anachronist

One has to assume that his original plan was to "buy" it then stiff them on the bill.

but if we look at the countries on this planet that are the most successful in terms of economics, equality, personal freedom, human rights, etc. then we find countries that made it work through regulation and strong government institutions

Yeah that's socialism. The best societies were all degrees of socialist, this includes western Europe and the USA at its mid-century peak. These societies all had aggressive, borderline confiscatory progressive taxation, large scale government intervention in the economy (in the US especially aggressive anti-trust), a generous social welfare state, and a large and professionalized civil service.

They also had large and well-organized labor unions capable of wielding power on behalf of their members and disrupting plans of the elites.

Remove those things and you quickly slide into a dystopian fascist nightmare state as the US and parts of Europe like the UK are discovering.

Ghost of Christmas Future bud.

During the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy asked about using a tactical nuke against Cuba.

Kennedy's generals explained that the only possible options would be enormous first strike against the USSR, or nothing. Because if the US used a tactical nuke Khrushchev would be forced to respond. Then you'd have a nuclear exchange between superpowers anyway, but would also be giving the enemy time to react.

There even isn’t much panic about being caught on the street to be conscripted

Because Russia hasn't mobilized besides the "partial mobilization" in 2022. The question is why. One theory is that they don't need to. The other theory is that they can't. I live in the US and remember the Iraq war. In 2004 one of the biggest things going around was that Bush was going to start conscription.

But if he were to have attempted mobilization the support for the war in the US would have instantly collapsed so instead he tried various things to fill the ranks like using mercenaries, "backdoor drafts" via stoploss, activating national guard, etc. And in the end, let's be honest, the US lost both of Bush's wars.

It's easy to look at the side of a war of attrition where you have more information and say that they're losing because you don't have as much information on the other side. Russia has every reason to present itself as still having massive reserves to call upon because it helps their case.

Many people thought that Germany was on the cusp of winning WWI during the spring offensive in 1918.

That being said I think Ukraine's situation isn't great. I was surprised at the seeming depth of the Russia's reserves. They have been sustaining incredible losses for the last year almost, and yet continue to advance. During previous phases of the war we saw them overextend themselves and then have to retreat against Ukrainian advances.

Russia's reserves are finite both in terms of manpower and equipment. They are demonstrating strain in both categories and will presumably start to have sustainment issues soon. If Ukraine can hold together and stop the advance then presumably the next phase would be a negotiated peace hopefully. There's always a chance that some shoe could drop though. Putin could die or get overthrown, the west could withdraw all support, China could start providing blank-check support to Russia, Russia could successfully go into full-mobilization mode.

Every time there's an AI hype cycle the charlatans start accusing the naysayers of moving goalposts. Heck that exact same thing was happing constantly during the Watson hype. Remember that? Or before that the Alpha Go hype. Remember that?

I was editing my comment down to the core argument when you responded. But fundamentally you can't make a machine think without understanding thought. While I believe it is easy to test that Watson or ChatGPT are not thinking, because you can prove it through counterexample, the reality is that charlatans can always "but actually" those counterexamples aside by saying "it's a different kind of thought."

What we do know because this at least the 6th time this has happened is that the wow factor of the demo will wear off, most promised use cases won't materialize, everyone will realize it's still just an expensive stochastic parrot and, well, see you again for the next hype cycle a decade from now.

You think when these journalists keep expressing "confusion" about why the public loves Luigi, are they just pretending to not understand? Or perhaps they're so fucking cooked that they can't see things from the perspective of the class that they're in?

just because any specific chip in your calculator is incapable of math doesn’t mean your calculator as a system is

It's possible to point out the exact silicon in the calculator that does the calculations, and also exactly how it does it. The fact that you don't understand it doesn't mean that nobody does. The way a calculator calculates is something that is very well understood by the people who designed it.

By the way, this brings us to the history of AI which is a history of 1) misunderstanding thought and 2) charlatans passing off impressive demos as something they're not. When George Boole invented boolean mathematics he thought he was building a mathematical model of human thought because he assumed that thought==logic and if he could represent logic such that he could do math on it, he could encode and manipulate thought mathematically.

The biggest clue that human brains are not logic machines is probably that we're bad at logic, but setting that aside when boolean computers were invented people tried to describe them as "electronic brains" and there was an assumption that they'd be thinking for us in no time. Turns out, those "thinking machines" were, in fact, highly mechanical and nobody would look at a univac today and suggest that it was ever capable of thought.

Arithmetic was something that we did with our brains and when we had machines that could do it that led us to think that we had created mechanical brains. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now.

Is it possible that someday we'll make machines that think? Perhaps. But I think we first need to really understand how the human brain works and what thought actually is.

There's this message pushed by the charlatans that we might create an emergent brain by feeding data into the right statistical training algorithm. They give mathematical structures misleading names like "neural networks" and let media hype and people's propensity to anthropomorphize take over from there.

The fact that Luigi has not been convicted seems to be being treated as an irrelevant technicality by the media in this matter. Interesting given how scrupulous they usually are in dropping "alleged" everywhere.

Because everything we know about how the brain works says that it's not a statistical word predictor.

LLMs have no encoding of meaning or veracity.

There are some great philosophical exercises about this like the chinese room experiment.

There's also the fact that, empirically, human brains are bad at statistical inference but do not need to consume the entire internet and all written communication ever to have a conversation. Nor do they need to process a billion images of a bird to identify a bird.

Now of course because this exact argument has been had a billion times over the last few years your obvious comeback is "maybe it's a different kind of intelligence." Well fuck, maybe birds shit icecream. If you want to worship a chatbot made by a psycopath be my guest.

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