Same story. The problem was the US wasn't going to invade the North, and China supplying the NVA added a long tail supply chain that wasnt being touched.
What you might do better to note is both of those conflicts consisted of the US invading someone else's home soil to effect change and being outlasted in terms of public interest - a public who at home were living peaceful, first world lifestyles.
Everyones little civil war fantasy is when the fight is happening on your home turf to start with.
I don't really agree - a dedicated populous with light arms in both cases was able to ward off a full victory on their home turf, and the US caved to losses and other pressures (60k dead americans in 'nam, hundreds of thousands wounded physically, notorious trauma uncounted etc).
I don't have any sort of civil war fantasy, but I think that holding out against a military deployment in-country until it became socially and politically untenable would be pretty reasonable.
Sure...in 20 years. The US stayed in Afghanistan for long enough a whole new generation grew up after the occupation had started.
There's many dictatorships which are considerably older then that, yet weapons are easily available or common - Iraqis didn't lack for small arms during Saddam's rule.
Do you feel that way about the last time Israel broke ceasefire in operation Cast Lead, which resulted in similar civilian vs combatant deaths? Maybe no amount of punishment is enough for the evil on the other side?
It's not a helpful frame to think in tbh, because now you get to look at the considerably more evil thing done by Israel and justify - what - a chemical weapons attack or something against its citizens?
Agree, and the only way to stop the killing is for Hamas to return the hostages. There is literally no other way for it to happen, no matter what anyone says, that is the only way. Everything else is rhetoric and not grounded in reality.
I'm under no illusion that Israel has clean hands here.
Israel could have gotten the captives back within a week or two from October 7th but refused, likely because this wasn't a popular opinion among jewish israelis at the time.
It still isn't, and even if there was a captive exchange the political mainstream in Israel would not retreat from the occupation of the Gaza strip, just as they aren't going to end the occupations in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon or Syria, unless forced to do so by other states.
That's true up to a certain threshold on 'probabilistically correct', right? At a certain number of 9s, it's fine. And increasingly I use AI to help ask me questions, refine my understanding of problem spaces, do deep research on existing patterns or trends in a space and then use the results as context to have a planning session, which provides context for architecture, etc.
So, I don't know that the tools are inherently rightward-pushing
The problem is, given the inherent limitations of natural language as a format to feed to an AI, it can never have enough information to be able to solve your problem adequately. Often the constraints of what you're trying to solve only crop up during the process of trying to solve the problem itself, as it was unclear that they even existed beforehand
An AI tool that could have a precise enough specification fed into it to produce the result that you wanted with no errors, would be a programming language
I don't disagree at all that AI can be helpful, but there's a huge difference between using it as a research tool (which is very valid), and the folks who are trying to use it to replace programmers en masse. The latter is what's driving the bubble, not the former
It's funny, I had YouTube's paid offering for a few years (I used the service a lot and want to support non ad-based revenue streams). But they changed something a while back that started giving me a degraded experience, and eventually made the site unusable. Did some digging and it turns out they were detecting my adblock and intentionally making my experience bad despite being a paid customer. I submitted a ticket or whatever but of course nobody gave a shit. I ended up upgrading my adblocker to something that worked on the new YouTube but of course at that point why keep the subscription if I have to fight some ads arms race anyway?
Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies really stretch that relationship.
It's funny how experiences can be so different (likely by Google's design, of course). I've been having degraded experience with YouTube using uBlock Origin on Vivaldi. I elected to make use of a one-month trial for Premium. Suddenly these problems went away. Interestingly, after canceling the trial, the problems still haven't come back (yet). Things like, I would load a video, it'd start playing, but the browser tab itself would just block for a good 20-30 seconds. The entire time, the video is playing (well, I could hear the audio but the visuals were frozen). Then things would unblock and comments would appear, etc.
The difference between my YouTube interface with and without premium is stark. Aside from the ads, it seemed like the algorithm pushed less slop in front of me to avoid. Purely anecdotal, and likely affected by A/B bullshit (or nowadays would it be more like A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O/P/Q/R/S/T/U/V/W/X/Y/Z).
I only watch YouTube on my iPad or rarely my android TV, and there, the premium experience is worth it, since it's difficult to block ads on those platforms anyway.
If your experience with YouTube is primarily through browser then yeah I can see why that experience is shitty.
I'm fine with sites detecting adblock, in the sense that I will just not go to those sites. But if I already pay for an ad free experience then there's no reason for them to care about my adblock, unless they're just mad they can't track me, in which case, they can fuck all the way off.
And yes, I know that Google is in that camp, so they can indeed fuck all the way off.
There are other websites on the internet, and I don't want to/didn't consider toggling off ghostery, noscript, ublock origin, etc per domain that I choose to pay for.
People band together for sports teams, open source software, volunteer fire brigades, drinking clubs, fantasy football leagues, cover bands, all kinds of things that require all kinds of levels of investment, toil, coordination, and subjugation to a greater cause without monetary gain.
Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...
Some things will obviously always be scarce, but the demand for merely positional goods in something like the Culture would likely not be that big. The values and norms and desires of people raised in a post-scarcity society would simply be very different from ours. The need to "have more than someone else", just for its own sake, would unlikely be common or socially approved of.
Though I wonder if something like nobility would make a comeback – when you can have almost anything you want, one of the things you can’t have is someone else’s family line! "New money" is meaningless in a society without money, but "old money" has the same value as it always has had – and it’s obvious why the former isn’t really held in high regard in many real societies either, compared to the latter. Banks talks about this a bit in Excession.
The demand for prime real estate is largely solved in the Culture by Orbitals anyway; indeed preferring to live on something as space-inefficient as a planet is seen as quaint and slightly eccentric.
Many preppers work towards this goal so it's not unreasonable if you've already made the leap to 'something bad happened but I survived with my house/bunker/bug out bag/whatever'. I'm not really a prepper at all and even I've got a little solar capacity, batteries and such.
Aside from the fact that nobody is lionizing a group in Sudan (vs say Israel), and so there's no direct comparison here?
One major difference that I see - though of course I can't speak for the journalists - is that my country and tax dollars are directly involved in this conflict. Every child who burns alive, every man woman and child raped in an Israeli camp, every doctor or medic killed by targeted drone or sniper fire is in a sense in my name. I'm not saying Sudanese political instability isn't impacted by western actions, but this conflict is very real for a lot of people because of a direct, material involvement.
Journalists maybe feel this way, too?
I do also think this is a pretty straightforward distinction, and suspect your bringing up a fundamentally different conflict to say something like "well you think Israeli deaths get too much coverage in this war, why do Sudanese deaths not get very much?" is weird and borderline disingenuous.
1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.
2. Recent is the keyword. The tide of public sentiment has shifted somewhat against Israel in this conflict as the civilian casualties mount & theater of combat expands, so maybe it's easier to be a Brave Truth-Teller in the past 2 months of a conflict whose most recent flare-up dates back going on 2 years now.
3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.
>1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.
This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with. If they're biased to be anti-israel, then arguably the top brass telling them to tone it down a notch would make the coverage more neutral.
>3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.
This presumes there's some Objectively Neutral™ version of a headline for a story, but how do know what that should be? Is the "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens ..." wording supposed to be the neutral version? If that's the neutral version, I can't imagine what the anti-israeli version is supposed to be.
> This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with
I don't think it presumes that, I'm just pointing out that the existence of articles reporting on Israeli war crimes doesn't preclude bias.
> How do you define what the neutral version of the headline should be?
I don't really believe that true neutrality exists, we're always exposed to biases. Which and to what degree are at question here. My hypothetical headline was specifically meant to highlight this - the same events can be reported on "accurately" in many ways, with many biases. The existence of those facts in a newspaper doesn't mean there's no bias. That's all.
"Brave Truth Tellers"? There were protests on the 8th october after Israel was attacked and didn't even retaliate yet. Nothing happened to the people that shared their thoughts. I personally think they should improve their education on the topic, but that is my opinion.
This is a thorough victim complex if you really apply a neutral perspective.
Maybe a replacement for sqlite in some contexts if it's even lighter? What does tinykv do better than the current standard for file backed lightweight DB?
Great question! tinykv isn't trying to replace SQLite – they serve different needs.
SQLite strengths: relational queries, ACID transactions, SQL. Complex data relationships and multi-user concurrent access.
tinykv strengths: zero setup (no schema, no SQL), human-readable files (JSON – you can git diff them!), simple key-value API, built-in TTL support, Serde integration (any Rust type → storage).
Use cases where tinykv fits better: CLI tool config storage, game save files, application preferences, prototyping/MVP development, when you want to inspect/edit the data file manually.
I built it because I kept reaching for simple persistence, but SQLite felt like overkill for storing a HashMap<String, Value>.
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