You’re not grasping what I’m saying. I’m more or less agreeing with you that her campaigning was bad. My point is that, also, for things to even get to that point where this election was close whatever she did (even with people crying out for some kind of change to the point that anyone who wasn’t a politician looked like a step up to them), a lot of groundwork got laid that had absolutely nothing to do with her.

Some of it was the Democrats betraying the working class for the last 32 years, some of it was media. Some of it was her campaigning, too, sure. It’s not an either or thing.

Without trying to diminish the importance of this specific point about misogyny I would extend that this is true of a lot of statements that people reject or see as wild and out-of-pocket when they hear them.

Most of the time, people are talking sense according to what they’ve lived, and if it sounds crazy to you then you need to get more of the full story and learn about the context from them and why they think that. It’s not always. Sometimes people are just nuts or hateful or w/e. But most of the time, if you dig into that “she’s talking nonsense that doesn’t make any sense” statement you will find some good sense in it. It might not be the end of the story but it’s usually an important part of it. Most of the time.

Oh… huh, yeah, I see your point. I hadn’t watched the actual video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwt7hMaNaBQ

You can see how bothered she is by the question and how careful about endorsing him. Yeah, that’s kind of bullshit.

If the election was decided on the basis of “which candidate is going to give us what we want,” Trump would have gotten about 15% of the vote. Look around at what’s happening now, and it hasn’t even got really ramped up yet. We’ve got years and years more of this stuff. And it’s going to get worse (not just politically but in terms of economic suffering, the final death of American science and education, stuff we haven’t even really had on the radar yet).

I don’t disagree that some of her campaign strategy was bad, keeping Biden in that long was bad, all that stuff, but also… if the people are choosing diving into the empty swimming pool instead of the full one, then sure you could say you could spruce up the full one to make it more enticing and make sure the water’s not too cold, but that’s not the core of the issue.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, so I’ll just answer it straight: There is basically nothing that any establishment Democrat could say about Mamdani that would make me think any different about him. It’s a little bit relevant for his prospects whether they officially endorse him, because it means money and institutional support and it probably will sway a decent number of establishment-Democrat voters. But mostly I’m speaking about it as a way to test the people doing the endorsing or not endorsing. Harris doing right by endorsing him doesn’t really surprise me, because I already thought she was basically okay, but some of the others it would. It wouldn’t really make me think positive about them, more than anything I would take it meaning the DNC consultant narrative and awareness of where people are at is catching up to reality which would be a good thing. Does that answer?

She never was the dogshit that people made her out to be, it’s not really that surprising in a way it would be for people like Pelosi or Chuck Shumer.

I mean it is the normal thing to endorse your party’s person who won the primary, it is only a handful of real pieces of shit that are holding back on it. The problem is that those pieces of shit are highly placed in the Democratic party sadly enough.

Edit: Oof… I hadn’t watched the actual video. Yeah, it’s at least 30% dogshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwt7hMaNaBQ

Out here asking the real questions

True that

I feel like almost every really good leader is someone who happens to have that “natural leader” quality, but also asks people for input constantly and is aware of their lack of judgement.

A little semi related aside: There is a fascinating story in “Most Secret War” of the author’s first meeting where Winston Churchill was running the meeting. One, Churchill came in in working clothes, the only one not wearing a suit, and everyone thought for a second that he was the janitor or something entering the wrong room when he walked in. He just didn’t carry himself like “the boss.” Once they all realized everyone stood up and he sort of waved it off and took his seat like nothing special. He had sort of anti charisma.

Once he started running the meeting, Jones said that Churchill had an almost supernatural ability to spot when Jones at least had something he needed to say. Somebody would say something that was wrong, Jones would carefully keep his face neutral because he was just some random low-level peon at this meeting and didn’t want to get in trouble, and the next thing that happened Churchill would say, “Jones, what do you think of that?” Basically he was at a grandmaster level of digging to get to the bottom of what was actually happening so everyone could make good decisions.

I don’t really know that much about any famous leaders through history, but it was just fuckin’ fascinating as a window onto how these decisions and plans actually get made, to some small extent.

A billion in EU buys many times less than the same billion does in russia.

Think about why it does

Because no one in their right mind wants rubles, so money comparisons that involve rubles have to be corrected back to reality before the values actually match. If you go by the exchange rate alone, you might as well be comparing dollars to lollipops or something.

1. I was talking about how much they’re spending on the Ukraine war, not how much they’re spending in general. Obviously the EU’s economy dwarfs Russia’s so of course they’re going to spend more on their military in general, it’s only even competitive because of PPP and because Russia has mobilized its entire country more or less into a war economy for the Ukraine war
2. PPP is the correct way to compare dollar values between countries, most of the time, doing otherwise gives wildly misleading values for a lot of comparisons
3. “It sound foolish to believe Russia has plans to attack” my guy they are literally “attacking,” they are literally moving their units into enemy territory (and then back out) right now
4. “they would be heading for a war they have no guarantee of winning” I have bad news for you about what it means historically when the massive nation is invading a small country that didn’t do anything to it, and the war is still going on with no progress several years in. That’s not just “no guarantee of winning” territory at that point…

I actually do see another possibility beyond what I said: I think it’s also possible that Russia has decided on war with NATO, and is doing provocations so the other party will have to be the one to “officially start” the war and then they can “retaliate.” That’s part of why I was saying it would be smart for NATO to establish very clear ahead-of-time guidelines and then stick to them, so there’s no escalation by mistake once missiles do start flying around. Anyway that type of behavior is a time-honored tradition especially for democratic countries that have to worry about the public perception (US with Japan before WW2, US with Vietnam at Tonkin Gulf, Israel at all times…). I don’t think that’s what they are doing for a couple of reasons, but it’s the only other explanation besides what I said that makes any sense to me.

Yeah. I’m not exactly a geopolitics-man, but my best guess for what’s going on with Putin and Russia’s strategy here is:

1. He’d been doing fine with taking over small countries up until 2022, and it generally gave him opportunities for new goodies to give away to his friends and also it’s exciting and makes him look like a winner
2. He’s been surrounded by yes men for so long that he’s lost his ability to really tell what are good strategies, what is happening, or what’s likely to happen in the future

I think the combination means that he’s just kind of telling his military to do whatever, including invading Ukraine thinking it would go about the same way as Georgia, Crimea, Chechnya, and the US elections. I do think he benefits from a certain amount of native cunning in this particular brinksmanship with NATO, and of course it doesn’t take too much detailed understanding of facts on the ground to just fly some planes around in their airspace and flip people off, but also I think in general this latest chapter of Russia is just a pretty good demonstration of why authoritarianism doesn’t make for effective countries.

EU countries combined are matching already russia military expenses

Check the data

The US plus all partners has sent about $150 billion in total, it looks like, up until the middle of last year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine/ About half of that is EU, so say $75 billion from the EU.

Russia spends about $500 billion per year: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/02/12/russias-2024-military-spending-surpassed-eu-uk-combined-in-ppp-terms-study-a87974 They have mobilized basically their entire economy to try to win this thing.

What is your source for saying the EU alone is matching Russia? The EU is barely paying attention to the war, because of complacency and a subtle racism. But the idea that the EU is pulling out all the stops like Russia is, or prioritizing making their “defense” contractors rich in this as the US is wont to do, is absurd.

and watch out for propaganda.

Can do! I think I might have found some, I’m not sure.

Oh wait lol

Russia is already shooting down anything that enters their airspace (or trying to, mostly succeeding). As well as lots and lots of things which are outside their airspace including civilian airliners sometimes. It’s only in NATO-land that it’s this big crisis like “oh no oh no whatever shall we do.”

The whole thing where moderators have mostly-unchecked power in their little domain, and they can ban people or delete comments and make rules for what other humans in their space can and can’t say, is one of the most toxic features of Reddit. I think Lemmy copied it from sheer traditionalism, but it was really a mistake in both locations. It leads a bro to think they’re supposed to be in charge of the other little peons in their space, and that’s a pretty bad thing for a bro to start thinking like.

See, now you’ve got a problem. If you’d shot down the first one, Russia would have made a big noise and then it would have been fine. Now that you didn’t, now it’s weird if you start shooting them down.

My advice is to just be straight about it: Publicly announce what the line is where you’ll shoot them down, and then stick to it. Even if you just announced a date when the shooting-down will start any time they enter NATO airspace, that might be fine. But you have to stick to it. Right now you’re trying to figure out how to make them stop without shooting them down, and that approach just doesn’t work. Like you’re all surprised they don’t establish radio contact. Bro… that is not the game you are engaged in.

(You might also want to confiscate $10 billion in frozen Russian assets to give to Ukraine for each incursion, just to respond to what’s already happened… but again without shooting them down it’s not going to accomplish anything. The money’s already gone honestly, and they know that, they’re just waiting for you to figure it out and go through your whole “process” and make it official, and they think you’re stupid and weak for every year that goes by that you’re not doing that.)

Yeah, I get it. I don’t think it is necessarily bad research or anything. I just feel like maybe it would have been good to go into it as two papers:

1. Look at the funny LLM and how far off the rails it goes if you don’t keep it stable and let it kind of “build on itself” over time iteratively and don’t put the right boundaries on
2. How should we actually wrap up an LLM into a sensible model so that it can pursue an “agent” type of task, what leads it off the rails and what doesn’t, what are some various ideas to keep it grounded and which ones work and don’t work

And yeah obviously they can get confused or output counterfactuals or nonsense as a failure mode, what I meant to say was just that they don’t really do that as a response to an overload / “DDOS” situation specifically. They might do it as a result of too much context or a badly set up framework around them sure.

Fair point. Human endeavors operate a lot by habits and mental models though. People generally will push back harder against government censorship when it happens if they’ve already got it firmly in mind that “hate speech” is a bullshit category that needs not to exist. Once you start to say that hate speech shouldn’t be allowed for example on Substack (which I think is the majority view now), it becomes a lot easier for the government to ban it (which I think is precisely what’s happening, both in the US and in Canada apparently).

Wow, that’s crazy. I was telling people that Substack banning Nazis was a bad idea, because in any free thinking society the reaction when you tell someone you’re banning “hate speech” should be “fuck you people can speak even if it’s hateful according to the government.”

Yes I know Substack is not the government and yes I know the first amendment doesn’t apply in Canada. My point is that “hate speech” is allowed, full stop. If you don’t think so, then eventually some kind of speech you care about will be curtailed, because someone decided it was hate speech. You can’t have no Nazi speech and yes Palestine speech, you can (in the long run) only have yes both or no both, and unless you care more about protecting the Nazi part than the people who are going to be making the rules care about banning the Palestine part, you will have no Palestine part.

(In case it wasn’t obvious, because of course the Palestine Liberation Front and some similar entities are on the list.)

I realize I am in the minority in this. That’s what up in my book though.

Initial thought: Well… but this is a transparently absurd way to set up an ML system to manage a vending machine. I mean it is a useful data point I guess, but to me it leads to the conclusion “Even though LLMs sound to humans like they know what they’re doing, they does not, don’t just stick the whole situation into the LLM input and expect good decisions and strategies to come out of the output, you have to embed it into a more capable and structured system for any good to come of it.”

Updated thought, after reading a little bit of the paper: Holy Christ on a pancake. Is this architecture what people have been meaning by “AI agents” this whole time I’ve been hearing about them? Yeah this isn’t going to work. What the fuck, of course it goes insane over time. I stand corrected, I guess, this is valid research pointing out the stupidity of basically putting the LLM in the driver’s seat of something even more complicated than the stuff it’s already been shown to fuck up, and hoping that goes okay.

Edit: Final thought, after reading more of the paper: Okay, now I’m back closer to the original reaction. I’ve done stuff like this before, this is not how you do it. Have it output JSON, have some tolerance and retries in the framework code for parsing the JSON, be more careful with the prompts to make sure that it’s set up for success, definitely don’t include all the damn history in the context up to the full wildly-inflated context window to send it off the rails, basically, be a lot more careful with how to set it up than this, and put a lot more limits on how much you are asking of the LLM so that it can actually succeed within the little box you’ve put it in. I am not at all surprised that this setup went off the rails in hilarious fashion (and it really is hilarious, you should read). Anyway that’s what LLMs do. I don’t know if this is because the researchers didn’t know any better, or because they were deliberately setting up the framework around the LLM to produce bad results, or because this stupid approach really is the state of the art right now, but this is not how you do it. I actually am a little bit skeptical about whether you even could set up a framework for a current-generation LLM that would enable to succeed at an objective and pretty frickin’ complicated task like they set it up for here, but regardless, this wasn’t a fair test. If it was meant as a test of “are LLMs capable of AGI all on their own regardless of the setup like humans generally are,” then congratulations, you learned the answer is no. But you could have framed it a little more directly to talk about that being the answer instead of setting up a poorly-designed agent framework to be involved in it.

Yeah it’s a bunch of shit. I’m not an expert obviously, just talking out of my ass, but:

1. Running inference for all the devices in the building to “our dev server” would not have maintained a usable level of response time for any of them, unless he meant to say “the dev cluster” or something and his home wifi glitched right at that moment and made it sound different
2. LLMs don’t degrade by giving wrong answers, they degrade by stopping producing tokens
3. Meta already has shown itself to be okay with lying
4. GUYS JUST USE FUCKING CANNED ANSWERS WITH THE RIGHT SOUNDING VOICE, THIS ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE, THAT’S HOW YOU DO DEMOS WHEN YOUR SHIT’S NOT DONE YET