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Romanians I've spoken to all say they voted for Nicusor Dan because the other candidate(s) were/was so dire.


Not that individualistic. We have tables giving upper and lower limits for around 26 nutrients for daily intake. These tables are published by dozens of countries which mostly did their own research over decades. The tables are pretty much consistent with very little variation. Grok offers a rough estimate of between 10 and 50 million subjects used to determine these values. When you say 'you just have to see what works for you' that’s fine if the ‘what’ is a container (food) that provides content (nutrients) within the limits that extensive research has found to work. With a few very odd exceptions our biochemistry is consistent.


Here's one issue. Romania has a really lousy motorway system, what there is of it. I gather that corruption has much to do with this apart from construction difficulties involving the Carpathians. As an example there isn't even a motorway between Bucharest and Brasov (88 miles or 141 km apart), the latter being a favorite destination for tourists and wealthy and not-so wealthy second home owners alike. The trip by car either way is usually a nightmare. I should add that Brasov is one of the major towns of Romania not just a tourist attraction.

To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.


It's a bit more nuanced.

The teachers will just move to cities with more schools. Qualified workforce too. Rural areas are already depopulated.

Yes, the trip by car to Brasov is quite daunting on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. But infrastructure is getting better thanks to the EU. The politicians learned that motorways with EU and government funds is a great way to get them voted and they created a current account deficit.

Brasov is nice. What's not that nice about it, is brown bears roaming freely at night on the streets. Trivia: was also named after Stalin during stalinism. It also had a Hollywood like sign post cut in the treeline on the main hill with the dictator's name.


What is it then that they love doing? Is there a long-term thrill in being a piracy site? I don't think so. No truth in the angel story but they do say "it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form".


> What is it then that they love doing?

They're earning a fuck ton of money, that's what they're doing.

Just like megaupload back in the days, they sell premium accounts for fast download speeds and no queue.


If you do good, and also make money doing it, are you somehow bad?


Which/Whose Lord?


Lord is a word used to describe a personal relationship , like “save me my Lord” and “Ask your Lord”. Even when the Lord is being referred to the same God.

The Lord the commenter here is referring to as the ultimate Lord who has no Lord or power above him and who is beholden to no one.

In occult, the idea is to substitute your Lord from the ultimate power to the lower orders. Going back to the comment, he means to say don’t substitute your Lord for someone smaller.



Maybe that's true but there's also the down-stream effect of a persistent public voice telling us 'we should be ashamed of this country's (UK) past'. If accepted without examination, this view has rather obvious consequences as revealed in a poll from 2024 tt '17 per cent of British people would “willingly” fight for the UK in a war'. Other polls have found similar results. Why care about public order?

https://www.thenational.scot/news/24076378.just-17-per-cent-....


Not Claude but ChatGPT - I asked it to pipe down on exactly that kind of response. And it did.


GPT-5 ends every single response with something like.

> If you’d like, I can demonstrate…

or

> If you want…

and that's /after/ I put in instructions to not do it.


It's weird that it does that given that the leaked system prompt explicitly told it not to.


I've done this in my Claude settings, but it still doesn't seem that keen on following it:

> Please be measured and critical in your response. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.! I prefer objectivity to sycophancy.


Remove everything after .... 'in your response' and you will likely get better results.


> I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.!

Is this part useful as instruction for a model? Seems targeted to a human. And even then I'm not sure how useful it would be.

The first and last sentence should suffice, no?


I wonder if asking it to respond in the style of Linus Torvalds would be an improvement.


Too much context tokens.


Yes, ChatGPT can do this, more or less.


Yet I'll tell it 100 times to stop using em dashes and it refuses.


What kind of monster would tell a LLM to avoid correct typography?


one that wants to hide he's using LLMs


> Don't like Farage. At all I love the way folk feel they have to apologize to HN users (guess which way the majority lean) when they recognize someone like Farage has a point.


'hoarding more and more of the wealth'. Sounds very much like you believe in the pie fallacy. A zero sum game? Maybe that's not what you meant though.


The pie has nothing to do with it.

The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.


Have you noticed the massive growth in government? You're paying for it, one way or another.

Inflation is caused by the government via deficit spending. It's another tax on you.


Inflation isn't the problem. Corporate consolidation, collusion, price fixing, and market capture are the problems.

In nearly every field where there used to be 10-20 competitors there are 2-4 and they're not doing much "competing" any more. They're using consultants and third parties to share data and fix prices, they're buying up the entire supply and dividing areas so they have monopolies.

Note how during the COVID "inflation" corporate profits soared faster than inflation.


> In nearly every field where there used to be 10-20 competitors there are 2-4 and they're not doing much "competing" any more.

I'm old, and I've heard that my entire life. Something's wrong with your assessment.


The pie isn't always growing and the pie isn't always static. There are times where either can happen. I think people are just feeling that we are entering a period where the pie will be stagnant for a while. In the short term the world might be a zero sum game.


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