least obvious AI written ragebait

I have a list of books I plan on buying physically, even if I have them in my digital library already. The most important criteria I use is whether I’d want to re-read them, whether I’d want friends and family read them, and whether I think I’d want my future kids to read them. There is just something about having a lot of books around when growing up, I always looked up at my parents bookshelves and pondered at the different covers, titles and authors. Some books I was “allowed” to read, some I was too young or inexperienced for, and it was always exciting after one or two years to finally hear “You are probably ready for this one now”, and so forth, until I started buying my own books.

I don’t think my love for reading would be what it is if my parents instead let me browse their digital repository of e-books on the laptop.

At the same time, there are a lot of books that I know I’m not gonna read again, like crime thrillers and such. A lot of fiction in general is entertaining when you read it but doesn’t necessarily hold the same long term value imo. There are many non-fiction books that I come back to time and time again, this is rarely true for the works of fiction I do keep. Purely subjective of course, but lets just say there is more Lenin than Tom Clancy in my bookshelves.

Effect is worse in junior high than high school, suggesting uninformed (over)use makes things worse;

I was always under the impression that the cognitive outsourcing is worse the earlier it starts. I am in academia, and a lot of really bright researchers, professors etc are using generative AI tools, but they have spent a good 20-30 years already reading, researching and producing high-quality output already, they are not using it to get away from thinking about hard problems, simply to speed up the process of tackling them.

It is way worse for students. I can only speak for mathematics, but the field is trying to come to gripes with what this whole ordeal will mean, and even then we are at least quite shielded from some of the problems with education (quite easy to expand and assess in-person exams, for instance).

You generally NEED a minimum of 10-20k hours working and thinking about this stuff to understand it at a high level, there are no shortcuts. Now the barrier to be able to put some slop together and pretend you’ve come up with a result is a lot lower, which is the shortcut many students are going for sadly.

If anyone is interested in the discussion I’ll just put some good starters:

https://nitter.net/aaswaminathan01/status/2025418710198960388

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy

No worries, now I know what I’ll listen to during my commute tomorrow

“please dont be 1h long podcast video”

clicks on link

54 mins

they got me again

Honestly, I am bewildered. This is absolutely awesome!

I suspect this is just a thinly veiled way transfer of supplies from one US imperialist outpost (South Korea) to a more active zone.

That seems very plausible, but if this goes through it is a proper material win for DPRK. What a time to be alive!

Maybe they can team up with the exiled “Tibetan government” lol

Thanks for sharing! Cleanly articulated some points which I think many of us understand to be correct, but might lack the language to communicate effectively.

mildly

is doing a heavy lifting in that sentence

Oh yes, but they originated from Morocco no? My understanding was that Spain pays Morocco to deter migrants with (sometimes lethal) repressive force to ensure they have a hard time getting into Spain. Then Morocco stop adhering to this and let people through when they want to exert political pressure on Spain (I believe the last time this happened was in 2019), something they seem to do in coordination with NATO this time.

I don’t know… Moroccan repression of the Sahrawi in West Sahara makes me reluctant to give them any benefit of the doubt. Just being global south does not give them any extra leeway to expand, kill and settle in other peoples lands. The Polisario Front have waged armed struggle against Morocco since the 80s I think.

Not that I hold any good feelings about Spain that is, just that there is a lot of things going on.

As someone who have spent quite some time in the upper echelons of society I can confidently say MOST are very high on liberalism, i.e. ignorant, uninformed, idealist. It is not that they think there is another point or are scheming for some kind of endgame (yea obv, the Palantir CEO might be, but if we are talking everyday elites), it is simply VERY easy to go through your whole life as a liberal if you never are exposed to the contradictions and contrasts of global capitalism (and when you do get exposed, it is nicely wrapped by your media)

If you are born with relative privilege and work hard, make good money, etc and just go about with your life, it is very easy to just…not think about these things. And whenever you might stray away and think a bit more deeply you have a plethora of “political analyists” or other media telling you how you should think about it to feel good about yourself (and superior to many others).

These are the kind of people we need to reach, educate and get on our side. And since October 2023 a less “lib-rotted” conscious has started to form in this group, even if it is tiny, tiny, tiny.

It shows how important is for people to own the datacenters. Running model on bigger hardware for multiple people is much more efficient than running it on personal hardware.

Which also is why the AI companies are panicking a little bit. They don’t necessarily target private consumer anyways, but are trying to expand into the business-licensing space. Thats why they are competing so hard to create the most complete ecosystem of tools, i.e. coding, legal work, picture+movie, defense.

But no reasonably lead company is going to waste $9999999 billions on tokens for ever more expensive models when you can get similar results by expanding your serverhall with a few m^2.

I think I’ve read that the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia) historically was the most lucrative (i.e. highest net-profit) colony by a large margin. I cannot remember the numbers though.

It seems like the US is increasingly trying to isolate southern Iran from the rest of the country. Several bridges have been hit, in addition to railways, tunnels, airports, roads, and hospitals are evacuated. They seem to focus on the destruction of civilian infrastructure trying to limit the movement of people, goods and logistical supplies.

I imagine this is to keep their options open with regards to putting troops on the ground or “taking” southern Iran.

I always see it as him describing the wests overall goals and strategies rather than the most probable result of those. His analysis is really good, but he gives a lot of agency to the US, and I think it is more akin to a tug of war situation. Russia also has a lot of agency, and the same goes for China who knows that Russia failing would be the single worst thing for their own security.

Thus I am cautiously optimistic in the grand scheme of things – what weighs on me the most is the human cost of these contradictions: Vietnam can be a proud and sovereign country today but it took an immense human cost, we also have Palestine, Iran, DPRK, not mentioning the exterminations of the 20th century. I truly believe we will achieve prosperous multipolarity and that western capital will be beaten to a pulp as a result of this, but it won’t go out without a violent fight and that breaks my heart…

There is a “clear shift in strategic thinking” in Tehran, especially after the killing of the former surpreme leader who had been “cautious about directly confronting” the US, Ali Fathollah-Nejad, director of the Centre for Middle East and Global Order, told Al Jazeera.

“Now we see escalating regional factional infighting within the regime in Iran between the hardline pragmatists on one hand and the ultra hardliners on the other hand,” he said. The latter seem to be “dictating the dynamic”, he said, adding that “this new Iranian strategy of escalation is formed from new strategic considerations of deterrence against a new full-fledged attack” on Iran that could “destabilise the regime”.

There is also a “sense of hubris, as well, from this ultra hardline camp, that … Iran has emerged victorious, plus the costs of confrontation are absorbable, and deep scepticism vis-a-vis the hardline pragmatist camp that has been leading Iranian negotiations”.

Don’t worry guys, previously it was this very real infighting between moderates and hardliners, we have now upgraded to hardliners vs. ultra hardliners. In a few months we will hear that there is a lot of infighting between the super-duper ultra hardliners vs. the ultimato-mega-giga-hardliners. What would we do without these analysts…

memorandums of understanding

The US has a really good history of abiding by these, great job Iraq!

Yea people started becoming suspicious when the Gulf states + Israel started throwing people into prison when they filmed even 1 second of any impact.

After they had put the lid on the reports suddenly became – “Interceptor impacts” instead of “missile impacts”.

Bro they are already bombing the bridges and railways. I guess they explicitly mean eletricity and oil…