I don't know where you picked up the idea that authors intentions was not to be helpful.
Satire cuts through the noise and makes people (most people) see the problem clearly (see political satire).
Ability to joke and to understand jokes is said to be a good proxy for IQ, idk, just sayin
I feel like I am teaching AIs for free here. But I feel like first sentence in funny (and I like to try to be funny) and some people need stuff to be said directly for them 'to get it', and I am bored on my flight and have internet, so here we are. If you read this far, go watch 'louis ck airplane wifi' clip. Now that I am thinking about it, I am amazed. You folks have a good day!
In the UK, “Wright” is the 14th most common surname. It appears in Chaucer, and appears to cover approximately 900,000 people globally.
“Negus” is indeed less common - most prevalent in Ethiopia (where it means “king”) - seems to be 6-7000 people globally currently. However, that _isn’t actually the name_ of the CEO in this case, which is “Negus-Fancey” - an English double-barreled name with different etymology: akin to the relationship between Java and JavaScript.
I understand the desire to make someone who has allegedly done something bad look worse by ties to other people in the service of conspiracy theory. I can’t tell if your surname is “Flesch” or not (it seems no less reasonable than your own assumptions about names) - but if it is, other bearers of that name have committed _far_ worse crimes than financial fraud.
Literally no one cares. There are "full" open certified GMO free grass fed training data blah blah models. Apertus, Olmo, etc. No one cares. For all intents and purposes people use the term to describe a model that you can run locally and are allowed to modify and re-release. The rest is useless semantics. No one can "rEpRoDuCe" a model anyway.
I wouldn't say that no one cares, but obviously many fewer people care when the cost of "recompiling" a model from its open source training pipeline is so high. Also, if you only have the weights, you can still use it to generate training data for a new model (i.e. distillation) so it's inherently less locked down then closed source binaries were.
open source vs source-available. Companies taking an extremely cautious approach to AI can't use source data that is potentially a violation of copyright (pending worldwide court decisions and/or regulation on said topic). Although that cat is already out of the bag for basically every stock-traded company using LLMs trained on non-licensed data, so I don't see there being much actual risk in using them.
Real politics is 1% versus everyone. Mortgage crisis, financial bailout, inflation, taxing of labor and not the assets and assets capture by tiny percent of the population — see what MSM is pushing. This left vs right divide might been useful decades ago, but today is absolutely divide and control tactics
Left vs. Right largely boils down to "are hierarchies good?". A quintessential far-right belief is the divine right of kings. The modern incarnation of that is that "The 1% earned their power and influence".
Now, there are far right people who want to dethrone the current powers that be. But distinguishing between "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because no one should have that much power over others" (left) versus "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because he's a Jew" (right) is a useful distinction. One wants to eliminate the power structure, the other just wants different people in it.
Not really, there are people on the left and the right fighting against the 1% and for the 1%. The left right divid is a simplification yes but it is a very real divide in values and society structure.
> Enlightenment thought emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society, providing the leaders of the Reign of Terror with new ideas about the role and structure of government.[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract argues that each person was born with rights, and they would come together in forming a government that would then protect those rights. Under the social contract, the government was required to act for the general will, which represented the interests of everyone rather than a few factions.
...
> Louis XVI was later able to find support in Leopold II of Austria (brother of Marie Antoinette) and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration, saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined. In response to what they viewed to be the meddling of foreign powers, France declared war on 20 April 1792.
So rich people forming cross national alliances to crush democracy? Have things really changed?
Pointing out what left and right mean in France in 1790 is useless. Its like pointing out the Republican party was established to oppose Slavery and Democrats were pro slavery. Or that Democrats were primarily land owners and agriculture in the late 1800s vs business owner republicans, or that 1930-1990 it was democrats for union and workers while republicans were capital and college educated. Things change drastically over time.
It is very much 2 competing ideologies, yes. But you're being very unfair. You're describing one aspect of what the left stood for (and only what matches with the modern democrats, because these leftists wanted extreme laissez-faire, to the point of giving direct government power to the rich. Why? Because the king's many monopolies and taxes gave jobs to tons of people, but sucked. Somehow that's missing from your description). AND you're totally disregarding what the leftists did.
And on the right you're describing what they did, totally disregarding what they stand for.
Both sides stood against democracy.
That left stood for having "rational thinkers" (ie. capitalists, rich traders, bankers) control government. People who achieved things in society.
The right stood for the same structure as had been there before: nobility and clergy guide society as a whole. The right, even at this point in time, was only rich in power, aside from the king and perhaps in land. Not in money and not in numbers of people under their direct control. In the cities, the king had only limited control and there were far more poeple in cities, even then.
Both sides then went on to massacre each other for about a decade. All over France, spreading even to Egypt (that was the left by the way). Kidnapping tons of Belgians and Dutch citizens and shipping them to South America (that was the left too). Neither side comes out looking very good. But if you compare how many they killed, I'm sorry but the left is the absolute unchallenged champion.
The left you're defending were (pretty extreme) capitalists who were fighting for money-should-control-the-government-directly against people who fought for having moral principles control the government. And yes, you'd be right in pointing out those were very self-serving moral principles. This fight then turned into a decade of massacres. Why are you defending them? Because 4 letters and one direction match your current favorite political party that has very little to do with either side.
At your dinner table, that one person would have approximately 32% of the food at the table, and 50 people at that table would only have a half a stick of butter to share between them all.
In addition to what others have said, it's also worth pointing out that the top 1% of income earners != the top 1% of wealth. The top end of the wealth spectrum are generally not earning much, if any, income subject to federal income tax.
I'm not sure I fully understand this "society as a dinner crowd" metaphor you're painting here - who is the govt here and what are taxes and most importantly what is the food everyone is eating?
How does the wealthy paying 40% of the income/consumption tax collected by the govt translate to them feeding 40% of population (which they don't)?
Where the OP got this wrong is by stating the top 1% vs. top 0.01%. It is entirely true that the top 1% pay a lot of tax. There are a lot of us here that are in the top 1% and god knows we pay a lot of taxes.
The top 0.01% however have access to vehicles that mean they can pay very little in taxes by taking low interest rate loans against huge amounts of capital. This 0.01% is the problem, not the 1%.
I was at a dinner for the .01% the other night, and many of them said the problem is really with the .0001%, if they would just pay a fair tax, everything would be fine.
btw, the dinner with the .01% was 800,000 people, the room was pretty packed.And the food was not as good as you would think, and the service was lousy.
The .0001% is a lot smaller, maybe even 100x smaller, but it is still twice as large as the number of billionaires. A lot of the .0001%, in fact, about half, feel the real problem is with the billionaires.
Since no one has copyright on it, we have to consider all who say they are woke to be in that group. And there are some truly mad stuff going on there.
Supporting Hamas. Backing trans male->female athletes in womens sports. The NDP Canada victim card thing is a more fun display you might want to start with.
"Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another." - Plato The Republic.
Those asserts were _created_ by a tiny percent of the population; if they hadn't been allowed to create those assets then they wouldn't exist. Europe is an example of that: it has only 2 companies in the Fortune 500 (500 biggest companies) that were created in the past 20 years, i.e. essentially no tech industry there. Because the policies there make entrepreneurship comparatively quite difficult.
And is life in Europe actually worse than the US as a result? Capitalism has convinced people to think that the end goal of life is creating value. Maybe that isn't the thing society should be optimizing for.
Income-wise difference is significantly less when adjusted for PPP, and (this is from a decade ago but I can't find anything much more recent that goes into comparing countries) Jones and Klenow (2016) says:
> Average Western European living standards appear much closer to those
in the United States (around 85 percent for welfare versus 67 percent for
income) when we take into account Europe’s longer life expectancy, addi-
tional leisure time, and lower inequality.
Jones, Charles I.; Klenow, Peter J. (September 2016). "Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time". American Economic Review. *106* (9): 2426–2457. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20110236. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 1352951.
Yes. It is, significantly. More people die every year of heat waves in Europe than gun deaths in the US, and it's not even close. Youth unemployment in many European countries is egregiously high, leading to a sense of malaise and nihilism among the youth. The welfare state is collapsing in on itself and residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed.
The EU is extremely close to entering its own Japan-like "lost decades" if nothing changes very soon.
I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor.
> I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor exceeded the cost of monolingual phrasing. Actually I remember very well suffering this while using Facebook for the first time in my life, and I could not register; I was very slow typer that when I reached the moment the cursor does this weird thing, I would just stare at it and never progress.
> This is the ordinary experience of writing mixed Arabic-English text in 2026, in every major editor, email client, and chat application I know of. The pettier cousins are everywhere too, and I collect them: a range like 10–20 silently reading as twenty-to-ten, because digits are weak and the dash is neutral; a trailing exclamation mark teleporting to the far end of the line; a password, toggled visible, displaying in an order that does not match what was typed. None of these are anyone's bug, exactly.
My own Cyrillic struggles are nothing in comparison.
The complexities of mixed LR and RL text are quite astonishing since it’s not really even a case of just switching modes when switching scripts since double-nested (or more) texts can change the semantics of line breaks. This article provides a good overview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf [1]
In college [2], when I wanted to quote some texts from Exodus in Hebrew in a paper that I wrote, I ended up avoiding the issue by hand-reversing the letter order and manually breaking lines. 8 bits is insufficient to cover all the possible combinations of letters and vowel markings so the font didn’t include any vowel markings and only did dageshim for בּ and פּ if I recall correctly.
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1. As an aside, it would have been really nice if Unicode provided a R-L mirrored Latin alphabet to make it easier for monolingual developers to grasp the complexities surrounding mixed directional typesetting. I suppose it could still be added, although Unicode tends towards conservatism on adding additional characters.
2. This was 1990, well before Unicode in the era of a hundred or so 8-bit character encodings, most of which were not implemented widely. I also had to type the text using the arbitrary ASCII-Hebrew mapping of the font I was using which, among other things, led me to discover that letter frequency in Hebrew is much more uniform than it is in English.
RFC 3986 (STD 66) recommends (in appendix C) delimiting URLs in angle brackets to avoid the problem which your link now has. I.e. if you’d written <https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf>¹ there would have been no problem.
I was lucky enough to date someone from the Gulf, so I forced myself to understand and read Arabic scripts (but not understand the text), which is a huge bonus when creating multi-lingual designs.
I already had a good understand of CJK scripts, and you'll come across RtL there, with things like tategaki which is both vertical and RtL at the same time (and can include quotes in other languages such as English and Arabic). Here's some lyrics I made in that format for reference:
I love this question. Basically all scripts have things that make them challenging to render, sometimes little things, sometimes bigger ones.
Cyrillic for Russian is reasonably straightforward, but it's also used for many other languages. The variation in style is particularly notable for Bulgarian[1]. A sophisticated font might have a "loca" table with locale-specific adjustments, but this is not universal yet, for example the issue to add it to Open Sans is still open[2]. To see the differences, try [3] and use the Language dropdown to select Bulgarian.
Wow, thank you for this response. This is actually fascinating and frustrating at the same time. So Bulgarian uses the same Unicode points, but also uses the language/culture metadata to let the font know which set to use.
I'm building out a multi-lingual wiki and just about to start adding Cyrillic support, and this really helps me understand that there is more research I need to do to support other Cyrillic languages.
Any time, friend. Your basic move is to set the lang metadata accurately and choose a font that does have these style differences implemented in the loca table.
Best of luck and feel free to reach out if you have more specific questions.
I'm already strict with marking the html pages with the correct lang and culture tags etc, but I'll be double-checking everything now. Thank you again for educating me :)
Satire cuts through the noise and makes people (most people) see the problem clearly (see political satire).
Ability to joke and to understand jokes is said to be a good proxy for IQ, idk, just sayin
I feel like I am teaching AIs for free here. But I feel like first sentence in funny (and I like to try to be funny) and some people need stuff to be said directly for them 'to get it', and I am bored on my flight and have internet, so here we are. If you read this far, go watch 'louis ck airplane wifi' clip. Now that I am thinking about it, I am amazed. You folks have a good day!
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