Thanks for this. Time to play around and experiment.

The honest answer is no one knows. The line is subject to change. My opinion is foreign troops threatening Russia.

Hypothetical (I hope for now and forever) If, say, France actually put soldiers in Ukraine Russia would do all sorts of shenanigans short of nuking anyone. If French and Ukrainian troops entered Russia, then we’d see tactical nukes used on Ukrainian soil for certain.

I’m going to tackle this as best as I can. I am not a subject matter expert, but have done enough political science work and worked with both Power Transition Theory and Great Power Theory to at least kick off a discussion. None of what follows is my personal opinion on the war or ideas concerning morality or just wars. This is also very simplified.

-At the moment, the Ukraine War is contained. It is not spreading and, thus, the world powers are not interested in intervening. Even in this case, the amoral state (read Richelieu) has no reason to get involved.

-The war’s continuation, at the moment, does not threaten state survival to anyone outside of Russia and Ukraine. Maybe Belarus? But I view that as a non-issue since they are essentially Russia’s puppet state.

-Internal challenges in nation’s that could intervene will prevent them from doing so. Why? Escalating to “boots on the ground” has one of two effects. One, a surge of nationalism that allows the state to absorb immediate shocks and unifies the population. Two, a complete disruption of legitimacy and systems that could cause the state to collapse. There’s not enough risk to justify the possibility of two happening.

-The western European states have not seen a major ground war in Europe since WW2. Entire generations have no idea what a modern nation-state vs. nation-state war is actually like. Afghanistan or Iraq, where international forces did operate, was very different. Getting into a shooting war directly with another power is a huge risk and huge unknown.

I’m not reading the article but instead trying to be amusing. If it breaks the reality, please put me in a new one with really good scotch, healthy knees, and a spirit of adventure!

My family invested in a jungle-gym when I was a kid. We were lucky. The slide was wood with a thin wax coating. It lasted about one year in that region, baking in one season, swelling in another, freezing and thawing in the other two, until it became a splinter distributor and we never used it again.

For the metal slides, however, lying on a skateboard + metal slide = somehow never broke a bone.

Oh you know, existential dread, filing out visa and residency paperwork for different countries, applying for jobs in said places to make such a leap easier; the usual start to a dystopian week.

I highly recommend you visit your local library and request/check-out a copy of the book Polarization by Nolan McCarty. Read that.

The epilogue is actually pretty damn good. Highly recommended.

I’ve been playing Soulmask and enjoying it, but I need a break as the building in that game leaves a lot to be desired. So I’m returning to Baldur’s Gate 3. I can never bring myself to play Durge or evil aligned characters, but I’m going to try a class and character I’ve never considered and see how it goes.

Month later update: This is the route I’ve gone down. I’ve used WSL to get Ollama and WebopenUI to work and started playing around with document analysis using Llama 3. I’m going to try a few other models and see what the same document outputs now. Prompting the model to chat with the documents is…a learning experience, but I’m at the point where I can get it to spit out quotes and provide evidence for it’s interpretation, at least in Llama3. Super fascinating stuff.

Not too shabby Beehaw, not too shabby.

I really appreciate all the responses, but I’m overwhelmed by the amount of information and possible starting points. Could I ask you to explain or reference learning content that talks to me like I’m a curious five year old?

ELI 5?

Most challenging teaching experiences of my still new career. I’m having a lot of anxiety over how students are responding in one class, if I’m getting through to them, and adjusting lesson plans and my lectures to ensure I am. I’m teaching a very difficult subject, with a history of students failing out of it. So after taking it over from the last professor, I’ve toned it down. It’s a “why we budget” class and most of the students are either a) completely accounting illiterate but great at decision making or b) accountants and don’t understand why we’re talking about theory and decision making. It’s a bit of both, across all major sectors, which makes it notoriously challenging for professors and students. Trying my best, but I’m loosing a lot of sleep over this class.

Am I getting through? Why did only 2 students provide mid-term feedback? 1 positive, 1 not so much? All fair critiques, and fair praise, but where’s everyone else? Is anyone actually doing the readings or is my approach (you read, you research a little, then I lecture and summarize what you need to take away), not working here?

Struggles, and I also decided no scotch this week which was my “I am home now, not in the classroom” mental break from the day.

Manor Lords. Its got some annoying bugs in this EA version, but the developer should be really happy. Enjoying what is in front of me. Its beautiful, mind boggling at times, and fun.

So many story telling memories. ME is still a treasure to me despite its challenges and missteps. ME2 is among my favorite game of all time, right behind Dragon Age: Origins.

But ME3 has a scene that was so well executed that I don’t think anything has ever topped it, for me, in video gaming storytelling. From his decision to rectify what he now believes is a past wrong, do it alone, to his final remark about seashells.

It, to me, is extremely emotional and in the best way that a good story can be.

I’m using Claude (subbed) to help me do qualitative coding and summarizing within a very niche academic framework. I was encouraged to try it by an LLM researcher and frankly I’m happy with the results. I am using it as a tool to assist my work, not replace it, and I’m trying to balance the bias and insights of the tool with my own position as a researcher.

On that note, if anyone has any insights or suggestions to improve prompts, tools, or check myself while I tinker, please, tell me.

I’m in a glass box of emotion, in an easy to read list:

1. SCOTUS and the entire justice system in the US scare the shit out of me and are giving off some very Weimar Republic vibes with their handling of important issues. We are all thinking of how tiered and corrupt this cavalcade of insanity has been, but I’ve yet to hear anyone at the top do or say anything to fight back.

2. I have a student who is just a total asshole who absolutely needs to be kicked out of my class. Really disappoints me. The mountain of paperwork is exhausting but I’m doing it because someone in a position of power needs to do the right thing once in awhile.

3. I’m loosing weight and just need to get over this plateau and into my goal area. So close but wow is Laphroaig delicious on cool evenings.

4. New “older me” personal best on the bench. So I got that going for me, which is nice. I use our college gym and it’s amazing. Most of the staff use the faculty hour but early in the morning, it’s only dedicated athletes and people who want to be there. It’s incredible and extremely satisfying to never need to wait for anything, and loose myself in heavy metal. 10/10.

5. Since AI is all the rage here, I used it for qualitative coding. Not to do my research. But to summarize and make suggestions. After playing with prompts it was pumping out time saving insights to empower me to dive deeper. Saved me MONTHS of work.

6. Finished a really funny article in the Atlantic on cruise ships. Awesome writing. Great story.

I was on two Boeing 787 flights and made it back to type about it. No problems. However, I have to admit I was irrationally nervous since all the whistleblower reports on the 787 came out as I was checking in for the second, a 10 hour direct journey.

So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Dragon Age: Origins

I’ll need to learn to swim better than a dead fish, but yes, I should look into doing this.