By that logic, China is currently subservient to the US. Is it?

The inevitable end result will be subservience to China.

citation needed

These folks like to throw around words like subservience, but I’m not sure how you get that without conquering someone militarily. People like to talk about NATO subservience to the US, for instance, but Trump doesn’t seem to be waltzing into Greenland any time soon. Pretty weak subservience if you ask me, given how much smaller Denmark is than the US.

Exactly. It’s sort of like a massively scaled up example of the blind man and the elephant.

Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

Predicting the next word vs predicting a word in the middle and then predicting backwards are not hugely different things. It’s still predicting parts of the passage based solely on other parts of the passage.

Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

It has nothing to do with wanting to actually fight NATO. The idea is to manufacture a carefully crafted situation where Article 5 is triggered, but due to internal disagreement and individual risk, it is not fully honored.

Needless to say, any such move would be very risky.

Impressive piece of journalism.

Agreed. Great voice acting is one thing. Quality voicing a cast that gigantic is another. I first noticed with that frog in the hag’s area. You don’t even get it if you don’t cast speak with animals and talk to this random frog hopping around, but if you bother to, you get this short, amazingly acted dialogue.

The attention to detail is just off the charts.

Good. He’s overusing his “witch hunt” rhetoric, in a situation where it’s unusually easy for anybody to verify the details for oneself.

I wonder how tempted he was to hit that “report spam” button.

or maybe “national security adviser,”

lol

Just gotta say, that Colorado law is ridiculous. I’m all for good conditions for farm animals, but 1 sq ft per chicken isn’t helping. A single square foot is about the size of a chicken. The thing is still in “a cage”, that cage is just formed of other chickens now.

I wonder if lobbyists got to them to water down the law.

If an edible variety has any lookalikes that similar that can be found in your climate zone, you need to steer clear from it. This isn’t the case for all varieties and all areas though. General mushroom foraging may be dangerous, but certain species can be safely selected, due to not having lookalikes you need to be worried about.

Which these are requires learning specific to your local area though. The skills do not transfer to other regions, and everything you know would need to be reconfirmed if you moved anywhere new.

One aspect that doesn’t get discussed enough is how effective their grassroots in predominantly young, male hobby spaces has become.

20 years ago, if you weren’t that interested in politics, you wouldn’t get much of it. Currently though, it has thoroughly infiltrated spaces like athletics and gaming. This was not an accident. They have a strong ground game, it just operates in spaces we’re unaccustomed to thinking about in reference to politics.

I see, thank you for the detail.

According to the White House, El Salvador’s government received $6m (£4.62m) to take the detainees

Ahhh, that’s the part I was missing. I thought the Central American govts caved awfully fast after initially protesting the deportations. This is going to get ugly, if they’re basically being turned into a revenue-stream. El Salv will need to ensure they make a profit of some sort on that 6m.

… he’s a Mennonite, lot of them won’t even use the internal combustion engine. It’s one of those low-tech sects of Christianity like Amish.

Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what’s so surprising about a bunch of professional diplomats being diplomatic with their statements. It’s not a group I expect a lot of outright, direct statements of their positions from.

I don’t know where you get your info, but China and Russia have a frenemy relationship, a friendly rivalry, basically. This goes back to Stalin’s limited support for the CCP in their early days, or even before when the Russian Tsar conquered huge swaths of land from the Qing Dynasty during their Century of Humiliation, about the time when we Americans were busy having our Civil War. We see it to this day, where China could have a huge and decisive effect on the Russo-Ukrainian War if they wished and fully threw in with Russia, but instead are happy to sit back and war profiteer while Russia takes heavy loses and the West spends money instead of making it.

Then Iran and Saudi Arabia are archenemies. Iran is a Shia-majority theocracy, SA is a Sunni-majority secular monarchy with a history of persecuting Shias, and even warming up to Israel before Oct 7th. They have a long history of conflict.

Not sure how Turkey gets on the list either, Turkey has consistently played both sides, always being in it for Turkey. I don’t see the benefit for them to actually pick a side, thus losing their benefits from the other. We see this clearly, again, in how they’ve approached the Russo-Ukrainian War. Like cozying up to Putin, but hey, have some free Bayraktars, Ukraine!

I know a lot of people put a lot of effort into trying to make it seem like a real WW3 with fairly even sides is plausible in the near future, but it always requires a lot of cherry picking and ignoring realities for them to spin their stories together.

One major issue with this: The left and right are fighting for different things.

The far right would ultimately like a military dictatorship of sorts. In order to pull this off in a way the majority of the public would accept, they need people to be afraid, to have violent enemies that can only be defeated with organized military force.

The left, on the other hand, is fighting for civilian rule. This is based on the idea that laws need to apply to everyone, and that military force should not be used to suppress the public at large. In order to pull this off, it must be true that military force applied domestically is not actually necessary to have a functioning society.

Because these goals are fundamentally different, the methods of accomplishing them become different by necessity. Some methods strengthen and empower the goals of the right, other methods strengthen and empower the left. These are distinct, and it’s very important not to be manipulated into playing into the hands of your opponent.