind of unifying force. The king only ever expresses opinions that are extremely popular and uncontroversial. Some people really like the idea of the head of state being representative rather than being directly involved in governance, and they want that representative head of state to be completely apolitical.
For complicated historical reasons I won't get into, the current Norwegian monarchy is young; there have only been three kings since its introduction and it's been constitutional and symbolic from the start. This means the royal family has always had to endear itself to the people and justify their existence by presenting themselves as that unifying apolitical force that's always expressing the opinions that are already held by the vast majority of people and never ruffles any feathers. To their credit, even as someone who is anti-monarchy, those three kings have done a very good job of that. They've built up a large "sympathy bank" balance, and even if the current heir to the throne raised a right bastard as a stepson, there needs to be way more to fully deplete the goodwill bank.
Most people have the "bad apple" approach to the royal family. Prune off the bad branches but leave the trunk alone. A recent survey found a majority of people want the King to step in and strip his daughter, Princess Märtha Louise, of her royal title. She's controversial because she has some to put it mildly, alternative views on science and medicine, and her husband* (who has no royal title) is even worse on that front, but the main crux of the critique is her exploitation of royal titles for commercial gain. This runs counter to what most people believe and desire the monarchy to be.
The monarchy may have dodged a bullet with her, since she's the eldest child of the king, but far down the line of succession because the inheritance law was changed from oldest son to oldest child after her birth, which is why her younger brother is heir, but his daughter is second in line. Of course, there may be an argument that if she'd been born to inherit the throne, her life might have turned out quite different. When she was younger, she was a competitive equestrian and read fairy tales to children on tv; she was at least moderately popular. As she got older she apparently decided that what she really wants to be in life isn't a nice lady who reads fairy tales and smiles for the cameras, but rather a mystic who renounces conventional science and medicine and a profiteer off of her royal name. Funny how that goes.
But even if she were to be de-titled or even removed entirely from the line of succession, that hardly changes anything. Her antics just kind of move the needle a few percentage points on public opinion, and arguably if you're anti-monarchy, you have this perverse incentive to want the worst offenders (in the court of public opinion) to remain closely associated with the royal family and the monarchy. If they're entirely disassociated, you kind of just lost one of your best arguments against the monarchy.
* Wikipedia has a pretty damning intro paragraph: "Durek Verrett (born November 17, 1974, as Derek David Verrett) is an American conspiracy theorist,[2] convicted felon,[3] alternative therapist,[4][5] and self-professed shaman as a practitioner of Neoshamanism. He has been widely described by media and other observers as a conman and conspiracy theorist." My favorite thing he's said (as in one of the worst) is that children who have cancer are sick because they want to be sick. Apparently he believes in some kind of "the secret" esque world where thoughts can manifest directly into reality, so you can literally wish yourself to be cured and be cured, which means if children aren't cured of cancer it must mean they don't want to be cured badly enough. This dude really had the gall to pull the race card and claim that the Norwegian public don't like him because he's black, and not because, like, he's a criminal conman and all-around asshole.
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Comment on Marius Borg Høiby, the 27-year-old son of Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit, has been arrested on suspicion of raping a woman in her 20s in ~news
imperialismus Link ParentHe isn't a royal. He has no blood relation to the royal family, he's the son of the crown princess from a previous relationship before she met crown prince Haakon, the son of the king. The law in...He isn't a royal. He has no blood relation to the royal family, he's the son of the crown princess from a previous relationship before she met crown prince Haakon, the son of the king.
The law in Norway states that the monarch can't be prosecuted. It also states that princes and princesses can be prosecuted, but only by a court appointed by "the king". In this case, the legal interpretation of "the king" would likely be "the cabinet", as "the king" in Norwegian constitutional law in practice more or less means the democratically elected executive branch of which the king is a mere figurehead. The cabinet would likely simply appoint a regular court of law, if Marius were a prince, but he's not. He has no official royal title or representative duties, and thus no special legal protections.
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Comment on 2024 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 7th - 14th October 2024 in ~misc
imperialismus Link ParentIt's a buzzword that was coined by John McCarthy in 1956. It might be overhyped at the moment, and applied incorrectly and overeagerly, but it's certainly not a new word or concept and I'm not..."AI" is a buzzword, it's not what the research use to be called
It's a buzzword that was coined by John McCarthy in 1956. It might be overhyped at the moment, and applied incorrectly and overeagerly, but it's certainly not a new word or concept and I'm not basing the above opinion on hype from the past five years.
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Comment on 2024 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 7th - 14th October 2024 in ~misc
imperialismus Link ParentI think we just have fundamentally different views on this topic. You seem to be entirely focused on the means and not the end result. The purpose of the field of AI research, going back to...I think we just have fundamentally different views on this topic. You seem to be entirely focused on the means and not the end result. The purpose of the field of AI research, going back to Turing, has been to replicate intelligent behavior. The means are statistics and computer science, but that's like saying the human brain isn't relevant to psychology because it's just physics which is just applied math which is just a particular application of theoretical math. The context matters a lot.
If machine learning didn't have any scientific applications, I'd agree with you. But it does. Regardless, I don't think we'll reach an agreement on this, but I appreciate your perspective, it just simply doesn't line up with my own.
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Comment on 2024 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 7th - 14th October 2024 in ~misc
imperialismus Link ParentI think the study of intelligence is inherently connected with science in a way that most theoretical math isn't. I also think as a matter of principle, if a technology is invented that is...I think the study of intelligence is inherently connected with science in a way that most theoretical math isn't. I also think as a matter of principle, if a technology is invented that is relevant to almost all fields of natural science, it's within the purview of the premier award in science to award the theoretical underpinnings of that technology, even if they're mostly math/computer science-y in nature.
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Comment on 2024 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 7th - 14th October 2024 in ~misc
imperialismus Link ParentI have to disagree. It's no more "99% math" than theoretical physics. In a year where they awarded a prize for the practical application of the technology in chemistry, it makes perfect sense to...I have to disagree. It's no more "99% math" than theoretical physics. In a year where they awarded a prize for the practical application of the technology in chemistry, it makes perfect sense to award the theoretical underpinnings of said practical application as well.
That's just my opinion of course.
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Comment on 2024 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 7th - 14th October 2024 in ~misc
imperialismus Link ParentYeah, I think they're running into the issue that a lot of modern scientific fields simply didn't exist back when Alfred Nobel wrote his testament. It would be a bit strange if machine...Yeah, I think they're running into the issue that a lot of modern scientific fields simply didn't exist back when Alfred Nobel wrote his testament. It would be a bit strange if machine learning/artificial neural networks, a field that's like cross-disciplinary relevant to almost all fields of science, never got acknowledged by the premier award in all of science. There just isn't anywhere else to "slot it in". At least that's my guess as to why.
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Comment on What are your spooky, creepy or unexplained stories? in ~talk
imperialismus LinkI haven't told this story to many people, because it sounds like a joke without a punchline. But it's the most unexplainable thing I've ever experienced. When I was about ten years old, someone...I haven't told this story to many people, because it sounds like a joke without a punchline. But it's the most unexplainable thing I've ever experienced.
When I was about ten years old, someone sneaked into my family's house, left a giant pile of shit on the floor, and sneaked back out. This all happened in broad daylight, in a time window of about 15-20 minutes when my entire family was upstairs having lunch. It was mid morning on a weekend and two cars were parked out front. We didn't have any pets and the entire family was accounted for. It happened in a room my parents were renovating downstairs, and I was the last person to leave that room. When I got back down there after lunch, I almost stepped in the pile of poop.
To this day, I have no idea who did it, or why, or how they got in and out undetected. The last part is the least mysterious: I know from experience that the front door was noisy, and you'd have to pass through several doors to get to the room at the back of the house. But those doors were usually unlocked during the day when people were home, so it wouldn't have required any Mission Impossible style antics, just being very very careful not to make a noise while opening and closing the doors. The more interesting question is who and why. What could possibly be the reason? I can't think of anyone in my life at the time that would have done it as a prank, certainly not done it and kept quiet about it for more than 20 years.
I was more intrigued than creeped out at the time. Now, many years later, I'm thinking a freak who would do something like that, so brazenly with a whole family present in the house, could potentially be capable of something more sinister. But nothing else creepy or strange ever happened in that house, which my parents have been living in for more than 25 years at this point.
So yeah, that's my unexplained experience. The mystery pooper. It's so bizzarre I'd almost convinced myself it was a false memory until a family member brought it up recently. At least it wasn't a severed horse head!
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Comment on 2024 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 7th - 14th October 2024 in ~misc
imperialismus Link ParentThe scientific prizes are decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It's only the Peace Prize that's handed out by the Nobel Committee in Oslo.I guess describing the oceanic conveyor belt, the carbon cycle, and “global warming” wasn't enough for Oslo.
The scientific prizes are decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It's only the Peace Prize that's handed out by the Nobel Committee in Oslo.
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Comment on Demis Hassabis, John M. Jumper and David Baker win the 2024 Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work on proteins in ~science
imperialismus Link ParentI didn't expect there to be a thread in the ~misc category!I didn't expect there to be a thread in the ~misc category!
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Demis Hassabis, John M. Jumper and David Baker win the 2024 Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work on proteins
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Comment on How accurate is the conventional wisdom about dopamine? in ~health.mental
imperialismus LinkNote: not a neuroscientist, just a person who read lots of papers. These two things are not the same! A lot of the research of the past 20+ years on the role of dopamine in reward has leaned in...Note: not a neuroscientist, just a person who read lots of papers.
There’s a seemingly widespread understanding that dopamine makes us feel good and that it can be used against us to make us do things we don’t necessarily like (like endlessly scroll feeds).
These two things are not the same! A lot of the research of the past 20+ years on the role of dopamine in reward has leaned in the direction of separating reward from reward seeking, or "wanting" from "liking". There's some evidence that dopamine motivates reward seeking behavior, but may not necessarily be involved in the actual reward itself. It enhances the anticipation of pleasure, and can even motivate you to do things that you know rationally aren't going to be pleasurable. But it's likely that the primary modulator of the actual feel-good feelings isn't dopamine.
When researchers look for "hedonic hotspots", which are areas of the brain that are involving in causing an increase in pleasurable feelings, they tend to be activated by opioid or endocannabinoid stimulation, rather than dopamine. Some may also be modulated by GABA.
Of course, the brain is a super complex thing and the common idea of one chemical for each feeling or whatever is a vast oversimplification, but I'm sure you suspected as much.
Here is a source that discusses hedonic hotspots and gets into the role, or lack thereof, of dopamine at the end (in-line citations removed for ease of reading):
Perhaps the most famous candidate for a brain substrate that generates pleasure were so-called “pleasure electrodes”, which used brain electrical stimulation of the subcortical limbic forebrain to reinforce self-administration behavior such as pressing a lever or pushing a button. Pleasure electrodes were typically
aimed at the septum or lateral hypothalamus, though a number of the sites fell within what neuroanatomists would now call the nucleus accumbens, and most electrodes likely activated mesolimbic dopamine systems. Some patients stimulated these ‘pleasure electrodes’ thousands of times in a single 3-hour session. Many textbooks cite these cases as examples of intense brain-induced pleasure. But despite such dramatic self-administration, it is questionable whether many of those electrodes ever actually caused pleasure.For example, “B-19”, a young man with chronic electrodes implanted by Heath and colleagues in the 1960s, voraciously self-stimulated his electrode located in septum and nucleus accumbens, and protested when the stimulation button was taken away. Still, B-19 was never reported to utter exclamations of delight or to say that the electrodes caused pleasure thrills. Instead, B19 reported that stimulating his electrode evoked desire to stimulate again, as well as a strong desire to engage in sexual activities. Another Heath patient said his electrode “made him feel as if he were building up to sexual orgasm” but left him “unable to achieve the orgastic end point”, an outcome which often was frustrating and produced a “nervous feeling” that seems nearly opposite to pleasure.
(...)Dopamine is not needed to cause normal pleasure of food or drugs of abuse. For example, even massive destruction of ascending dopamine projections does not impair affective ‘liking’ reactions elicited by
a sweet taste. Similarly, complete gene-based elimination of dopamine has been suggested to not impair ‘liking’ in dopamine-deficient mutant mice. Nor does dopamine blockade by neuroleptic drugs reduce ‘liking’ facial reactions of rats to sweetness. In humans, the perceived pleasantness of chocolate milk is not reduced by the loss of brain dopamine neurons in Parkinson’s disease. Similarly, human subjective ratings of the pleasantness of amphetamine, cocaine or cigarettes have been reported to persist unsuppressed by dopamine-blocking drugs or dietary-induced dopamine depletion, even when those treatments do suppress wanting
for more of the same drug.When I first stumbled upon this idea that you could have this brain chemical that causes you to want to do something, but doesn't actually make you like doing that thing when you're actually doing it, it kind of blew my mind. If this turns out to be the case, it has huge implications for all kinds of addictive behavior, whether it's drugs or food or doomscrolling.
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Comment on The theory that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather is wrong in ~science
imperialismus Link ParentThis is just a misunderstanding of how competitive running actually works. Having a pace setter break the air resistance is a significant advantage. But there are rules for how this is done in...- Exemplary
Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
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This is just a misunderstanding of how competitive running actually works. Having a pace setter break the air resistance is a significant advantage. But there are rules for how this is done in competition. The first man to run a marathon under 2 hours, Eliud Kipchoge, didn't get the time recognized as an official world record, despite "running himself", because the pace setters were rotating in and out of the race, which isn't permitted. You can look at the recent men's 1500m Olympic final to see the guy running in front the whole race - who had by far the best PB in the race - completely fading in the last 200m while three guys ran past him to set new personal bests. Those guys were running on their own but would never have been able to run that fast without someone faster than them front running.
In many events, there's literally hundreds, possibly thousands of male athletes who could pace a female WR run to the finish line. This is clearly not comparable to a race with women only.
Just like Kipchoge ran "artificially faster" due to rotating pacemakers, so could women with male pacemakers. It's just a very strange framing. Women's and men's athletics are separate for a reason. Sports have rules to ensure that results are fair and records set in different competitions are comparable, which is also why only a 2m/s tailwind is allowed in sprints. lt's not sexism to suggest that a women's world record should be performed in a women's race.
It also has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not women hunted during Neolithic times. It doesn't mean that women aren't capable runners. Top female athletes would absolutely smoke the average dude. You don't just show up and run a 2:16 marathon ("women only" marathon world record), even if the women's record in a mixed-sex race of 2:11 (both are recognized by World Athletics as separate records) is faster.
It's not about disparaging women athletes, it's about fairness and consistency across different competitions. You can't run with whatever shoes you want either, even if it's your own feet doing the running; there are rules for that too, because some shoes are deemed so energy efficient as to be equivalent to "mechanical doping" and therefore banned. Athletics isn't just "run a certain distance as fast as possible", like all sports it also has various ancilliary rules and regulations. This particular rule has nothing to do with the point of the article and bringing it up in this context sounds like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about.
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Comment on An important update on Concord - "At this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024" in ~games
imperialismus Link ParentJust adding onto what you said. Fornite is possibly the most successful pivot in gaming history, and it's the one-in-a-thousand case that jumping on a trend for the sake of it actually paid off....Just adding onto what you said. Fornite is possibly the most successful pivot in gaming history, and it's the one-in-a-thousand case that jumping on a trend for the sake of it actually paid off. It was supposed to be a PvE coop game, and I remember seeing ads for the coop tower defense mode when it first came out. But then just a few months before the game was set to go into early access, PUBG came out and became a success, and so they made a Fortnite battle royale mode. They just happened to have built the perfect foundation for the next big trend which they had no way of anticipating while working on a completely different game concept for the past six years.
It's not something you can plan for. The original elevator pitch for Fortnite was "Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead". If the BR subgenre hadn't exploded in popularity at that exact time, the game would probably be remembered as exactly that, a moderately successful coop survival game with a cutesy art style.
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Jakob Ingebrigtsen smashes longstanding world 3000m record in Silesia
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Comment on Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke in ~tech
imperialismus Link ParentThere's a long tradition of documentary art photography. It happens to be my specialty within photography. I think what you mean to say is that art photographers have always experimented with...This is what I mean when I say that art photography has never been about documentation
There's a long tradition of documentary art photography. It happens to be my specialty within photography. I think what you mean to say is that art photographers have always experimented with divorcing photography from documentation, but that's not the same as saying that documentation hasn't been a primary motivation of many artists whose work is photographic in nature and displayed in galleries.
Art photography has gone through several phases or stylistic periods. Early on there was pictorialism, which emulated painting, and like painting, wasn't very concerned with depicting literal reality. But then there was an opposing movement to really emphasize the things that made photography its own unique medium, rather than a kind of second-rate painting for people who can't paint. One of the most famous art photographers of all time, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was both a photojournalist and an artist, and his approach was basically the same whether he was photographing for the gallery or the newspaper.
It's a good point to emphasize that photo manipulation is as old as photography; it's just gotten more accessible now than ever before. I just want to provide a counterpoint to the idea that photography-as-art is necessarily different from photography-as-documentation; it's not really a view that the world of art photography shares.
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Comment on Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke in ~tech
imperialismus LinkAs a photographer, I've kind of mixed feelings about this debate. Let's be clear: there's a significant difference between adding or removing objects from a scene, and adjusting color balance,...- Exemplary
As a photographer, I've kind of mixed feelings about this debate. Let's be clear: there's a significant difference between adding or removing objects from a scene, and adjusting color balance, contrast, tone curves, etc. But photography has always been a "variably objective" medium. Even in the film days, the choice of film and how to develop it could affect the tone of a photo. Not to mention what exactly you put in the frame, as opposed to outside it.
I absolutely support some sort of certification for AI manipulated images, even though it would probably be easily circumvented by people who aren't complete amateurs. But we need to actually consider that all images are an imperfect representation of reality. A good example was a new law that was introduced here in Norway that made it mandatory to mark images as "retouched person(s)". The problem was this law made no distinction between something like changing the color balance, which might be done to make the image more true to the person's actual skin color, versus making a person slimmer and removing skin imperfections. If we're going to legislate, we need to consider the intent and the actual result, not just the fact that "AI" was somehow involved.
Phone cameras have for years cheated the "image=reality" paradigm with computational photography. Their sensors are small and optics sub par compared to professional gear, so to compensate, they've done things like combine multiple exposures into one to reduce noise and increase dynamic range. And then you have things like fake shallow depth of field, which is a real effect you can achieve optically, but not using phone hardware, because the lenses simply aren't long enough. It's a mess. We need to really consider the intent behind things and not just slap a label on everything as "manipulated", because then we have to do that for all phone images taken in the past decade.
Probably a hot take on tildes, but I don't think presidential pardons based on personal discretion should be a thing. It's far too abusable. It literally circumvents the justice system, and if you or a loved one was in prison for something that someone more well connected had gotten wiped away by a penstroke, how would you feel? This is a principled stance and has nothing to do with Biden, jr or senior, specifically. Trump already abused that power and will probably abuse it again in the future.
I just really don't like any system that puts some people above the law.
If the American justice system is so fucked that these special powers are needed, you might as well make the office of president into one entirely dedicated to issuing pardons. I guarantee there's thousands of far worse cases that go unresolved because nobody important gave a damn, or even knew about them.