Stalin used to use the term ‘useful idiots’ for Westerners who would help advance his interests. Sometimes they were sincere progressives who thought that Stalin was a trusted ally, and others were blatant opportunists.
Or as Khrushchev said, ‘when the time comes to hang the West an American businessman will sell us the rope.’
I don’t know there are these ideas get stuck in our head and we just assume they are true for some reason. This “the capitalist will sell us the rope we will use to hang him” is prolific, its everywhere and one has to wonder why. There’s no truth in it. People would attribute it to Marx too but Marx would never say that. I think its a cultural relic that serves to make communism sound badass and scary. But hanging capitalists will not put the world on the path to socialism, if anything the opposite must be true.
Well Marx already has the formulation of “capitalism creates its own gravediggers” which is his idea that the material conditions created by capitalism create individuals who are committed to overthrow it, and so the challenge historically is how to get these people all pulling the same correct direction, and once you do, how do you keep it from breaking apart or giving into reformism or whatever.
But there’s something about the way it is framed? Those of us who want to see capitalism overthrown are able to read something more abstract into it, but the metaphor persists more or less intact. The brutality of it never gives way to the truth that we read into it. So in that way when we accept the truth there is violence that hitches a ride in our reasoning. How far are we then from Bordiga’s formulation of “Socialism and Barbarism”? Idk. Everyone knows that quote, but people don’t know about Matewan, or the American Strike waves of 1932, or Burkina Faso, or Pancho Villa.
In short, is what we are learning and repeating educational in a revolutionary way? After all, as Paulo Friere said, “When education isn’t liberating it is the dream of the oppressed to become the oppressor.”
That’s my favorite part of the movie, Krishna is in the office about to gun down Jesus, when Buddha kicks down the door and is like “Life is suffering, prepare to live!” And then shoots all the mobsters with a drum loaded Thompson machine gun, before killing Krishna and saving Jesus. And then the sex scene is so passionate
tl, dr = A distant space colony has been turned into a combination brothel/game preserve by the crew of the ship that brought the inhabitants ancestors there. Using tech the crew has made themselves into the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Kali, Shiva, Agni, et al reincarnate themselves every few years and keep the mortals at the Bronze Age. One member of the crew decides enough is enough and becomes the Buddha in order to overthrow the old gods.
Yup. A variation of the quote (basically capitalists instead of American businessmen) is commonly attributed to Lenin instead of Khrushchev. But that, too, can’t be verified and is said to be fake.
That’s what you get for electing a corrupt cop as mayor.
Also Adams is yet another example, why having someone from a marginalized group in office does not mean that the represents or even really cares about the needs of that group past his own political advantage.
If it’s not repeated then it’s doomed to be forgotten. We move too fast in the information age and there is too much information to keep in mind. We must repeat the important things.
This is a good sentiment. Just because your specific in-group believes something doesn’t mean its common knowledge. It is still deserving of attention.
I guess when you get tired of writing stories about school shootings, rapes, and murders in your own country, you can always… actually I have no fucking idea…
Maybe they just want you to “know” that brown people are bad?
You’re right. It could be bias that only those stories make it over here often. For sure America has its own issues with endless shootings stories or police violence.
I guarantee school shooting stories make it to India every time it happens. Pretending that gang rape isn’t a major problem in India under an article about a mass medical staff strike linked directly to a gang rape is fucking ridiculous.
Agreed. ChatGPT doesn’t like to cite sources. Microsoft CoPilot and Google Gemini do link to some sources, though not as accurate or thorough like Wikipedia.
What I don’t understand is how Microsoft has/has Watson which was able to answer questions well enough to go on Jeopardy and dominate. And now, more than a decade later these LLMs absolutely suck at it.
It makes me wonder if Watson was nothing more than a Mechanical Turk because what is out there now seems like a huge step backwards.
They just work in entirely different ways. An car and a horse are both able to serve as transportation, but they aren’t anything alike in other ways. LLMs compared to previous sorts of bots are similar.
The main difference is that an LLM isn’t fetching whole answers from some database somewhere. It’s generating them fresh. You have to hope it generates the right stuff, which it does a certain percentage of the time.
It’s actually not easy to ensure that an LLM will cite a correct source, in the same way it’s not easy to ensure that it will provide accurate information. It’s based on token probability, not deterministic lookups of “this data came from this source.” It could entirely make something up, then write “Source:” and then probabilistically write “Wikipedia” because those tokens commonly follow those for “Source.”
If you have an AI bot that looks up information in real time, then that would be easy. But for a trained LLM, the training process is highly destructive. Original information is not preserved except in relationships based on probability.
Right, in my experience the majority of URLs generated by LLMs are just jumbles of letters that vaguely look like a URL. A fundamental architecture difference needs to happen in one way or another to properly cite sources, and it’s really bad for performance.
It’s a fun toy. It’s not a research aid, it’s not a productivity tool, and it’s not particularly useful in the workplace.
It’s honestly very similar to the VR craze of a few years back. Silicon Valley invented a fun toy and then tried to convince everyone that it would transform the workplace. Meetings in VR and simulated workstations and all that. Ultimately everyone figured out that VR is completely useless in the workplace and Silicon Valley was just trying to find ways to sell their fun toy. Now we’re going through the same learnings with AI.
I choose to interpret the grandparent commenter’s use of “easily” to mean “not impossible, and an ethical obligation, so you’d better fuckin’ make it a priority.”
That’s accurate. Nothing in technology is actually “easy” and I know it requires a lot of work. Didn’t mean to diminish all the time and energy put into making this stuff. Thanks for better expressing what I meant.
Maybe specifying source should be a legal requirement if the LLM service provider shouldn’t automatically be held accountable for the answers their services produce?
Yeah Bing Chat had sources for a while (not sure if it still does) and when I checked the sources, the frequently didn’t contain the claim in question. So even if you get it to cite real pages, it just doesn’t work the same way as human citations do.
I don’t get it then, why are all these companies so gung-ho to replace something that was working with an AI that doesn’t?
It’s less accurate, it uses way more energy, it doesn’t show its work, it doesn’t cite its source, and it’ll make up shit that sounds right when it needs to. Why would anyone think AI is worth putting in any consumer product at this rate?
OK so BIden had a bad debate, was visibly incoherent for a while beforeheand, and they took him out of the race.
Now Trump has had a bad debate and has been visibly incoherent for years. Is the GOP going to take him out of the race for a stronger candidate?
I don’t want to make a false equivalency, these are different parties and different candidates; Trump supporters are more loyal than usual, and he would take them with him as he’s not likely to accept his exclusion, so the GOP taking Trump out of the race is riskier than Dems taking Biden out of the race.
But, seen from the left, conservatives are the ones with a reputation for ruthless pragmatism when it comes to electoral politics. They’re the ones who sacrifice their values by voting for candidates that do advance their goals.
A lot of leftists, out of idealism, wouldn’t vote for Clinton in 2016 or Biden in 2020; meanwhile evangelicals made the pragmatic decision to vote for Trump, the least christian man in the whole GOP, because he furthers their anti-abortion agenda. I argue that conservatives are absolutely correct in this, voting for a candidate that you don’t like just to advance your goals is the correct approach to representative democracy. My evidence for this is that evangelical voters were rewarded for their vote when of Roe v Wade was overruled thanks to judges from the Trump administration.
So i think, if the GOP replaces Trump but keeps an equally extremist agenda, there’s a world where electoral pragmatism causes those voters to transfer over, leading to better odds of a GOP victory. And a conservative presidency other than Trump would push their agenda more efficiently than the first Trump presidency did or that a second Trump presidency would.
Uh… So DON’T do that. That should not happen. It would be the right thing for the GOP to do, which means it’s the wrong thing and i hope it doesn’t happen.
The thing that allowed the Democrats to switch candidates was that the Democratic National Convention had not happened yet, which is when the candidate is officially locked in as the party’s candidate on ballots for president.
The Republican National Convention was mid July. Trump and Vance are locked in. To swap candidates now would be considerably more difficult for them (not to mention having to fight against a self centered toddler that will refuse to let anyone other than him run).
Swapping out candidates would be good for the Republicans. The process of swapping out candidates would not be.
This is my thought as well… honestly, it might be a good thing because you know Trump will cry foul and all the… fine people…who are voting for him will eat it up and follow him into oblivion, thereby splitting the vote and allowing the whole thing to cave in on itself
They cannot swap him out because he will not cooperate. Attempting to swap him out would do nothing but split the vote for them.
Repubs have spent decades propagandizing their fear-addicted voters with racist delusions. Donald has taken over that mechanism.
The sane but sociopathic Repub leadership is experiencing the classic trope of a monster they thought was tame (the racist voters they have been agitating) turning on them (a dementia patient they have no control over blathering about eating cats during the debate).
meanwhile evangelicals made the pragmatic decision to vote for Trump, the least christian man in the whole GOP, because he furthers their anti-abortion agenda. I
Conservatives get abortions as soon as their own daughters get pregnant. They’re consummate hypocrites. Voting republican has always been about keeping workers deprived of rights and wage increases. No conservative gives a shit about the culture war stuff. The culture war is and has always been a distraction from creating welfare states like in EU.
The culture war is an important piece of the conservative agenda- it isolates and eliminates the various groups that will group together to support conservatives.
The automakers don’t like EVs because they have much better margins on pickups and SUVs. Dealers don’t like EVs because they require less maintenance, which cuts future revenue. The politicians don’t like EVs because their campaigns are financed by the big auto companies and dealership owners.
It is really beyond time for citizen review boards to stop being “advisory” and to start having the authority to impose punishments directly themselves.
As it stands, such boards exist to give the appearance of doing something about police brutality, but not actually be effective at it, and that’s 1000% by design.
Elon Musk has repeatedly said EV sales worldwide are slowing as an excuse for why Tesla sales are slowing, rather than blaming his poor leadership. Repeat a lie often enough and it enters the public consciousness
Sales slowing is only one variable in the “growth” equation. Specifically, are sales of gas vehicles slowing more than sales of electric cars? Yes.
People are replacing vehicles at some standard rate, but growth of EVs is dependent on what percentage of new vehicle sales are gas versus electric. As long as people aren’t moving back to gas cars en masse, the growth of the segment can continue to rise, even if sales overall are slowing.
The statistics I can find suggests EVs make up between 5% and 15% of new cars sales in the US. For comparison, in China the majority of new cars are EVs.
This is likely due to the difference in market segments, electric vehicles in North America occupy the high-end segment, which prices out most consumers whereas the Chinese market prices for the majority of consumers by using agressive government subsidies.
Some have speculated that this is so they can price out the compition as these subsidies are unsustainable, but I’m frankly not qualified to examine it.
buying a hospital (system I guess?) in order to sell off all the equipment and property and rent it back until they’re bankrupt is just so cartoonishly evil, wtf
That’s how a lot of venture capital places operate when they buy anything. I’m pretty sure that’s what red lobster is doing. It happened to an MSP I used to work at (about two thirds of our clients were hospitals or clinics, for whatever that’s worth). Doing it with a hospital system is just extra especially vile rather than the normal amount of vile.
It’s more accurate to say that the first recipe for Apple Pie is British. Specifically mentioned in A Cook’s Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century.
But since both pastry dough and apples had already been around for centuries, I think it’s very likely that people had the idea to put apples in a pie a long time before that. They just didn’t write down the recipe.
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