DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
While the Judeo-Hapa ruling class had been foretold, I am still not convinced it's any better than Jews and Chinese separately.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
China does incomparably more business with Gulf Arabs than with Iran. This is post-hoc rationalization.
In the wake of Epstein files release (btw not as bad as I imagined from all the hype, though pathetic and occasionally very funny), I've noticed the popularization of terms like “goy”, “goycattle”, “goyim” (the “goyim in abundance” line was legitimately comedy gold, as was Masha Drokova's calculation of Jew percentage – she's a very entertaining person herself, and my friends in SF tell me that her parties have the hottest Russian women somehow, it's the norm to go blabber about technical secrets there, "ahaha just kidding"). There are plenty of edits of Gigachad Epstein and super-Diddy, kids are imagining ideal worlds where they have to worship pedophiles. Jews are understandably unnerved about all the Antisemitic Dogwhistles and correctly recognize over-the-top endorsements of ZOG as sarcasm and trolling, but I think it's evolving in the direction ultimately aligned with their interests. It's habituation. Israelis are more openly talking about Amalek as policy justification (and generally moving far to the religious right), Huckabee on Tucker's show has de facto endorsed Greater Israel and so far has kept his post, Kiriakou says AIPAC has all US politicians by the balls, and the public reaction is… what? Incomprehension? Trying to shoo it away like usual? Genuine Evangelical approval? Some baffled chuckling? Chuds going “we told you so”? Patriots power-tripping over the decapitation of Iranian regime and living vicariously through Israeli dominance? That's all shades of low-agency complicity, cuckoldry… Oh, I've forgotten about the insane left that hates Israel because it reminds them of Western civilization, Christianity, capitalism, heterosexual families and their own parents, reinforcing the false “Zionist vs Commie Third Worldist” dichotomy – these guys sure have fallen off. Incidentally, Israeli stocks are ripping, like 66% up over 12 months. The market is betting on Israel achieving its operational goals, even as everything else is going to the dogs.
In the end, I guess people of Western extraction are accustomed to hereditary transnational elite, and they've ran out of their own aristocracy (and it was kind of dumb and non-meritocratic anyway). Recognizing the natural nobility and greater leadership qualities of Jews and deferring to their choices in international decision-making is in line with the advice of Nietzsche and von Coudenhove-Kalergi, with best practices from Nixon (Kissinger) to Biden (Blinken) to Trump (Kushner) with lots of others in between. And frankly, haven't we all started from this, with LessWrong and Scott gushing over the genius of the Ashkenazim, Eliezer dreaming of the eugenic Dath Ilani like himself, Gwern scheming to clone or embryo-select John von Neumann, others planning to have an army of them save the world from unaligned AGI? Aren't all top AGI projects, aligned or not, led or owned by the Ashkenazim in our timeline – Altman, Amodei, Brin&Page, even Sutskever in Israel (Elon is an outlier like usual, though, but his project seems to be shitty in comparison)? Obviously Jews should make all the important decisions and the dominant American religion amounts to approving their divine right to make all the important decisions and succeed in every endeavor. That slip from Rubio is just acceptance, I think. Yeah Israel steers American foreign policy, because Jews are a natural higher caste in the American society, on account of being smarter and more based; if you oppose Affirmative Action, you have to accept this reality. Whether from the religious, from the biological or from the meritocratic perspective, deference to superiors makes perfect sense. In contrast, resistance is futile, Netanyahu had said it 25 fucking years ago: America is something really easy to steer in the right direction. G-d willing, in a few more years Americans will incorporate the doctrine of exterminating the Amalek into official policymaking.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
to create a worldwide network of US aligned states while completely isolating China.
This is Paradox-brain. These "states" are comparably worthless whether aligned or misaligned, just painting them in your colors does little.
Meanwhile, we continue to increase our space tech advantage, and utterly starve them of fossil fuels.
The most important fossil fuel for China is domestic coal. They can make liquid fuel from it too, btw. Hell, they're so far ahead in renewable power generation that they can make methanol from direct CO2 capture. This isn't 1940s Japan.
You're clinging to the idea of dominance that's only fit for dealing with shitholes behind you in economy, industry and scale, you have no theory of victory against a superior opponent. These clever schemes negligibly change your position wrt China.
already have this to a limited degree
Not really. Maybe against drones, but even HELIOS is underpowered for intercepting realistic incoming missiles. You need to get to 1MW level lasers. The US is in the lead in this research, admittedly.
amphibious assaults are fundamentally difficult Why do people say this? Most large scale amphibious assaults throughout history have succeeded, even despite less advantageous logistics. Moreover China is likely to do a blockade and bombardment, as dictated by the common sense. Taiwan has dismantled its nuclear power generation and will run out of energy and begin starving in weeks if a blockade succeeds. And China is not going to do any D-Day LARP, the PLA aspires to have minimum casualties by flooding the battlefield with robots. https://www.news.cn/milpro/20250710/47f7a7b22ae44725884fb04195bd3461/c.html
Finally, geography is also much less of a factor than commonly assumed when you can have barges letting you disembark on virtually the entire coast (ofc there's the obvious objection that barges will be destroyed by brave defenders, I'll let you think through counterpoints). "Taiwan only has 2 suitable beaches" is a hypothesis fit for a shithole without shipbuilding industry, pardon my French.
you're the one in the fantasy dream scenario where the opponent is static but China is constantly improving
No, I'm being realistic. The advantages of Chinese industry are compounding very quickly, they've reached escape velocity of sorts. The US definitely can improve but the gap is likely to get wider over the next decade or two.
you have a habit of taking relatively minor things as data points
it's illustrations.
As I understand it, the Ford hasn't launched the F-35 because it hasn't gotten the necessary upgrades and it will at some point when the Navy does a refit on the ship
I really don't share popular skepticism with regard to F-35, but this isn't just about planes. Ford EMALS is just an older, less reliable system, Ma Weiming's MVDC architecture is superior from first principles, it builds on common civilian Chinese advantages in electrical engineering that are expressed in their grid and battery dominance. This is also why they can put EMALS on 076, on some trucks, on trucks stacked on a container ship, basically play with it like LEGO. This again is illustrative of the disparity in industrial capacity and diversity and prospects for military procurement in the years to come.
will likely be capable of shooting down whatever 6th generation aircraft the Chinese push out
this is dubious because the core feature and design principle of J-36 is overpowered electric generation and radars (again building on their civilian advantages) so at the very least they can be expected to notice your Rhinos first. I won't engage in spiderman vs batman analysis, none of this will be about 1 on 1 dogfights of course.
Yeah, because the Chinese are operating from a technological inferior position and are converging on the position of the United States
Maaaaaybe you can say this in aggregate, but there are many domains where you're behind and the gap is growing because they are still improving faster.
They're likely decades behind in some very important areas, such as submarine quieting
I mean, how hard can it be? Americans did it. Broke-ass Communist Russians with inferior metrology did it. I've known people who did similar things for the Soviet Union, they're not some John von Neumann geniuses shooting lightning out the arse, just normal engineers; there's not much to all this Cold War magic by modern standards, it's likely less g-loaded than CATL battery process engineering or TikTok recommender algos. China is crushingly dominant in materials science now, they author like 50% of top papers. We'll see soon if Type 09V reaches Virginia levels of quieting, probably it comes close, reducing the gap by 20+ years.
via industrial espionage
you overestimate the role and misunderstand the nature of industrial espionage, that's a popular cope. Eg recently there's been a big brouhaha about them stealing ASML IP and building a EUV prototype. The leader of the project is Lin Nan, head of light source technology between 2015 and 2021, "Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research". They have been advancing Western research until recently, and can do as well at home.
Do let me know when that shows up in the polling data.
For one thing, prediction markets say it's almost certain that KMT wins the next elections, and everyone knows they're pro-cooperation with the Mainland; their representative insists on Chinese identity, is friendly towards Xi and opposes Taiwanese independence. Abuse from Trump and Lutnick is not very good alliance-building, Beijing barely needed to do a thing. Here's one perspective. There are such polls to drive the point home but I am not sure about it.
Things can change fast.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
What F-15s were lost?
Idk about the serial numbers, but three? Well, in fairness, Kuwaiti defense forces seem to be at fault, so it's no great slight on the American hyperpower, and if anything goes to show the power of your air defense.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/02/middleeast/us-kuwait-aircraft-crash-iran-intl-hnk
China is going to deal with the loss of this oil supply
Why do you presume they will lose any oil supply? Why do you think you get to just tell countries to stop exporting to China? They're broke and need some income. You're an oil exporter. Oil is a global commodity, more oil on the market mechanistically reduces prices. Trump has already said he won't stop Venezuelan exports to China. This is just more capeshit to rationalize actions compelled half by unilateral Israeli decision and half by procrastination as part of your competition with China.
Why do you discount fossil fuels and agriculture?
Because I'm generous and as I've explained massive commodity sectors depress a nation's ECI. It is fair that on the physical level there's plenty of complexity in fracking (the Chinese think it's one of three impressive American industries) but the volume of exports dilutes your technological value-add.
which is something we are actively trying to increase
Yes but it's hopeless for basic reasons of economic development and the tremendous success of American system. Every American with half a functioning brain is already gainfully employed, and very few of those are in manufacturing, and the rest are more or less ballast. You can increase the output somewhat but if you think you get to "catch up" to China or whatever, it's pure hubris. Like, when exactly are you going to build Shenzhen and staff it with whom? Do you even realize how far ahead they are in industrial automation, in integration of all ecosystems? That it's stopped to be about "cheap labor" maybe a decade ago? That your lofty plans of solving these issues with robots all depend on Chinese suppliers?
But if the US stops exporting food and oil to China, I don't see how China replaces those.
With South American imports. You mainly export pig feed (soybeans), and cattle feed (alfalfa), not human food. In the worst case, if you compel South Americans to also stop exports, they'll probably have to eat less beef and pork, as they had historically and as the Greatest Democracy India does today. Look at the calorie consumption in China over the years, they have developed a lot of slack.
American oil is irrelevant and replaceable, you're power-tripping. They depend more on the Gulf. So next comes the usual fantasy about closing the Malacca strait I guess. Of course this is an act of war which locals (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore) will likely resist so as to not become a battlefield, and the Chinese have and will have more than enough reserves and domestic production to operate their rapidly growing navy. Did you know that China is the world's sixth largest oil producer? That in terms of total primary energy production (domestic production yes), they're global number 1 and 40% higher than the US? And that they are very quickly making inland logistics oil-independent? They'll survive even if they stop getting any oil. I swear, almost everything about conflict with China is some rehashing of the 20th century arc with Japan plus something about Soviets.
But if that link is broken, both nations fall apart.
Again, for some reason you assume that your dependencies (eg the rare earths threat, that forced Trump to halt the BIS Affiliate Rule last November) are easily fixable, despite decades of forewarning, literally 30 years of Chinese openly saying that they'll weaponize it one day. I guess it's nice to have such faith in your people, and dismiss previous ineptitude as enemy action or just carelessness. Not sure how warranted it is, though.
If China wants to invade Taiwan, they must be terrified that it would end up in a nuclear war with the US.
Ok, let's say this is the new strategy. How fast do you think China could make another 2, 3, 5 thousand warheads if they wanted to? Do you really want to go back to a nuclear arms race? Who is currently building over half of all new nuclear reactors in the world, entire fleets of nuclear submarines, a nuclear aircraft carrier? In economy, they dwarf the Soviet Union colossally, and their defense spending is a fraction of yours, around 2% GD. They could outrace you by a very solid margin.
Nuclear bluff has limits, your threats have to be credible. Psychologically, they're not terrified because they assume you're not retarded enough to sacrifice New York for Taipei, no matter the imbalance. That you might sacrifice New York just to take out Beijing and Shanghai is a bit of an alien thought to them. Perhaps they're wrong, but that's the reality of their decisionmaking.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
the US will plausibly be able spam so many antiship missiles from every corner of the first island chain that it will be the Chinese who are having interceptor shortfalls
Within a decade it's more likely that both sides have directed energy interception, which introduces its own problems. You're still living in this popular dream scenario where the opponent is static but the US is constantly improving. (Hence also all the embarrassing stuff about "not letting China win in robotics/industry" when they're like a century ahead.) It's not just a matter of buildup, they're not just an assembly floor, you're improving slower than them technologically.
Taiwanese might be more interested or, rather, less opposed to unification because the US is rapidly depleting their Silicon Shield in preparation for vacating the island, also coercing them into undesirable investment plans and imposing unfair tariffs.
One of them is just preventing rival economic/geopolitical entities from forming
Too late, too much main character syndrome.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3d ago
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I'm afraid this jingoistic intoxication will get worse when the US proceeds to topple some other incompetent country (probably Cuba next). This is all fine and good so long as the actual decisionmakers are sober and don't infer they can start anything with China, but will they be sober? Currently you're burning through interceptors and, if this is not AI fog of war slop, even losing F-15s (alledegely to friendly fire, I presume due to lack of relevant training. Should have called upon Ukrainians to teach you guys air defense). But long term, Iran is poised to lose the war, of course, so the sense of invulnerability will be restored.
First of all Iran was not a "military ally" to China in a way that matters, this is just cope to inflate the sense of achievement, just like hyping up Iranian "gigantic military built over 40 years" (I see you double down on it). For reference, India, Kazakhstan and Pakistan are also there, are they Iranian allies too? Are India and Pakistan allies? They've just had a war. "Heavily involved in selling oil" just means that due to sanctions their oil was selling at a discount, which the Chinese opportunistically exploited. Here's what Foreign Policy had to say last September about the nature of the relationship:
Contrary to much Western analysis, Iran never fully embraced China—even after Trump’s 2018 exit from the nuclear deal. As the conservative Farhikhtegan newspaper recently noted, Tehran long treated Beijing as a fallback, abandoning major proposals whenever fleeting openings with the West arose. The paper asserts that Xi Jinping offered a $40 billion investment package in 2016, but it went nowhere, while the much-touted 25-year cooperation road map remained largely symbolic for lack of Iranian initiative.
Indeed, in the brief window of sanctions relief after the 2015 nuclear agreement, Tehran handed lucrative contracts to Western firms such as Total, Airbus, and Boeing—sidestepping Chinese companies. As Hossein Qaheri, the head of the Iranian-Chinese Strategic Studies Think Tank, admitted: “Time and again, for short-term gains, we have abandoned China—and the Chinese have repeatedly said they do not have strategic trust in Iran.” …
That's diplomatic; on a personal level, Chinese consider Iranians worthless backstabbing third worlders. So, their lack of direct involvement is quite understandable. The article lists some symbolic gestures (Beijing inviting Iranians to Victory day parade, agreement on implementation of the 25 year investment pact) but that was transparently a panicked reaction to a crisis. Objectively they're given about the same treatment as Starmer, Macron, Carney and other foreign dignitaries. I don't want to say there's nothing to multipolar agenda, obviously China prefers Iran to remain a thorn in the US/Israeli side and also to buy cheaper oil. But that's a benefit of bounded and not great value, and ineptitude and duplicity of the mullah regime qualifies it further.
No, Iran is only about Iran and Israel, not China. Except psychologically (I'll return to this).
I think what we're learning is not so much that the US is a supreme military power but that it's been a very reluctant hegemonic empire indeed. Why do these shitholes even exist? Venezuela, Cuba? Seriously? The former is a pure petrostate that had failed to keep its oil rigs running due to decades of mismanagement and populism (and also sanctions). The latter is a country famous for sugarcane that's importing sugar now because Communists have ran the industry into the ground. Just months ago, Iran had almost collapsed due to a drought, not to mention that it's deeply infiltrated by Mossad. Why does the US tolerate such enemies instead of giving them a push? Why does it just allow the hostility to persist? Well, Trump has been asking himself just this, it seems. The answer is, there's no good reason. The US can afford to crush them, because it'll be pretty cheap (especially given the fixed costs of US military power).
The problem comes with assuming that China is anything like them. I get it, too – Communists, enemies of America, poor, theoretically allies (though China has no real allies except for North Korea and informally Pakistan, to counter India). But it's dangerously delusional. At the end of the day, the reason America can do this, the reason it has all those stealth jets and satellites and AI and smart munitions and everything else is that it has a large, productive, complex, technologically advanced economy. Even the industrial sector, for all the talk of hollowing out, is the world's second largest (though it depends on how you treat value-added figures – in physical output, it might be closer to Japan than to China). And these guys are so far down the line they barely have an economy.
I like the measure called Economic Complexity Index, maintained by Harvard Growth Lab. In intention, it tracks how capable a nation is of mainitaining industries that generate globally competitive products, though in reality is just measures export diversity. It's not pefrect – for example, Australia and the US get punished by the predominance of a few commodities in their export basket – but it's a decent proxy if you keep that in mind. Say, in 2024, Venezuela was ranked #133 out of 145 countrires. Cuba is #122. Afghanistan is #110. Iran is #87. Russia is #67. Canada (commodity exporter) is #35. USA is #20, between Hong Kong and France. The top 10 all have negligible commodity endowment. The list is as follows: Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Czechia, Israel, Slovenia, China (climbed 7 points in the last 16 years; the US has fallen down by 7 again). Discounting the fraction of the economy involved in fossil fuels and agriculture (a generous choice), I'd say the US would end up roughly as complex as China. They have a nice visualisation, you can click through it, eg here's the structure of American imports from China, and here are exports. Or, here are Chinese exports to Japan which as we know is number 1. And the other way around. It's quite clear to me that the ranking is directionally aligned with reality. And it's a ranking of complexity. In terms of volume or human capital employed in militarily relevant fields, it's not close. China doesn't need "allies" because it surpasses the entire Western bloc in scale.
plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do
Reminder that China is already testing two 6th generation jets in the open, and given that you haven't resolved the issue of launching 5th generation from Ford in over a decade (their EMALS works flawlessly btw), there are hardly any grounds to expect the gap to widen (or even to exist).
THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage
How's that working out? I see Iranian ballistic missiles hit Israel online. Reminder that it's a barely functional theocracy, these aren't some fancy MIRVs or HGVs. Forget THAAD, actually, you're struggling wtih Shaheds.
oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical
Starship is a real argument for interception, but the gap in rocket technology is likely smaller than it seems. We'll see over 2026 if China can begin landing their boosters, and they won't need Starship unit economics to scale up production.
China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal
Currently estimated at 600 warheads, vs American stockpile of 3700. It's a completely sufficient deterrence. You glibly dismiss 50-90 million dead Americans, I suspect that's a lowball but the point is that you're unlikely to destroy China either, for all the memes about Three Gorges Dam. Their cities are denser but made of concrete far more resilient to nuclear flash than your suburbs, for starters. That said, we're all far from the genocidal peak of Cold War, and these assets on both sides would be used on counterforce strike.
What I want to say is that this isn't just a funny hypothetical. "How do we fight China" is the question on the mind of American planners, and the answer is "we don't, not really". China is your only rival and pacing threat, China is likely to take Taiwan in years, and there are no adequate answers sans praying to AGI and Elon Musk to bail the US out. Accordingly this showboating in hostile shitholes, while inflating their alleged capability to proportionally inflate American dominance, to the extent that it's not executing on prior plans and commitments – is best understood as procrastination in the face of unsolvable strategic dilemma, with a nice bonus of inciting this feverish national pride and maybe improving the GOP's chances in the midterms.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
There had just been massive protests, which the Iranian regime has drowned in blood. I am suspicious of exact numbers, but it sounds more that people were beaten into temporary submission with overwhelming violence than that they simply gave up. Uprising is plausible I think.
Have you done research? It's not even about the tedium of grant-writing or whatever, people are doing a tremendous amount of routine work in data analysis and literature search, and scientific standards for programming are very low, "Ph.D code" is a meme. Even if AI doesn't contribute to the process of "discovery" per se (such as reasoning about hypotheses and planning experiments – though it definitely can plan experiments at this stage), it can trivially take over 90% of pure cognitive work-hours.
I recommend trying out some of the hot new models, with high reasoning settings. Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.2, Gemini 3.0 pro and so on, or even DeepSeek-Speciale. They're starting to make progress on really hard research-level physical reasoning tasks even without human guidance, and in a structured environment they are a great help to researchers.
P.S. Just an example of people's opinions, one of hundreds.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
23d ago
What is the point of this obstinacy? They're all correct, it is an act of war. We constantly commit acts of war by bombing the shit out of Ukrainian residential blocks, and this gets called terrorism because civilians become collateral damage, even if terror is not the point (terror is the point in human safari and arguably in infrastructure destruction though). If Russia could surgically annihilate Ukrainian generals no matter where they are, that's be merely war.
Ukrainians do commit terrorism, but not in this case.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
23d ago
Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?
At least seems to be true in Korea:
The Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games, which officially opened with preliminary events on Wednesday (local time) before the formal opening ceremony on Friday, have drawn the lowest level of Korean public interest ever recorded for a Winter Olympics. Google Trends data shows domestic searches for "Olympics" have fallen below 10 on a 100-point scale — down from 30 during the 2022 Beijing Games and a peak of 100 when Korea hosted the PyeongChang Games in 2018.
The disengagement is not uniquely Korean. U.S. broadcaster NBC's prime-time viewership for the Beijing Olympics averaged just 11.4 million — a 42 percent drop from PyeongChang. Ticket sales for Milan Cortina reached about 75 percent of capacity by early February, with nearly 1.2 million of roughly 1.5 million tickets sold, though organizers had relied on late surges and NHL star power to close the gap after a sluggish start that saw only 613,000 tickets sold through October.
"There was a time when families sat together in the living room to watch, even during hard economic times. That era is over," Yu said. "Everyone now consumes whatever content they want on their own smartphones."
Yu added that Koreans' emotional investment in national representation has weakened. "People are less inclined to feel that someone else's achievement on the international stage is somehow their own. Korea already has so much cultural content representing the nation globally that the Olympics no longer hold that singular status."
Ilia Kostaoinov Belov
The ID (which identifies his Bulgarian citizenship) says BELOV Mr. Ilia Kostadinov. This straightforwardly means he's Ilia Belov and his father's given name was Kostadin. There seems to be a lot of these guys. Like, here is the youtube of a Bulgarian guy named like this, but it's ancient.
How he can also be Fatos Ali Dumana, is beyond my Slavic knowledge, I guess that's just his nickname on FB. «Fatos is an Albanian masculine given name, which means "daring", "brave" or "valiant"». (Bulgaria and Albania are separated by North Macedonia). The caption on the video means something like "hey ladies, congratulations". He's listening to this crap from a duo of rappers, Turkish and German (I guess also Turkish). The ladies, surprisingly enough, do congratulate him, they seem to be family (at least one is clearly some auntie). The account is low-activity and consists of typical slop you might expect of a young low-IQ Southern Slav with Global Black characteristics trying to show off clothes and shit, or perhaps really just a Gypsy, though neither of his names is Gypsy-coded.
Looking up "Ali Dumana" floods the search with this Ilia. It's a very unusual string of tokens. If I restrict the search to a period before this scandal, I only get nonsense like this (an independent sexual allegation in Dundee, no Dumanas), somehow.
Now theCourier publishes propaganda about our "Dumana":
Bulgarian dad says his life has been shattered since a video of a Dundee street confrontation went viral after being shared by right-wing figures including Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson.
A 12-year-old girl, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, has been charged in connection with the alleged possession of a knife and an axe.
Speaking at his home, with his wife Fetka Fatosh, 19, and eight-month-old son Kostadin beside him, Mr Dumana said the abuse has left him in fear of leaving the house.
Although he speaks good English, his interview with The Courier was carried out in his native tongue and then translated by our journalist, who speaks both languages fluently.
"Fetka" is Slavic, "Fatosh" is some dimunitive in Arabic/Turkic I guess?
I particularly like this detail:
Far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Image: DC Thomson
So we get the name of the irrelevant right-winger, but the Mr Dumana remains an enigma. Brits are quite provincial, this is not exactly Soviet but pretty crude. Did they do any actual investigation?
Anyway, he's a Bulgarian citizen named Ilia Belov, he's got this weird Islamic pseudonym, he looks quite brown (without throwing any shade – that entire region is brown, I can't pin him to a specific country, between Bulgaria/Albania/etc), so I guess the girls could have panicked/reacted racistly even if he is a peaceful "Bulgarian dad" (feels weird to identify someone aged 22 as primarily "dad") and has never hurt a fly.
Very low information situation.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
26d ago
Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk
This sort of nonsense is why I do not follow the war news. It's disgusting seeing people, especially foreigners, cheer on two Slavic teams slowly grinding each other into nothingness, hype up a minor breach (in reality "a group of Russians maybe spotted slightly ahead of their usual positions") or interpret troop movements in the rear as a sign of impending collapse.
My dad used to repeat that the strongest bet in WWII on a day-to-day base was «nothing changes». But WWII was quite dynamic compared to this. It's actually hard to take territory in this kind of a war. Most gains are ephemeral digital map-painting, but losses are very real, and yet very gradual and insufficient to undermine either side's long-term warfighting capacity. Of course there's no decisive defensive line or «logistics hub» the loss of which will doom Ukraine – they can retreat just a little, to a more thoroughly prepared set of fucking trenches, and continue eroding Russian troops with the usual drone-centric tactics. There won't be gallant armor brigades thundering over the steppe, armor burns easily these days. With steady Chinese support of Russian military industry (bought and paid for) and steady European life support for the entire Ukrainian state (presumably Russians will end up paying for that too), it can go on like this for many years more.
Any plausible upset can only come from those external forces – either China ramping up its engagement, actually selling military assets rather than just dual-use goods and some sneakily rebranded «civilian» lasers and such (at the cost of losing European markets and goodwill, won largely through Trump's buffoonery), or the EU/NATO committing forces, or providing Ukraine with F-35s or something to that effect, or maybe the US getting serious. Nobody seems interested, however.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
but ontologically it matters whether the system has state that persists across interruption and is causally necessary for its future behavior. Its not an arbitrary boundary.
Why? It's a meaningful distinction on its own terms, but what does it have to do with experience, awareness or consciousness?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
28d ago
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand.
Because it's either a non sequitur or a completely bizarre theory of cognitive awareness.
LLMs, shouldn't be thought of as minds or cognitively aware "beings" or any other such "conceptions" because we know exactly, precisely, specifically what they are.
In other words, only things for which we do not have this exact, precise, specific understanding can be minds or cognitively aware beings? So cognitive awareness intrinsic to X is conditional on our ignorance of the nation of X? Or a mind is inherently not-knowable? Or what?
I repeat, what's your actual argument here? I gave you some options.
You see a house and say "That house is really a landscape for a family to build dreams. It's a compassion and bonding machine" Well, that's fine if it works for you, but what the house really is is a house
This condescension is not helping. You are apparently vastly overestimating the quality of your ontology and epistemology. I hope you realize how frankly childish it is, using my helpful examples. A house is a house rather than a landscape not because we can precisely define a house, but because we can precisely define both a house and a landscape – or at least train an LLM to investigate embedding similarity – and see how the definitions do not intersect, and so applying the token "house" to a "landscape" or vice versa is purely metaphorical speech. We have a definition of an LLM. Do you have a rigorous definition of a mind that excludes LLMs on principled grounds?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
29d ago
Why? Superdeterminism posits that everything is absolutely determined, including humans. Does this change the human condition? In general I have never seen the link between consciousness, agency, and randomness/unpredictability. I suppose seeing it requires a very practical, utilitarian mindset where a real agent changes the global state on its own, and if the state is evolving according solely to its intrinsic rules, there is no place for agency in the system and no need for the term. I believe that's too depressing a metaphysics. Agents are a class of events we observe inside the universe. They must be be definable, for they are observable, even if their substance is as immaterial as a sunbeam or a shadow. And AI agents just put our folk metaphysics to test.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
30d ago
That is not my definition, and I do not see how non-determinism is required at all.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
30d ago
LLMs don't have an internal state that I know of. If you have another article I'll read it, I do enjoy them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23675
https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-new-ml-paradigm-for-continual-learning/
Is merely making LLM weights dynamic at inference enough to challenge your model? KV cache is «external state» but weights must be internal I suppose, since LLMs have already been defined as weights above.
This is all an aesthetics-based argument with arbitrarily drawn categories. I don't see why we should care how particular matrices are stored and multiplied.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
30d ago
At what point does scaling up molecular dynamics result in agency? How many molecules does it take?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
30d ago
With AI models, you can describe behavior directly in terms of the underlying code
You can't. It's intractable. For example, one of the top 3 organizations pursuing AGI, the current leader in agentic coding, Anthropic, investigating misalignment:
New Anthropic Fellows research: How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?
When advanced AI fails, will it do so by pursuing the wrong goals? Or will it fail unpredictably and incoherently—like a "hot mess?"
Finding 2: Scale improves coherence on easy tasks, not hard ones
How does incoherence change with model scale? The answer depends on task difficulty:
Easy tasks: Larger models become more coherent
Hard tasks: Larger models become more incoherent or remain unchanged
This suggests that scaling alone won't eliminate incoherence. As more capable models tackle harder problems, variance-dominated failures persist or worsen.
Why Should We Expect Incoherence? LLMs as Dynamical Systems
A key conceptual point: LLMs are dynamical systems, not optimizers. When a language model generates text or takes actions, it traces trajectories through a high-dimensional state space. It has to be trained to act as an optimizer, and trained to align with human intent. It's unclear which of these properties will be more robust as we scale.
Constraining a generic dynamical system to act as a coherent optimizer is extremely difficult. Often the number of constraints required for monotonic progress toward a goal grows exponentially with the dimensionality of the state space. We shouldn't expect AI to act as coherent optimizers without considerable effort, and this difficulty doesn't automatically decrease with scale.
That's, like, the frontier of interpretability research.
Does this look like looking at the code and saying «Ah I get it, X does A»?
We're in a very similar epistemic position with regard to a tiger and to an LLM. The big difference is that with a tiger we have some very limited observation methods like electrocorticography or tomography or something, and with an LLM we can – in theory – deconstruct any particular causal sequence, every activation, every decoded token. But it won't become comprehensible to humans just because we produce another vast array of zeroes and ones from logging its activity.
They are parameterized conditional probability functions, that are finite-order Markovian models over token sequences. Nothing exists outside their context window. They don't persist across interactions, there is no endogenous memory, and no self-updating parameters during inference
Just a string of non sequiturs.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
30d ago
That's literally, exactly, precisely what they are.
So what?
@self_made_human proceeds to generate a lot of prose, but all he really needed to do was press for some substantiation of this argument. «Weights» is a word. What LLMs really are is information. Why exactly is this specific mode of information incompatible with having high-level properties like «personality flaws»? You accuse him of incoherence in the inane tiger side debate, but «models are weights, ergo anthropomorphized traits don't apply except as a loose metaphor» is basically schizophrenic in my book. What's the actual claim here? That anthropomorphic properties are substrate-dependent, that functionalism is wrong? Just say so instead of snarking and appealing to incredulity. Ideally with some defense for this opinion.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'
Where are we getting the idea that this is what is happening?
Jordan Schneider: What does this mean for Taiwan contingencies?
Jon Czin: I’ve actually been turning this question on its head. This isn’t the core driver of what’s going on, but Xi’s willingness to totally clean house — renovate the military, strip the high command down to its studs — shows he feels pretty comfortable about the external environment and the cross-strait environment in particular.
There are three big reasons for that. First, President Trump doesn’t seem personally invested in the Taiwan issue. The national defense strategy doesn’t even mention Taiwan, and they’re reading that signal pretty clearly. Second, President Lai Ching-te, whom they loathe, is in political trouble at home after the failed recall campaign this summer. There’s going to be an election in 2028, and the opposition KMT’s new leadership is saying very favorable things about Beijing. From their perspective, they’ve got breathing room, and 2028 is probably the next big pivot point where they sense a real opportunity to shape and shift the dynamic.
Again, that’s not a driver, but when Xi is thinking about all this, he probably feels pretty comfortable about the situation.
The other thing to point out: assessing the PLA is always challenging because, yes, there’s deeply rooted corruption, but the modernization effort remains really impressive. This is true of China’s economy and development writ large — there’s real rot, real dysfunction, and real corruption, but also real dynamism. They’re doing real things with actual impressive quality. Both coexist at the same time.
Even in the last few months, just a few weeks after the exclamation mark on the last round of purges at this fall’s plenum, the PLA conducted a pretty significant military exercise around Taiwan in the closing days of 2025. There was this theory floating around that because a bunch of people from the 31st Group Army were purged, they wouldn’t know how to do these things anymore. It’s pretty clear they still know how to do these things, based on the operation they pulled together at the end of last year.
You have to think this is terrible for morale. It’s not how you’d run a high-morale, high-tempo organization in the West. But it’s their system, and this is how they operate.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Regrettable, how the idea of a well-organized militia of private citizens is now so demonized. Civilian self-organization and initiative used to be the big selling points of the American way of life. I guess the US has grown used to dealing with either inept drama queens or actual enemy state actors (or propping up "organic resistance" themselves).
I don't have much to say except it's disappointing how Americans are bound to precedents. Well, not just them, of course, everyone is hidebound but you'd expect more from a brand new intelligently designed super-innovative superpower. And yet, escalating cycle of the culture of victimhood, Plucky Underdogs and Just Revenge (look at the pathetic whataboutism, "Democrats did X, so how can X' be wrong?), this damn geriatric nonsense about fascism, endless epicycles around Jewish WWII trauma, the whole moral arc of the universe wrapped around that European event three generations ago, much like in Russia.
Trumpism is wrong on its own merits. Trump is a dishonorable Latin American type strongman who does petty advertisement, lashes out childishly, takes bribes, doesn't keep his word and relishes crass bootlicking. His appointees like Hegseth and Lutnick are mere thugs. The Based Conservatives here demonstrate craven allegiance to whatever the Party Linei s this week because they see in Trump not so much a reformer as their champion in getting revenge on Democrats. As for the Democrats' party, enough has been said. Is this the Elite Human Capital that is equipped to lead the global hegemon? It's a deeply diseased Republic and too good a Democracy, and it's stuck in the past even as it innovates new ways to be vulgar and demonstrate spiritually third worldist attitude. Just sad.
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