What is the sense of analyzing sentences removed from semantics and pragmatics? I am sure there is some utility to it in linguistics but we see this outside of linguistics a great deal. Short sentences are very useful to writers like Hemingway who dumps everything they can into the subtext but this also means we don't get much information from the semantics, it is all in the pragmatics. So what does the syntax really tell us about what is being said? Very little when it comes to short sentences as far as I can tell, becomes more interesting with long sentences but there it is a guide helping you through the semantics.
>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
I look around and see what is going on around me, things have changed since last you looked; you can get surprisingly good at judging what time it is based off the sunlight through a window. Sometimes I think about something if something happens to pop into my mind.
Is it possible (practical) to reverse engineer a synth that uses a custom and undocumented DSP? The Alesis Micron is probably my favorite synth and I have always wanted it in a little laptop groovebox type of package, considered just repackaging mine but the main PCB is not very suited to what I would want. I also tried to just redesign it from the ground up but it has some tricks for avoiding aliasing and are a major part of its overall sound which I can not figure out.
Assuming this is possible, any resources for learning how to go about it? What little I have found has relied heavily on the DSP being well documented.
Apologies if OP video goes into this, internet is not cooperating right now and steaming is not going to happen. Looking forward to watching it, never pass on anything that might offer even a tiny glimpse into reverse engineering the Micron.
> Is it possible (practical) to reverse engineer a synth that uses a custom and undocumented DSP?
Yes, that's what the talk is about. It's probably an interesting watch to you since they actually went through a couple of different approaches to end up with a working emulation.
The video covers their DSP56300 work briefly in the introduction, but the main topic is that of reverse engineering the undocumented Toshiba DSP used in Roland JP-8000.
We already have lobste.rs. I would not mind if flagged/dead got removed from active but I understand why they are kept. Flag and hide political threads which are likely to derail you.
I just spent way too much time reading through this thread looking for a single post more concerned about Venezuela and its people than the poster's own politics. I gave up when I noticed I was only a 1/4 of the way through thread, should have started from the bottom.
One thing to keep in mind is that reflexive comments always show up first, because they're the quickest responses to feel, to write, and to post. Reflective and thoughtful comments—such as ones that express concern for people, as you were wanting to see—are slower to arise, take more time to write, and therefore are slower to show up in threads [2].
Reading a few hundred mostly low effort reactionary posts of people using the events in Venezuela as validation for their politics had a strong effect on my mood.
These sorts of events are tricky on HN, all the user can do is flag flag flag and hope you or others like you (mods) will sort it all out and give the front page its one thread on the topic, if we don't the front page will be consumed and the community will die. But we can't always rely on mods, you have lives and have to rely on certain pragmatism, you have to wait and see how the community reacts/events unfold to see if something should get a thread on the front page or risk the consequences. And I think you did weigh in but vouching on a single thread may have won out against the flagging, as it should. So I gave the thread a chance and started reading.
One of the only changes I think HN could use, is mods being able to make a post in a thread that can not be voted on or replied to but will remain top post and simply stating that the community has ruled and this submission will live but every related submission will be killed as a dupe until the thread dies. But that would be very difficult to do without being accused of having an agenda by one side or the other.
Part of the reason I avoid becoming too much a part of sites like HN is because I fear being asked to be more than a user. I do not envy your position but I appreciate all you do.
> One of the only changes I think HN could use, is mods being able to make a post in a thread that can not be voted on or replied to but will remain top post and simply stating that the community has ruled and this submission will live but every related submission will be killed as a dupe until the thread dies.
We do sometimes make pinned posts like that—I've listed a few below—but they're mostly for reminding people to follow the site guidelines. In a way, that includes the message you're talking about (i.e. we're allowing this thread because the community insists on it), but only implicitly.
> Part of the reason I avoid becoming too much a part of sites like HN is because I fear being asked to be more than a user.
Can you say more? What would constitute being asked to be more than a user?
>What would constitute being asked to be more than a user?
That was mostly a way to say that I really don't want your job. Mostly, I want to retain my ability to occasionally make posts like the one I made in this thread.
>practically unique!
Are you saying that I am unique in a practical, salt of the earth fashion or that I am almost unique? I ultimately did exactly what I admonished in this thread and just admitted to wanting to cling to being able to be salty and moody, which fits well with almost unique. It was very Gassian in its phrasing and quite good. Even if unintended, it was very on point.
With some charity, you can assume that people have default concern for Venezuelans.
The politics are baffling. There hasn't even been a case made that one could disagree with. Why are we killing Venezuelans and kidnapping their president? If this is for the greater good, where is that argument?
1. Most people from Venezuela are happy Maduro is out. A striking difference with people from Ukraine about the invasion. This is the most important thing about this and most people here in comments ignore it.
2. Maduro wasn't even the president. He was someone who took the country illegally with cartel people.
3. Why? Maduro was smuggling drugs in USA. Huge operations. And I guess there must be geopolitical reasons. You want China and Russia be there? And people from Venezuela were the biggest migration wave in the World last decades. You want millions of refugees?
I think one of the best arguments against US interventionalism when it comes to tyrants is just how 'variable' (let's say) the outcomes have been over the years. For every Panama, there's two or three Guatamalas, Irans or most recently Iraq. Generally the hard part is not the removal of the head of state, which for the US is usually pretty quick. It's what beurocratic structures remain functional and whether the power vacuum created brings something better and more robust, or just decades of violence.
I think Sarah Paine on dwarkesh has noted that it tends to go well when the countries already have fairly robust institutions and tends to go badly when they don't
As I'm not a historian, I can only note that it hasn't gone well recently even when multiple successive presidents want it to
> Most people from Venezuela are happy Maduro is out.
Based on what? There's a poll already about the US bombing Venezuela and kidnapping Maduro? There's a big difference between removing a leader through a legitimate domestic process and this.
What legitimate domestic process are you envisioning? He lost an election and stayed in power anyway. Any domestic process to remove him would look like a coup.
If there was drug trafficking, why has the administration failed to provide any evidence of it on the many boats they've destroyed and the many lives they've taken for it? Instead, the limited evidence we have points at the boats being entirely unrelated to drug trafficking.
If the administration had evidence, it would be in its best interest to have shared it already. Instead they keep on pushing points they can barely articulate and that conflict with known information.
They indicted Maduro and his cronies in 2020, before anything with the boats. And the "why" might be that there is no standard that a government needs to release the information they make decisions on. In fact, it's more standard to not release it under the guide of "sources and methods". In any case, are the boats even related to Maduro or just some other thing?
> Not in itself, but the trafficking of drugs into the US is a US issue.
They are already backtracking on the "Cartel de los Soles" accusation, after finally realizing there's no such organization, but it was always a slang frase about corruption in the military. Maduro cannot possibly lead an organization that doesn't exist. Source: NYT.
The indictment removed almost all of the mentions of this cartel, now phrasing the accusation in much broader, vague terms.
It wouldn't surprise me if at some stage they changed tack entirely and tried a different angle than drug trafficking, since, let's face it:
We did. And if he was successful, and then started threatening Canada, I think I'd be totally fine with Canada performing a special operation and taking him to stand trial.
And if that doesn't work? You could, for example, envision a situation where 10% of the people are well treated and armed by the government. It'd be very hard for an unarmed ill-treated 90% to conduct any kind of uprising if the government was sufficiently well organized and brutal.
The word “exiled” implies these people were forced out by the Maduro regime, which is not the case; virtually all of them left the country due to deteriorating economic conditions.
Venezuelans for the past 5+ years have been the most or almost the most numerous asylum seekers in the US. And "poor economic conditions" or general poverty is not a valid reason to claim asylum
> Venezuelans for the past 5+ years have been the most or almost the most numerous asylum seekers in the US.
That by itself does not demonstrate that the majority have been exiled, even if we want to expand the definition of "exile" to be inclusive of those who were not actually forced to leave, but felt it was necessary to leave due to political persecution.
The majority of Venezuelans will never have a legal option to reside in the United States. This incentivizes Venezuelans to make asylum claims in order to gain entry. Similar abuses of the asylum process are seen at far smaller scales in Canada and the European Union.
What sort of persecution are these people claiming to have experienced, and more specifically, what rights are they alleging to have been deprived of by the Maduro regime?
Please, educate yourself on Maduro and the people of Venezuela. It would be hard to find a less popular leader. A quarter of Venezuelans have fled the country under his regime. 82% of Venezuelans are living in poverty and he has presided over hyperinflation. Exit polls showed him losing the last election in a landslide and he stole the country anyway.
Well the videos of ~200,000 Venezuelan people partying in the capitol of Argentina is a start. As well as many other pictures and videos of gatherings wherever there is significant Venezuelan refugees.
My question wasn't about whether he was popular, it was about whether people approve of this specific military action by the US. People can hate their leaders and still not want a foreign country directly replacing them.
In this case you are just objectively wrong. Venezuelans are thrilled with this military action. They are happy they don't have to die by the millions to oust their dictator. For many, this was the best-case scenario (assuming democratic elections are held at some point in the future.)
Normal Venezuelans saw absolutely zero benefit from whatever oil revenue there was, so even in the worst case scenario, which is not a given, their lives would not be different.
I think there's massive astroturfing with the usual talking points about drug trafficking, Maduro a dictator, Venezuelans are "Happy" plastered everywhere to try and distract from the naked fact of the oil.
First off, I'll give you credit for at least trying to justify this, it puts you ahead of the administration that can't even bother.
Second off, only #3b above (geopolitics) could possibly count at all. We support dozens of dictators, don't give a darn about their people as long as it's geopolitically useful. So I've been conditioned to assume it's bullshit when someone says "we're doing it for the people there".
Third, and to your #3.. it's Venezuela. No disrespect to the people there but it's not exactly the lynchpin of international relations. Is this really worth it? For some crude which is really high in sulfur and not even that important given fracking? Even if I'm a Henry Kissinger psychopath, this still doesn't make sense.
I am saying that a wide majority of Venezolans are totally happy about this and most people here aren't concerned about this at all. They just want to talk about their pet political point.
About what are the reasons behind this I (and most people commenting here) can only have educated guess, but I wouldn't discard so easily to weaken cartels as a reason. It is the third (Cuba and Nicaragua the others) Country they got to totally control and the most important and they are powerful and organized enough to keep spreading, and they are supported by China.
Maduro lost elections. 8 millions of exilees can't love him. And I interact daily with exilees. You can disagree. It is hard to believe narco dictators have too much love from people anyway.
We are talking about 20% of the population here. A massive wave.
They would be impoverished, imprisoned or dead have they not fled. Hard to believe people who stayed are happy about this.
But check the news, the web, talk to people objectively.I can be wrong, but I think the evidence is overwhelming, statistically speaking.Check for yourself.
My Venezuelan friends in the US are for the most part very happy about it. And this is not a gotcha at all, but I haven’t seen much about Venezuela in exporting fent to the US coming from anyone outside the Trump camp
No doubt that exilees do not love him. But it was about a "wide majority" who hold that opinion. There are lots of russian refugees for example as well and they are not a fan of Putin. But back at home he still seems to enjoy majority support in a broad sense at least and I have no inside knowledge into Venezuela at all.
I see you keep repeating this exact statement every time you are challenged and asked for actual sources. Others have pointed out that when you do provide some sources, they end up contradicting your position. If all you have is videos of people celebrating, then you can find plenty of those from Jan 6th. Does that mean that Biden lost the elections and the people of the United States approved of the attempted coup?
At this point, it's hard to imagine that you are actually arguing in good faith.
Any argument along the lines of "Venezuelans aren't happy with this" out of touch with Venezuelan culture. They do not have to die by the millions to oust a dictator that killed thousands and caused 20% to emigrate. They are happy with this.
That is what OP is saying: HN users, in order to promote their personal politics, are being concerned for a people that don't want and actively reject your concern because they are happy with the outcome.
HN is doing the equivalent of (a) denying Venezuelans appreciate this, and when that fails (b) claiming they know better than Venezuelans wrt whether this is good or bad for them.
> That is what OP is saying: HN users, in order to promote their personal politics, are being concerned for a people that don't want and actively reject your concern because they are happy with the outcome.
> (b) claiming they know better than Venezuelans wrt whether this is good or bad for them.
Well, this isn't surprising at all. At least these two points also apply to the right within the US, the HN bubble doesn't even try to understand their actual views either.
> HN is doing the equivalent of (a) denying Venezuelans appreciate this, and when that fails (b) claiming they know better than Venezuelans wrt whether this is good or bad for them.
It’s very dangerous to do the “right thing” for the wrong reasons in a complex situation. This is step 1. Does anyone have faith that the Trump admin will properly execute steps 2..N?
I would have some respect if the administration announced that it would support a provisional government led by the apparent winner of the last election in Venezuela. As such it seems to be that the administration has left the existing power structure in place and established a client/patron relationship with the leadership. This is revolting.
> It’s very dangerous to do the “right thing” for the wrong reasons in a complex situation.
Venezuelans do not care for this train of thought. No one else was going to do it, and their equivalent of Hitler has just been ousted.
Far better, from their perspective, to have the evil guy removed than endless do-nothing hand-wringing from the international community that shares your train of thought.
Democratically held elections will be run again in the country.
The "wrong reasons" can still be mutually beneficial. The US gets its oil and Venezuela gets its dictator disappeared.
It's not clear what this is really about. Trump doesn't care about the people of the US, much less Venezuela, but there seems to be a widespread consensus that Maduro was a nogoodnik who won't be missed. I have no idea what the mood on the ground really is.
As for drugs, if Trump cared about drugs, he wouldn't pardon so many drug kingpins.
Some say this has to do with asserting control over China's oil imports, but according to https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/fi... and other sources, Venezuela barely makes it into the list of China's top 10 suppliers. So while China is indeed Venezuela's best customer, this argument doesn't seem persuasive unless I'm missing something. Venezuela's next-highest volume customer is the US itself.
My guess is drugs, not because Trump cares, but because they had become too powerful, controlling Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, as well as a wide net of politicians.
Thanks for engaging in good faith, but you know that China is selling more cars to all of Latin America than us currently, right?
Will this engagement deepen Latin American trust and respect for the US or the opposite? China makes it very clear that they do not give a shit about politics and just want to do good business, they're deepening ties that way. What's our plan? Invade random countries and tell them they better not cross us? How long does that work?
Full diaclosure: I am from Argentina. I interact daily with exilees from Venezuela. They are coworkers, they drive my Uber. They are totally happy about this.
About trust and respect, I don't see any change. Leftist will keep their mantra and Normal people will mind their business.
About the 'master plan'. No one commenting here really knows. As I mentioned to avoid criminal cartels controlling three countries and spreading it is not something I would discard. Imagine if they get nukes. Or they can start to systematicallly buy politicians in USA, as they do in Mexico.
Increasing the supply of oil will lower its price. Bringing production in Venezuela back online will have this effect. Historically they have produced three million barrels per day, currently that number is closer to one million.
Russia is funding its war in Ukraine with profits on thier oil production. All else being equal, this makes it harder for them to keep doing that. They reportedly spent $6 billion on air defense systems in Venezuela, not for no reason.
Lower oil prices also reduce China’s dependence on Russia for energy. Reducing the incentive for those two countries two cooperate would be in US interests.
Energy is fungible and lower oil prices will help reduce the cost to operate AI data centers. On the margin it will improve their profitability and reduce public backlash about rising electricity prices in the US.
A large portion of the migrant crisis in the US has been driven by Venezuelan refugees fleeing Maduro’s gross mismanagement of the country. If the subsequent government can bring prosperity back to the country it also reduces illegal immigration in the US, something the current US administration clearly supports.
Lots of positive things could result here and you don’t have to be a “Kissinger psychopath” to imagine them and hope they materialize.
Ok, but at the cost of American freedoms? We are a country ruled by laws not people. Everything about this operation violated this principle. Are you willing to give up your freedoms in order to create cheap oil so that your scenarios play out? My ancestors didn't die on the battlefield to support such things.
What freedoms did you lose today? The Patriot Act was signed into law two decades ago. I can’t remember the last time Congress passed a declaration of war prior to the President engaging in military action.
I’m sympathetic to your sentiment but that train left the station likely before you were born.
I'm very likely older than you so I have total context going back to the 1970's. Your question is silly. You don't suddenly lose freedoms, they erode. The current executive overreach is without precedent. In prior administrations congress was involved. Even during the second Iraq war congress was involved and time was taken to make a justification. The action of today was by executive fiat.
I am still confused about this. Is the goal for US companies to extract Venezuelan oil, or is it to suppress Venezuelan oil exports altogether? Or are both goals orthogonal?
I don't think oil has something to do with this. As I have mentioned I think the main reason is the cartel has become too powerful and menacing, controlling three countries and expanding.
Everyone claimed we invaded Iraq back in the early 2000s to take their oil, but the US spent a whole bunch of money on the military operations, and opened up oil and gas to basically every other country, including geopolitical rivals like China and Russia. Maybe "oil" is too simple of an explanation.
Oil is important but as lever to pull on because it affects China.
The invasion is meant to orient the US to fight China. We are cutting away the Middle East war baggage, trying to end the Ukraine war baggage so we can focus on China. Russia would be a nice ally against China.
China was moving around Lat Am and we are removing the communists from the hemisphere.
China likes oil. Loves oil but can’t get enough oil which is why it’s building solar and nuclear so quickly. The US can clamp down on the oil if Venezuela is an ally. So the US wants a strong Venezuela that can’t be used against us.
It’s hard to conduct war without oil.
The US has a strong incentive to make sure Venezuela comes out strong, and the Chinese have a strong incentive to not let that happen.
Sure, but don't forget the oil on your educated guess. There are other reasons besides the official being said. There's no invasion for justice, there's always an underlying motive for this scale of invasion. Presidents are not kidnapped because of narco traffic
Whatever you and I say about this are educated guesses.
He wasn't the president. My educated guess is that with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, together with China support cartel become too powerful. They systematicallly buy politicians in México, Spain, Colombia, probably Brazil and Argentina. They expanded too much. But again, it is just speculation.
I'm not Venezuelan, but I am Brazilian, so I consider myself closer to the problem than people outside of South America. If the cartels were the real problem, the US would have invaded Mexico or Brazil a long time ago.
Maduro was not fairly elected, it was a fraud, but he was the de facto head of state of Venezuela.
The whole cartel excuse is just a sham in my opinion, it is all about power, sending the example and getting the oil. Maduro, and Chavez before him, challenged the US grip on SA, and actively fought american interest in the region.
Maduro lost elections. 8 millions of exilees can't love him. And I interact daily with exilees. There are already videos if people celebrating in Caracas and all over the World. You can disagree. It is hard to believe narco dictators have too much love from people anyway.
They would be impoverished, imprisoned or dead have they not fled. Hard to believe people who stayed are happy about this. And exilees are 20% of Venezuela's population. It was a massive wave.
Asking questions in good faith is not appropriate?
If difference exist between two people then the quickest way to resolve them is to reveal them. It seems some people prefer to paw around in the dark out of deference. I did not believe this was part of the "hacker ethic."
> Asking questions in good faith is not appropriate?
You aren't asking questions in good faith, you're trying to score points.
> It seems some people prefer to paw around in the dark out of deference.
You're doing it here, implying that I'm a deferential coward instead of stating it outright. I would urge you to review the site guidelines. The only reason this site is worth visiting in the first place is because it isn't ordinarily full of the sort of Reddit-style commentary you're engaging in right now.
Thoroughly answering somebody's questions and refuting their points is not appropriate for this forum?
We should all agree with each other and sing along how lucky Venezuelans are that US, the self proclaimed world police, came to steal their oil and bomb their capital (terrorism/war crime)?
1) the method the US performed is irrespective of popular sentiment. If we were to buck the rules, I'm not sure if Venezuela would make the top 10 targets.
3) Trump pardoned the Honduras president. The drug smuggling excuse is moot. This is a power grab, as usual. And it came from Trump's mouth. We're no better than Russia if we choose to go with this narrative.
> Why? Maduro was smuggling drugs in USA. Huge operations.
What are you talking about? The war on drugs is just a bad excuse. Trump keeps claiming that Venezuela is responsible for the fentanyl crisis, which is demonstrably wrong.
And if the US administration was so worried about drugs, why did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, ex-president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years for drug trafficking? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9qewln7912o
If Russia rolled into the United States tomorrow and deposed Trump, _most people_ would "be happy" trump was out.
It's not important at all. I've seen this exact line repeated all over the Internet today, almost like it's not a real sentiment and instead a pre seeded talking point to muddy the waters.
It is amusing to see the consent factory so efficiently spit this shit out though.
> you can assume that people have default concern for Venezuelans.
Let’s be real, the vast majority of Americans couldn’t even place Venezuela on a map.
The default state for humans isn’t caring about everything and everyone, nobody has the mental capacity or resources to do that.
We only care about something when we are incentivized to by actual self interest, familial bond, or emotional stories that align this 3rd party with our familial instincts via empathy.
I am perpetrating the exact wrong the parent poster referenced but: this is why liberalism is such a good principle and political position. It's almost a meta-position, and it provides clarity in circumstances like these.
My political reaction comes from the following chain of thought:
* My country just did something I think is wrong.
* My country is led by people elected by a process that I generally trust but believe is under stress.
* The process or the people have failed and I want to stop this from happening by fixing the process so the people are replaced.
And, now I am stuck on how to do this. There a other actions I can take to help the people of Venezuela, but from a civics perspective, I believe it is my responsibility to partake in a discussion about the systemic failure that lead to this.
I think it is common for Americans to do this because we have a history of at least trying to fix our government because we usually believe we can.
Write to your representative and senators. It may seem impotent, but it what you as an American can to today. If you are concerned it is your duty to take the 10 minutes to write. If you do not then you are condoning these actions and the erosion of your rights.
How is that helpful? You either have a blue representative that already agrees with you, or a corrupt red one that most likely don't really listen to their constituents, or at least not the one that send mail.
Because that is how democracy works. I you don't exercise it will go away. Also there are Republican representatives who are on the record as being against the executive overreach. Getting feedback from their constituents will give them the support to push back. It really does work.
I believe you may have the causality backwards: ignoring constituents is probably not how democracy works, yet that is what we see today, therefore what we see today must not be democratic.
How can they get away with ignoring their constituents? Well: gerrymandering has made it so that representatives can select their constituents (and their opponent's constituents, or lack thereof). They will remain in their post indefinitely, regardless of this carefully-selected minority of constituents wants, so long as they continue to bend the knee and kiss the ring for you-know-who.
If an existing politician already lacks both the moral compunction and a self-interested political survial motivation to say a thing is bad, then a letter from a minority-opinioned constituent of theirs won't change their mind.
My concern for Venezuelans is precisely what makes me believe "removing Maduro good" even though things are more nuanced and complex than those three words.
Destabilizing the country and/or installing a US puppet or just allowing the power vacuum to fill itself is likely not to the betterment of their people.
Maduro lost elections. 8 millions of exilees can't love him. And I interact daily with exilees. There are already videos of people celebrating all around the world. You can disagree. It is hard to believe narco dictators have too much love from people anyway.
> This article analyzes the consequences of the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S. government since August of 2017. The authors find that most of the impact of these sanctions has not been on the government but on the civilian population. The sanctions reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation. They made it nearly impossible to stabilize Venezuela’s economic crisis. These impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.
Surely Maduro is bad, but that doesn't mean the next phase won't be worse. Trump has never shown any interest in spreading democracy or human rights. I would not be surprised if the mission involved a side deal with someone in Maduro's inner circle to let them become the new dictator who is willing sell oil leases to the US and who will be as bad or worse to the Venezuelan populace. We have absolutely no idea what happens next and Trump has not given any indication of strategy beyond wanting oil.
Does anyone believe that the US regime, an entity that utterly ignores the needs of its masses in favor of a relative handful of lobbyists, is really going to install a representative government that exists to improve the lives of Venezuelans instead of enriching the same powers that it's beholden to?
It's a great point. Maduro won't be missed by anyone. But the top posted comment here perfectly captured my feelings. There's the wider picture to look at. I personally would love it if America did that to Iran, Russia, Cuba etc, but i feel there should be more of a process and i'm allowed to be suspicious of the motives.
If Venezuela actually becomes a functioning country again and drugs, gangs and illegal immigrants stop flooding America then i personally would applaud the operation. Still, you really shouldn't just kidnap other countries presidents just like that as a general rule.
Unless the said comments you want to read don't discuss how US imperialism has been benefitting corporations for over a 100 years, I wouldn't expect much honest introspection.
I think 2026 will be the year when we move way past that threshold. When conflicts and casualties are rare, each one gets highlighted and garners significant attention. But once you pass a certain point, it becomes just another conflict, just more people suffering. A tragic event affecting millions of people becomes another line item on a list.
Most conflicts in the last 20 years had significant coverage (ie: Iraq war, Georgia annexation, etc.). If you have 30-40 active conflicts world wide, then China invading Myanmar becomes a side-story.
Crazy amount of comments - We need a tool that maps narrative angles and reply/conversational interation mapping. Ratio of comments herein to other stories is wild. Lot of lurkers on this site that seem very informed when things like this come up.
I think you're greatly exaggerating here. I'm seeing pretty nuanced discussion from everyone.
It's a political event between two countries. So people are discussing two things: What it means for Venezuela that Maduro is gone, and what it means that Trump can completely sidestep Congress to start a war. Both seem relevant. But you're trying to reduce it to something narrower. Most of us are aware that feelings in the first 24 hours of something like this are completely irrelevant. Time will tell if this is a net positive.
Why does it matter? Illegal actions are illegal. On the 1 in a million chance this results in things getting better for Venezuela the outcome does not forgive the action.
Care for others is an increasingly condemnable trait in public opinion nowadays, a social suicide, ironically. As history taught us it will not end well.
To be blunt, I simply don't have much more than the default respect for Venezuela as a country and fellow human beings. I have no special sentiment to provide in that regard. This is destructive, I hate that more innocent lives are lost over this, etc. I can't speak intimately to its culture, norms, attitudes, nor economics. So I won't talk on ignorant grounds.
Meanwhile, I hold disdain for my country's actions and have some minimal pull to at least protest and complain to my reps about it. So the focus of my discussion will be around those actions.
Americans are too culturally isolated from other countries and cultures to build empathy. I think Americans have main character syndrome at scale, and these comments are obvious when read through this lens.
This may surprise folks who don't live in the U.S., because Americans describe their country as a nation of immigrants and say things like "I'm Italian" and "I'm Irish" when describing their identity. Yet these same folks haven't set foot in Italy or Ireland, don't speak the language or have awareness of present-day concerns from those countries.
I think it's worse than that. There's a general unwillingness to engage with uncomfortable things. Can't really build empathy if there isn't space to talk about problems.
the entire readership of this website is clueless, it’s an echo chamber. Unless you write a thoroughly detailed contra comment you get downvoted. If you say Elon is good you get downvoted. I do not want to source my comments, I work a job! Maybe Elon is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Maybe I don’t want to drop how I know something because my employer would be very mad.
You can no longer get the full picture because all the guys with alpha (investing term) left and post on Twitter/X now. All rando accounts without their faces. Anything interesting for AI is on there now and you can chat with the actual researchers too, you don’t need to bump into them at a shoes off party after work.
There’s a lot of very uncomfortable discussion on Twitter/X if you can stomach it, you’ll end up with a much clearer picture of the world. There’s a lot of dumb stuff on there too! You have to sift through it.
HN hit its Eternal September. There’s still some really great technical stuff you can find on here though. I don’t know how long the decline has been but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
The poster here is asking how they can find posts, possibly by anyone, that other users have flagged. What is there in the Guidelines and FAQ will answer that question?
> The post was killed by software, user flags, or moderators.
> Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile.
> If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear.
I use it to explain and explore things I don't understand and I will have it give me code examples in multiple languages, explain the benefits and differences which each language offers for the task, and ask questions about each. I stick to the ChatGPT free plan and when I hit the usage limit for the top model, I close the window and switch to writing code. by the time my limit resets I will have much better and more focused questions to ask but generally I wait until I have a real reason to go back, bang my head against the problem for awhile.
I have found that it is much better at answering questions if you start with code it wrote instead your own code or someone else's code, so I boil my question down to a simple programming task and start by having it write that code. For example, there were some things I was unsure about with VMs/bytecode interpreters/compilers, so I started my session by asking ChatGPT to write me a simple Forth VM in C and then used that as the jumping off point.
>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
William Gass - On Being Blue.
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