jkf
22d ago
If the same is true of Mennonites more broadly
I don't think it is -- I've contracted with them before in ways that required mutual trust, and I'm pretty sure that the carpenter ones don't require cash up front before they build you a house or whatever.
jkf
23d ago
The not-particularly-strict Mennonites that I know seem to maintain the same sort of lifestyle when they start construction or other businesses -- I'm pretty sure it's mostly the church and community support. Whether they can maintain this is another story -- I don't really know any "urban Mennonites", or if that's even a thing.
jkf
24d ago
If I were running Ford and trying to destroy Ford, I wouldn't start by cutting the cars everyone doesn't like. I would start by ending Mustang production, screwing up the engine and bed on the F150
Ford doesn't have a monopoly on violence though; in the government analogy, they just make everyone drive Escapes -- which makes people hate the Forderlords but it's not like they can go buy a Camaro instead.
Whereas if they quit making Escapes and nobody cares, it's a viable argument that Ford is wasting a lot of resources on things nobody likes, and further cuts should be NBD. (of course the plan breaks down when all the CUV engineers start writing articles about how many puppies will die if they are laid off)
jkf
25d ago
In 1995 computers could barely play chess.
In 1995 computers could kick your ass in chess, unless you are a pretty good player who studied their algorithmic weaknesses -- indeed I'll bet my Vic-20 could kick your ass at chess in 1980. AIUI for a long time their improvements (including things like DeepBlue) were mostly driven by better compute and memory availability -- I guess there's some interesting parallels with neural networks there. But the thing about chess programs is that there's sort of a plateau -- you can only be so good at chess. AI takeoff theory hinges on this not being the case for general intelligence -- which I don't think has been adequately proven.
jkf
25d ago
Probably not helpful per se, but I'm thinking of the oldish days in which mods were expected to put up with blunt-to-the-point-of-against-the-rules commentary on their decisions as part and parcel of the awesome power they wield. I'd probably need to go pretty far back on the reddit sub to find examples, and don't really know where the norm came from (LessWrong?) but it struck me as a pretty good norm. As with the "free-speech vs hate-speech" issue, "criticizing the mods is only allowed if you aren't a PITA about it" is not really a stable equilibrium.
jkf
26d ago
the ankle-biting will stop. Now.
Clamping down on blunt feedback to the mods is a pretty serious change in norms around here, and a very negative development -- you should stop.
jkf
28d ago
A touch cold-hearted, but sure -- assuming you accept that Russia is an implacable threat, and a hostile relationship is the only way forward. Which could be argued either way, but there's another problem:
Whether or not Ukraine has a shot at "winning" or regaining significant territory is irrelevant. Every day that the war continues is another day that the Russian military continues to deteriorate without any loss of American life
This part is only true until it isn't -- if Ukraine runs too short of bodies to hold the line at some point, there's a risk that Russia wins outright. Then we have an implacable enemy with a battlehardened (granted, drawn down some) armed force, a shiny feather in its cap, and a nice big buffer zone between us and its heartland.
Seems a little risky?
jkf
28d ago
It's more effort than he deserves -- "LPC is hawkish on China" isn't even low effort, it's just agitprop.
jkf
28d ago
The issue is that there wouldn't be any need for an all out war, at least with India.
China doesn't see it this way, so none of what else you say matters -- if there's a possibility that a war might occur, they want to be in the best possible position for it.
Like I said it's a bit of a throwback to pre-WWI international relations, but you see it a bit in Russia's adventures in Ukraine. Happens when high-ranking military officials get a direct voice in diplomacy.
jkf
28d ago
the past few administrations have increasingly become China hawks
LOL
https://www.nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf
jkf
28d ago
I realize how much of the international opprobrium China faces is entirely due to its own weight throwing, for very little potential gain in this particular case.
Chinese foreign policy is a bit of a throwback in that it's strongly driven by concrete strategic military goals, AIUI -- if they care about the random mountains, it's because they think that they are useful in an all-out war. Same with Tibet, same with Taiwan.
jkf
28d ago
Trump himself could probably be sold on the idea of a unified trade bloc going after China -- this would probably an actual Good Thing, but Canadian politics is pretty compromised on that front so we will probably only hear that Going After China is Racist or something.
jkf
28d ago
Canada's certainly been having a go at taxing digital media services lately -- and has had regulations effectively subsidizing locally produced movies/shows for a long time.
The recent scrap with Facebook/Google is I think theoretically nation-agnostic in that Canadian social media giants would also have to pay -- but given that there aren't any Canadian social media giants it could see viewing it as a kind of tariff.
jkf
30d ago
"Trudeau is retarded" is not a controversial position -- even people who like him are not doing it on the basis that he's smart.
Trudeau just is a lib why would he agree with Trump politically?
Policy is not the issue, it's his history of moralizing with Trump on unrelated issues; 'too woke' essentially -- and now Trump is cancelling him along with all the other woke stuff.
Like, I think the case that this is just fundamentally predatory - targeting a nation that is both inherently dependent on the US and has actively made itself moreso due to bad policy - is actually a much more sensible one.
If that's what Trump is thinking then he's retarded too -- while the actual gross balance going south is not that large compared to other partners, it's primarily inputs to a wide cross-section of American industry. My guess is that the Trump tariffs on Canadian imports will be more harmful to US businesses than the lame-ass 'retaliatory' ones Trudeau is proposing.
Self-owns all round I guess -- but somebody who is willing to build a personal relationship with Trump is what's needed to mend it. "Shamrock Summit II" anyone?
jkf
30d ago
And then Trump shows back up treating Trudeau as a domestic partisan enemy because ??
Because he is?
Trudeau (like Zelensky, maybe) made the mistake of aligning himself with the (current) losing side on US politics, strongly and explicitly. There's no way he's walking back from that; he also hates Trump, and Trump knows it.
Everything is personal with Trump; kind of a weird way to run a country, but easy enough to work with if you aren't an idiot.
jkf
30d ago
A sound is not a word? (or chunk thereof)
There also is not a 1:1 mapping of sounds to tokens in English. (or most languages really, but English is particularly bad that way)
LLMs are trained on text corpora -- how do you map those text tokens to sound data?
jkf
30d ago
Nah, it's inorganic, and probably astroturfed to a large degree. People will settle down soon enough.
jkf
30d ago
Probably the majority of the 'realpolitik' posts are bent on avoiding the stating of plain facts such as that 'Russia is a totalitarian state that invaded a democracy'.
I have no problem with this, but would tend not to include it in a realpolitik post because it's exactly the kind of thing that's irrelevant in a realpolitik framework.
jkf
1mo ago
All that remains to be seen is if the Red party calls an election immediately, or tries to force the Blue party to vote for a non-confidence vote
They've got their sugar rush, I think they will go for it -- I do think there's some Kamala effect going on here at the moment and they will still lose, but I guess wrecking the country to avert a landslide is what these fuckers would consider a win.
jkf
1mo ago
It could (maybe), but this is drifting even further from how current LLMs work -- the previous discussion on this was around an example where (if the model were doing this rather than working from a transcript and hallucinating) it completely failed to account for pronunciation, much less tone.
jkf
1mo ago
But audio tokens are not intercompatible with text tokens, for obvious reasons -- if you were to train your model on a corpus of audio tokens intermingled with the text ones, wouldn't it tend to respond differently depending on the form of your input?
jkf
1mo ago
If we can manage to elect somebody who's not a total moron (so yeah, probably boned) I think it can be OK -- the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls. The political is very very personal for Trump, and since he & Trudeau already hate each other deeply there was never going to be any rapprochement until he's gone -- the upside is that there is an opportunity there for the new guy to, um, build back better?
I do hope that during the campaign somebody will be able to convincingly point out that adding to the burden of American tariffs on our producers' exports with an additional domestic tariff burden on a big chunk of their input costs is the most retarded idea I've ever heard -- are we really that dumb?
jkf
1mo ago
I don't think it's not within their potential capabilities, I just don't see any reason why this would be added -- if you were to do so, it clearly would need to be specifically trained on audio tokens which seems to me to amount to embedding a Whisper model into your LLM. I just don't see any reason to do that? Wouldn't it make more sense to just call a transcription model (which as you know are pretty good these days) and throw the resulting text at your LLM?
You'd need pretty serious port infrastructure at either end for this -- there are ports there now so it's probably feasible, but I'll bet it would be expensive if you were going to handle significant volume.
More options
Context Copy link