you are actively defending North Korea

If this was any other county, you wouldn’t consider it an insult.

Why do you feel the need to hate a foreign people this much? They have no impact on you whatsoever.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

you think I’m defending the genocidal losers

If the shoe fits

15% of russian GDP has already been seized

Do you know what GDP is?

one side sucks so clearly that means the other side is absolutely perfect

It’s funny to hear liberals defend the genocidal members of the Democratic Party by insisting “we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.

But when you’re a guerrilla resistance fighting of the Japanese at their most bloodthirsty, or a country that’s painstakingly recovering after suffering more bombings in a year than all of Europe suffered in four, the bar gets raised through the roof.

You idealize tyranny and oppression

You are living under a totalitarian regime right now, you big dummy. You don’t seem to mind.

LeCun says current AI models are a dead end for progress.

Sure. That’s easily proven, as the Pacific Rim tech companies are all running laps around the American models in terms of efficiency and output.

It looks like two guys arguing about which dead end to pursue

They’re both Snipe Hunting for the mythological AGI, because they’re each invested in the idea of a Singularity solving all their problems.

LLMs have a set of niche useful applications, but these dudes are chucking that advancement aside in pursuit of Digital God.

With Roko’s Basilisk bumping around in their heads, I can’t help but detect a certain religious fervor, either. We really might have folks who believe they’ll be tortured for eternity if they don’t build AI Hellraiser first.

It’s jibberish. Might as well be calling Trump a TERF or complaining that Andrew Cuomo isn’t Italian.

totally-not-zionist “lefty” Mandani

What?

Obviously, the solution is US slavery

US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance

Sounds reasonable.

Does it, though? Feels like we’re just rewriting the sales manual without thinking about what “learning from video” would actually entail.

Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

There’s an old book from back in 2008 - Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity - that a lot of the modern Techbros took perhaps too closely to heart. It posited that chasing the next generation of technological advancement was more important than keeping your existing revenue streams functional. And you really should kill the golden goose if it means you’ve got a shot at new one in the near future.

What these Tech Companies are chasing is the Next Big Thing, even when they don’t really understand what that is. And they’re so blindly devoted to advancing the technological curve that they really will blow a trillion dollars (mostly of other people’s money) on whatever it is they think that might be.

The real problem is that these guys are, largely, uncreative and incurious and not particularly intelligent. So they leap on fads rather than pursuing meaningful Blue Sky Research. And that gives us this endless recycling of Sci-Fi tropes as a stand in for material investments in productive next generation infrastructure.

Well, he’s got a bowtie and Zuck wears an oversized t-shirt with Bugs Bunny dressed as a 90s rapper.

They certainly can’t both be wrong, can they?

Listen, that’s fine and all. But the best scene in the movie is every scene with General Zhukov.

My brothers, in the process of ratting me out.

By whom?

FYI, the debt will be paid by Russian war reparation

The EU equivalent of saying Mexico Will Pay For the Wall.

War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land

Western financing to Ukraine in recent years has been tied to a drastic structural adjustment program that has required austerity and privatization measures, including the creation of a land market for the sale of agricultural land. President Zelenskyy put the land reform into law in 2020 against the will of the vast majority of the population who feared it would exacerbate corruption and reinforce control by powerful interests in the agricultural sector. Findings of the report concur with these concerns. While large landholders are securing massive financing from Western financial institutions, Ukrainian farmers — essential for ensuring domestic food supply — receive virtually no support. With the land market in place, amidst high economic stress and war, this difference of treatment will lead to more land consolidation by large agribusinesses.

Ukraine’s been operating under the same Shock Doctrine that came for the rest of Eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR (and much of Latin America and Oceania before that). The government is perpetually in a state of debt to its EU neighbors and it is constantly hemorrhaging state property at cut-throat prices to lowest-bidder private interests.

The looting of the Soviet sphere isn’t new and it isn’t the result of the Russian invasion. But the sudden acute need for foreign cash, combined with the mass displacement of Ukrainian citizens, has accelerated the process enormously.

I see through your sarcasm. This is a Reddit-tier bannable offense. -100 Credit Score Points. Don’t make me report you to your landlord.

I don’t hate everyone in the middle east

Name one good Arab.

Are you saying everyone in the middle east is part of these organizations

I’m saying you know virtually nothing about the region, you’re just regurgitating the bigotry you’ve been force fed since kindergarten.

I respect Cuba 1000x more than China.

I think the most telling indictment of the Chinese government is its failure to extend aid to its ideological allies abroad, whether that’s Cuba or Kashmir. But when you’re lifting 200M people at home out of poverty with industrial improvements and agricultural modernization, its hard to complain. Beijing has done an amazing job of not-getting-into-wars. More than the Russian Soviets managed by a long shot.

Unfortunately, they’re still a one-party state without free and fair elections.

You could say the same thing about California or Florida. What’s annoying is that “one-party state” is held up as some kind of indictment without regard to how popular the party is. Like, I hate Texas politics, but I’m not naive enough to believe the state lacks a Republican majority. I’m not going to hold Cuba to a higher standard, simply because they’re venerating Che Guevera instead of T. Boone Pickens.